Speaking of Liberty

4. Ideas

AN AMERICAN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM

[This talk was delivered at the Scott L. Probasco Chair of Free Enterprise Seminar on Classical Liberalism, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, June 6, 1996.]

Every four years, as the November presidential election draws near, I have the same daydream: that I don’t know or care who the president of the United States is. More importantly, I don’t need to know or care. I don’t have to vote or even pay attention to debates. I can ignore all campaign commercials. There are no high stakes for my family or my country. My liberty and property are so secure that, frankly, it doesn’t matter who wins. I don’t even need to know his name.

In my daydream, the president is mostly a figurehead and a symbol, almost invisible to myself and my community. He has no public wealth at his disposal. He administers no regulatory departments. He cannot tax us, send our children into foreign wars, pass out welfare to the rich or the poor, appoint judges to take away our rights of self-government, control a central bank that inflates the money supply and brings on the business cycle, or change the laws willy-nilly according to the special interests he likes or seeks to punish.

His job is simply to oversee a tiny government with virtually no power except to arbitrate disputes among the states, which are the primary governmental units. He is head of state, though never head of government. His position, in fact, is one of constant subordination to the office holders around him and the thousands of statesmen on the state and local level. He adheres to a strict rule of law and is always aware that anytime he transgresses by trying to expand his power, he will be impeached as a criminal.

But impeachment is not likely, because the mere threat reminds him of his place. This president is also a man of outstanding character, well respected by the natural elites in society, a person whose integrity is trusted by all who know him, who represents the best of what an American is.

The president can be a wealthy heir, a successful businessman, a highly educated intellectual, or a prominent farmer. Regardless, his powers are minimal. He has a tiny staff, which is mostly consumed with ceremonial matters like signing proclamations and scheduling meetings with visiting heads of state.

The presidency is not a position to be avidly sought but almost granted as honorary and temporary. To make sure that is the case, the person chosen as vice president is the president’s chief political adversary. The vice president therefore serves as a constant reminder that the president is eminently replaceable. In this way, the vice presidential office is very powerful, not with regard to the people, but in keeping the executive in check.

But as for people like me who have concerns besides politics, it matters little who the president is. He doesn’t affect my life one way or the other. Neither does anyone under his control. His authority is mainly social, and derived from how much the natural elites in society respect him. This authority is lost as easily as it is gained, so it is unlikely to be abused.

This man is elected indirectly, with the electors chosen as the states direct, with only one proviso: no elector may be a federal official. In the states that choose their electors by majority vote, not every citizen or resident can participate. The people who do vote, a small percentage of the population, are those who have the best interests of society at heart. They are those who own property, who head households, and have been educated. These voters choose a man whose job it is to think only of the security, stability, and liberty of his country.

For those who do not vote and do not care about politics, their liberty is secure. They have no access to special rights, yet their rights to person, property, and self-government are never in doubt. For that reason and for all practical purposes, they can forget about the president and, for that matter, the rest of the federal government. It might as well not exist. People do not pay direct taxes to it. It doesn’t tell them how to conduct their lives. It doesn’t send them to foreign wars, regulate their schools, pay for their retirement, much less employ them to spy on their fellow citizens. The government is almost invisible.

The political controversies that involve me tend to be at the level of the city, town, or state. This is true for all issues, including taxes, education, crime, welfare, and even immigration. The only exception is the general defense of the nation, although the standing military is very small with large state-based militias in case of need. The president is commander in chief of the federal armed forces, but this is a minor position absent a congressional declaration of war. It requires no more than insuring the impenetrability of the borders by foreign attackers, a relatively easy task considering our geography and the ocean that separates us from the incessant feuding of the old world.

In my daydream, there are two types of representatives in Washington: members of the House of Representatives, a huge body of statesmen that grows larger as the population does, and a Senate elected by state legislatures. The House works to keep the federal Senate in check, and the Senate works to keep the executive in check.

Legislative power over the public is nearly nonexistent. Congressmen have little incentive to increase that power, because they themselves are real citizens. My House member lives within a square mile of my house. He is my neighbor and my friend. I do not know my federal senator, and do not need to, because he is responsible to the state legislators I do know.

Thus, in my daydream, there is virtually nothing at stake in this coming presidential election. No matter which way it goes, I retain my liberty and my property.

The politics of this country is extremely decentralized, but the community is united by an economy that is perfectly free and a system of trading that allows people to voluntarily associate, innovate, save, and work based on mutual benefit. The economy is not controlled, hindered, or even influenced by any central command.

People are allowed to keep what they earn. The money they use to trade is solid, stable, and backed by gold. Capitalists can start and close businesses at will. Workers are free to take any job they want at any wage or any age. Businesses have only two goals: to serve the consumer and make a profit.

There are no labor controls, mandated benefits, payroll taxes, or other regulations. For this reason, everyone specializes in what he does best, and the peaceful exchanges of voluntary enterprise cause ever-widening waves of prosperity throughout the country.

What shape the economy takes—whether agricultural, industrial, or high-tech—is of no concern to the federal government. Trade is allowed to take place naturally and freely, and everyone understands that it should be managed by property holders, not office holders. The federal government couldn’t impose internal taxes if it wanted to, much less taxes on income, and trade with foreign nations is rivalrous and free.

If by chance this system of liberty begins to break down, my own political community—the state in which I live—has an option: to separate from the federal government, form a new government, and join other states in this effort. The law of the land is widely understood as allowing secession. That was part of the guarantee required to make the federation possible to begin with. And from time to time, states threaten to secede, just as a way of showing the federal government who’s boss.

This system reinforces the fact that the president is not the president of the American people, much less their commander in chief, but merely the president of the United States. He serves only with their permission and only as the largely symbolic head of this voluntary union of prior political communities. This president could never make light of the rights of the states, much less violate them in practice, because he would be betraying his oath of office and risk being tossed out on his ear.

In this society without central management, a vast network of private associations serves as the dominant social authority. Religious communities wield vast influence over public and private life, as do civic groups and community leaders of all sorts. They create a huge patchwork of associations and a true diversity in which every individual and group finds a place.

This combination of political decentralization, economic liberty, free trade, and self-government creates, day by day, the most prosperous, diverse, peaceful, and just society the world has ever known.

Is this a utopia? Actually, it is nothing more than the result of my initial premise: that the president of the United States is so restricted that it is not even important that I know who he is. This means a free society that is not managed by anyone but its members in their capacities as citizens, parents, workers, and entrepreneurs.

As you may have already assumed, my daydream is what our system was designed to be in every detail. It was created by the US Constitution, or, at least, the system that the vast majority of Americans believed they were getting with the US Constitution. It was the world’s great free republic, however unrecognizable it is today.

This was the country where people were to govern themselves and to plan their own economy, not have it planned by Washington, DC. The president never concerned himself with the welfare of the American people because the federal government had no say over it. That was left to the people’s political communities of choice.

Before the Constitution was ratified, there were some doubters called the anti-federalists. They were unhappy with any move away from the extreme decentralism of the Articles of Confederation. To placate their fears, and to ensure that the federal government was held in check, the framers further restricted its powers with the Bill of Rights. This list was not designed to restrict the rights of the states. It did not even apply to them. It confined to the ultimate extent what the central government could do to individuals and to their communities.

As de Tocqueville observed about America even as late as the 1830s,

[i]n some countries a power exists which, though it is in a degree foreign to the social body, directs it, and forces it to pursue a certain track. In others the ruling force is divided, being partly within and partly without the ranks of the people. But nothing of the kind is to be seen in the United States; there society governs itself for itself.

and “scarcely an individual is to be met with who would venture to conceive or, still less, to express the idea” of any other system.

As for the presidency itself, de Tocqueville wrote that, “the power of that office is temporary, limited, and subordinate” and

[n]o candidate has as yet been able to arouse the dangerous enthusiasm or the passionate sympathies of the people in his favor, for the simple reason that when he is at the head of the government, he has but little power, little wealth, and little glory to share among his friends; and his influence in the state is too small for the success or the ruin of a faction to depend upon his elevation to power.

That America would never have tolerated such an atrocity as the Americans with Disabilities Act. Here is a law that governs the way every local public building in America must be structured. It holds a veto power over every employment decision in the country. It mandates that people take no account of other people’s abilities in daily economic affairs. All of this is arbitrarily enforced by an army of permanent bureaucrats working with lawyers who get rich quick if they know how to manipulate the system.

The ADA is merely one example among tens of thousands that would have been considered appalling, and, indeed, unimaginable, by the framers. It’s not because they didn’t like handicapped people or thought that people should be discriminated for or against. It is because they held to a philosophy of government and public life that excluded even the possibility of such a law. That philosophy was called liberalism.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the term liberalism generally meant a philosophy of public life that affirmed the following principle: societies and all their component parts need no central management and control because societies generally manage themselves through the voluntary interaction of its members to their mutual benefit. Today we cannot call this philosophy liberalism because the term has been appropriated by the democratic totalitarians. In an attempt to recover this philosophy for our own time, we give it a new name, classical liberalism.

Classical liberalism means a society in which my daydream is a reality. We don’t need to know the president’s name. The outcome of elections is largely irrelevant, because society is ruled by laws and not men. We don’t fear the government because it takes nothing from us, gives nothing to us, and leaves us alone to shape our own lives, communities, and futures.

This vision of government and public life has been destroyed in our country and in almost every country in the world. In our case, the president of the US is not only extremely powerful, especially given all the executive agencies he controls; he is probably the most powerful man on earth—excepting, of course, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

There is a public myth in this country that the office of the presidency sanctifies the man. For all the browbeating that Richard Nixon took as president, and the humiliation of his resignation, the testimonials and tribute at his funeral spoke of a man who had ascended to godlike status, like some Roman emperor. Even with all of Clinton’s troubles, I have no doubt that he would be treated the same way. This sanctification process applies even to cabinet appointees: Ron Brown, a corrupt fixer, ascended to godhood status despite the fact that his legal troubles were on their way to sweeping him into jail.

Of course my comments might be denounced as antigovernment. We are told on a daily basis that people who are antigovernment are a public menace. But as Jefferson wrote in the Kentucky Resolutions, free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard about confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.” Or as Madison said in the Federalist, “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.” We can add that any government that employs three million people, most of them armed to the teeth, ought to be distrusted to an enormous degree. This is an attitude cultivated by the classical liberal mind, which puts a premium on the liberty of individuals and communities to control their own lives.

We could multiply the “antigovernment” statements by the framers without end. For they spelled out their theory of public affairs, that of classical liberalism, because in the midand late-18th century, it had come under fire by a new brand of absolutism, and Rousseau was its prophet. In his view, a democratic government embodied the general will of the people, this will was always right, and therefore government should have absolute, centralized power over a militarized and unified egalitarian nation-State.

This has been Rousseau’s century. And with the help of the statist doctrines of Marx and Keynes, it has also been the bloodiest in human history. Their views of government are the very opposite of the classical liberal. They allege that society cannot run itself; instead the general will, the interests of the proletariat, or the economic plans of the people need to be organized and embodied in the nation and its head. This is a view of government that the framers rightly saw as despotic, and tried to prevent from taking root here.

Of course, they were not entirely successful. Two centuries of war, economic crisis, wrongheaded constitutional amendments, executive usurpation, congressional surrender, and judicial imperialism gave rise to a form of government that is the opposite of the framers’ design, and the opposite of classical liberalism. The ability of the federal government, with the president as its head, to tax, regulate, control, and completely dominate national life is practically without limit today.

When the Constitution was written, Washington, DC was a marshy cow pasture with a couple of buildings, and American society was the freest in the world. Today, the DC metropolitan area is the richest on the face of the earth because it is host to the biggest government in the world.

The US government has more people, resources, and powers at its disposal than any other. It regulates more and in finer detail than any government on the planet. Its military empire is the largest and the most far-flung in the history of the world. Its annual tax take dwarfs the total output of, for example, the old Soviet Union.

As for the federal system, it is more a slogan than a reality. From time to time, we hear about returning power to the states or banning unfunded mandates. Bob Dole says he carries a copy of the Tenth Amendment in his pocket. But don’t take this rhetoric too seriously. The states are virtual adjuncts of national power, by virtue of the mandates they are under, the bribes they accept, and the programs they run.

The individual, the family, and the community—the essential units of society in the pre-statist era—have been reduced to federal serfs, having only the freedoms the government allows them to have, but otherwise required to act as part of an overall national collectivist order. No major national political figure proposes to change that.

The reality, however, is that people are not satisfied with this arrangement. During the Cold War, the public was persuaded to hand over a surprising amount of their freedoms for the sake of the larger mission of rolling back Communism. Before that, it was World War II, then the Depression, then World War I. For only the second time in this century, we live in absence of any crisis the government can use to suppress the rights the framers intended to guarantee.

As a result, public opinion now overwhelmingly favors reductions in government power. Practically every politician in this country who wins an election has promised to do something about it. That goes for both major parties. This year, both Clinton and Dole will run on platforms that promise, in one way or another, to reduce the size and scope of federal power.

If we think back to November 1994, we heard some of the most radical anti-Washington rhetoric from politicians since 1776. Unlike the media, I found this to be a wonderful thing. The results, however, were less than impressive. Taxes and spending are higher since the Republicans took over. The foreign aid budget is up. The regulatory State is more invasive than ever. The centerpieces of the Republican legislative agenda—including the farm bill, the adoption bill, and the medical bill—expand, not shrink, government power.

There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the duplicity of the congressional leadership and the talents of their allies in the conservative press, who give them an ideological cover. Yet the freshmen themselves, whom the media describe as ideological firebrands, deserve some of the blame, for they lacked a consistent philosophical logic to oppose the monster they encountered.

Consider for example the issue of the balanced budget. Every politician claims to want one. The freshmen promised to vote for one. But they were immediately snookered by the political class. When they wanted to cut taxes, the elites pounced on them and said that this would increase the deficit. Immediately, they were confronted with a problem: how to reconcile their fiscal conservatism with their desire for lower taxes?

This confusion results from intellectual error. The priority is to shrink government. That means taxes should be cut anywhere and everywhere. And well-schooled classical liberals know that governments can use the trick of balanced budgets to keep themselves large and growing. Higher taxes do not typically lessen the deficit, and even if they did, that is no way for men of honor to proceed. The federal budget is not a household’s writ large. It is a giant redistribution racket.

This fact raises a central insight of the classical-liberal intellectual tradition. Government has no power and no resources that it doesn’t first take from the people. Unlike private enterprise, it cannot produce anything. Whatever it has, it must extract from private enterprise. Although this was understood well in the 18th century, and most of the 19th as well, it has been largely forgotten in our century of socialism and statism, of Nazism, Communism, New Dealism, welfarism, and total war.

As we approach the next century, what lessons have we learned from this one? The most important refutation of socialism came from Ludwig von Mises in 1922. His treatise called Socialism converted good people away from bad doctrines, and was never refuted by any of the thousands of Marxists and statists who tackled it. For this book, he is now hailed as a prophet even by lifelong social democrats who spent years attacking and smearing him.

Much less well known is another treatise which appeared three years later. This was his great book Liberalism. Once having attacked all-out statism, he found it necessary to spell out the alternative. It was the first full-scale revival of the classical-liberal program in many decades, this time from the leading political economist on the continent.

In his introduction, Mises noted that the 18th and 19th century version of liberalism had made a mistake. It had attempted to speak not only to the material world, but also to spiritual matters. Typically, the liberals had positioned themselves against the church, which had the unfortunate effect of influencing the church against the free market and free trade.

To try to avoid this polarizing effect, Mises makes clear that liberalism

is a doctrine directed entirely towards the conduct of men in this world ... it has nothing else in view than the advancement of their outward, material welfare and does not concern itself directly with their inner, spiritual and metaphysical needs.

Of course men’s lives concern more than eating and drinking and gaining material advancement. That is why liberalism does not pretend to be a full-blown theory of life. For that reason, it cannot be reproached by theologians and conservatives for being a purely secular ideology. It is secular only in the sense that it deals with matters appropriate to the political world, and no more. There is nothing in the liberalism of Mises to which any religious person should object, provided that he agrees that the material advancement of society is not morally objectionable.

Another change Mises made in traditional liberal doctrine was to link it directly to the capitalist economic order. Too often the older liberalism offered a magnificent defense of free speech and the free press, but neglected the all-important economic dimension.

Mises’s direct linkage of liberalism and capitalism also helped divorce the liberal position from the fraudulent form that was emerging in Europe and America. This phony liberalism claimed that there was some way to favor both civil liberties and socialism, as the ACLU said then and now.

But as Mises argued, liberty is all of a piece. If the government is big and powerful enough to stamp out the freedom to trade, to inflate the money, or to fund massive public works, it is no large step to also control speech and press, and to engage in military adventures abroad.

Thus Mises’s most famous line from his book, the one that both alarmed and inspired intellectuals the world over: “The program of liberalism,” if “condensed into a single word, would have to read: property.” By property, Mises meant not only its private ownership at all levels of society, but also its control by those same owners.

With that one demand, that property and its control be kept in private hands, we can see how the State must necessarily be radically limited. If the government can only work with resources it takes from others, and if all resources are owned and controlled by private parties, the government is restricted.

If private property is secure, we can count on all other aspects of society to be free and prosperous. Society cannot manage itself unless its members own and control property; or, conversely, if property is in the hands of the State, it will manage society with the catastrophic results we know so well.

If property rights are strictly guarded, the State cannot take advantage of social crises to seize power, as it has during wars, depressions, and natural disasters. The limits on government apply regardless. There are no exceptions. Thus a classical-liberal society would not have built the TVA, it would not bail out Texas farmers in a drought, it would not send men on space missions, and it would not have taxed Americans six trillion dollars and poured it into a failed war on poverty.

The second pillar of the liberal society, Mises says, is freedom. This means that people are not slaves of each other or of the government, but are self-owners who are at liberty to pursue their interests so long as they do not violate the property rights of others. Most importantly, all workers are free to work in the profession of their choice, establishing free contracts with employers or becoming employers themselves.

Combining liberty and property, people are able to exercise the all-important right of exclusion. I can keep you off my property. You can keep me off yours. You do not have to trade with me. I do not have to trade with you. This right of exclusion, along with the right to trade generally, is a key to social peace. If we cannot choose the form and manner of our associations, we are not free in any authentic sense.

The breakdown of the freedom of association, especially in the form of antidiscrimination law, is a main reason why social acrimony has so increased in our time. Although hardly ever questioned, antidiscrimination law cannot be reconciled with the classical-liberal view of society. No association that is forced can ever be good for the parties involved or society at large.

Any discussion of this subject invariably raises the issue of equality. And here we find yet another improvement that Mises made over earlier models of liberalism. They were too much in love with the idea of equality, not only as a legal construct, but also in hoping and working for a society without classes, which is nonsensical.

As Mises said, “All human power would be insufficient to make men really equal. Men are and will always remain unequal.” He argued that people cannot be given equal wealth or even equal opportunity to become wealthy. The best society can do for its members is to establish rules that apply across the board. These rules do not exempt anyone, including the rulers in government.

The very rich will always be with us, thank goodness, and so will the very poor. These concepts are bound up with particular societies and settings, of course, but from the standpoint of policy, they are best ignored. It is the job of charity, not government, to care for the poor, and to protect them from being drafted into demagogic political campaigns that threaten essential liberties.

Government in a liberal society does not protect individuals from themselves, strive for a particular distribution of wealth, promote any particular region or technology or group, or delineate the distinction between peaceful vices and virtues. The central government does not manage society or economy in any respect.

The third pillar of classical liberalism is peace. This means that there can be no love of war, and, when it occurs, it cannot be seen as heroic, but only as tragic for everyone. Yet we continue to hear how war is good for the economy, even though it always and everywhere misdirects resources and destroys them. Even the victor, Mises pointed out, loses. For “war,” said Randolph Bourne, “is the health of the state.”

So is empire. Americans opposed an alien Soviet presence in our hemisphere. Yet we never consider how people in Japan, to take just one example, may feel about large numbers of American troops in their country. By far the largest cause of crime in Okinawa and the rest of Japan is American troops. But do our troops and planes and ships and nuclear weapons “defend” Japan? From whom? No, we continue to occupy the country 51 years after the end of World War II for purposes of control.

If you want to discover the real character of a man, forget about what he says about himself, and look at his dealings with other people. The same is true of a government. We can forget its claims; simply look at how it treats others. The classical-liberal state is one that protects the rights of its citizens to trade with foreign peoples. It does not pine for foreign conflicts of any kind. It does not, for example, demand that foreign countries buy the products of influential US manufacturers, as Kodak is demanding, backed by US military power, that Japan buy its film.

Neither does the truly liberal society send government aid to foreign countries, bribe or arrest or kill their rulers, tell other governments what kind of country they should have, or get involved in global schemes to impose welfare rights on the world. Yet these are all actions the US has undertaken as normal policy since the 1930s. Our rulers seem to think that they must be bribing someone, bombing someone, or both. Otherwise we risk falling into the dreaded “isolationism.”

Jonathan Kwitney illustrated American foreign policy this way: he asks us to imagine that every few months we take a walk down the block, knocking on every door. At one house, we announce to our neighbor, “I like you, I approve of you, here’s $1,000.” At the next house, we do the same thing. But at the third house, we say, “I don’t like you, I don’t approve of you.” Then we reach under our coat, pull out a sawed-off 12 gauge shotgun, and blow him and his family away.

So we go, down the block, every few months, handing out money to some people, death to others, and making our decisions based on the interests we have at the moment, with no clear rules.

My guess is that we would not be very popular. Think about that the next time you see some “anti-American” rally on television. These people might be receiving our foreign aid, but they might also think they could be the next Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, or Panama. For a classical-liberal foreign policy is no foreign policy at all, except, as George Washington said, of commerce with all and belligerence toward none.

These three elements—property, freedom, and peace—are the basis of the liberal program. They are the core of a philosophy that can restore our lost prosperity and social stability. Yet I have only begun to scratch the surface of the liberal program. There is more to be said about monetary policy, about trade treaties, about social insurance schemes, and so much else. Yet if our political class could understand this core of freedom, property, and peace, we would be much better off, and I would feel more confident that the next class of freshmen we send to Washington would keep their eye on the prize, which is not redistribution or special rights, but liberty.

“Liberalism,” Mises wrote,

seeks to give men only one thing, the peaceful, undisturbed development of material well-being for all, in order thereby to shield them from the external causes of pain and suffering as far as it lies within the power of social institutions to do so at all. To diminish suffering, to increase happiness: that is its aim.

Would classical liberalism work in our time? Think about the contentious issues in society today. Every one involves some area of life that is wrapped up in some form of government intervention. Today’s conflicts revolve around the desire to grab hold of someone else’s property using the political apparatus of compulsion that is the State. Would our society be more peaceful and prosperous if it followed the liberal program? The question answers itself.

Now back to my daydream. I don’t know or care about presidential politics because they don’t matter either way. My liberty and property are so secure that, frankly, it doesn’t matter who wins. But to arrive at this goal, none of us can eschew the political or intellectual battles of our time. Even once the classical-liberal vision has been restored in this country, as I believe it can and will be, we cannot afford to rest.

Goethe’s Prometheus cries:

Do you fancy that I should hate life,
Should flee to the wilderness,
Because not all my budding dreams have blossomed?

And Faust answers with his “last word of wisdom”:

No man deserves his freedom or his life
Who does not daily win them anew.

IN DEFENSE OF PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS

[Adapted from an address on the dedication of the Mises Institute’s new campus, Auburn, Alabama, September 28, 2001.]

In the last two weeks, I’ve heard some people comment that this is a difficult time to be a libertarian. I disagree. The events of September 11 and its aftermath only reinforce the case for a free society, a point to which I will return shortly. What is difficult is to defend freedom and peace when everyone around you is crying out for unprecedented statism, central planning, and ever more bloodshed. Indeed, many public intellectuals, backed by the enormous megaphone of the mass media and the immense power of the State, have used the occasion of the attack to call effectively for the end of freedom itself.

The chorus went like this. The reality of September 11 suggests that there are some values, namely security and unity, that are more important than liberty and rights. Our predilection for liberty presupposes that people are basically well intentioned. Because we have come face to face with evil, an evil from which only public authority can protect us, we must now recognize that our attachment to liberty is anachronistic, even dangerous, even life threatening.

Consider Francis Fukuyama’s comments. “Peace and prosperity,” he theorized,

encourage preoccupation with one’s own petty affairs and allow people to forget that they are parts of larger communities. [During] the long economic boom ... many Americans lost interest in public affairs, and in the larger world beyond its borders; others expressed growing contempt for government.... In this respect, the September 11 attacks on Wall Street were a salutary lesson.

Now, Fukuyama may find people’s desire to be free and to be able to provide a good life for themselves and their families to be petty. He is, after all, part of an intellectual tradition that longs for the reinvention of the pre-Christian, Greco-Roman polis, in which State and society are one, where individual rights are unknown, where the merchant class is expendable, and where the head of State becomes a god after his death. But it is the later ideas of liberty and individual rights, and the free-enterprise economy that are implied by both, that are the very foundation of the rise of Western civilization.

It is this freedom that makes authentic community, based on voluntarism and contract, possible in the first place. To provide for ourselves materially means to build family security, purchase the best education and medical care for our children, invest in new businesses that serve people with ever-better goods and services, give to charity and educational causes, fund the arts, and have time and space for the contemplative life. Prosperity is not a petty concern but the very pith of what it means to thrive and grow in peace.

The social cooperation engendered in the market economy is not only local but international, and symbolized by the activities that went on in the World Trade Center towers. Here were people who, in pursuit of their allegedly petty affairs, managed to facilitate trade and cooperation among two hundred countries and just as many language groups and currencies, and also to make a profit by doing so. Government has nowhere accomplished any of the miracles that are the daily business of free enterprise.

I would gladly compare the creative productivity of any business in the world to the goings-on in the highest councils of any government. If you have ever examined government closely, you know that the ideal of the all-encompassing polis as the ancients conceived it is actually a horror; any attempt to reimpose it, using wartime as the excuse, would result in a massive reduction in freedom, a trampling on human rights, further invasion of family and property, and a complete repudiation of everything the founders of this country worked to achieve.

But in these times, many are prepared to do just that. Letters to the editor of the New York Times scream that taxes must be raised, industry must be nationalized, privacy must be ended, and citizens conscripted. They say we should rally around the flag, and in doing so abolish everything that is good and right and true about America.

Yet that view was widely held long before the attack. Partisans of the statist model have been saying exactly this for centuries. Whether war or peace, prosperity or poverty, security or anxiety, there are some people who always find a good reason to justify Hegel’s conception of the State as God walking on earth.

When prosperity and security prevail, they say we are losing our sense of civic duty and need the State to restore it. They claim that the State must grow in order to check our natural tendencies to focus selfishly on ourselves and our families. In peace, they say we need the State to prevent war. In war, they say the State is the only answer. In times of crisis and upheaval, they see the answer as nothing short of what Mises called “omnipotent government,” total war and total State. For many of these intellectuals, there is never a good time for freedom and peace. For them, the State must always be on the move, or history is regressing.

And make no mistake: the logic of the State apparatus is always to expand. As Mises says,

governments ... have always looked askance at private property. Governments are never liberal from inclination. It is in the nature of the men handling the apparatus of compulsion and coercion ... to strive at subduing all spheres of human life.... [S]tatism is the occupational disease of rulers, warriors, and civil servants.

As for those who believe that the State is the instrument by which we raise ourselves above our petty concerns to deal with crisis, Mises asks us to remember that

The state is a human institution, not a superhuman being. He who says “state” means coercion and compulsion. He who says: There should be a law concerning this matter, means: The armed men of the government should force people to do what they do not want to do, or not to do what they like. He who says: This law should be better enforced, means: The police should force people to obey this law. He who says: The state is God, deifies arms and prisons. The worship of the state is the worship of force.

The worst aspects of a State are made worse in war. Says Rothbard,

In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate, and, under the slogans of “defense” and “emergency,” it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace. War thus provides many benefits to a State, and indeed every modern war has brought to the warring peoples a permanent legacy of increased State burdens upon society.

It is never more important to remember this than in a crisis, when people are so apt to give up their remaining liberties. Stalin once explained why he scrapped Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which permitted primitive free enterprise when the entire urban population was starving, and replaced it with a total command economy that he surely knew would cause chaos.

He explained,

Crisis alone permitted the authorities to demand—and obtain—total submission and all necessary sacrifices from its citizens. The system needed sacrifices and sacrificial victims for the good of the cause and the happiness of future generations. Crises enabled the system in this way to build a bridge from the fictional world of utopian programs to the world of reality.

As much as peace and prosperity is in our interest, it is not always in the interest of our rulers. In the 18th century, Voltaire observed that “the peoples are indifferent to their rulers’ wars” because then, after many centuries of just-war teachings, armed conflicts took place between rulers and did not affect the civilian population to any great extent. But that was before the modern State, beginning with the French Revolution, which draws the entire civilian population into every conflict, and targets them, as the pagans did.

One victim of modern war is commercial freedom. And all other freedoms are made vulnerable and attacked once this one falls. Notice that in all the tributes offered to the victims of the attack, precious little has been said about the people who worked in the World Trade Center, about the traders, brokers, insurers, speculators, money managers, stock analysts, and economists who lost their property and their lives. Some were friends of the Mises Institute.

On every other day, after all, the contribution of such people to society is denigrated. Government treats their jobs like crimes waiting to happen. Popular culture considers them parasites as Soviet propaganda demonized the kulaks. No fewer than three rap groups had CDs already in production featuring covers with the World Trade Center towers on fire. One of the CDs had a song called: “Five Million Ways To Kill a CEO.” The director of sales explained to the Washington Post that the group didn’t mean any harm; they were just carrying forward their desire for the “destruction of corporate America.”

That is precisely the message imbibed by students around the country in their classes, where assaults on free enterprise are core dogma. Students who come to us constantly express amazement and relief just to be out from under the tyranny of this intense indoctrination, which reflects the attitudes of the ruling regime toward the capitalist class.

The actions of the federal government after the terrorist attack have only contributed to the assault. Its first impulse was to ground all airplanes, close all flight schools, shut down the stock market, force foreign exchanges to prohibit trading in US stocks, harass and fine so-called price gougers, and spy on Internet service providers. In short, the war on terrorism began exactly as you might expect: as a war on capitalism. Even worse, the new regulations and spending will make it more difficult for the economy to recover from the attack, much less climb out of the recession into which it was already heading after the bubble of the late 1990s.

Consistent with Mises’s theory of intervention, in which one action against market freedom seems to make others necessary, the federal government then bailed out both the financial markets through the creation of new money and the airline industry with direct subsidies. And this is just the beginning. The demands for wider circles of subsidies, bailouts, and every manner of central planning, will continue.

Not surprisingly, the very same people supporting this have also claimed that the terror attack was good for the economy. The absurdities began with Timothy Noah of Slate Magazine, who said that the rebuilding would spur an economic boom. Paul Krugman, a reliable and faithful Keynesian if there ever was one, said the same in the New York Times. But the claim wasn’t limited to the left. On the right, National Review echoed the same sentiments.

Austrian economists find it exasperating to have to explain again and again what Henry Hazlitt presented in his 1946 book, Economics in One Lesson. Picking up on a theme developed by Frédéric Bastiat in the nineteenth century, he said that such a rationale—that catastrophe is good for the economy—ignores the alternative uses of resources had the destruction not occurred. This is the simple idea of opportunity cost, the very beginning of good economic analysis. But as Mises said, Keynes and his followers are wrong from their very first assumption.

Going further down the list of economy-killing devices, the federal government now has the power to impose eavesdropping on email. Then there are the preposterous regulations on the airlines. There is no more curbside check-in, no more parking near the terminal, no more metal utensils, and a physical search of bags. Never mind that none of this relates to anything having to do with the attack. The malicious people in this case used plastic box cutters, which were effective only because they were the biggest weapons on board.

The thing to do, then, to end hijacking, is to assure that pilots and crew are armed. Yet this continues to be opposed by the government. Why? For the same reason that nothing was done to arm teachers and principals after Columbine. The State is willing to consider any measure that takes away property rights and freedom, including the right to defend yourself against attack, but unwilling to consider reasonable suggestions that might actually solve the problem.

With every other war serving as precedent, the Federal Reserve has opened the monetary spigots, and is promising a total bailout of the banking system and stock market if necessary. Then there is the Office of Homeland Security, whose creation didn’t relieve a single anxiety anywhere in the country. The US Constitution enumerates only a few functions of the central government, among which is to provide for the common defense. The feds tax and spend $2.1 trillion per year, and only now does it occur to anyone in Washington that it is time to secure the homeland.

Compounding the problem is that the new department will not protect us. The emphasis in the press is that this is a new “cabinet-level” agency, as if giving its director access to cabinet meetings is going to protect it from becoming what every other agency in DC already is: not only a waste of money, but a threat to life and property and real security.

A march through the sorry history of war shows the same pattern again and again. Taxes, inflation, industrial planning, control of opinion, censorship, and brutality against civilians is a pattern. As for the problem of rampant militarism abroad, some of the best minds in the military and economic sciences have warned about the problem of blowback for years. Murray Rothbard did in the early 1990s. The historian Martin van Creveld foresaw this as well. Among our own scholars, Robert Higgs, David Henderson, and Jon Utley issued many warnings. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has said again and again, at conferences that you may have attended, that the State’s security is an illusion.

But you haven’t read about this in the mainstream press, and, in fact, you have read very little about the relationship between the rise of the terrorist threat and US policy. The self-censorship of our free press is truly a wonder to behold, and it applies whether the government is pursuing a war on terrorism or a war on poverty, drugs, tobacco, homelessness, disease, ill health, racism, ignorance, and a hundred other ills. We are told about the alleged progress, but rarely the setbacks. We are told about the supposed victories but not the costs.

Rarely are the initial ambitions compared with the actual results, for in each case we find that the program did not achieve what its designers claimed, and usually made the original problem worse. For example, it took a war on tobacco to actually increase the rate of teen smoking, a war on discrimination to actually increase unemployment among disabled people, a war on poverty to entrench an impoverished class, and a war on ignorance to cause the illiteracy rate and the cost of education to rise proportionally. I shudder to think what a full-scale war on terrorism is going to bring.

But there will be some unintended effects too. In the coming days and years, everything about our political system will be coming into question. Even now, when public opinion strongly supports political initiatives—at least that’s what people are willing to tell strangers phoning them—no one seriously believes that government action is going to make us more secure. We may look back at our current plight as the beginning of a sea change in attitudes toward the federal government, and the ideas of individual freedom and responsibility. The first impulse is always to expand the State. The next may be the rational one: to recognize that the State has failed us in every way, from employing Osama bin Laden, to creating the Taliban, to fueling international hatreds, to disarming pilots, to failing to provide promised security.

We were told that the FAA was providing security on planes, but it turns out that the FAA was preventing it from being provided. We were told that the military would protect US cities, but they couldn’t even protect their headquarters. We were told that a vast intelligence apparatus kept a watchful eye on terrorists, but the large group involved in this attack either went unnoticed or was ignored. We were told that US foreign policy was designed to deter aggression, but it turns out to inspire it.

If the US government were a private security agency, it would be fired and sued. But because it is a monopoly provider without voluntary customers, it can’t be. So it takes the opposite course after massive failure: it extracts even more money and grabs even more power.

The ultimate lesson is that we cannot trust the State to do what it says it will do. This truth is not going away, no matter how much they spend, regulate, propagandize, and control. The growth of international trade, the collapse of formal socialism abroad, the rise of a sense of solidarity among the taxpayers of all nations, the ability of the market to outperform the government in every area of life, the advance of libertarian theory—all have combined to make it very difficult for the nation-State to operate as it once did.

Many people look to the 1930s or the 1950s as the model for the current wartime mode. In those days, the intellectual movement that backed a consistent application of libertarian principles at home and abroad was very small indeed. But during the last 20 years, this too has changed. We have a huge commercial class that has seen how politics poses a deadly threat to trade, commerce, and enterprise. We have a burgeoning middle class that knows better than to believe that any sort of central planning will be good for them. We have a large and growing movement of intellectuals for freedom in universities who are teaching more and more students in the Misesian tradition of thought.

We have centers of thought springing up all over the United States, but also in Paris, Madrid, Bucharest, and even Moscow. The translations of works are proceeding so quickly it is difficult to keep track. There is now enough quality scholarship in our tradition to support several major journals and publishing programs. It was Jeffrey Herbener, director of our Austrian Scholars Conference, who called our movement the largest intellectual global conspiracy since Marxism.

Indeed, a new book by a Marxist blames free marketeers and the Mises Institute for stopping the progress of socialism by clouding the minds of the masses and preventing them from seeing their true interests. We would say clarifying, not clouding, but it is not difficult to be flattered by his claim, for that is precisely what the ideas of liberty do indeed accomplish.

It was Mises’s view that the role of intellectuals is to boldly dissent from conventional wisdom, and proclaim what they know to be true, especially in the most difficult circumstances. You believe that too, and that is why you have been so supportive of our work. You have taken up Mises’s challenge to throw yourselves into the intellectual battle.

What does this accomplish? Everything in the world. Just stating what is true can cause minds to change, conventions to collapse, and even States to decline. Just saying what is true is the most powerful weapon in the history of liberty. It is what terrorists and despots fear, and it is ultimately the very basis of freedom itself.

Tomorrow is the 120th anniversary of Ludwig von Mises’s birth. What better way to celebrate that than the dedication of this campus to his memory and ideals? In the conservatory you will notice that we reprint his lifetime motto, adopted from Virgil when he was in high school. We have it in many languages because ours is truly an international school. The words in Latin are “Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.” In English, they are: “Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.”

We should never tire in our mission to point out that there is an alternative to the Politically Correct Left and the Militarized Right: that there is freedom itself, the genuine article, and a tradition of thought in defense of freedom unmatched by any other in its rigor and dedication. This ideal will continue to rise from the ashes, again and again, to point the way forward to peace, prosperity, and liberty.

THE SINFUL STATE

[The following article is based on a talk delivered for Thomas Dorman, M.D., in Federal Way, Washington, on November 26, 2002.]

Hardly anyone talks of the table of virtues and vices anymore—which includes the Seven Deadly Sins—but in reviewing them, we find that they nicely sum up the foundation of bourgeois ethics, and provide a solid moral critique of the modern State.

Now, libertarians don’t often talk about virtues and vices, mainly because we agree with Lysander Spooner that vices are not crimes, and that the law ought only to address the latter. At the same time, we do need to observe that vices and virtues—and our conception of what constitutes proper behavior and culture generally—have a strong bearing on the rise and decline of freedom.

Let me illustrate. A speaker at a Mises Institute conference two years ago was explaining how problems of welfare, charity, and support for the poor could be handled through voluntary means; that is, through philanthropy. His explanation was brilliant, but a hand shot up.

A student from India had a question. What if, he said, one lives in a society in which the religion says that a person’s lot in life is dictated by God, and thus it would be sin to change it in any way. The poor, in this view, are supposed to be poor, and to help them would violate God’s will. In fact, a charitable person is committing a crime against God.

The speaker stood there in stunned silence. The students around the room looked at the questioner with their mouths open. We were all amazed to confront a reality too often ignored; namely, that the ethics undergirding our culture, which we so often take for granted, are essential to the functioning of what we call the good society, based on the dignity of the individual, and the possibility of progress, freedom, and prosperity.

In our country and in our times, a productive free-market economy, one supported by a strong sense of personal responsibility and a moral commitment to the security of property rights, has one great enemy: the interventionist State. It is the State that taxes, regulates, and inflates, distorting a system that would otherwise operate smoothly, productively, and to the great benefit of all, generating wealth, security, and peace, and creating the conditions necessary for the flourishing of everything we call civilization.

The name that Karl Marx gave to this system was capitalism, because he believed that the free market was the system that empowered the owners of capital—the bourgeoisie—at the expense of the workers and peasants of the proletarian class.

The name capitalism is somewhat misleading, because free enterprise is not, in fact, a system of economics organized for the sole benefit of the property-owning classes. And yet, the advocates of free markets have not been entirely unhappy with having to use the term capitalism, precisely because capital ownership and accumulation is indeed the engine that drives the operation of a productive free market.

While the system works not to the sole benefit of the capitalists, it is certainly true that private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of this class of citizens, are crucial for us to enjoy all the glories of a productive economy to bestow themselves on society.

Along with the creation of this class comes the formation of what are called bourgeois ethics—a term used derisively to describe the habitual ways of the business class. Hard-core Marxists still use the phrase as if it described the exploiter class. More commonly, it is used by intellectuals to identify a kind of white-bread sameness and predictability that lacks an appreciation for the avant-garde.

Usually it is used to describe people who have an affection for hometown, faith, and family, and a suspicion of lifestyle experiments and behaviors that skirt commonly accepted cultural norms. But those who use the term derisively are not generally appreciative of the extent to which bourgeois ethics make possible the lifestyle of all classes, including the intellectual class.

The bourgeoisie is a class of savers and contract keepers, people who are concerned for the future more than the present, people with an attachment to family. This class of people cares more for their children’s welfare, and for work and productivity, than for leisure and personal indulgence.

The virtues of the bourgeoisie are the traditional virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Each has an economic component—many economic components in fact.

Prudence supports the institution of saving, the desire to get a good education to prepare for the future, and the hope to pass on an inheritance to our children.

With justice comes the desire to keep contracts, to tell the truth in business dealings, and to provide compensation to those who have been wronged.

With temperance comes the desire to restrain oneself, to work before play, which shows that prosperity and freedom are ultimately supported by an internal discipline.

With fortitude comes the entrepreneurial impulse to set aside inordinate fear and to forge ahead when faced with life’s uncertainties. These virtues are the foundation of the bourgeoisie, and the basis of great civilizations.

But the mirror image of these virtues shows how the virtuous mode of human behavior finds its opposite in public policies employed by the modern State. The State sets itself against bourgeois ethics and undermines them, and the decline of bourgeois ethics allows the State to expand at the expense of both freedom and virtue.

In the Western religious tradition, the Seven Deadly Sins are not the only ones. They are called the deadly ones because in traditional teaching, they result in spiritual death. Let’s take each one in turn.

VAINGLORY. This is also called pride, or, more precisely, excessive or disproportionate pride. We know what it means for a person to be excessively vainglorious or prideful. It means that he puts his interests before that of anyone else, even if doing so may cause harm to another. It is the overestimation of the worth of oneself and one’s interests and entitlements at the expense of others.

In public policy, we can think of many pressure groups who believe their interests are more important than anyone else’s. In fact, this trait of vainglory describes the appalling clamor for all sorts of new rights. We have disability lobbyists who believe they are entitled to violate everyone else’s property rights and freedom for their own sake.

The same is true of many groups identified by various racial and sexual categories. They are convinced by their own pride to believe that they are owed special privileges. The rule of law and its equal application becomes distorted by the demands of the few against the many.

This is hardly the route to long-term social peace. Consider the issue of discrimination in hiring. Why anyone would want to work for an employer who does not really want to hire him is beyond me. In a competitive market, employers are permitted to discriminate, but the costs of discriminatory hiring are wholly born by the employer, whose success or failure is determined by the consumer.

Because employers are in competition with each other, everyone can find a place for himself within the vast network of the division of labor. The pride that leads to short-circuiting this process is not in the long-term interests of society.

The same is true of nations. There is nothing wrong with having a natural and normal pride in one’s nation. But to be vainglorious and to overestimate the merit of one’s nation can have bad economic effects. Among these bad effects may be chauvinism and belligerence in foreign affairs, as well as mercantilism in international trade policy.

If, for example, we are so convinced that American steel is so much better than foreign steel that we must punish any foreigner who would attempt to sell us steel, we are guilty of vainglory. We are also doing ourselves economic harm by forcing consumers of steel—at all stages of production—to pay higher prices for lesser quality steel than would prevail in a free market.

This is an unsustainable state of affairs. Any industry that is protected from competition becomes ever less efficient. The nation that comes to practice this form of mercantilism can end up producing all sorts of things inefficiently, and displacing new lines of production that would be efficient but are not being undertaken.

Pride in public policy can result in a failure to use critical intelligence in assessing our system of government. We might say, for example, that the United States is the greatest nation on earth. But does that mean that our tax and regulatory polices are what they should be, and that to criticize them is somehow anti-American? Not by any means. To say so is to be guilty of vainglory.

The truth is that the US system of government is gravely flawed and woefully contrary to most of what the founders hoped to bring about when they set up a new government.

The framers never imagined such a thing as the monstrous Department of Homeland Security, or an income tax, or a Federal Reserve, or a far-flung military empire that spends more than most of the world’s other nations combined.

These institutions and the change of public-policy culture generally have created the most vainglorious State in the history of the world, especially under the leadership of the current president, whose speeches and statements give new meaning to the word messianic.

ANGER. Western civilization over the last 2,000 years has regarded anger as a grave vice because it leads to destruction rather than peace and productivity. Thus the institution of courts in domestic affairs and diplomacy in foreign affairs.

But in our own country, the taboo against anger in public affairs came to be violated, in particular by the war crimes of federal armies during the civil war. Civilians were deliberately targeted. Homes were looted, crops were burned, livestock killed. This was an expression of anger.

The institutionalization of anger has persisted ever since, in massacres of civilians in the Philippines, in the hunger blockade of World War I, in the bombing of cities in World War II, in the destruction of churches in the war on Serbia, and in the war on Iraq, 11 years running.

When officials say they are angry and plan to unleash Hell on some foreign country, they are partaking in this deadly vice, which also has cultural effects.

The man who was behind the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building developed his taste for violent anger during the first Gulf War. Many of the killers who have shot up public schools were later revealed to be obsessed with military means and wars.

What lesson is the current generation learning from the speeches and attitudes of the current ruling class and its taste for blood? I shudder to think.

The modern military arsenal, combined with a shredding of all restraints on what is permissible and impermissible in warfare, has unleashed the angry State on the world. Its relentless mode in foreign policy is vengeance, and its main product is human suffering and death.

ENVY. Again, this is a word hardly heard anymore. Envy is not the same as jealousy. Jealousy is merely wishing that you enjoyed the same property and status as another. Envy means the desire to harm someone else solely because he enjoys some quality, virtue, or possession, and you do not. It is the desire to destroy the success or good fortune of another.

In the current round of corporation bashing, I fear the unleashing of envy against people because of their personal accomplishments. And we see the work of envy in the redistributionist welfare State.

Some people say that what matters most is not that the welfare State helps the poor but rather that it hurts the rich. So too with the inheritance tax, which collects relatively little revenue, but does grave damage to would-be family dynasties.

How many Congressional speeches against the business class and the rich are driven by this deadly sin? All too many. Antitrust policy that seeks to smash a business solely because it is big and successful is a working out of envy. I recall an article by Michael Kinsley several years ago in Slate Magazine that honestly asked the question: what is wrong with envy?

Nothing, he concluded. In fact, he rightly observed, it is the foundation of much modern public policy. Even so, it is a deadly sin. It is one that will destroy society if it is fully unleashed. And nowhere is it more relentlessly unleashed than within the culture of the State itself, which attacks success in business and private life in every way.

A century ago, many private dynasties had more wealth at their disposal than the federal government. Would the modern Envy State tolerate such a thing? Not likely. All wealth apart from the State’s own is up for grabs, but particularly dynastic wealth.

COVETOUSNESS. The related sin of desiring to grasp what belongs to another, through whatever means one can assemble, is also socially harmful. Through taxation and welfare programs, the State is effectively blessing the sin of covetousness.

Now, let us be clear. To covet something is not the same as an innocent desire to improve one’s lot in life. This is a good impulse, one that drives people to succeed. Covetousness is different because it cares nothing for the means used to achieve one’s goals.

Instead of productive exchange, covetousness resorts to theft, whether private theft or public theft that uses the government. We saw covetousness turn to a public clamor after the collapse in stock prices in 2000 and following, when the public demanded that the Fed do something to stop their investments from going belly-up.

Here again, we see the desire for money outstrip the moral consideration of how precisely this money is to be acquired. And the more the State feeds the sin of covetousness, the more of it we are likely to see, and the more bourgeois ethics fall into disuse.

The modern State is nothing if not covetous. It has its gaze constantly fixed on our liberty, privacy, wealth, and independence, and desires to take through any means possible. In the covetous State, liberty is always declining, the percentage of wealth subject to taxation always growing, and the ability for institutions and individuals to thrive apart from government blessing always in doubt.

GLUTTONY. We think of gluttony as solely related to eating. But it can also mean the excessive desire for comfort, luxury, and leisure at the expense of work and productivity. Senior citizens’ lobbies, when they demand that the public provide comfy living for all septuagenarians at the expense of young workers, are playing into the deadly sin of gluttony.

The problem doesn’t only afflict seniors. It is a problem among the poor, who have been conditioned by the welfare state to believe they are entitled to live well without earning their money. Interestingly, rates of obesity among the poor far outstrip those among the bourgeoisie.

The pervasiveness of gluttony also shows up in the appalling consumer debt load. This implies a desire to consume now regardless of the later consequences. The gluttonous consumer cares nothing about the long term, only that his appetite is satisfied today.

The Federal Reserve encourages this deadly sin through loose credit policies and bailouts, which create the illusion that there is no downside to living for the present at the expense of the future. So too with the policy of inflation, which encourages us to spend money today because it will have less buying power tomorrow. Inflation institutionalizes the sin of gluttony and makes it appear rational.

It only takes a quick look at a detailed map of Washington, DC to see the ultimate display of gluttony, for land, money, and power. From the point of view of the State, it never has enough land, money, and power. It eats and eats, grows ever fatter, and you take a risk in merely pointing this out.

SLOTH. The story of how the welfare State has created a slothful class is an old one, hardly disputed anymore, but no less true. The promise of something for nothing at others’ expense has corrupted the poor, but also the aged and another group as well: students between the ages of 18 and 25.

On the aged, it is pathetic to see how a class of people that should be leading society with wisdom and through experience, to the highest ideals, has become a grasping group of vacationers with ever more time on their hands. Let us be clear: in a free society, there is no right to retirement, and certainly no right to a comfortable retirement. The concept itself was invented by the late New Deal. Before then, sloth was something to be purchased with one’s own money. Now, one can enjoy it via the tax State.

As for students, our school system has socialized them into believing that the more official credentials one earns, the more one has the right to extract from society, a payment in return for blessing the world with one’s mere presence. Talk to anyone who is in the hiring business these days. He will tell you that it is extremely rare to find a young person who understands that employment is not a tribute paid but an exchange of work for wages. All these trends are worse in Europe, where school welfare is more generous—but we are catching up.

The subsidization of sloth creates a vicious circle. The more the State rewards not working, the less people have by way of personal and financial resources to live independently from the State. The slothful are naturally inclined to develop dependencies, which is exactly the way the State likes it.

Meanwhile, consider the slothfulness of the State itself. There is no more risk-averse class than the bureaucratic one. Whether it is in the FDA process of approving drugs or the loan-application department at HUD, getting bureaucrats to work is like getting hogs to run a race.

Some years ago, a federal bureaucrat sent us the following article, to which he refused to attach his name. It noted:

What draws people to government work? What keeps them there for a lifetime? It’s simple: overcompensation, huge benefits, and great working conditions. It’s attractive to sign up and nearly impossible to leave.... What would I lose if I left the government? The short work week would be out the window.... Right now, I can spend 8.7 percent of my work time on vacation. That’s six weeks per year in perpetuity.... I could also forget about the unofficial “bennies”: for example, I take an hour-long jog every day, followed by a shower and a leisurely lunch. It keeps me in tip-top condition for my vacations. And shopping excursions during work are always possible. What about stress? If relaxation lengthened life, bureaucrats would live to be 150 years old.

And yet, in this one area, perhaps we should be grateful. The only thing worse than the slothful State is an energized one that awakes early to take away our liberty.

LUST. This is thought of as a personal problem only. But we see its destructiveness at work in any government policy that fails to appreciate the family as the foundation of bourgeois society. In public life today, we pretend as if the family is dispensable, when it is the essential bulwark between the individual and the State.

Thoughtful economists like Ludwig von Mises and Joseph Schumpeter saw that the family is the training ground for the ethics of capitalism. It is here where we learn about the evil of theft and to respect others’ property, to save and to plan for the future, to keep our word.

It is no accident that Marxists have long sought to smash the family as an institution, and reduce all of society to atomistic individuals who lack the resources to provide security for themselves and who inevitably turn to the State, instead of parents and kin, for help.

These are the Seven Deadly Sins, and in each case, and in a hundred ways I have not mentioned, current government policy encourages them at the expense of bourgeois ethics, which are the ethics of a free market, of a society that is productive, peaceful, and secure from arbitrary power.

Why do we hear so little of the Seven Deadly Sins? Perhaps because no institution is more gluttonous, covetous, prideful, or angry than the State itself. In the private sector, market institutions correct these abuses over time. In the State, with no market test and no check on unethical behavior, these deadly sins thrive with a vengeance.

I am by no means despairing of the future of the bourgeoisie. If there were a danger that this class could be destroyed, 60 or so years of government policy designed to kill it would have accomplished its goal by now.

And yet, we should not become complacent. To the same degree that so many current political struggles are reduced to a conflict of cultures, our best means of fighting back is to live and practice bourgeois ethics in our homes, communities, and businesses.

Let us instead recall the four great bourgeois virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, and, in doing so, do our part to build freedom and prosperity, even in our times. May we never take these cultural foundations of our civilization for granted.

THE REAL STATE OF THE UNION

[Delivered at the Mises Institute’s Supporters’ Summit in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, February 5, 1994.]

Ludwig von Mises was once asked how we can distinguish a nonsocialist economy from a socialist one. He thought a bit, and then answered: the presence of a stock market. It is this that indicates that the nation’s capital stock, or at least a portion of it, is in private hands.

America’s stock market—inflated as it may be due to central-bank credit expansion—demonstrates that we are not a socialist country. But a realistic assessment of our current predicament would have to conclude that in almost every other area, our government operates on one of socialism’s principal claims.

That claim is this: in the name of equality, fairness, and helping the poor, the central State should loot and obstruct bourgeois property owners and independent producers. Just as the Communists tried to organize the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, so it is in our country. The names have been changed, but the drama remains the same. The bourgeoisie is the middle class. The proletariat is the underclass. The capitalist exploiters are those who “discriminate” against accredited victim groups. The five-year plan is the Economic Report of the president and the libraries of regulations that appear every year. The one-party State is the two-party cartel, both of whom have a stake in the status quo.

As in the USSR, the intellectual classes are in the pay of the ruling elite, or act so as to be worthy of such beneficence. The cultural tone is dictated by our own Pravda and Izvestia, the manipulative, statist media.

So let’s forget the rubbish we’ve heard recently about the wonderful (in the Democratic version) or the pretty good (in the Republican version) state of the union. The union is in crisis, a crisis caused by an explosion in the size and scope of federal power.

Statism has enormous and complex effects on every aspect of national life. It separates work from production, destroys our communities, and politicizes our culture. It shreds our history, wastes our resources, and attacks our families. It feeds off public vice and private envy, promotes crime, and transforms education into indoctrination.

Every day, our markets are less free, our property less secure, our laws more arbitrary, our officials more corrupt, and the ideal of liberty a more distant memory.

Federal regulators are grasping for control over every sector of the economy. Medical care is the most obvious example. Both parties seem to have settled on one or another mandatory national plan for universal access, a euphemism for socialism. This is despite the sorry fiscal record of Medicare and Medicaid, the source of present industry problems.

Every Republican alternative to medical socialism accepts the dominant assumptions of Clinton’s program. They may not go as far as Ira Magaziner would, but Clinton is correct in thinking that the final bill need not. So long as the new health care system is universal and mandatory, it will eventually become totalitarian. And as far as private practice goes, it will be targeted and drafted into the State apparatus.

Another mandatory national plan with universal access is Social Security. That too is in crisis. Demographic trends ensure that the program will eventually go belly-up. The younger generation knows it will never see the promised benefits. Yet there is no serious effort toward reform.

The term “insurance” itself has been corrupted. In the private model of insurance, the underwriter is supposed to make a profit by correctly assessing risk and premiums. The new model of insurance is welfare and redistribution. In the name of insurance, the government routinely practices what was once called insurance fraud.

The family is being nationalized. The administration is pushing for starting school earlier, more federally funded babysitting services, and more after-school programs, so as to keep children in the hands of State-approved therapists. Eventually, every three-, four-, and five-year-old is supposed to enter Head Start.

The danger is not the cost, although it is exorbitant. It is not even its failure rate, which is high. It is that it takes the responsibility for raising children away from parents and gives it to bureaucrats.

The family serves as the primary bulwark between the individual and the State. That’s why the State relentlessly attacks it. This administration sees parents as expendable at best and abusers at worst. If we get a health security card from the Clinton bill, children’s lives will be monitored from birth.

The Department of Education is developing politically correct national standards to be imposed on every school. The new curriculum includes not only environmental and other statist propaganda, but also sexual reeducation.

American history, as taught in the new federally approved classroom, is so dumbed down and left wing as to be a parody of itself. Here it is in a nutshell: America was founded by patriarchal white males who oppressed women and killed Indians; they also enslaved African blacks, broke up their families, and whipped them unmercifully as the slaves built America; Lincoln freed the slaves; women got the vote; labor unions got rights; Roosevelt saved the country from a greed-caused depression; Martin Luther King, Jr. finished freeing the blacks; Reagan unleashed greed and racism; but Clinton is giving rights to blacks, women, gays, unions, the disabled, and the uninsured. That’s about it.

In this type of system, a real education involves first unlearning everything you’ve been taught in the government schools. The National Service program passed by Congress was a deception. Under it, the government agrees to pay for college, provided the recipient of the money gives, as they say, “something back to the community.” In concrete terms, this means the taxpayers fund not only schooling, but also a make-work job.

It would be cheaper for taxpayers if the students never gave anything back to the community, and instead got real jobs. This program will start small, but unless stopped, it will balloon into a full-scale European model.

Old standards of merit are being destroyed and replaced with affirmative-action mandates and quotas. We cannot overestimate the damage this has inflicted on our society. There was a time, for example, when a smart student could get an academic scholarship regardless of his income level. Those days are gone. Scholarship money is reserved for the politically correct.

This form of redistribution can be devastating. While middle-class parents struggle to make ends meet and get their kids through school, others get unjust favors, which in turn increases social division.

Businessmen suffer from the constant threat of victim-group lawsuits. Pity the businessman in a large city who has a frequent turnover in his staff. The more he must hire, the more he exposes himself to lawsuits.

Denny’s and Shoney’s, for example, were the targets of hate campaigns alleging that their waitresses and managers were turning away paying black customers. This was nonsense, of course, but fearing the cost of litigation, and the cost of worldwide media condemnation, the companies paid millions to a few lawyers and their recruited plaintiffs. There’s a word for this: extortion.

Then there’s the Americans with Disabilities Act. Thousands of complaints have already been registered with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but we haven’t begun to see the damage the ADA will do. Under the ADA, business is required to accommodate so-called disabilities like drunkenness, drug addiction, AIDS, forgetfulness, and dim-wittedness. This has to do with the government’s effective definition of disability: “any physical or mental limitation.”

Notice that a surprising number of new jobs being created in the private sector are in temporary employment. This can be through temporary employment agencies or direct contracting with the individual. In the last 12 months, it may be as high as 28 percent of all new jobs.

Why is that? The mandates on business for full-time employees are just too high, and they can be avoided by hiring temporary employees, who do not have to be paid medical insurance or unemployment insurance, and who do not have tenure through victimology. That is, temps can be easily fired. The businessman is much less likely to face charges of discrimination and be bankrupted by lawsuits.

The temporary industry is a wonderful market innovation, but it is also largely a response to the socialization of the labor pool. So it is not surprising that Congresswoman Pat Schroeder and Labor Secretary Robert Reich hate the temporary employment market. If they follow the pattern of their counterparts in Europe, and her legislation in Congress, they will crush this growing market.

The Environmental Protection Agency is completely out of control. As I speak, it is conducting the so-called National Biological Survey to take a full accounting of every plant, animal, bug, weed, stick, and dirt ball in the country, to make sure all are frozen in place and not “endangered.”

The Senate was barely able to pass a binding resolution forbidding the EPA from intruding on private property without the owner’s knowledge. Now, at least, they have to notify you before they trespass on your land with the hope of finding plants or animals that will enable them to steal it.

There are enough Green laws on the books to destroy the economy overnight if they were all enforced. The Endangered Species Act is only one of many examples. The National Biological Survey will extend it nationwide.

Clinton’s new head of OSHA promises a reign of terror against business. The FDA wants to control the wording of every food label and drive out alternative health remedies. And HUD is sending out spies to mortgage companies and apartment buildings all over the country to check for so-called discrimination. These swarms of roaming testers have a chilling effect, of course.

HUD uses a statistical measure called the Index of Dissimilarity to target areas that are too homogeneous, so coercive therapy can be administrated. This was tried in the 1970s with Chicago’s Gautreaux Demonstration Program. The result was 700,000 people fleeing Chicago altogether.

In international trade, with Nafta, we got a total of 43 new bureaucracies. The bill pretended to be about trade, but instead merely cartelized regulatory agencies across borders. Congress can no longer easily lighten labor and environmental regulations. Any such effort would face a challenge from the Nafta commissions on the environment and labor.

Now we are confronted with the prospect of Gatt, another regulatory bill being promoted as free trade. In April, the US Trade Representative will sign this agreement to create a World Trade Organization. It institutionalizes the environmental agenda, Keynesian fiscal planning, redistributionism, and “full-employment” policies. This is the Keynesian dream come true, but it’s a nightmare for national sovereignty and economic liberty.

Incredibly, the wording of the WTO charter is almost identical to that of the failed International Trade Organization, which the postwar planners tried to foist on the country in 1948. It was killed by Mises’s student and free-market businessman Philip Cortney, with his great book the Economic Munich. Almost single-handedly, Cortney proved the power of ideas. Similarly, we should do everything in our power to expose the WTO.

This is not easy, of course. The ideological climate is intolerant of libertarian ideas. For example, in an age of email, faxes, FedEx, and UPS, hardly anybody is considering privatizing the postal service or repealing its monopoly status. The private sector has achieved miracles in information distribution, but it is not allowed to carry the mail. Meanwhile the government mandates, and controls. Instead of obeying customers, entrepreneurs now have to spend much of their time obeying politicians and social workers.

Even personal liberty is in free fall. In the name of crime control, private gun ownership is under attack as never before. And the administration of the post office raids companies to make sure they are not using FedEx in violation of the law.

Similarly, even after the S&L fiasco, which was created by government deposit insurance, there are no efforts underway to put banking on a sounder footing. Instead, the banking industry is slipping into a mire of victimology.

A bank can no longer conduct mortgage policy based on merit. It must first consider race. Indeed banks are paying millions of dollars in ransom to pressure groups. The old values of saving money and paying bills no longer apply.

We have nearly lost the traditional American principle that liberty is the best organizing force for society. It’s no longer simple, for example, to start a business, so costly and twisted are regulations and taxes. The Clinton administration has announced its intention to drive most gun dealers out of business through higher taxes.

Maybe we should be thankful that the administration has admitted, for once, what taxes do to thriving enterprises. Yet a columnist who is supposed to favor tax cuts recently suggested a nationwide confiscation of handguns, a position well-received at the White House. I speak of Bill Buckley.

Then there are the FBI, the US Marshals, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. They killed 86 religious dissenters in Waco, Texas. The survivors are now on trial for defending their lives and property. And the media is rooting for their conviction.

There’s also the exploding debt, Washington’s phony budgeting, the sorry state of education, foreign aid, domestic aid, tax-funded condom ads, and foreign adventurism.

But what about the good economic news we’ve been hearing recently? Inflation is down and economic growth is up. Yet Mises taught us to look behind these numbers. The growth is almost entirely fueled by low interest rates.

There would be nothing wrong with that if these rates were based on increased savings and a longer-term outlook by the public. But savings remain historically low and the public is increasingly short-term oriented. Given these conditions, we should have much higher interest rates than we do.

One of the many hallmarks of the Austrian School is warning about the damage that artificially low interest rates do to the capital structure. They cause the capital goods sector (residential housing, for example) to over-extend itself, an extension which is reflected in the official data.

We are on the upswing in a government-manufactured business cycle. The inevitable result of a Fed-induced boom is a market-driven recession. That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be buying homes. Market signals suggest they should. It means the punch has been spiked and will eventually run out. And the after-effects are worse than a steady state of sobriety.

But what economic school will be prepared to explain this when the downturn comes? How can we turn our next economic crisis into an opportunity for the advancement of freedom? And is there anything that can be done before a collapse to improve our lot, and lessen the arrogance of the central State?

That brings me to the role of the Mises Institute. The truth about what is being done to our economy and society is being suppressed by a kept media and a political class that benefits from allowing only marginal criticism of the status quo. Part of the Institute’s efforts are therefore devoted to public education.

We are anxious to use every forum available to us to explain sound economics, identify its enemies, incite anger against the State, and urge that something be done. We don’t attempt to persuade politicians or lobby for legislation. That has proven a dead end in many cases.

Instead, we strike when we see the opportunity. Through public education, we battled last year against new administration appointees, against the trends of race quotas for banking, against trade bureaucracies, and against the spending trends in Washington. We’ve learned that when the trumpet sounds a certain tone, the troops will swing into action. But our work in public affairs is only the beginning. We also attempt to address the underlying problem of our country’s economic ignorance, bolstered by the academic establishment for at least 40 years.

Within the academy, statism is newly in vogue. The media have again beatified John Maynard Keynes just as volume two of his hagiographic biography appears. The New York Times praises “Socialism’s Noble Aims.” All reports from the meetings of the American Economic Association said it was overrun with socialists and would-be central planners. The eighties’ enthusiasm for tax cuts was completely unrepresented.

A recent dispatch from the Associated Press names the economic guru of our age: John Kenneth Galbraith. “At age 85,” the AP reports, “he’s back in vogue.” There’s no denying the truth of that statement. In the early 1980s, we thought we had gotten rid of him. When socialism collapsed in Eastern Europe, we hoped he would become an object of ridicule. If there were justice in this world, he would have.

Galbraith should do penance for his lifetime advocacy of State power, price controls, budget deficits, inflation, and central economic controls. Instead of listing among his greatest achievements his stint as Franklin Roosevelt’s price control czar, he should be redfaced about it. He should, in fact, be out on the street with a sign reading: “Will work for food.”

The public figure he admires most, Galbraith says, is Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he comments about himself and other economists: “We didn’t make up our minds on an issue until we knew what Roosevelt wanted.”

Imagine: “We didn’t make up our minds on an issue until we knew what Roosevelt wanted.” That’s a Harvard professor describing his profession as being in the business of serving the State.

Times have not changed. Most economists are political weather vanes. Whichever way the wind is blowing in Washington, they go in that direction, although they are particularly excited about moving to the left, because it gives them status and power.

Today economists ask, what does Clinton want? You only have to look at the transcripts of Clinton’s economic summit. One by one, on bended knee, economists told the incoming president what he wanted to hear. And the students who learn under them are indoctrinated into the reigning ideological regime.

The Austrian School is different, however, and always has been. Carl Menger fought the statist and nihilistic trends of his time when he founded the Austrian School on the view that economics is about acting individuals. His colleagues and students did, too.

Ludwig von Mises, the father of the modern Austrian School, battled his whole life against statism and for economic truth. Though he sometimes won acclaim for his brilliance, he faced unremitting hostility and opposition to his writings. But it didn’t stop him. This prophet of socialism’s collapse was a Rock of Gibraltar, as his students are in our time.

The Institute that carries on his work desires a society where the central government is neither seen nor heard. When that day comes, we can all live as Americans were supposed to live: secure in our property and freedom, and with optimism for the future. That is why we are so grateful for your support—spiritual, intellectual, and material. You enable us to carry on. Ludwig von Mises never gave up the fight, and neither will the Institute privileged to be named in his memory.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN OPINION

[Delivered at the Mises Institute’s Supporters Summit, “Liberty and Public Life,” Newport Beach, California, February 2, 2001.]

We live in times that are both despotic and revolutionary. We know what despotism means. Never before has any people lived under a government this well-funded, this technologically sophisticated, this well-armed, which daily undertakes activities that would have been inconceivable to governments of ages past. The great tax and political revolts in history occurred under regimes that mostly look like paradises of liberty by comparison.

We shell out 40 percent and more of our income to fund a government to oppress us with its regulations and routine invasions of our private life, to erect and run schools to which we are loath to send our children, to engage in far-flung wars that create nothing but wreckage and death, to gouge us with their mail and utility services, to seize our guns, to fund welfare schemes and entitlements that drain life from economic affairs.

An even greater loss consists in what we do not see. How many innovations have been lost due to regulations? How many businesses have left their plans unfulfilled due to discrimination lawsuits and taxes? How many good minds have been lost to the public-school system? These are the sunk costs of statism, and they are incalculable.

What’s more, the defenders of this system posture as the nation’s moral elite, and are nearly wholly in control of the establishment media and educational institutions. On a day-to-day basis, it is this aspect of the present despotism, the endless prattle from the Left, that drives us all bonkers.

Who can stand to listen to National Public Radio pose as a voice of moral authority as it spews out repackaged press releases from the Democratic National Committee? Who can bear another solemn proclamation from the New York Times that Jesse Jackson’s plan to redistribute wealth should be immediately implemented? Who can stand to hear another election analyst tell us that the Republicans must curb their extremist rhetoric, or that no living soul ought ever again to speak at Bob Jones University, or that no person who aspires to national office should ever again take a principled stand on anything?

Most of this nonsense is made up out of whole cloth, and has no connection to what any real American is thinking about these issues. These statements reflect media etiquette, which is nothing but a repackaging of the etiquette of the State. In that etiquette, one must never say anything that would cast a poor reflection on the left-liberal agenda, and must always treat any alternative as morally suspect.

The etiquette needs no conspiracy to enforce it. It is the backdrop of the entire profession. It is pervasive because the corruption begins at the top and journalists are professionally ambitious. If the crime reporter for the local paper hopes to make it to the national news desk of a major daily, he had better start thinking like a reporter thinks. And he finds out very quickly what this means. It means adopting the official etiquette of the profession.

Thank goodness for the advent of Web communications, which has liberated so many of us from the tyranny of this tiny elite and their insufferable and intolerable bias against normalcy and good sense. The promise that talk radio offered in the early 1990s has exploded into something unimaginable in the past: the possibility of being, at the same time, completely informed on public affairs and completely independent of established channels of information.

More on the media despotism and what to do about it later. What about this word, “revolution”? I fear that we no longer know what it means. Newt Gingrich called himself a revolutionary. But his only lasting legacy was to impose term limits on House committee chairmen. Whatever you think of that idea, it is not revolutionary. These days political figures have watered down the word so much that we hear calls for a revolution every few months. What they mean is a more compelling version of the status quo.

That is not what I mean by revolution. In 1969, when the New Left was proclaiming its desire for revolution, Murray N. Rothbard wrote a short but extremely powerful essay on the subject, one that penetrates to the essence of the issue. In those days, the word revolution still had an edge. It still caused people to sit up and listen. It was not used to describe a new line of toiletries or a new congressional spending bill. It meant a wholesale turning over of political affairs marked by direct acts against the State, some nonviolent, some not. Often revolutions led to war. But they certainly ended in an entirely new state of affairs.

The word revolution recalled Lexington and Concord, the storming of the Bastille, and the murder of the Czar—all three of which were directed against government power, but only the first of which ended by establishing liberty. Today, we have other examples that keep within the American tradition: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the trial and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu, the flight of Gorbachev loyalists from the Politburo. These are all examples of revolutions that turned out much better for the cause of human liberty.

Rothbard emphasized that such events are just the culmination of a long, mighty, complex process with many vital parts and functions. A revolution necessarily begins with small acts on all fronts. The seeds of the American Revolution, for example, were planted centuries before when scholars in Spain and France in the High Middle Ages began to radically question the need for the State as a social and political manager. They were the first moderns to see the potential for individuals, and voluntarily formed associations to serve as the foundation for a prosperous and peaceful society. They were the first to formulate systematic objections to coercion as a means of social organization.

These ideas became the basis of the great liberal movements of the 17th and 18th centuries, movements that involved everyone who cared about ideas: intellectuals, pamphleteers, journalists, teachers, philanthropists, churchmen, students, agitators, businessmen, propagandists, and statesmen. Not one of the groups could do it alone, but inspired by an idea and driven by a moral agenda—carried out over the generations—they finally overthrew mercantilism and perpetual war, and replaced them with the foundations of social peace, the free market, and a free society. We owe the prosperity and freedom we have today to these movements that took a great idea and acted on it.

In passing, Rothbard also exposed the phoniness of the idea of socialist revolution. He argued that socialism is neither genuinely radical nor truly revolutionary. True, it claims to achieve classical liberalism; that is, bring about economic progress and the withering away of the State. But it does so using collectivism and State control. Socialist ideology, he said, is not revolutionary but rather a new form of Toryism that seeks to take the present system of government and entrench it so deeply and expand it so far that it cannot be questioned or challenged.

His insight here helps us understand why many of us feel so uncomfortable with the word conservative to describe our agenda. The last thing we need today is to conserve the collectivist and socialist victories of Clinton, Johnson, FDR, Wilson, and Lincoln, or keep in place the present media elite that are constantly telling us how wonderful these people are.

And as Rothbard further emphasized in this piece, there is no one predetermined path to achieving a revolutionary victory. Rather, each individual uses the talents he has to delegitimize and fight the present structure of mainstream opinion. The action could be introducing a friend to a book or article he may not otherwise have seen. It could be writing the definitive treatise reinterpreting a historical event, or one improving our understanding of economic theory. It could be a letter to the editor, a speech to a civic organization, an article, a scholarship to the promising student of liberty, or education you provide your own children and grandchildren. These actions produce a cumulative effect, maybe not in one year or one generation. The key is that the movement behind them endures to the end.

Rothbard also underscored a point Mises often made in his writings. The difference between a revolution that is building and one whose time has come can be found in the shape of public opinion. By that, I do not mean polls, though they are variously helpful and misleading, depending on the methodology. I mean the assumptions about political and economic life shared by the majority of people. As long as public opinion generally supports a regime, so that the system has more friends than enemies, it survives. But when the situation reverses, so that the regime has more enemies than friends, the path of history can turn dramatically. The regime must either conform to the turning of the tide, or risk its very existence.

It is no accident that the art of molding and shaping public opinion has been the preoccupation of governments from time immemorial. Their very existence depends on it, simply because—as de la Boétie, Hume, Mises, Rothbard, and many others have shown—the State cannot rule by coercion alone. It needs consensus if it is to have control. It follows, then, that the prospects for a genuine overthrow of the current despotism depends heavily on access to information. Not just any information but the kind of information that tells the truth about the State and its apologists.

Consider the place of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, the pamphlet that circulated in the months before the American Revolution. Published in 1776, an incredible 120,000 copies sold in three months. Nearly every literate home in the country could quote its contents. It was more than an attack on the British monarchy; it was an exegetical treatment of the origin of the State itself. He distinguished between society, which he called our patron, and government, which he called our punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.... Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

Incidentally, Paine was sound on a whole host of issues from taxation to inflation. He was an advocate of the gold standard and even 100-percent reserves in banking.

Just as Paine’s pamphlet emboldened the radicals, it terrified the Tories. The work was called artful, insidious, pernicious, and seditious. It was said that this pamphlet could lead to ruin, horror, desolation, and anarchy. These days, such language seems to be lost on our media elite, who would be satisfied to dub it racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, hateful, and generally meanspirited. But the fact remains that the pamphlet triggered a revolution, without which America might have sunk into the historical ditch.

Why have there been so few decisive pamphlets since Paine’s? It wasn’t long after the Constitution was ratified that the American elite worked to suppress such radicalism, and took up the Tory line that anyone who wrote such things was crazy, cranky, dangerous, and flirting with anarchism. Indeed, if you look back over the course of American history, it is actually quite surprising how far the radicalism of Tom Paine has faded into memory.

Tom Paine-style thinkers have been especially rare in the last century, when the intellectual classes and the approved journalistic voices have tended to sympathize with the State. If you leaf through the library for American books on liberty between the years 1900 and 1920, for example, you will find precious few authors who understood the essential issues. There were virtually no economists denouncing the income or inheritance tax on principled grounds, and virtually none warning of the dangers of central banking.

These watershed years also gave us World War I and the embryonic version of the New Deal. What strikes you when studying this time was the lack of a coherent opposition movement. Yes, there were people who resisted the drive for war and people who resented the income tax. But still, the libertarian movement was small and lacked a firm intellectual foundation. It had virtually no institutional apparatus of support and precious little presence in the universities.

But as the State continued to grow, so did its opponents, so that each new generation created a crop of thinkers, activists, and statesmen that had been influenced by the last generation of dissidents. There were the anti-New Dealers, a vibrant movement that fought FDR at every turn, but which was later almost destroyed by the war. Their successors made something of a showing in the 1950s, and again in the 1980s. Thus, parallel with the rise of the State in our century has been the growth of a radical opposition movement, a revolutionary movement, one that continues to build today.

The Mises Institute was founded in 1982 with the goal of encouraging that opposition, as well as becoming the vanguard intellectual movement to further antistatist trends in academic and public life. And today that revolution is proceeding in ways that should make us hopeful for the future, most noticeably in the manner in which public opinion has been transformed in recent years by the explosion of quality information available.

The explosion of Web access has also created an effect that I couldn’t have imagined.

Outstanding writers from all walks of life are coming forward with excellent articles on a wide range of political and historical subjects. I run a daily news site, and I can tell you that I have far more excellent copy than I could ever run. And the irony strikes me daily that the difference between my one-man news site and the massive MSNBC is nothing more than a click.

At a time when Web traffic is highly competitive, Mises.org is receiving 2 million hits per month. Users range from students and professors doing deep research, to classrooms using journals and articles, to businessmen simply reading the latest commentary. And the traffic is international and truly interdisciplinary.

This reality has contributed to the threat of accountability to the press and their allies on campus. No longer do their lies and distortions go uncorrected. Reporters find themselves flooded with email when their biases get out of hand. And when they cover up a story, there is always a site out there to pick it up and get the truth out. The speed at which this happens on a daily and hourly basis is truly breathtaking. And this change has contributed to the brewing revolution. Indeed, access to information may in the long run prove to be the critical turning point.

Now, the Left uses the Web as well, but not with nearly the degree of success that real dissidents have. Salon.com, for example, was deluded into thinking that it could actually make a profit by combining hit pieces on Clinton’s opponents with pornography. They even went so far as to hold an IPO, selling shares for $40 a pop. Today that stock is in the penny category, with the site plagued by lack of traffic and unimpressed advertisers.

It is due in part to the new technologies that no excrescence of government enjoys the uncritical public support they all did from World War I until the mid-1970s. The new media have helped encourage and embolden the trend away from State worship and have dramatically accelerated the process of discrediting the old media.

The election of 2000 illustrates what I mean. For years leading up to this election, we were told by the pundit classes that the American people had once again fallen in love with big government. People didn’t want tax cuts. Indeed, we were told, people would be glad to pay higher taxes in exchange for more government “services.” The spirit of 1994 was gone forever because, thanks to Clinton, we have at last made our peace with Leviathan.

Again, this was sheer nonsense. In the waning days of the campaign, both candidates declared themselves opponents of big government. Gore probably told the biggest whopper of his life when he said, on national television: “I’m opposed to big government.... I don’t believe any government program can replace the responsibility of parents, the hard work of families, or the innovation of industry.”

Bush refined his message down to his claim that he is for the people, not the government—a version of Tom Paine’s essential message. Now, if it is really true that the American people have abandoned that old libertarian spirit, if people had really come to love Leviathan, why were the candidates talking this way? Of course, they and their pollsters knew what the voters on the margin wanted to hear.

The lack of public confidence in the State is evident in these large areas but also small ones. The post office, for example, was recently forced to cut a deal with Federal Express to help maintain its overnight delivery service. The post office is on life support as it is, and with the march of electronic communication, we can confidently predict that it probably has no more than a decade of life left.

There was a rush after the rolling blackouts in California to place the blame on deregulation. But this was absurd because price controls were never fully repealed and environmental controls prevented the construction of new power plants and shut down old ones. Once again, the government showed itself unable to perform even the most basic function of keeping the power on.

There was a time when we had to wait for publishers to correct these errors in articles that came out months later. No more. We are now able to respond within hours to such nonsense, posting pieces on our sites, sending messages to our lists, and broadcasting the response to major media outlets. Such responses are taken up in classrooms and newsgroups around the world where current events are discussed. We are also able to anticipate the left-wing line and counter it before it takes hold of the public mind.

The free-market position, the truly revolutionary position, is getting a hearing.

And the effect not only works in the popular press. When an antigun historical tract by a professor at Emory University appeared last year, gun experts from around the country started to rip it to shreds. It was only a matter of weeks before large archives of rebuttals, including some from LewRock-well.com and Mises.org, were available in an instant, and the professor ended up whining to the press about how horribly he had been treated.

The Left is worried about all this activity. They have taken note of where the energy is in American life. They grow bitter at developments like the massive growth in private arbitration, the explosion in private security guards and gated subdivision living, and they see all these trends as indicators of a decline in public confidence in their beloved government. They are as aware as anyone that the ideological forces in American life that oppose government control are huge, diverse, and young, while the defenders of the old order of government control, while retaining power, lack intellectual confidence.

Recently, ex-New York Times writer Anna Quindlen, writing for MSNBC, tried to console leftists by assuring them that they are merely out of power and not irrelevant. She cited the example of the delayed nomination of John Ashcroft as US Attorney General as proof of the kind of mischief the Left can cause.

It is a good example because it illustrates how fundamentally thin and absurd the Left has become. Instead of being a robust intellectual movement, it is nothing but a collection of grasping, screaming, hysterical special interests who come nowhere close to representing anything normal. Given Ashcroft’s public positions, and the extent of leftist power in the media, it is something of a shock that he was nominated at all.

And yet, this powerful apparatus, involving many sectors of society, has a weak hold on power and a very thin margin of public support, and they grow weaker and thinner by the day. That fact in large part accounts for the increasingly hysterical tone of left-wing rhetoric and the maniacal behavior of interest groups that depend on the welfare-warfare state.

No longer do the Left and its media backers consider people who oppose wealth redistribution and support local self-government and free enterprise to be merely mistaken or misguided. No, we’ve seen a change in tone in the last few years. Even the slightest deviation from left-wing orthodoxy is decried as hate, and any man who dares think unapproved thoughts is pounced on as an enemy of society. This is true in politics, academia, the business world, and many other sectors.

To be sure, this type of rhetoric has a long historical precedent. In the 1960s, books were already appearing that purported to unearth hate and danger on the Right. The tactic was always the same: linking people through association. If a conservative politician had once taken a phone call from a donor who was friends with someone who was on the board of an alleged Nazi group, the politician was said to be secretly allying himself with Nazis.

Now, you might think that such tactics actually date from the McCarthy era of the 1950s. That’s not entirely accurate, because it is impossible to understand McCarthyism without seeing it as partial response to FDRism of the 1930s, in which every opponent of the New Deal and the run-up to war was smeared as a proto-fascist. Many of the anti-New Deal writers and activists lost their jobs and had their lives ruined by the Roosevelt administration’s determination to shut up all its critics by any means necessary. The McCarthyites, who often had a strong case to make, simply regarded turnabout as fair play.

We can keep going back further in American political history, to see that Wilson decried his political opponents as reactionaries or Germanophiles, and ended up jailing quite a few of them. German teachers were even lynched. And before that, there was Reconstruction, in which every white Southerner was treated as a political criminal by virtue of his birth and race, not to speak of Lincoln’s jailing of his opponents and shutdowns of dissenting newspapers. In truly Stalinist fashion, Americans were jailed for the crime of being present when Lincoln’s policies were criticized, and remaining silent.

In fact, we can trace the use of smear tactics back all the way to the Federalists, who used vicious rhetoric against any partisans of the Articles of Confederation, and later attempted to shut down political opposition with the Alien and Sedition Acts. All opponents of the regime have received the same treatment given Tom Paine by the Tories in 1776.

Today, contrary to conventional wisdom, Marxism is more, not less, mainstream than in the past. Instead of defining people according to class, the new Marxists define people according to race, sex, religion, and, now, sexual orientation. History, in their eyes, is nothing other than the working out of a great struggle within these categories.

The philosophical method by which this transition took place is complex, and I don’t want to go into it here, but it involves a several-stage process by which old-fashioned standards of logic and reason and truth are thrown out. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, people are first encouraged to believe in nothing, and then are fully prepared to believe in anything. What the Left, particularly that which runs the mainstream media, believes in today is power and little else, because, to them, only power, exercised in the interest of group identity, has meaning.

Today, if a free-market economist makes an argument against taxes, he is called a tool of the rich. If he argues against race and sex quotas, he is called a racist and a sexist. If he argues against trade sanctions, he is called a tool of Saddam or Castro. If he argues against disability or environmental regulations, he is called an enemy of the disabled and clean air. These are not arguments but attempts to shut people up, which is just about all the Left can come up with. This is Marxism at work, throwing out rationality in favor of identity demonization.

This approach is pervasive in today’s political culture, but far from being an indication that we are losing the battle of ideas, it is actually a measure of how much we are winning, and how close we are coming to the day when the regime’s enemies outnumber its friends. Increasingly, the State and its allies resort to intimidation and power as their means of maintaining their grip on the sectors of national life they control.

Think of all the old liberal clichés that are hardly ever invoked anymore. Remember this one from Voltaire? “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This has been transformed, so that the new left-wing message, on campus and in public life, is: if you say the wrong thing, I’m not only going to run you out of polite society, I’m going to call the federal cops.

Recall the phrase “academic freedom,” once so sacred to the Left? Today, people who invoke it are dismissed as dangerous rightists attempting to bypass the thought police on curriculum and human rights committees.

Now, there is some truth to the Marxist idea that a type of struggle characterizes history. In fact, Marx himself stole the idea from the classical liberals, who saw that a struggle between the taxeaters and the taxpayers, the producers and the dependents, the market and the State, is at the heart of politics, and no more so than in our heavily interventionist society. In the days after the national election, USA Today produced a county-by-county map of the US, with the areas that voted for Bush colored in red and those that went with Gore colored in blue.

If you have seen this map, you know that it is worth more than any lecture in politics or sociology you ever heard. What it showed was nothing short of a sea of red, from top to bottom and left to right. The red zone represented five times more land mass than the blue. What’s more, the division perfectly summed up the deep split between the taxeaters and the taxpayers.

The blues were inner cities, the state capitols, the government-funded intellectual class on the east coast, the leftist cultural elite on the California coast, immigrant areas on the borders, and the environmental crazies. And who are the reds? Everyone else. If you believe that we live in a stable political system, one look at this map and you will see that it is wildly unstable, and unworkable over the long run.

Now, this is not to say that Bush somehow represents a pure case of political revolt, but when you are aware of how hard the press worked to defeat him, and how the media did this work for 12 months leading up to the election, you begin to realize just how entrenched mainstream American opinion is against the ideological orientation approved by the media elite.

The Mises Institute recently came under fire from one of these watchdog groups that claims to oppose intolerance and hate. What was our offense? We have published revisionist accounts of the origins of the Civil War that demonstrate that the tariff bred more conflict between the South and the feds than slavery. For that, we were decried as a dangerous institutional proponent of “neoconfederate” ideology. Why not just plain old Confederate ideology? The addition of the prefix neo is supposed to conjure up other dangers, like those associated with the term neo-Nazi.

These are desperate tactics of people who know, in their heart of hearts, that they are on the wrong side of history. Their day has come and gone, and now they will do anything to hang on to the only source of life they have, which is not intellectual or popular, but rather rooted only in government power.

The Left and the partisans of government power are surrounded on all sides by dissidents. In the media, only one of four networks, Fox, offers anything close to a balanced view of current events, and it recently zoomed past the other three networks in total viewership.

This is a change most of us never expected to see in our lifetimes. In the universities, Mises Institute faculty members report that it is precisely their political incorrectness that draws students to their classes and drives young people to devour the literature they recommend. When they get in trouble with the thought police on campus, it is the students who come to their defense.

As for the attack on us, distributed by a major leftist organization to every important media outlet in the country, we received all of two phone calls. Neither resulted in an article.

Someday, perhaps even Republicans will figure this out. An amusing exchange occurred the other day during the hearings on John Ashcroft, who once correctly wrote that the most important reason for private gun ownership was to protect against tyranny. Ted Kennedy exploded in a tyrannical rage at Ashcroft for suggesting that the United States system of government could ever be tyrannical—this coming from an architect of the tyranny.

Ashcroft, in keeping with the instructions he received from the Bush transition team, didn’t respond to Kennedy’s harangue. But wouldn’t it have been nice to actually hear him explain what he meant? He could have quoted the founders on the issue of gun ownership. He could have upbraided Kennedy’s strange arrogance in thinking that the US government is somehow, unlike any government in the history of the world, incapable of tyrannical acts. How glorious to have heard Ashcroft say what we hope he believes: that the Kennedys of this nation are personally responsible for the present tyranny, and that Ted stands as the living embodiment of why it is so important that the citizens be armed.

Alas, Ashcroft did not. And though we may be disappointed, we are no longer surprised that Republicans acquiesce to left-liberal claims of moral and intellectual superiority. We’ve seen it for so long. Anyone who expects the Republicans to set out to reverse the tide of statism ushered in by Democrats hasn’t been paying attention to the course of American politics for the last century. The Democrats and Republicans have played the role of Good Cop and Bad Cop in the statist enterprise, each putting a face on despotism that can be accepted by their loyal constituents.

A good example is Clinton’s program of Americorp, an embryonic system of national service. This program was passed by a Democratic Congress in 1993 with nearly universal Republican opposition. Over seven years, it has paid young people to become servants in a political army whose job it is to entice families and businesses to get on welfare, and otherwise agitate to sell big government to the grass roots through grants to left-wing organizations.

So committed has Americorp been to big government that its enlistees have even distributed the much-hated low-flush toilets to households that still have old-fashioned toilets that use enough water to keep them clean and working. On the other end, Americorp enlistees have worked to round up and crush older toilets, to make sure that they do not become part of the burgeoning black market.

What are Republicans saying about the program today? In the last week of its term, the Clinton White House sent out a press release quoting Republicans—including John McCain, Rick Santorum, John Kasich, Robert Bennett, Orrin Hatch, Thad Cochran, Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell, Conrad Burns, Mike DeWine, Pete Domenici, among many others—testifying that the program is wonderful, efficient, and should be preserved and expanded.

Another example: the Republican Congress is going wild for President Bush’s education proposal. The New York Times announced the proposal with the following lead sentence: “President Bush proposed a significant increase today in the federal role in public education.” That’s really all you need to know to make a judgment about it. It spends more money, grants more power to the Department of Education, imposes a national testing scheme on schools for the first time, and pushes a new spending program that will put willing private schools on the federal dole.

The GOP is intimidated by the media and always looking for an occasion, if not a good reason, to sell out, only to be shocked that the much-anticipated praise from the Left never arrives. A bigger problem is that, while Republicans are blessed with some degree of sense, and they are less reliant on parasitic special interest groups than the Democrats, they lack any kind of ideological sophistication, and thus are not prepared to make any kind of serious argument against government intervention.

In all my years of observing Capitol Hill, I’ve known of only one man who did not succumb to the temptations of power. He is Ron Paul of Texas. And still, there is little chance of cloning him, no matter how many think tanks move their offices to Capitol Hill, no matter how many seminars are held for legislative aides, no matter how many cocktail parties are held for our rulers.

In the end, political involvement and activism of the conventional sort will not be enough to reverse the tide. What is needed, and what is occurring right now, is an underlying intellectual and cultural shift. For years, libertarians and conservatives have placed their hopes in politicians and political forces, only to be disappointed again and again. It’s time that we understand that these people are often late barometers of shifts in public opinion; they tend to follow, not lead.

Now, whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about the prospects for the Bush presidency depends a lot on your starting point. If you start with the assumption that these people will govern like many other Republican administrations, it means you expect no serious decrease in any area of big government, and fear massive increases. We need only think about the Hoover, Eisenhower, and Nixon administrations.

People look back on the Reagan years with some degree of fondness but, in fact, his reputation is wildly overblown. At the end of the 1980s, taxes were higher, spending had quadrupled, the welfare state had doubled, and regulation on the private sector had dramatically increased. Was it all the Democrats’ fault? These things took place with a Republican Senate.

A serious problem also presents itself when you look at the legacy of George W. Bush’s father, who not only gave us a tax increase but also the Americans with Disabilities Act, some disastrous amendments to civil rights law, and the first major post-Cold War war, which set a precedent for Clinton’s warmongering during the 1990s. We can only hope that the son does not follow his father in this respect.

One reason many of us are not woefully pessimistic about this administration, of course, is that whatever it is, it is not the Clinton administration, a regime implacably opposed to the ideals of a free society. And yet, when you consider what the administration wanted, and measure that against what it actually did, there are some surprising results.

Despite its desire, expressed by Hillary when she complained there were no gatekeepers on the Web, the Clinton government was never able to regulate or tax the Internet. In fact, the Clinton regime was pressured into accepting legislation that guaranteed a measure of freedom. Many plots to read our email, tax our mail-order and Internet transactions, and spoil our privacy were foiled by the enormous public outrage that each attempt provoked.

Despite the Clinton administration’s socialist ideological orientation, it was not able to raise taxes after its initial increase in Clinton’s first term. You might chalk that up to increased revenue due to the economic expansion. And yet it is interesting that the rate of discretionary domestic spending actually slowed during the Clinton years.

It is preposterous that Clinton claimed to have shrunk the government to its smallest level in postwar times. Yet it does remain true that the employed workforce of the federal government is smaller than anytime since World War II. That is due to a major problem that faces government: people are quitting, and recruits to government work are fewer every year. This reflects no deliberate change in policy, but rather a dramatic shift in public opinion that is working itself out in ways that are going to change our future.

What do the ideological convolutions of our age tell us? I believe they tell us which way the wind is blowing, and it is toward freedom and away from government planning. The Left continually claims that government has never been weaker or more downtrodden than today. They see the triumph of capitalism everywhere and bemoan it. They cry and wail that there are no more New Deals, Great Societies, or grand socialist experiments abroad. They say this represents the end of political idealism, a word used to mask an essentially totalitarian agenda.

Now, the Left is obviously exaggerating for political effect. Nonetheless, there is truth in what they say. The socialists control the universities, the labor unions, the nonprofit world, most special interest lobbying organizations, the international bureaucracies, the public schools, and nearly all positions in the permanent bureaucracy. And yet, strangely, they complain that they have no power and no influence.

This is because they sense that they do not and cannot control those things which are most determinative of the shape of the future: the pace and direction of technological change, the explosive growth of the private sector worldwide, the antigovernment trendline in public opinion, and, most importantly, the imaginations of the new generation of intellectuals.

There is a revolution that is brewing and building slowly, systematically, but relentlessly. And it is a revolution against that ideological centerpiece of the 20th century, the omnipotent State. It is taking the form of a renewal of private life and the establishment of a new generation of natural elites and intellectuals who have no interest in allying themselves with the State. Indeed, they are working for a society in which society is left to flourish in the State’s absence.

How long it will take for this revolution to run its course, and turn the world we live in upside-down, cannot be known. It may be this year or it may be 50 years. But this much we do know: those of us committed to the building of an intellectual infrastructure necessary to overturn the despotism of a government-managed society must never let up. Never let anyone tell you that what you believe is an anachronism. The Left does not own the future.

If we get discouraged we also need to remember that our efforts are not in vain even when they are not victorious. I’m reminded of something C.S. Lewis said in response to the example of a man who is both very bad and very religious. Lewis asked us to imagine how much worse he might be without religion. In some ways, we might also imagine how much worse off we would be today without efforts of our forebears.

What if Mises had never written his attack on socialism when it was universally popular, or if Rothbard hadn’t come to the defense of property rights at a time when they were universally traduced? Knowing the ways in which ideas affect the course of events, we can say that we would be much worse off. All great revolutions in history had an ideological basis that took generations to build up. That is the stage we are in today.

The times are also right. We are not in depression and we are not in war. We are not locked into any Manichean international struggle. It has never been easier to see that the enemy of American freedom is not overseas, but within the Beltway. It has never been easier to find out the truth, and the tellers of truth have never told it with so much evidence and moral conviction.

We have every reason to celebrate the political and cultural constellation of our time. These days, supporters of less government at home also tend to be those who doubt the wisdom of globalist nation building, while those who favor big government at home are also most likely to push for the globalization of government authority abroad. This is a huge step in the right direction: our side is working to shed the ideological baggage of imperialism, and approaching something like a consistent set of principles.

The rise of homeschooling and gated communities gives the middle class a strong interest in the protection of the sanctity of the home and private property. As Mises explained, these are as much issues of capitalism as complicated questions of corporate finance. Also, the new generation of Web users and people whose livelihoods and essential sources of information are connected with the new technologies are with us as well.

There is much work left to do. The judiciary needs to be desanctified. The history of statism and its evil needs to be constantly researched and published. Economic theory needs to be separated from its positivist research program that fits so well with the needs of the State, and good economic theory restored to its proper foundation in the social sciences. Students need ever more opportunities to escape the ideological prisons of their universities and colleges, and to be exposed to alternative modes of thought. The need for funding for books, conferences, teaching materials, journals, and scholarships is immense.

If we approach our task with vigor and continue to build on our victories, we can win. This victory will not take a conventional path, or even a path we can expect. But we know that victory is impossible unless we continue to raise up and encourage a new generation of intellectuals, whose work with future students can build a powerful force for change, and continue to sway public opinion for freedom and against the State.

That is the mission of the Mises Institute. Throughout history, the strongest defense of liberty has come from the natural elites in society who own property, form families, establish dynasties, worship God, and serve as the backbone of the business class. As in past revolutions for liberty, they must link arms with the dissident intellectuals who refuse to become mouthpieces for the ruling regime, and have the courage to defy conventional wisdom.

When freedom is finally secured, and big government brought to its knees, it will be the consequence of a revolution led by this coalition. It is this intellectual and political movement that can speak a radical language that embraces the free economy and the prosperity that comes with it, and tolerates no more government interference in family, community, business, or any other aspect of our lives.

As Tom Paine concluded his pamphlet, “we have it in our power to begin the world over again. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”

DAWN WILL FOLLOW THIS DARKNESS

[This speech was delivered at the Mises Institute’s “Boom, Bust, and the Future” conference in Auburn, Alabama, January 19, 2002.]

In arguing that dawn will follow the present darkness, I must first establish that the darkness exists at all. If you believe Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, the dawn has already arrived with the government’s response to September 11, and its political and economic aftermath.

Now, Bartley’s a supply-sider, and if you know something of that school, it is a mixed bag. It can be very good on the need for tax cuts and the fallacies of zero-sum thinking. However, it is dismissive toward debt and public spending, and all-too-friendly toward inflation and State intervention generally.

Bartley writes that before the Bush administration’s bombing campaign, America was consumed with guilt “at being too powerful, too prosperous, and ... too assertive.” Now, however, with the war, we can consolidate “a new century of safety, peace, and spreading prosperity.”

Now, the supply-siders can be an absurdly Panglossian bunch, so long as stock prices are rising. And for many years, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has never found a low stock price that it didn’t believe could and should be raised with an injection of new liquidity. That leads the writers to celebrate any event that will prompt the Fed to lower interest rates. War, for example.

But the Journal is hardly alone in the opinion that war and prosperity go together. The whole media hold that the overthrow of a tottering and thuggish regime in dirt-poor Afghanistan represents some sort of triumph of the national will, a foreshadowing of the government-run utopia of peace and prosperity headed our way.

The tactic here is an old one: the identification of military prowess with economic health, which conflates the voluntary sector of private productivity with the coercive sector of central planning. It accepts fallacies from Keynes’s view that government spending boosts productivity, to Lenin’s view that capitalism thrives on military conquest.

But Bartley goes further. His point is not only that prosperity and military assertiveness stem from the same political priorities, which is not true in any case. He actually suggests that militarism itself is what brings about prosperity. After all, his column is not a tribute to enterprise but to war planners.

Bartley should know that it is not the military that makes prosperity possible. It is prosperity that makes it possible for the military, like all government programs, to exist in the first place. Government revenue that funds the military is seized from the private sector, the way a parasite lives off a host. The healthier the host, the happier the parasite, which is allowed to become fatter and stronger than ever.

Thus, it is capitalism and the astounding productivity of the free economy alone that accounts for the power and influence of the US. As to the government, when it isn’t taxing the markets, it is draining their productive power in other ways.

The current war on recession, for example, is being funded through credit expansion, which has led to massive debt accumulation. Meanwhile, the Fed’s 12-month campaign to keep the economic expansion going has been a spectacular failure. It has pushed interest rates so low that saving, already at historic lows, is punished in favor of stock speculation.

In the second half of 2001, American politicians got into the act by urging consumers and businesses to go on a spending spree. This was an attempt to stymie the good instincts that people have to get their financial house in order during recession. Instead of dumping debt, debt of all kinds has reached very dangerous highs. Americans have driven up total consumer credit, as well as corporate credit, to record highs.

Neither cheerleading nor an artificial injection of liquidity is a viable substitute for old-fashioned rebuilding. As we’ve learned at this conference, real economic growth can’t be created by a printing press. At a time when the political establishment is using happy talk to generate the appearance of happy days, and spending untold billions on war and welfare, no one wants to hear the message that there is a price to pay for this fiscal and monetary profligacy.

“War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings,” Mises wrote.

The earthquake means good business for construction workers, and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists, and undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.

Government power and market productivity work at cross purposes. As Mises wrote:

History is a struggle between two principles, the peaceful principle, which advances the development of trade, and the militarist-imperialist principle, which interprets human society not as a friendly division of labor but as the forcible repression of some of its members by others.

He goes on to point out that: “The military state is a state of bandits. It prefers to live on booty and tribute.”

In Mises’s view, there are times when employing the military is necessary, but he pleads with us not to be naïve about the consequences. “Not only economic but moral and political conditions will be affected,” he writes. “Militarism will supplant democracy; civil liberties will vanish wherever military discipline must be supreme.” Hence, says Mises, the use of the military always comes at the expense of liberty, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise.

We see the erosion of liberty taking place in our own time. Thanks to legislation passed this fall and winter, the federal police now enjoy unprecedented rights against the people. And our supposedly free media have been ignoring this—or, in the most abject, toadying fashion—heralding it.

Right now, political deviants are being rounded up without probable cause. In recent days, students said to hold antigovernment views have been visited by the FBI and the Secret Service at their dormitories. So have business professionals, overheard making cynical remarks at, for example, the local gym. As for Congress, it has become utterly useless in curbing the executive State. By congressional decree, the chief executive has been granted unprecedented power and autonomy, in complete violation of the Constitution.

That only begins the catalog of interventions. In economic affairs, we now have a conservative administration calling for a vast expansion of unemployment benefits, new restrictions on the use of cash, food stamps for foreigners, stepped-up federal spending and control of public schools, more foreign aid, and more Federal Reserve money and credit to make it all possible.

We can look forward to another round of international bailouts, possibly even of Japan, where banks are holding $1 trillion in bad debt, and officials are burning up the phone lines to DC. And don’t forget the billions headed toward Afghanistan to fund a massive rebuilding of what the US just destroyed.

No one should believe the Wall Street Journal, that the dawn has arrived because the government believes itself to be more powerful than anyone or anything on earth. No, as Jefferson said, the opposite is true: the more latitude the government has at home and abroad, the more we ought to be concerned for the future of freedom.

Interestingly, Bartley pens a chilling sentence that would appear to indicate some knowledge of this. Listen to his choice of language:

A new era ... cannot be consolidated in the foreign arena alone. In the new year, Mr. Bush will have to make the point that the serious minds who can so ably run a war are also the best minds to run an economy, nurture better education, make environmental trade-offs, and save a faltering Social Security system. [Emphasis added.]

Of course, he favors central planning by Republicans as opposed to Democrats, but from the point of view of the free society, it doesn’t matter whose calling card the State is carrying.

That free enterprise is capable of funding a huge military empire creates something of a problem for those of us who advocate freedom, for we know that the more wealth society produces, the more tempted governments are to steal it. This is why it is morally and intellectually incumbent on believers in free enterprise to take the lead in warning against expansions of government, of all sorts.

One may argue, of course, that to the extent that the US military assists in keeping peace and stability in the world, this is good for free markets and prosperity. But is this what the Pentagon does? The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center were striking out at wealth and those who produce it, just as many bureaucrats in Washington strike out at market productivity on a daily basis. The damage done on September 11 was dramatic and compressed into one instant; the damage done by Washington bureaucrats is spread out over years and decades, and less visible to the eye.

But both forms of violence constitute the use of coercion against peaceful people. So by hating and attacking the market economy, the terrorists share a profession in common with the political class in this country, though the latter is in good standing with the law; indeed, it makes and enforces the law.

Moreover, there is more than enough evidence, including the statements of the terrorists themselves, that they were not only protesting economic freedom but also specific US military policies that would not exist in a free market, for example, a deadly embargo against Iraq, and US troops on what is to them the holy sand of Saudi Arabia. I don’t believe that US foreign policy ought to change because terrorists demand it; I believe it should change because it is the right thing to do.

The US government somehow managed to do more than simply provide terrorists with motivation. With policies dating back decades, it made it very difficult for Americans to protect themselves against terrorist attacks, by, for example, preventing privately owned planes from arming themselves against hijackers, and leading us to believe that a military budget larger than that of every other developed country combined might actually be all the protection we would need.

A government at war always uses the occasion to expand its power over the economic and social lives of its citizens. To be sure, some of its excuses are quite plausible: everyone favors justice for those involved in killing the innocent. But unleashing the dogs of war leads to unpredictable consequences. Even after adding to Afghanistan’s miserable lot, and killing some 4,000 civilians who had no part in September 11, the US still hasn’t caught Osama bin Laden. There were better ways than war to pursue justice, but there was no better way to increase the grip of the central State over America, which is what the government actually aims at.

That we have always known, but events of recent months have reminded us again of why it is so urgent to join the intellectual battle in defense of the free society, particularly in the field of economics, and for the sake of our personal well-being and that of society as a whole.

If there is new faith in government today, it is not a faith that government can completely manage society, as tracts from the 1930s claimed. Instead, it is a faith that government can pulverize its enemies with ease, and to that degree the faith is not entirely misplaced. The human mind has always been impressed by the ability of power to accomplish spectacular acts of destruction.

Yet the Fed has proven itself powerless as a tool of macroeconomic stimulus during this recession. Its impotence has startled everyone, especially the Fed’s own economists.

Think of it: we live in times when the government cannot point to a single one of its programs and call it a success. We are faced with several huge fiscal crises in the future involving retirement benefits, rising debt, and the overvaluation of stocks. Because politicians destroyed the gold standard, we have a currency that is fundamentally unsound and unchecked by any limits on the central bank. We have collapsing public schools, public transit, and public services of all sorts, which no amount of cash infusions are going to fix.

Yet there are positive signs that have emerged recently. I would name the shredding of the Kyoto treaty and the hampering of environmentalism as a political movement, the inability of the left-liberals to enact more gun laws, the sucker punch that September 11 gave to the multicultural movement which claims that there is something inferior and inherently awful about the Western mind, the relentless march of the homeschooling movement, the well-documented trend among students to reject the left-wing prattle of their professors, the rise of a new bourgeois cultural sensibility, and the continued growth of a diverse Internet as an alternative source of news.

The realization that the government, despite the Department of Homeland Security, cannot protect us is probably a good thing too. It can only increase the use of market means of providing the security we all seek. These things are not enough to bring about a new dawn, of course. But we will also be helped by one thing we can be one hundred percent sure of: the State will continue to get egg on its face wherever it intervenes, in terms of spectacular scandal, and spectacular failure.

Before talking about what we must do, however, let me explain what I mean by dawn. For all of us, it is the free society, one in which we are secure in our property and privacy from a grasping government, when our families and community lives are permitted to flourish in absence of the belligerence of State officials, when the US government no longer believes itself the master of the country and the world, but rather begins to observe the Constitution’s limits on its power.

That dawn will require, first, an ideological change in public opinion, where people’s latent distrust of government is hardened into a hard-core love of liberty itself. This change must begin in the world of ideas, the world to which the Mises Institute is dedicated.

Through it all, the Mises Institute’s intellectual work proceeds apace and with astounding results. Our teaching and resident fellow programs prepare the cadre that any revolution needs. Our journals overflow with outstanding scientific and historical scholarship. All of this, which you help make possible, is laying a foundation for the future, just as Rothbard and Mises did.

However, that doesn’t mean that good scholarship in the Austrian tradition goes unnoticed today. The IMF, for example, just released a working paper that does a credible job of presenting the Austrian theory of the business cycle. If you think about this, it is astounding for a theory that was supposedly killed off in the 1930s to be emerging into discussion again today. But it is happening, and at far more places than the IMF. This is the power of ideas at work.

Recently, Gene Callahan mentioned that there are so many articles appearing in the popular press that discuss Mises that you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one. This would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

Every summer we bring in hundreds of brilliant and dedicated students, leaders on their campuses, to receive systematic instruction in economics, history, ethics, law, and social theory. They leave telling us that their time here had a greater impact on their education than anything at their colleges and universities. Dozens of dissertations and books have been completed based on ideas sparked at these conferences.

We have hundreds of young professors, teachers, researchers, and writers doing the hard work of liberty. Our daily editorials reach tens of thousands of the world’s smartest students, educators, and business professionals. The intellectual movement backing our ideas has become nothing short of a well-oiled international machine spreading truth and good sense at all levels of academia, society, and culture. I submit to you that this trend should make us more bullish on liberty, despite any political or financial crisis.

The time is ripe for the Austrians to be heard. Only the Austrian School has coherently explained what is happening right now in Argentina and Japan. Only the Austrian School has provided a full account of what brought us to the present economic downturn in America, and why welfare and warfare and inflation only make things worse. Only the Austrian School has offered a consistent vision of a radical alternative, one that is capable of attracting young minds and appealing to society’s cultural and intellectual leaders.

Our greatest patron in this battle is the free economy itself, which daily astonishes us with its ability to provide, innovate, and expand in the midst of so many attacks. The creative power of commerce dumbfounds even the leftists who have foretold its death. The State may pave, but the flowers of enterprise break up the concrete. And by commerce and enterprise, what I really mean is human action, the choices of individuals to embrace their own self-interest, and that of their families and communities, rather than to live for the political aims of the omnipotent State.

For hundreds of years, and more so now than ever, the market has outrun the ability of interventionist governments to make it conform to some predetermined plan. And despite the boom and bust of dot-coms—thanks to the Fed—the Internet continues to grow as a source of commercial strength, and as an alternative source of news and analysis not cleared with DC in advance. The success of LewRockwell.com, the libertarian daily news, is only one example.

With the aid of human motivation and innovation, and human action in the marketplace, aided by all those institutions that sustain it in society, we will see our way out of the mire.

We must be aware, of course, that those of us who champion a consistent vision of a free society, without apology or compromise, are going to continue to come under fire. These criticisms can be brutal, but they are no different in character from what they have always been. The fundamental tactic is to question our motives, and to disparage our cause as only another special interest. But liberty is not the demand of a pressure group. It is a plea for the good of the entire society. That makes it unique.

Ours is not a mass movement, of course, and it need not be so. Throughout history, the true friends of freedom, the ones who believe in it as a matter of hard-core principle, have always been few. We have been reminded of this in recent days.

How much more important, then, to stress and restress our continuing theme: liberty for everyone, State privilege for no one. This is the social framework of a market economy.

This is a message that no faction within the ruling class wants to hear. No matter how divided the factions are among themselves, they form a united front against the libertarian idea.

That’s why to sign up with the cause of liberty is to take a principled step. It means rejecting the dominant strain of politics, that the State ought to be used to promote the agenda of some special interest, whether it be those who benefit from welfare, regulation, inflation, or war.

The cause of liberty rejects all this, not because we have a special interest but because we stick by the most unpopular claim of all: that society ought to be permitted to organize itself so that it benefits everyone in the long run. There is only one system that does so, and that is the competitive market economy operating under the natural order of liberty.

We must never, even now, underestimate the power of ideas. The State, with its attacks on freedom and peace, is ultimately no match for the truths we love and defend with all the energy we have.

Our tradition of thought is deeply rooted in European and American history. It flourishes today among students, faculty, and professionals all over the world. Those who seek to stamp it out through intimidation are no match for a body of thought that has withstood every crisis that has befallen it for centuries, survived and flourished, as new young minds join its cause.

One of the blessings of prosperity is that it permits serious scholarship and teaching—in addition to art and music and all the humane studies—to flourish. In this way, through the intellectual means, civilization perpetuates itself.

There will always be crises: financial, economic, social, and political. But there will also be great opportunities for change. If we adhere to the spirit as well as the ideas of freedom, there will indeed be a new dawn. As Mises said, “Ideas and only ideas can light the darkness.” We have the ideas, and they will light the way to victory.

THE PATH TO VICTORY

[This talk was given at the Mises Institute Spring Seminar Series, Auburn, Alabama, March 5, 2003.]

The Mises Institute was founded as a research center based on classically liberal ideas that have always been under fire: the ideas of Mises and the tradition of thought he represents. That means a focus on the Austrian School of economics, and, in political philosophy, individual liberty and the need to prevent the State and its interests from crushing it, as all States everywhere are inclined to do.

The first priority of such an institute is to keep a body of ideas alive. Great ideas have no inherent life of their own, especially not those that are opposed by the powers that be. They must circulate and be a part of the academic and public mind in order to avoid extinction.

And yet we must do more than merely keep a body of thought alive. We don’t just want our ideas to live; we want them to grow and develop, advance within the culture and public debate, become a force to be reckoned with among intellectuals, be constantly employed toward the end of explaining history and current reality, and eventually win in the great ideological battles of our times.

What is the best means of achieving such victory? This is a subject that is rarely discussed on the free-market right. Murray Rothbard pointed out that strategy is a huge part of the scholarship of the left. Once having settled on the doctrine, the left works very hard at honing the message and finding ways to push it. This is a major explanation for the left’s success.

Our side, on the other hand, doesn’t discuss this subject much. But since some sort of strategy is unavoidable, let me just list a few tactics that I do not believe work. The following, I’m quite sure, will fail for various reasons:

QUIETISM. Faced with the incredible odds against success, there is a tendency among believers in liberty to despair and find solace in being around their friends and talking only to each other. This is understandable, of course, even fruitful at times, but it is also irresponsible and rather selfish. Yes, we may always be a minority, but we are always either growing or shrinking. If we shrink enough, we disappear. If we grow enough, we win. That is why we must never give up the battle for young minds and for changing older minds. Our message has tremendous explanatory power. We must never hide our light under a bushel.

RETREAT. One mark of the liberal tradition is its intellectual rigor. It contains more than enough intellectual substance to occupy the academic mind for several lifetimes. There is a tendency, then, to believe that retreating into academia and eschewing public life is the correct path. The idea is that we should just use our knowledge to pen journal articles and otherwise keep to ourselves, in the hopes that someday this path will pay off in terms of academic respectability. But this has not been the path of brilliant minds from Turgot and Jefferson, Bastiat and Constant, Mises and Hayek, Roth-bard and the adjunct scholars of the Mises Institute. They are all engaged at some level in public debate. They believed that too much is at stake to retreat solely to private study. We cannot afford that luxury.

HOLDING CHAIRS IN THE IVY LEAGUE. I’ve seen this related error take a real toll on otherwise good minds. A young person can start out with real commitments, but he may fear the marginalization that comes with holding unpopular ideas. He tries to pass himself off as a conventional scholar, while sneaking in libertarian thoughts along the way. He may intend to reveal his true colors eventually, but then there are the demands of tenure and promotion, and social pressures to boot. Eventually, in short, he comes to sell out.

CONVINCING THE POLITICIANS. Another type of problem stems from the belief that political organizing is the answer. But this can only lead to despondency, as effort after effort fails to yield fruit. Despite what you hear, the political class is not interested in ideas for their own sake. They are interested in subsidizing their friends, protecting their territory, and getting reelected. Political ideology for them is, at best, a hobby. It is only useful insofar as it provides a cover for what they would do otherwise. I’m generalizing here, and yes, exceptions are possible. In fact, I can think of one in our century: Ron Paul.

PLACING HIGH-PROFILE ARTICLES. I know think-tank people who would do just about anything to get in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. This is a snare and delusion. Once you put a priority on the medium over the message—and this is inevitable once you begin to think this way—you are forgetting why you got in this business to begin with. If these venues come to you and ask you to offer an opinion you hold, by all means do so. But that is not the way it works.

GETTING ON TV. The same applies here. I know people who were once dedicated to the ideas of liberty who developed a hankering for media attention, and eventually forgot why they got into the ideas business in the first place.

STARTING MORE THINK TANKS. I know this sounds silly but some people on our side of the fence believe that the more nonprofit organizations there are, the more likely we are to win the battle of ideas. To me, this amounts to confusing the success that franchising represents in the commercial marketplace with ideological success, which is not guaranteed by the proliferation of websites and institutes. Indeed, ideology is not solely a commercial enterprise. We are a nonprofit research institute for a reason. What we do pays huge returns for civilization but not in the form of accounting profits. Our reward comes in other ways.

BUILDING AN IMMENSE ENDOWMENT AND HIRING A HUGE STAFF. Funding and staff alone will solve nothing. Funding is crucial and heaven knows the Mises Institute needs more of it. Staffing is great, so long as the people are dedicated and competent. But neither is an end in itself. The crucial question is whether the passion for ideas is there, not just the financial means. Amazing things are possible on small budgets, as I think the success of the Mises Institute shows.

WAIT FOR THE COLLAPSE. We know that socialism and interventionism cannot work. We know they fail, and we suspect that they might finally fail in a catastrophic manner. This may be true, but we are mistaken if we believe that the ideas of liberty will naturally emerge in such a setting. Crisis can present opportunities but no guarantees.

Finding errors such as these is easy, and I could list a dozen more. Let me offer a few points I think we should remember.

Our ideas are unpopular. We are in the minority. Our views are not welcome by the regime. They often fall on the deaf ears of an indifferent public. Big newspapers don’t often care what we think. In fact, they want to keep us out of their pages. Politicians will always find us impractical at best, and threatening at worst.

In short, we fight an uphill battle. We must recognize this at the outset. We are what Albert Jay Nock called the remnant, a small band of brothers who have special knowledge of theory and history, and a concern for the well-being of civilization. What we do with that knowledge and concern is up to us. We can retreat or sell out, or we can use it as our battle cry and go forward through history to face the enemy.

Let me offer just a quick outline of some principles I use:

EDUCATE EVERY STUDENT who is interested in what we do. Never neglect anyone. One never knows where the next Mises or Rothbard or Hayek or Hazlitt is going to come from.

ENCOURAGE A PROLIFERATION OF TALENTS. Some people are great writers. Others are great teachers. Still others have a talent for research. There are other abilities too, like public speaking and technological competence. It takes all these abilities to make up the great freedom movement of our time. There is no need to insist on a single model; rather, we should make use of the division of labor.

USE EVERY MEDIUM we can to advance our ideas, from the smallest newsletter to the largest Website. Never believe that a medium is beneath you, or above you. We must be in the academic journals and we must be in the pages of the local newspaper. Along these lines, the Web has solved the major problem we faced throughout history, namely finding a medium to communicate our ideas in a way that makes them available to everyone who is interested. But it never happens automatically. It requires tremendous effort and creativity to bring about change.

ADHERE TO WHAT IS TRUE. This means avoiding fancy ways of pitching your ideas in keeping with current trends. It’s fine to be attentive to sales techniques. But never let this concern swamp your message.

SAY WHAT IS TRUE. Never underestimate the power of just stating things plainly and openly. Whatever the topic, the ideas of liberty have something to add that is missing from public debate. It is our job to make that addition.

DON’T NEGLECT ACADEMIA. Yes, colleges and universities are corrupt. But they are where the ideas that rule civilization come from. We must not neglect them. We must publish journals, sponsor colloquia, help faculty and students. Never let academia believe it has the luxury of forgetting about our ideas. This is why the Mises Institute holds seminars for professors and students, as well as financial professionals and interested people of every sort.

DON’T NEGLECT POPULAR CULTURE. Yes, popular culture is corrupt, but not entirely. We must not neglect it because it has a huge impact on the way people see themselves and learn about their world.

USE YOUR MINORITY STATUS TO YOUR OWN BENEFIT. There is no sense in duplicating what others already do. If you publish, publish something radical and surprising. If you produce a book, make it a book that will change people’s minds. If you hold a seminar, say things that are worth saying. Never fear the unconventional. It is possible to be conventional in form and radical in content.

REMEMBER THAT INFLUENCE CAN BE INDIRECT. The effect of ideas on a civilization is like waves on water. By the time they reach the shore, no one remembers or knows for sure where they came from. Our job is to stick to the task. We should use every means at our disposal to get the ideas out there; what happens after that is as unpredictable as the future always is.

SUCCESS CAN TAKE MANY FORMS. I am often asked how we can think we are succeeding even as the government keeps growing. To me, this poses no great quandary. All governments want total control. What stops them, primarily, is ideological opposition. Without it, the government would grow much quicker and civilization would be doomed in short order. To what extent has the circulation of the ideas of liberty slowed down the growth of the State? How much worse off might we be?

CHANGE CAN HAPPEN QUICKLY. The ideological foundations of statism weaken in ways that are not always detectable. Change can happen overnight, after which all becomes clear in retrospect. If you had told the average Russian in 1985 that in five years, the Soviet Union would be defunct, you would have been dismissed as a madman. It’s my opinion that statism in America may have run its course. We should all do our best to speed up the process.

In the history of warfare, there have always been armies that are ruled by the center and emphasize drills, lines, and discipline. They tend to treat their soldiers as expendable. They can win but at a huge price.

The other model is guerrilla warfare, usually undertaken by the underdog in the battle. Guerrilla armies usually consist of volunteers; every soldier is considered valuable. Their tactics are unpredictable. They are not ruled by the center but rather exploit the creativity of each member. Such armies have proven remarkably effective in the history of warfare.

I believe that the guerrilla model is what suits us best—a campaign of ideological guerrilla warfare conducted by the remnant. This is no guarantee of success but it is the best guarantee against failure that I know.

Mises.org receives 15 million hits per month, and LewRockwell.com is the most popular liberty-minded site on the net. This week 250 scholars will present papers at our annual scholars conference. Our journals circulate like never before, in academia and public culture. Our books have changed history in so many ways.

The key to our success, I believe, is that the Mises Institute is all about being attached to principle and truth before anything else. We’ve never traded short-term attention for building for the long term.

Mises did not either, and he paid a personal price. But his ideas are changing the world. We must all follow his lead, never giving in, never giving up, fighting for truth until our last breath. We have the passion and energy. Most importantly, we have truth on our side. I believe we can have the victory.