hi.

thank you. thank you all for being here. my name is gene healy. i'm senior vice president for policy at the cato institute and i'll be your moderator for today's festivities. we're here for a conversation with brian doherty about his new book modern libertarianism, a brief history of classical liberalism in the united states.

brian is a senior editor at liberty bring isms flagship magazine reason, where he's worked since 1994 and as his recent bio notes, his reporting and comments, he has appeared in over 100 publications, including new york times, washington post, wall street, mother jones, wired and spin, not mentioned. there is a little known magazine gene. i brought props, liberty, publisher. from 1987 to 2005, and that's where i first started seeing brian's byline in the early 1990s. now, if a reason is an outrage, each magazine directed at a wider audience, liberty was definitely enriched, shows full of inside baseball and in turn has seen fights between libertarian factions. and the whole thing was just as

wonderfully weird as the libertarian movement itself. and since i was weird to add a subscription in college, and that's when i first became a brian doherty fan. brian is the author of six books including this is burning. man, 2004. ron paul's from cato, 2012, and 2020 two's dirty pictures, which sounds like he's leaning into the libertines stereotype, but it's actually about underground comics movement of the sixties and seventies. along the way, brian has also become the historian of the libertarian movement. one of those six books is this mammoth doorstop. radicals for capitalism a freewheeling history of the modern american libertarian movement. it's freewheeling, an

exhaustive. it clocks in at 619 pages before you even get to the footnotes. modern libertarianism is the slimmed down, digestible version of that history, with new material covering the 17 or so years since the radicals for capitalism was. it's sort of the new book is sort of the gateway drug, something that newbies can experiment with before making the decision perhaps to take a longer stranger trip into movement law. today, we're going to talk about brian's new book and about this thing in bars, the libertarian movement in general, the achievements it's had along the way where it might have fallen short, the future and the challenges ahead.

the invite for this event, if you notice, promises a quote, rollicking discussion of this important new book. so, brian, let's get ready to get right on the rollicking. hi. thanks for coming. as jean points out, this is my second take at trying to write a history of the libertarian movement as it came to be understood in america, mostly since world war two. and and as he also said, it's this thing of, ah, as i wrote these books, not as an objective outside observer, but from someone who a believes all this crazy stuff and has believed it since i was a teenager and has worked within the libertarian movement my entire professional career. i hope that that gave me a sense of depth and understanding that's unique. i hope it did not make me beholden to, you know, any one side of the movement or even to, you know, believing that

libertarian ideas, you know, could never have been off or ever done any wrong. but there are darn good set of ideas and the rooted in the american founding. i think that's a nice way in america to to talk about it. you know, it's all in our declaration. the purpose of government is to help preserve and protect life, liberty and not happiness itself. and this is a very important point. but the ability to pursue it, government is not there to try to make happy. it's it's there if it's there for any reason to try to create a set of instant structures in which we can pursue. and if government is not living up to these standards, it is the right of the people to either alter it or to abolish it. the libertarian movement has many people who emphasize the alter part. you know, the problem the less radical, the minimal status. and there are many who go straight to the abolish the anarchist wing, anarcho capitalist wing. they're all part of the story. they're all part of the mix. i appreciate them all. and i try to honor and explain

them all. a well in book. but it's certainly very interesting if you're an outsider and you're reading a book, say, let's use diet of hayek and rothbard, and you're like, oh, you're calling these two very distinct and different thinkers. you're calling them both libertarian. but like they're clearly big differences. absolutely. there are. i was trying in this book to be descriptive, not prescriptive. like as someone who moved to the movement, i tried to write about those figures who were considered by those who thought of themselves as american libertarians, as part of their team, and that most definitely did include both your hayek and your rothbard. so there's there's a wide range of ideas and thinkers. the book covers the five who i would say are the central intellectual of the bulk, are the two i just mentioned, plus two other economists, milton friedman and mrs. and then the novelist philosopher ayn rand, pictured on the cover is barry goldwater. when i wrote the book, i didn't really think of him as one of

the central figures in this. a little background information, how books get made, you know, decisions about things like covers are usually made at the end and they're often made by professionals who are not necessarily the writer, but it made a lot of sense because barry goldwater was the first guy in the era that this book tells you actually brought very, if not totally libertarian ideas into actual electoral politics in a significant way. and as everyone being about libertarians and those who want to make fun of libertarians will remind us. and he got trounced mightily and he did worse than, you know, any major candidate had ever done. but, you know, ideas have gone farther, didn't end with barry goldwater, didn't end with any of these people. but a lot of victories for the movement. i think this story for people who do care about these ideas is inspirational. obviously, we do not yet live in a libertarian world. i do think we live in a world where fights on libertarian grounds are more front and center than american government, than we could have ever imagined. might get into that later.

and so to me, this is a story of rank outsiders despised, abused, hated, really super isolated people who fought for ideas that were noble, that ultimately were about minimizing the use of violent force in human affairs. and that's you know, i kind of came into libertarianism through a little bit of a hippie dippy path. i was a robert anton wilson libertarian. if any of you know what that means. so freedom is great. of course, we all believe in freedom as ayn rand noted in her puckish alley, if not trollish, lee titled book the virtue of selfishness. a lot of people look at obsession with your own liberty as selfish. and she tried to explain why. yeah, it is. and also that's great, but you can also frame the libertarian project as not not about liberty per se, but about the flipside of liberty, which is we are minimizing the areas in which anyone else is justified in using violent force against you in those areas where no one is justified in using it, that is

area of your liberty. and i found that it's been rhetorically effective way to explain what what are you guys all about? what is it you want while we want human social relations to be based the least possible, they can be on violence. and some of us think that means eliminating it perhaps entirely, except for in self-defense, something we need a little more. i will stop ranting now and let let jean begin a conversation. you you pick up the story with the you know in the post war era and you know you said the the original proto libertarian movement was icily added and you really get a sense that it started small through the end of the fifties say it's a it was really more like a gang than a movement and you read the corresponding into the early figures and you know, they get excited because a bright high student, you know, discovered

libertarianism. but a lot of the thing the book did, you know, i guess i knew this already, but it's easy to forget. it reminded me that for such an odd, difficult and periodically dysfunction and old group of people, the achievements the modern libertarian movement have been pretty impressive. you know, not just the intellectual achievements, you know, the socialist calculation debate, the nobel prizes is won by various libertarians, but in concrete policy terms, you know, this little didn't smash the state. but there are some ways in which they won policy victories. it made the the world freer than it was before. can you talk about some of those? sure. i think most of them can be connected to the one in my five central figures who was undoubtedly the most directly

and specific influential so far, which is milton friedman. and you look at his his advocacy of a monitor or approach to a federal reserve policy, this never fully ruled federal reserve policy, but the understanding he imbued about how you cannot willy nilly and constantly, you know, raise the money supply from kind of the mid seventies on has helped create an era of fed management that was less damaging than i think it would otherwise have been without milton friedman existing. the fact that we currently lack a military draft, he was one of the great intellectual lynchpins of that. the fact that we now live in a world floating international exchange rates very. friedman that we have not yet won this victory and in terms of how the government manages its existing welfare state that friedman was a great arguer for a government redistribute tions that left as much decision making power in the hands of the recipients as possible.

he advocated ultimately, we don't have it yet, something that he called a negative income tax, which is look, look, don't have government running all these programs, running all these bureaucracies, trying to manage how people, behave like if we going to attempt to keep people above a certain level of destitution just, give them money and i think that as long as the welfare state exists, that probably is the best. and that's to be alive. idea in the debate because of him, all of the deregulations we've seen from seventies and on, a lot of them derive from the chicago school economists who were not necessarily libertarians across the board or libertarian activists, though friedman, one of their leaders, was, you know, anything that's happened the last 40 years where people more choices about how to run their businesses, you know, how they manage their lives, you know, the spread medical marijuana and then legalized marijuana. these are all victories for

libertarian ideas. it's not always the case that you can definitely identify that the bureaucrat got the idea from this libertarian thinker. but the the the the intellectual atmosphere here that was shaped by him, muses hayek's friedman's and ran as has made america much better and freer place than it would otherwise been, though not yet obviously as free as a libertarian would like. so some of those victories are you know they sound and you know conservative sometimes take credit for them, you know, stable monetary policy, deregulation, not the draft and drug to recruit criminals. another one would be school choice. and this is another thing that milton friedman, you know, played a key role in. wall street journal, a piece

recently that said in the five years, the number of state with universal voucher. went from 0 to 10. and that's an idea comes right out of capitalism and freedom. maybe it was, you know, it took red state governors and conservative activists to bring it about. but it's, you know something he was talking about 1961 of and yet despite you know some of those those occasional alliances with conservatives as you detail in the book, historically libertarians have had a pretty fraught relationship with the right. let's talk a little bit about that fusion ism. the original meyer idea and how, you know, prominent concern and libertarians reacted to you know, this bid for unity between traditionalists and

libertarians. yeah you know you can kind of look at the the conservative side for russell kirk as kind of the the you know, the epitome of that traditional version of conservatism that has been the most hostile toward libertarianism. very much believe that there was a certain sense of transcend in order that was necessary for human culture to be healthy, wealthy and virtuous and libertarian may often actually agree that that's true, but don't see it as having a lot of policy in a way that kirk might have. and murray rothbard on the other side, though, through strange little bits of culture that have happened until he died, there's many ways in which rothbard just kind of much more of a right wing figure in a libertarian thing. it's maybe too complicated to get into now, but certainly in the sixties and seventies and most, most time when he was alive, he explicitly more of a left wing figure and explicitly saw himself as against.

the kirk eight. buckley eight. right. one of his main issues about that and he did kind of poke at the the clerical traditionalist aspect of it, but also the foreign policy aspect of it that conservatives tended to believe that the cause of fighting cold war or fighting the influence of international communism was sufficient for all sorts of both domestic and international government action that a rothbard or most libertarian did not agree with. and even within the libertarian world, rothbard was kind of a left outlier. he was certainly the most in terms of what he thought was acceptable for the u.s. government to do overseas to fight communism. there were certain people, including robert poole, the guy who ran reason magazine. i worked for a long time. he was more of a cold war libertarian. you know, there are some libertarians think that, you know, the cause of liberty is not, you know, not one unless it's one globally. and then the kind of rothbard line more or less of the notion that, you know, you can you can just spend all of americans

liberty and treasure and in a futile attempt to try to make the world free. and it's just not going to work and it's going to destroy liberty here in the attempt. so, you know, the traditionalism and the cold were two of the the sticking points. but where they met is in a lot of the areas where we discussed some of the victories like most of the libertarian, most of them with exception of the medical marijuana stuff. and even there, i think the whole notion, you know, the right has sort of dissolved the notion that has to be against, you know, that sort of recreational drug use. i think to a large degree, it's the other two where they overlap, which is a free market economics, libertarian like myself might like emphasize. and i think there's a bit about that in the book that everything conservatives actually like succeed with and everything that was a conservative idea was really a libertarian idea. like, like all conservatives actually had going for them was the kind of free market stuff that they got from friedman and they got from masses that they got from hayek.

so i especially the context of now maybe in m.s. libel to emphasize the distinctions. i mean, they're still important to this day. i mean, to the that you look at the trump administration, if that's the representative of the american right, you know, you have these massive areas involving the free flow of, you know, capital goods and people all across national borders where trump has positions that are are very on the libertarian and traditional sense. but then again, you look at things like the attempts to cut government jobs, you know, in a manner that is pretty wrought even more rothbart than anything else, in the sense that it's kind of wild and it's just like we're we do not like state. we hate the state. that's like a rough already phrase. and we're just out to damage it and chip away at it and yeah, you may have you a little hack in rule of law concerns about are we doing this with the proper separation of powers and who actually gets to decide

where to spend the money and we have rules about this. that's a hierarchy in libertarian. take that might be a little concerned about how that's all going, but there are advantages. i'd like to clearly would be like, yes, yes. grind these, you know, these. i'm not going to curse, you know, a like curse that i might use to refer to government employees because because he had the you he had a kind of class warfare view of it, not in the marxian, but just in the sense that there's a governing class and all the people who live off the government, whether it be government employees or receivers of government benefits and they're enemies of the rest of us who are not that class and and in the service of that class warfare, he'd be less worried about kind of hierarchy and rule of law concerns. you know, both are part of the libertarian movement. and if you're trying to sort of pass libertarianism and the right libertarianism versus the right, those are both both different ways to look at it and prove either the rich variety of libertarians or its essential

incoherence is that i might say. but i, i lean on the side of which variety. so you touched on this a second ago, but rothbard words, new left period. yeah where he made a, you know, sort of the most strategic, strategically promiscuous of the major libertarian figures starting in the mid sixties, he makes a bid for opening to the lefty briefly goes guy guy for chair guevara writes a obituary sort of gushing obituary for guevara in 67 what's the the broader history of opening the you know not just rothbard but attempts for left fusion ism with libertarians. yeah. and that really does come down to him if you if you talk about even people like macy's, who was rothman's great teacher, mrs. hayek, rand friedman, these these and despite treatment role in the draft, these are not people who would have ever felt

comfortable like you say writing something in praise. guevara the reason rothman was able to do it and this touches on what i was just talking is he he would often get down to the idea that you've got to smash the state. right maybe way you're doing it isn't exactly strategically perfect or motivated by libertarianism and maybe what you want to replace it is terrible, the case of guevara. but if you are out there actually doing damage to this this hideous institution of wrapping and destruction and theft, that is the state you're going to cheer, then he always did. and it made a of other libertarians uncomfortable with him for various reasons like he was excited. did you know when south vietnam fell you know in the last helicopters leaving because a state had died and he was very excited about that. and i'm not that emotion is not alien me but it definitely did create the movement a sense that he was a bit of a wild man. i'm the other way to look at it. it's not just about state smashing but that his left turn

and then later in the nineties his turn toward a pat buchanan and like his more right turn was that he always saw war as the most important issue and he looking for whatever actual because libertarianism was during his lifetime in actual fact a political force right like if you actually wanted to make things happen to his mind you had to allow for the political force that actually might successful or might take power. and he thought the new left in the vietnam era was the prominent anti-war force, and he thought libertarianism should support it. in 1992, pat buchanan was post-cold war. he thought we should support that. so that's where that came from. and yeah, i don't stop there, you know, looking at these various attempts to reach out, to get together with the the right to reach out to the left.

where would you say the most fertile ground is? you know, you're tossing out the seeds. some fall on rocky ground, some of them grow up historically. where do you think you know on which side you know, have you know, has had a more bountiful harvest? i think if we go back to the issues that you were talking about and then glad you mentioned school vouchers as the paramount part not to mention that deregulation and you know even the draft because that was a nixon project or nixon did it it has be the right you know whatever whatever my non right tendencies are my complaint about the right think it's a historical that in the context of american history in the last 50 years of forces that they considered themselves conservative republican right have more amenable to the ideas

think it is because we meet on free market guys like milton friedman you know was a lifelong consultant advisor to republican politicians from goldwater to nixon to reagan, and was seen as conservative man of the right figure by most boring, solid libertarians. when i interviewed him in 1995, he made it very clear, like, of course, i am a libertarian but like if you look at my career, you will see, oh, i seem like i'm a guy who's working the republican party. well, i am, because that's where i can be effective. but of course, i'm a libertarian and he even granted to me that he would like to be a zero government libertarian like his son david, the anarcho theorist. he he was a little he was a little doubtful that it actually could be a sustainable human social structure. and then i think we went back and forth. and he admitted that strictly limited governments also don't seem to very sustained, long term, sustainable political social structure. so, you know, maybe if he had lived a little longer, he would have let a more anarchist flag

fly. but, you know and again, to point out, it was a figure like him found, an intellectual home within the right that that's just a fact. and you know, however, we feel about certain aspects of the right that's just the way it was. yeah this whole subject of thinking of another minor opening to the left. my former colleague and your former colleague. at one point, franklin's going on. 20 years ago, the liberal terrians appeared, in my recollection, you know, the reaction on the right to the breaks proposal. it's time to say goodbye to any sort of entangling alliance with the right side of the political spectrum. national review and places like those. oh, don't go. we we like you guys and jonathan chait in the new republic wrote a response to it.

you know, saying that quoting michael corleone in godfather, my offer is this nothing. yeah, this brings up another nice little division. and within the libertarian world and i can use my five figures you know as as an example of this on i'd say like high-iq meetings and friedman all economy and leonard reed who founded the first recognizably modern american libertarian educational that's still around today he called it the foundation economic education and that's important those figures tended to believe and friedman was saying this to me, you know, to within the month he died, i think that they either believed or thought it was best to act as if they believed that their interlocutors and opponents and people they were trying to persuade american political culture largely agreed on goals like we all we want a

rich world, you know, we want an world. we want a free world. we just there's misunderstandings about what's the best and most sustainable way to get there. and so leonard reed believed that market economics was the key, that like free market economics teaches us that. okay, you may think you need government manage things, but if we go back all the way to the root of adam smith and the classical economists, all the way to the 20th century austrians, we begin to understand how rich, complicated international systems of trade develop as if by an invisible hand. as smith put it, to a spontaneous order as hayek put it, and that if you understood free market, you would understand. you don't need government to have a wealthy accomplished culture. and in fact, governments to manage things actually tend to thwart people's desires. know the great example is price controls, right? people who impose them what they say they want is for things to be available and abundant. but what price controls actually is? they make them scarce and almost none, because people cannot,

except through ratcheting and ratcheting further tyranny, be encouraged to keep producing things at prices for no profit or profit or then they want to make. so that's the economic side. just help people understand all this. brandon rothbard had i think actually a more sophisticated or at least they added something very important to this, that there were things in the human mind, you know, rand would call them envy, hatred to the great rothbard would just look at like, look, you know, some of these creeps are just, you know, making a living off of the rest of us. and, you you can't argue them into understanding that. they shouldn't want to do that. right. that there are there are elements in the human psyche that are not amenable to just explaining to them that actually it would be fine if we were all free, though some people actually really don't want other people to be free. i think in the modern age, you know, get figures like musk, become sort of an attraction to this kind of energy. there some people who just are very, very upset at the notion of people who have vast

accumulations of wealth and they're not. and there many reasons, even from a libertarian perspective, of to to poke at the specifics of how certain people got the wealth they had. but, you know, if, in fact, you can mostly break it down to, well, these people happen that property ownership, it's usually this it's usually not that know they're sitting on a giant pile of money usually if you're a billionaire in the modern world, it's because you have equity ownership, some sort of enterprise that the entire body of people on planet earth together have valued a very highly. right. and that's fine. but to a lot of people, that's not finding that's never going to be fine. so it probably is the that your leonard reed's and your meetings in the friedmans were a little more naive than they needed to be about all the victories that needed to be won for libertarian ideas. economic education is very important. i don't think you can get anywhere without it, but i don't think you're going to get everywhere with with just that either. you remember our emmett tyrrell, the american spectator.

he's maybe still around. he was always writing you know piece called the and rewriting a piece called the conservative crackup. you know, the fault within the college and on the right that we're going to blow it up. and we've been talking a lot about, you know, libertarians overtures to the and to the right and their fights with it. what are the, you know, some of the internal fights we picked with ourselves, like the you know what, our past libertarian crack ups and where are the where are the fault lines keep showing up. i alluded to one of them earlier. the of how minimal you know, u.s. foreign interference in the face of a worldwide communist threat should be there. certainly some who thought of themselves, libertarians who were more supportive, cold war efforts than than, say, europe cards definitely showed up in iraq war, too. oh, yeah, absolutely.

i mean, cato famously stood very firmly against the iraq war and it lost some some support from kind right leaning institutions that for the reasons we've been alluding to, sort of saw common cause for libertarians on a lot of things that were very important to them, but couldn't quite fit to support the notion that the united states does not need to be, you know, exerting military force overseas to manage the world every which way. and i think that when it was no longer international, i think that that became more clarifying for libertarians like interest fights about foreign policy i think became narrower, but they didn't disappear entirely like in the 21st century. we're going to you you mentioned there are certain people within the libertarian world, too, who actually thought that the early 21st century middle east interventions were justified, not to be pursued. i like to think that the history of the last 20 years is settled

that largely and within the republican coalition that has settled. yeah, like nowadays in the trump era, you're considered loser and an idiot if you ever thought that that was a good idea. and that's great. that's then that's that's again, it's hard to say whether it's a it's a victory for libertarian ideas, even if you can't in intellectual history terms say, oh, a libertarian thinker caused it to happen and that's important. i mean, i wrote this book because we're human beings and human history actually unfolds through humans and ideas are spread through humans, but it's about the ideas. you know, it's it's what's important about it is not, you know, how great the novelist ayn rand was or how intellectual figure milton friedman was, or what a nuanced, complicated, fascinating to contemplate figure either hayek or rothbart in their own ways were. i mean, that's great. and it allows, you know, people like me to write books that probably more fun to read because you can connect them to human beings. but like it's it's the ideas,

the victories that are important and certainly if you are still a professional, have kind of a libertarian, it's probably futile to get hung up in like, well, who who won this victory. it's like, well, did the idea win? i don't like things about trump. well, i don't like things about trump either. but like, if trump was the instrument for mocking and deriding everyone, the republican coalition, whoever thought the iraq war was a great idea, like that's that's great. and you don't even have to say great for trump, is that going to keith to say great for trump. you just have to say great for that idea because that's an important idea. well, speaking of trump and libertarian crack ups, is it possible going through a bit of one now, you know in the last you touch on this a little bit, in the last chapter of modern libertarianism, but, you know, in the last almost ten years, ever since he came down the escalator, everything has been about donald trump, the way he likes it, living rent free.

and everyone's had and rent free said say in a lot of deliver libertarian mind as well. so you talk a little bit about the the rise of the mises caucus some of the stuff that happened in the lp. are we in the middle of a another libertarian crackup that's spurred by the guy who came down the escalator. yeah i think we probably are. and we talked a little bit about this earlier, the distinction i was trying to draw between how a you know ideal hierarchy in might look at the whole doge thing versus how a rough party in might look at it and i you're definitely to see libertarians taking both sides and you're going to see as libertarians love do getting super mad the other libertarians like the ones who like how can you not see that this is a nightmare. okay, sure. you know, some government employees are getting fired, but like if they're not changing

policy, that doesn't mean the government is actually shrinking. it just means government is going to be doing the things that makes us all do even worse than it it before versus, you know, we've had decades of attempting to ever make the federal workforce shrink. and then of course, you can get back the things clinton did, which quite honestly as i speak to you, i'm not an expert in, so i don't want to get too deep into it. but, you know, and that's how maybe there were other ways to do it that aren't just like letting letting you. i must do whatever he and you know we're seeing this fight happen in real time and they're probably going to get you know, uglier. and i think, you know, maybe two years from now, we'll actually understand more about, oh, what was the effect of everything that doge has been doing in the first two months and politics has gotten gotten. it's always been very personal right. i like there's not going to be a lot of side changing like, you know, even you no matter what we

see two years from now. i think the people who thought it was a idea right now are still going to think it was a great idea. and the people who doubted it are probably are still going to doubt it. i do want to say this. i intended book and i hope for this book to have a life beyond the controversies of and not even 2025, because obviously i started writing in 2024. so you might don't look for a ton done done done about certainly nothing about the second trump administration his book was written before the first. and i think probably lots of libertarian to for what i think were very sensible looking at what trump one did who never really expected anything in government drinking to come of trump probably i've been a little surprised and i should think anyone would be a little surprised i did not expect even chaotic and possibly fruitless slashes at the federal bureaucracy that happen instantly and they have and and it's it's interesting to watch and it will be interesting to watch libertarian fight about

the hows and whys of it. it's a you know, it's sad say that the smart money is probably the, you know it ends up something like the republic in nine mid-nineties chest pounding about getting rid of four or five cabinet departments you know that if you had to if you had a lot of skin in the game, probably the safer way to but i don't maybe. sorry, go ahead. i was going to say another we should bring it back to this. i don't to i mentioned this earlier, but i, i feel like i mentioned it again. i think one of the things about trump discourse that gets people very head up is like you're not you're not saying the important thing or we're not repeating it off. you're not saying it loud enough. and so i will repeat trump's attitudes and actions about. the international flow of human bodies, human goods and capital are terrible, ridiculously on

libertarian actually have an article in what i think is the new issue of reason that when you work for a magazine, your sense of what's the last issue in the next issue when the new wish you get mixed up. but somewhat recently there's an article i wrote that's actually derived from this book that talks about misses particularly, and how messages to be a darling of the right and how i think there's certain things about trumpism that have gone very wrong by ignoring misses. but even that, you should understand, was written before he actually took office again the second time. so it doesn't really deal with the doubt stuff and, and so that stuff is terrible. and the the power grabs like i'm enough of i actually and to think yeah it's not great when mercurial guy his seems to be really angry and mad at a lot of people and be very driven by revenge against enemies is is accruing or attempting to accrue all sorts of power in decision making strictly in himself. that's alarming and it's terrible and again i, i probably needlessly i would prefer

judging policies and ideas rather than people and know if if all the terrible things about trump make you feel like, well, i can't even say it's a good idea to cut some government jobs and cut some government program. i, i don't think that's i don't think it's good for the libertarian cause or, any cause. but it's understandable. but similarly, just because you like that doesn't mean you have to go on for trump and everything. trump does is great because trump is great. it's not it's not about being it's about whether the policies are correct. i to say i can't speak for the audience. i, for one, do not suspect you of being trump curious in that in any way but you know i think what you were alluding to is sort of calling and strikes, you know, the federal effort to root out diy and get rid of, you know, federal funded identity politics, good starting a trade

war, the world, stupidest trade war for couch bad i think can call and i mean you can though i completely respect people who were like no the the dictator part actually does overwhelm everything else and you can never not be against every single thing he does. like i. i hear that and i'm like, i understand why you might feel that way. and i really do. like, there's a lot about american politics on both sides that in the in the trump era that i think really hinges on how completely insane and horrible you assume your political foes are like if you're on the right and you think, okay, if the democrats get control, you know, where we're, you know, all white people's property is going to be confiscated, you know, give reparations and there'll be price and private property will be abolished and, you know, we'll all be forced to be transgender or whatever. like these things that i think a lot of people on the right kind

of believed. and i'm like, i'm not sure i think that any of that's true. and i wouldn't base my politics on feeling it. and and, you know, the left has certain fears about trump and including i guess ruthlessly, ethnically, we're never going to have another election again. so it doesn't matter. and if you believe and i agnostic, it's like i as a liberator and i i'm perhaps more than most to believing the most insane, horrible things about both the left and right. because i have those fears sometimes myself, so i do not complete lee laugh. and every seemingly insane fear that either left or right might have. and then it really just becomes a question of prudence. you can't prove that trump is not going to cancel the elections right now. you can fear it. you can go. i think that's reasonable. i think it's unreasonable how you proceed. a citizen right now is i think, of a question of prudence and the question of i know the

future or i know what the right thing. and if you don't know the future, then you don't know what the right thing to do is because what the right thing to do depends what you think the future is going to be. and it all gets very complex. i'm temperament not inclined and to be completely fearful. i've always been pretty optimistic. i think being a libertarian, you know, along libertarianism in a lot of cases and in my cases a sort of techno optimism like we're very we're excited about human possibilities and we're excited about the possibility of human freedom. and we feel like we've seen just our command of nature and power and power in the electro sense not in, you know, governmental know, get a you know, we've seen so positive change and and we believe that more freedom is going to lead to more of it and, you know, my general sense of the human future, you know there's a strong strain of almost hysterical techno optimism in the libertarian world. if you've ever heard the the

term expropriate you know these are like, oh, we're all going to, you know, be mines and, you know, well, whatever the craziest technological possibility you imagine in terms of increasing human capability, libertarians do tend to be the ones who believed and i do believe in it. so i'm not i'm not temperamentally inclined to be completely fearful. but i also don't think it's in all crazy to look at trump's in the last month and have some not honorees and more fears that he wants to change the way american governance runs in ways that are probably not going to redound to libertarian benefit, even if a bunch of bureaucrats get fired. i mean, but another libertarian would be, you know i'd like to hope is being sort of dispassionate and transactional about, you know, whoever's in power not getting caught up in the cult or the anti cult of that particular figure.

and, you know, i sort of feel since the rise of trump, that's that's eroding you get the impression that i mean we can put on once you're is once significant faction of the libertarian movement that went full barking maga which big mistake it is another faction that you know you get this sense there's an effort to sort of you know radical anti statist philosophy to like a bunch of platitudes on one of those in this house yard signs that you know, you see in nice neighborhoods with a lot of ngo and, you get the impression that the you know in the vanishingly unlikely scenario in which trump were to turn out to be not orange hitler but orange malay, there's a whole bunch of people

are going to be libertarians who are going to be really disappointed and frustrated by that i sure you know, i'm not sure that i have anything more to add on the trump. actually, there is one more thing. and again and one you no one does feel. it's one thing that i'm really like about the internet age actually, and there's a lot of great things about it. but that that sort of felt pressure and understanding of how like, okay, a thing is sad and you know what everyone is going to say against it and then you know what everyone's going to say against that. like, you can write that if you're an intelligent, aware person, you can write the comment thread in your head. it all just becomes it becomes boring in a sense, and like i don't even want to say anything is. it just feels all very played out. it's like, this might also just be an old man's complaint, but i think it's an old man in the internet age. it's combined yells a cloud. is that everything thing? yeah. a, b, c, yes. is. so i'm feeling the imaginary

comment pressure to bring up this point about trump. what i think is worth bringing up though it definitely it ties in to what you were saying about oh are you just being hysterical about this is the guy and more the people surrounding him than the guy? definitely to have a concern with ethno statism that is extremely disconcerting and it's a bad little sent around things and i think it makes people nervous beyond any policy specific. it's like i really concerned with like german who want to keep immigrants out. and you're really concerned with keeping immigrants out here. and you definitely do seem to like to make fun of people who are, you know, white men or whatever. like that's that's not a comforting space for a libertarian to inhabit. and it does go beyond policy issues. and maybe it makes maybe in the future it'll make you look like an indie because you worried about that. but it's hard not to think about it. i don't want them to rip up my techno optimist card, but when

you're talking, i was thinking, you know, it's maybe because i was younger, but really the era of google reader and blogs was a much better discourse in because you couldn't just, you know, point and say, look, this idiot with this idiot road, you have to write like 500 words blog post about it. but when i engage it and and it's this is absolutely an old man's gripe but like i write books about stuff and like i wrote a short one now, but, you know, decades ago i wrote a long one like i think books are the best way to engage with and understand ideas. and obviously that's not the way the younger generation works and there's yeah, you know, i'm not going to shrug. i'm going to shrug like an old man about that. but. all right, we'll get off trump because he takes up too much of everyone's attention in and

right we go to questions i've got one last one you know as i said, you're the historian, the libertarian movement. and you know dave, a devotee of the of the grand cause yourself so the question is to ask to do a little movement self-criticism some of which you've done along the way. you know, where do libertarians go wrong, this kind of like that, the horrible interview questions like, you know, what's biggest weakness? so i don't want you to say, you know, our biggest weakness is we care about too much, but what is the biggest weakness of the libertarian? i honestly don't have a good answer to that. i really don't. i am. i am enough of a believer in these ideas. and i have found the people i learn them from from the figures

in this book to, you know, think in terms the 21st century to be doing a good enough job that like you would see, of course, is to blame other people because they're too stupid to get it or whatever. and which sounds horrible. i don't completely disbelieve that. and i some of the ideas that i was to earlier that rand and rothbard brought up some, people don't don't actually love the idea of everyone flourishing in freedom. you know, there is there's the senses of control and senses of envy and senses of, you know, some people have too much. they shouldn't have that. and no matter how how they had it. yeah, i don't i'm just i'm an after putting that i could i could scramble and start talking a lot and maybe say something intelligent but i don't know. i don't know. what do you feel you have an answer to that question? no. i supposed to just wondering any time you read about anything

that you know, rothbard williams and evers, other figures have written children, that is it's been a stumbling for. yeah, we don't know how to deal with these little humans that aren't rational beings. yeah. yeah. so some of comes off as quite demented, but like i, i don't know that that's the biggest flaw. yeah. the other, you know. okay you've got me in a, in the direction and not just the children, i'm not going to get into much, but in general the ruthless, rationalistic application of property rights theory, which even though i believe in it, i well aware because i do talk i talk to more normal human beings than like my my non you know, my my social life is large like 99% either dedicated or just of background progressive democrats in the modern american sense and i'm aware that demented a very good word to put it they think the

application the one i've gotten the most backlash is this barton thing, which may be not all libertarians believe about blackmail. and get back to the beginning. i talked about how okay this libertarian project is about figuring out how to minimize the use violence in human affairs and so came up to what i think some pretty interesting conclusions about what should be considered crimes and one of his more controversial ones is that blackmail not a crime you cannot or punish someone for coming to you and saying, i am going to say something about you. true or, untrue. and unless pay me not to. and like most nearly every normal human being is like that's appalling behavior. we cannot let that happen. that must be legally punishable. rothbard by again the rigorous application of his sense of property rights is like, well, no, you know, because that all they're doing is they might say something and have the right to say things, right. we even have the right to tell lies. we certainly have the right to tell the truth.

and they are offering you a chance to do a fair, you know, a deal that both you agree upon to stop you from it. and and like, well, it destroys your reputation right. isn't that. and he's like, well, yeah, but what's your reputation? your reputation is the thoughts and attitudes in people's heads about you and you do not control them? well, we're getting some laughter, even the room now. i think i'm pretty fairly describing the roth bargaining argument about blackmail. i don't think i'm getting it wrong. a substantial degree and even in this room we have done and i don't know if you're laughing about it, do you think it's absurd or of course you also agree with it, but you're aware that other people think it's absurd. so, yeah, there is libertarianism has a proper italian streak to it and a rationalistic streak to it that doesn't strike many people as demented. but i can't sit here and really say that that's problem to be overcome because i actually

believe that stuff to write and maybe many people in this room do. so then the question, well, can you figure out a a better way to sell? and yeah, that's how it gets back to what's happening in the world today. again, this book is definitely not about what's happening in the world today, but we're talking in the world today. so let's talk about the world today. when goldwater was the successful, what it was, it was kind of an argument within the libertarian community, 64, about whether it actually might be a bad thing for libertarian ideas, that they were being pushed forward in electoral politics, way before the american people were ready for them. you know, the whole leonard reed idea was we. and that was really the kind of whole movement, at least through the eighties was all about education. that's all it was about. got to create a population that understands and believes this ideas and that if the vagaries

of fate and trump's personality and my personal put us in a world where there is libertarian and these things happening that everyone is appalled by, that might not you know, if you're thinking in the long term i think all libertarians, you don't want to go insane. you do have to think in the long you don't get very many short term victories. yet it is worth wondering in 15 years is is even these like very libertarian these things that are happening right now, are they going to prove in the long term good for the libertarian cause or is government action? so far ahead of? and we you know, we live in a world with other people and we live in a world with a certain set of government and you you you do need to grapple with the and you need to cope with the ideas that other people have. you can't just you know, libertarians are often accused in the nancy mcclain age of like, oh, you actually want a dictatorship because you're aware that you can only impose

your crazy freedom ideas through a dictatorship. and that's certainly true. and it's kind of ironically paradoxical to say that, oh, you're a dictator, but you're just not government force on people. but i don't think it's completely out of line for libertarians who do have a world historical view to wonder if it's dangerous, if government actions are more libertarian than democratic populace wants them to be, and. all right, we've got 5 minutes for questions. we're to try to take some from in the room and some from on make them as short as possible. i'm ending the question. is your name, your affiliation? if you think it matters and wait for the mic here? yes, very much so.

i'm only on one trump. i'm wondering if you can give us some ideas about some application of libertarian principles. so let me give you a couple of examples. number one is school vouchers, which was mentioned before versus the objective of having all citizens with a certain amount of a certain amount of education comprehend and to be informed citizenry. and a second example is how to have a successful economy that that attracts investment without certain institutions such as for example the fcc the fdic and heaven forbid the consumer financial protection bureau. yeah, i'm super quick answer that you know part of the libertarian project is kind of an ideal here is like it's very difficult libertarian business to seem like political science fiction people. right. because we've lived in a world where all these institutions exist and there's just a huge body of work, again, mostly from the economists that actually attempt to explain, okay, here's how the things that we all want to have happen can happen

without a government funded monopoly reorganization. most of the things you're about, people would say, well, like you know, the underwriters laboratory is the classic example of that. institutions that people need are going to arise, and if people need them and want them, they're going to willing to pay for them and that may tie in with what we're talking about of that libertarian ideas just sound demented to be more. but that's why the libertarian educational process and the people who fought it is ongoing because you have to be able to show people analytically you don't need a government monopoly on any service, that people actually want and libertarians believe that is certainly not going to sound convincing enough to minute answer to a question or even like an long lecture. but that's the general idea online audience. in the 3 minutes remaining, you may join the conversation and submit questions directly. the event webpage facebook, youtube annex using hashtag keto events. pericles you have a good

question from we do the online world thanks jean. yeah the the book focus on and economic thinkers what do you think science fiction writers like heinlein had in promoting libertarian ideas. many people credit science fiction as they are on ramp to the ideas of individualism and freedom. and we talked about techno optimism techno pessimism. what do you think? yeah, to the extent which i've always believed that like the more people there are in the world that believe this stuff, the better figures like online have enormously important, possibly more important than some of the philosophers. he was very born to me when i was a kid and he'd he ran was big on this. it's the dramatization of human achievement in a realm of liberty. which island was great at is extremely i and mind opening and you know if i could make every you know person under 13 read a highland book which i would not do because i'm a libertarian i think it would be it would be great if they did.

one final one. we yeah. so just yeah. quickly, i'd love to hear your comments on what's happening now in argentina with javier malay, his attempt to implement some of these ideas. yeah, actually, i'm am i am monolingual and i have not been i wrote a little about my life, so i'm speaking in a headline a way which i usually don't really like doing. but you asked and i'll answer to the extent that i underst what's going on. it seems mostly good and it's actual effects to the extent i've seen them in the macro economic stack of stats been i you know it be surprising to a libertarian but it's been heartening how not bad for the country even this sort of shock therapy approach has been and. i preface all that i may learn things about malay and i may know things that i read spanish, portuguese, all the language of that land that that i don't understand now. but like to what i know, you

know, sums up the malay i guess i think that's a good upbeat note to close on. i'd like to thank you all for being here for a a what was it rollicking rollicking conversation about modern libertarianism. i encourage you to pick up the book there for sale outside. brian will probably some of them for you if you do thank you all for being here and. please join us for a reception in cato's winter garden.

well, good morning, everyone and welcome to our special pacific research institute webinar. i'm tim anaya prize, vice president of marketing and