This to do boaz presents his thoughts on libertarianism and discusses its popularity in the u. S. Today. We are excited to have with us this morning our speaker this morning david boaz the executive Vice President of the Cato Institute. Hes played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and Libertarian Movement and is the author of this new book the liberitarian mind the manifesto for freedom, hes a provocative commentator and authority on domestic issues such as Education Choice and a very authorization of the secondary act, drug legalization, the growth of government, the rise of libertarianism. Hes the former editor of the magazine with executive director of the council for competitive economy. Prior to joining cato hes written lots of different publications of other books including the politics of freedom and the cato handbook for policymakers. Hes written many articles in the wall street journal, New York Times etc. Frequent commentator on national television. As an example of his thinking here is a quote from a recent article he wrote called washingtons parricide economy and the quote is if you want the federal government to tax and borrow and transfer for trillion dollars a year and build houses for the poor and finetune Economic Growth in the supply americans with healthcare cost lunches and Retirement Security and local bypass you have to accept such programs come with incentive problems, politicization corruption, waste and a wealthy parasite class. Thats an example of some of the provocative quote from david is why will turn over to him and again we are excited to have him with us this morning. Thank you all for being here. There are a couple of seats and as i understand there is practiced in the back. I want to thank the group for inviting me. They graciously invited me to be a guest at their breakfasts and i told robert sometime ago im not a breakfast person please do lunges but he finally got me to one of the breakfasts by leading media star letting me be a star and talk about my book. As you heard, the book is the liberitarian mind published by simon and schuster last week sold out the first day on amazon also you never know how many copies amazon actually had. Let me talk a little bit about libertarianism and the book the liberitarian mind and how this relates to what i know or concerns on the left of many of the people here in the audience. Libertarianism is the philosophy of freedom, Political Freedom, Economic Freedom and that means i think that libertarians can cut across left, right boundaries. I tried to write the best accessible to you of libertarianism. There are many great libertarian books from john locke and richard epstein. This book to be simple enough for me to understand is so hopefully its more accessible than those scholarly books are and they wrote it for libertarians who want to have a better understanding of our own philosophy. Libertarians who might want enough to give to their friends who say what is all this stuff youre talking about. But also i wrote it for tens of millions of americans who i think fall into the category that we might call fiscally conservative and socially liberal or fiscally responsible and socially tolerant. And of those people i think our broadly libertarian. If you think in general the government should be smaller in the economy and in government they should leave people of poland and their personal lives than whatever details in this book you might not get and be ready to accept that means you are essentially a libertarian. So one of my goals with the book is to help those people understand that they are not on the red team or the blue team. They are part of the broad libertarian constituency and i say i actually had some statistical evidence for that data. The Cato Institute published various studies under the theme. The gallup poll for some years now once a year asked people to questions. Do you think the government should be involved in promoting traditional values or is it the role of the government to promote any set of values and another question about do you think the government should do more to solve social problems or is that best left to the private sector . So they classify people who get one set of answers of liberals and one set of answers as conservatives and people who say the government should stay out of both of those areas and they find recently 20 to 24 of americans fall into the libertarian category. David kirby and i added a third question because we thought they were too easy so we added a third question from the gallup and the queue of the array of questions and when we did that we have 1315 of americans falling into the libertarian category. But we also had a zogby asked a question on one of his polls and that question was what you described yourself would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal also known as libertarian. The answer to that was 44 said yes. So that is a pretty good up or down for the libertarian vote in america that if you define libertarian as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, americans are willing to accept return. In the book i have what i consider the core chapters on the intellectual history of libertarianism going back on individual rights what right do we have as human beings chapters on individualism, pluralism toleration, all the civil society, economics and the market process. And then of course i have introductory concluding chapters to put it in the context of contemporary american politics and i also have a chapter called with Big Government is all about and the quotation about the parasite economy you heard at the beginning was drawn from that when you create a government as big as the one weve got mostly done for idealistic reason, there is a element here of people who want the government to evict because they believe it should take care of people and other people wanted to be big because they know they are talented at getting a piece of what the government has. If you want a government that big you will get incentive problems, politicization corruption waste and i think in that chapter i added the line from the godfather this is the business you have chosen. If this is the business you have chosen then this is the result you have to accept dealing with. I would say libertarians politically favored lower taxes less regulation, more tolerance towards marriage and marijuana, more skepticism about endless foreign wars. The book is about the deeper principles in the policies but it has the longest chapter in the book on contemporary policy problems ranging from the board Economic Health care and growth. Now because of the venue that we are in and the nature of the audience i want to state something about the tensions of modern liberals and libertarians i suppose its fair to say that libertarian magazines have lots of effects on modern liberals the first thing that they say when we talk about liberal tensions as we consider ourselves liberals in the sense of john locke and adam smith and Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill and somewhere around the end of the 19th century a split occurred among liberals not so much on the principles of free speech religious freedom extending the the promises of the declaration of independence to more and more people but on the issue of economics and the economy so we are still liberals but now we have to call ourselves classical liberals otherwise people wouldnt understand. Still, modern liberals and libertarians agree on a lot of things even though we may talk a lot more about the things we disagree about. Thursday the Washington Post had an article on civil libertarians and Tea Party Conservatives coming together in the Virginia Legislature to fight things like drones license plate readers. I thought that was interesting to see there could be this alliance. Theres a lot of that going on about Police Misconduct and the way that they treat the communities and Police Militarization and the Cato Institute was way ahead of the game on Police Militarization and for some years weve been running a website called Police Misconduct. Net. Youve probably all heard in the past few months there is no National Database of Police Misconduct except maybe the one we are running which is obviously an official. We have to comb the newspapers which has been made easier in the days of the internet to find examples of Police Misconduct and record them. But if you go to Police Misconduct. Net you can find examples that can be categorized by city and state and so on. Libertarians agree on opposing opposing these endless foreign wars although i must say we libertarians have been disappointed in the decline of antiwar sentiment among liberals in the past few years. But i trust we still have that and then ongoing issue. The war on drugs some libertarians have been critical for many years and we work with a lot of liberals on those issues. Nsa surveillance, all the things that came out particularly after edward revelations. Many of you will remember the amendment in 2013 to try to rein in a very small part of the nsa surveillance and one of the striking things about that amendment to me was that they came close to passing in the house. It got about 200 votes but like a lot of attempts to change the system there is no way that it was going to get 218. But it did get roughly half of both republicans and democrats see that civil libertarian democrats and leaning a team Party Influenced republicans to vote for the nsa while the centrist establishment and both parties supported every buck and cranny of the state because the amendment only went after one and he still couldnt get the past. Libertarians, Tech Companies and liberals Work Together to fight. A couple of years ago dont explain the capacity to play but those are but i know my colleagues at the Cato Institute to understand Technology Issues were very active. Corporate welfare, immigration, marriage all issues liberals and libertarians have been working together on. In fact i did a Little Research and concluded that the scholars may very well have been the first think tank scholars to endorse marriage, oppose the petri attacked and opposed the war starting in 2001 and published the first study on getting out of iraq. So we had have a long record on a lot of these issues. It is true libertarians believe in free markets and limited constitutional government. We be the Economic Growth would be stronger and poverty produced more rapidly if we have a stricter reliance on limited federal government and free markets than a lot of people in washington believe. We think freedom and individual rights mean freedom of speech, freedom of religion, free markets and strictly limited government. I do believe there is a bigger market for this than a lot of politicians and pundits recognized. We are starting to see some of that recognition. Before i never saw headlines talking about the libertarian wing of congress were libertarian faction of the Republican Party or libertarians unite to stop the bill that sort of thing so there is a growing recognition but i do believe its still the case that is two to 4 of the American People who asked would say they libertarians but 20 to 40 of americans who if it is explained to them as you generally believe government should spend less than the tax less and generally believe government should leave people alone on issues like marriage and marijuana that is a much larger number. One of the things i want to do in this book is reach those people. So thats my introduction to libertarianism and the libertarian mind. And im happy to engage in discussion. I would just ask if you would identify who you are, who you work for and ask your question. There are two areas i would like to hear you address. One is when you talk about the free market between 1 and the rest. When you talk about the market are you concerned about that growing economic gap in our society and if you have unfettered free markets, the libertarian point of view is there is no rule to deal with this. Second is this kind of question of the role of money in politics and we would like you to address how you see the crony capitalism and where cato comes down in terms of trying to address a system that has a pre market that isnt exactly before because candidates out there raising millions of dollars from a small number of people. What we talk a little bit about inequality. I do write about that a little bit in the book. I think the way that i would look at it is what is the real problem we are concerned about . The problem is poverty and secondarily the middleclass incomes. So from my own point of view every day that microsoft goes up the gap between me and bill gates gets larger but i have a tiny bit of microsoft stock so i am a little bit better off. Hes a lot better off. I were interested in me being a little better off than him being a lot better off so there may be people who are actually interested simply in the gap. I wore interested in how well people are living so what im interested in are policies that improve the middleclass incomes and give poor people a better chance of getting out of poverty, getting into the working class and i think many of the policies that are proposed to deal with any quality would actually slow Economic Growth, reduce the creation of jobs and that would be a bad thing. I would say there is a lot of crony capitalism in the system. There is a lot of economic activity. There is often an assumption that the government intervenes in the market to help the poor and middle class against that. But a lot of the Government Intervention in the market isnt even intended to help the poor and the middle class. The programs that are supposed to i think generally dont put a lot of programs are not even intended that way. They are to protect incumbents and those incumbents can be people with little or incomes. We got people trying to start new competitors to the regulated taxis into being blocked by the cartel, its friends in the state legislators and city council and existing regulations. So one of the things libertarians want is to break up these systems that protect. And then at the higher end you have two big to fail and wall street bailouts and Automobile Company bailouts and all of those things are at least eventually good for the owners of the capital but not good for the free market or Economic Growth not good for people who dont already own big bang is. So libertarians are very much against the wall street bailouts and all that. So, protectionism is another area that protects the incumbents. If you are a big business that has to compete with importers that you dont like imports but if you are a consumer you should like the competition. We stand on free trade. Im a First Amendment absolutist and i do believe that spending money to advance your political ideas is an exercise of your First Amendment rights. But i think the studies show is theres not much good evidence that Large Campaign donations and spending influences politicians. People give money to politicians they like rather than politicians doing what the funding once. However what we do know is most Campaign Spending goes to incumbents but they dont get defeated unless their opponents have a lot of money. So if you want to protect incumbents can you pass the law they have been passing like the mccainfeingold act. If you want to see more rotation in office there are better ways to do it. Allow challengers to raise enough money and put term limits. I would like to see weve we three term limit on the president and most governors and we should do the same for legislators in congress and state so i would rather stick to the First Amendment, allow people to spend money as they choose knowing that if you are trying to funnel money to a member of congress there are many ways to do it that are less transparent than giving money to his campaign office. There is the Mitch Mcconnell center for statesmanship at the university of louisville. All those kind of things, the boll foundation. They have a purpose to help handicapped people but it had a fever with the Senate Majority leader if you gave contributions. Youre never going to stamp out all postings those things so why not just make it transparent and let people give money to who they want to. Thats where i come down. [inaudible] i agree with a lot of what youre saying. My son is a hardcore libertarian and could you speak of the libertarian mind thinks about foreignpolicy . This is where i run into a brickwall agreed time. If we do find libertarians as people who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal or more precisely as people committed to personal freedom and Economic Freedom that does not inherently tell you what to think about foreignpolicy and there are people who would say they hold those views and are libertarian and favor a robust American Foreign policy to advance freedom around the world which might include protecting israel and ukraine, might include the iraq war whatever. I think the more appropriate policy is to recognize that the government isnt very good at achieving its purposes and that the war is a devastating thing for any society so we should avoid a war that isnt ours and pursue a policy of non interventionism. So the libertarians i know tended to oppose the first gulf war, the iraq war. Not necessarily the war in afghanistan because america was attacked by people who have at least been harbored in afghanistan and gone intervention is always said america must have a Strong National defense to counter any potential attack. Well we got attacked and weve responded that iraq didnt attack us and so in general i think libertarians be leaving in peace. Peace. They understand how devastating the war is to buy those antibodies and to the economy and society and therefore we would like to stay out of the war whenever possible. Im the acting director of the legislative office. First i want to thank you for working with us on a whole range of issues as you said immigration and criminal Justice Reform and any number of others that before too long will no longer be bedfellows but familiar bedfellows. I did want to ask about the libertarian view of the equal protection language of the constitution and various civil rights laws that have been passed. How do you reconcile those rights with some of the other views of limited government that youve talked about already . That heat protection clause by support for the equal protection clause and the Cato Institute is currently preparing a brief in the Supreme Court gave marriage case and weve made equal protection arguments in the previous cases and we will be doing so again. Im the first in my family not to be a lawyer so i dont want to go too deep into the constitution that equal protection i would favor. Where libertarians are troubled by some of these laws is when they affect private actions. You know the distinction between state and private. They must treat people equally. It was in violation of the act through the time it was imposing a segregated school and not to mention the things that were done to africanamericans in this country and violation of what the constitution should have been understood to say. But when you get into private action, then i think you should be much more cautious and i think theres been a libertarian debate on the 1964 civil rights act. The part that overturned jim crow libertarians are in favor of. The part that regulated private hiring and housing some libertarians said it is better for society in the long run to outlaw the jim crow practices but not interfere in private housing and hiring. Others said that is a good general principle but after 250 years of oppression by the state, its not good enough to say okay we are going to stop. When you get into other groups for instance more recently gayrights and antidiscrimination law i understand the argument for that and i think they tend to follow Public Opinion so the value is to change Public Opinion in the direction of tolerance and acceptance and recognition of the dignity and autonomy of every individual and to the extent that the changes the legal changes are not the necessary once they happen they reflect whats already happened in society and i have to say right now the idea that we are combing the country looking for wedding planners were photographers or take pictures and trying to use the power of the modern state to force them to take pictures of a wedding they are morally offended by is an unpleasant example of intolerance. There are lots of wedding photographers and lots of cake bakers. It doesnt seem necessary to meet force the people to tow the line. Again, the state has to treat people equally. It hasnt done that for lots of groups and thats why i talk about how one of the great liberal and libertarian triumphs of American History is slowly extending the promises of the declaration of independence, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to the groups to whom they have long been the night. Africanamericans, women can anybody that has been excluded from those things and its important that the state stop the discrimination and start treating them equally and obviously we have not yet achieved their edgy quality. That is one of the elements of equal protection in the narrow sense and the promises of the declaration of independence. Speaking of individual autonomy and self respect i was hoping you could speak a little bit as to how libertarians feel about abortion regulation. Since 2011 there have been more onerous regulations on providers and on one end than the previous decades combined. Waiting periods used to be 24 hours and now its 72 hours. Providers are asked to change the physical construct of their buildings to conform with things that have nothing to do with care and this is all by the state we are starting to see some of these situations in the federal level. Can you talk about those regulations because there is a conflict i think when it comes to the social aspect if you could speak on that. Yes. The usual talk about sort of social liberalism or tolerance when we talk about republicans and their social extremism that usually focuses on reproductive rights and marriage. Those are not the only examples of social extremism or intolerance towards individual lifestyle choices. Certainly the drug issue is one i would put it in that category and the reason journalists dont talk about it is while there are republicans who are less anti gay there are few that questioned the drug war and there was no faction or anything. On reproductive rights i think libertarians beliefs of the role of the government is to protect life, liberty and property. And right there you see a bit of a conflict. Some libertarians i would say probably two thirds to three quarters are prochoice. But there is a minority that are prolife. They would say the first purpose of government is to protect life and this is a life. Others would say this is the womans choice and you cant require a woman to bring forth life for another potential person. Therefore liberty is the operative word here. What i notice among libertarians is that both sides have more respect for the other position than i find in a lot of the prolife and prochoice battles. I heard a writer who is broadly speaking a libertarian speak once about this and she said i have friends who are prolife and they dont hate women and i have friends that are prochoice and they dont hate babies and i keep hearing this from both sides and i just think we need to be more open to hearing she told me more broadly than that we need to be more open to hearing the other sides point of view and appreciate where they are coming from without assuming they disagree with us down the wrong side. I am not an expert on bs laws providing for a libertarian at least it goes back to the basic point. If you believe that this is a human life and the governments purpose is to protect life then youre going to be sympathetic to these various attempts within the bounds of the Supreme Court jurisprudence to narrow the opportunity for termination of pregnancies. If you belief that this is a womans right. Its covered by the governments and aid to protect liberty and youll be on sympathetic to these things. So it comes down to the basic principle and as i say one of the studies we published on libertarians research by two women at ucla finding that somewhere around two thirds or three quarters of libertarians were prochoice which also fits my observation. Based on your principles and beliefs, how would you look at other countries what countries most sort of match your libertarian principle beliefs or connect the United States looks pretty good. We have the declaration of independence, the constitution. In fact i criticize libertarians a lot of times for having an overly negative view of the world and the United States. One of the great libertarian books written was the road to serfdom. Its a great book and a great warning. However a lot of people just think yes we are always on the road to serfdom. I dont think thats true. I think all the work ive been talking about here that ending slavery and jim crow, all of that is an advance dot towards serfdom but to freedom. And even within the economic activity, we did cut the tax rates particularly in the reagan years and we have eliminated a lot of the cartel regulation from the new deal in transportation and finance and telecommunications and i always tell i sometimes have libertarian interns come up to me and say we are losing all of our freedom on the road to serve them and i say young man are you worried about being drafted and sent to vietnam . Know while i was so that is a big advance for freedom. Other countries i think the United States and other western countries are pretty much in the same ballpark in terms of human rights, rule of law private property markets into those kind of things. Cato participates in the production of a report called the Economic Freedom of the world. It finds hong kong and singapore to be the most Economic Freedom tree in the world. Singapore may not rank so well but hong kong of course hasnt had the Political Freedom though it had personal freedom. There was robust free speech and people could live their lives as they chose they just couldnt choose their government under british rule. Under Economic Freedom thats true. As if you combined the Freedom House ratings with Economic Freedom in the world, you are going to get countries like new zealand, australia Northern Europe the United States being at the top on individual things. There might be topics where i would say some other country is doing better and i must say in the past dozen years the United States fell from third or fourth to about 15th. And i specified the past dozen years this isnt just obama, this is president bush also helped to propel that decline in Economic Freedom. But the most important fact is theyve taken it back to about 1975 and tried to assess the Economic Freedom every few years since 1975 and there has been a steady growth internationally and Economic Freedom fault her of the time of the great recession. But i think its kicked back up. A lot of that is because india and china and greater political and personal freedom. So libertarians often worry that we are on the road to serfdom but if you look at the world as a whole i believe with many exceptions the world is moving towards a greater recognition of human rights, the rule of law rights of religious minorities and protect property, sound money and market economics. So its a slow but there is progress happening in our time. [inaudible] dot having the full liberty to make im not sure that i ever convince anybody from the District Of Columbia on this point but i do think that the founders set up the District Of Columbia separately from the state because they wanted a Federal District and it was not supposed to be a state and it wasnt that wasnt supposed to have their representation in congress. Not having the voting delegates and congress doesnt eliminate the fact that senior government officials and Government Employees as a class are Interest Groups anyway but i do think thats a problem so i do not object to the district remaining a Federal District and nobody is required to live in the district if you want to be able to vote for a member of congress you can live in virginia or maryland. The Federal District i think it makes sense. The bigger problem is that you have both the Government Employees as an Interest Group using the taxpayer dollars to lobby the government to take more of my taxpayer dollars away from me and i think theres something wrong with that. In addition it creates a lot of wealth in washington that comes from the rest of society. Washington of course has a very bifurcated system of wealth. But a lot of people in washington go down where the Cato Institute is and you see all of these Office Buildings in an area that wasnt built up until the past 15 years or so and i think that is a sign that too much of americas wealth is being drawn to washington and being drawn into the game of lobbying and parasites. So, like i say i never convince anybody from the district that the founders were right to have the separate district but thats the way that i see at. I read this interesting well a couple of years ago he said im uncomfortable with the idea of the business and when the banks start to get too big on the brink of collapse the government always comes in and bails them out and it may be time to start because the risk of the government bailouts are too high. Spinning i am no expert on banking exploration but i have heard of libertarian economists say it would be better to make it clear to the banks that you are a business like any other business and if you run your business badly you should go out of business. Thats what happened to market process we have created disruption. That is a very sad thing. But this is what brought us from being a poor economy on the wealthiest society as we are so we need the creative instruction that means not only that that the screen activity in the economy of the businesses destroyed so what about the bang . Various people including the economists have said for some years freddie back and a friend in a swarm of stack of bibles they were not how can you convince the market fannie mae and freddie mac are not backed up. There is a law that says they cannot draw the credit of the United States. The secretary of the treasury stands on the steps of the treasury wants to hear and says i reaffirm though federal guarantee. But the loans always treated with a discount at the market copy were backed up by the government and guess what, they were but i did talk to a couple economists who said the stalks or the loans of the biggest banks also trade at a discount like that indicating that the market doesnt believe the biggest banks would be allowed to go bankrupt and indeed in 2008 leaseholder bailout happening. You can argue the day that the key Party Started as the the day that the Bush Administration announced it intended to spend 800 billion bailing out the big banks and their phones ring off the hook with nobody organizing it. So im opposed to too big to fail. They would make their own decisions if they had to stand on their own 2 feet. They would let the banks fail if they made bad decisions but what do i do just accept it they have been an imperfect world or a bank that is too big to fail is to big dont let it get that big. Obviously as a libertarian i dont think microsoft was too big its been creatively halfway destroyed. Other companies have come along. Is facebook too big . Im not bothered by faith but being too big but if the banks have a blank check on the treasury that that is a problem so i am not prepared at this point and i dont think george will was prepared to say lets pick off on the size of bang. So in the agreement that we have abandoned too big to failed i can see libertarians as saying another will be capsized the banks. In terms of the future of the Libertarian Party [inaudible] im a local independent and im talking about libertarian as a movement and concept and as far as i am concerned i hope there are more libertarians in america that become more conscious and they can join the Republican Party or Democratic Party or the Libertarian Party or they can just devote their efforts to Initiative Campaigns were making a secure future which is one of the reasons they underperform. If they can be left alone they are happy with that. I do belief that no one he knows our strikingly more libertarian on social issues, personal freedom issues. Thats a little more difficult to say. The reason they do a regular poll and they tried to present evidence that no one he knows are not as Big Government progress of liberal as some would indicate im not convinced however most millennialist still living in their parents basement have not yet really started paying taxes. They tend to get somewhat more fiscally conservative or libertarian on the size of government. I do think also about no one he knows there is a huge deep skepticism about the utility of government to solve problems even if they say they want to guarantee a job they are still deeply skeptical that the Government Works in the long run thats going to push them in a libertarian direction. Also, they are growing up in a world of incredible choice available in so many areas and i cant belief that millennialist who have accepted that choice in lifestyle and choice on the computer and devices when i was growing up we had three networks and basically in my little town we only had one newspaper so totally different now. You can read the New York Times every day or the times of london every day. I cant belief that now there is uber. The people that expect that much choice in their lives or come to accept it are going to be satisfied being told there is one school your child has been assigned to paste on the geography or that there is one Healthcare Plan you want to sign up for or one retirement system that was designed for the traditional family in the 1930s in the Social Security system so i would guess the cynicism about government and the casual acceptance of the choices they did push libertarians in the direction which does make me optimistic about the political future. One last question. My question is whether you think it is fair and legitimate for people to have the ability extremely high taxes and healthcare education etc. So its the majority taking away and maybe the minority doesnt. So is it possible for people to live a better life by reducing the right click you talked about scandinavia and i think the reason americans have a misconception that sometimes called in socialist countries. They do not have the undo levels of regulation. What they do have this high levels of taxes and transfer payments. Ive heard libertarians recently saying people talk about the model because they generally are pin trading economies in countries with a lot of personal freedom. They are countries that have generally very minimal capital regulation and not so much Labor Regulation they just have higher levels of taxes and transfers but if you had to make the trade some might not offer that. On the philosophical question you stated that one way at the beginning and another way at the end so can a society vote to take away its own rights . The problem with that it is unlikely to be unanimous so thats what bothers me about taking away our own rights. We are in fact going to take away rights from our neighbors and so i dont think that is an appropriate thing and you did acknowledge that means a majority takes away the right. That is as isnt good from the libertarian perspective of moral philosophy and its a good idea to guarantee our rights in the constitution which we try to do in this country in three ways. First we wrote a constitution that didnt give any power to take away the rights and gave it an article one a narrow set of powers and when it was proposed, the people deserve a bill of rights and i think it was Alexander Hamilton who said what is the point of the bill of rights when the constitution gives the government the power to violate rights so they wrote one for greater caution and for the amendments the outline of the rights they were protecting and defending the ninth amendment for even greater caution they said the admiration of certain rights in the constitution shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. People already had their rights and they guaranteed that they would retain them and in the tenth amendment except by the way any power not granted are reserved for the states or the people so it is a redundant system to protect our rights and freedoms but didnt entirely work but compared to the rest of the world it worked fairly well. I think it is a bad idea to talk about voting to give away our rights and that is what variable rights teens. People sometimes challenge libertarians. You can sell your soul for an extended contract but he couldnt sell himself into slavery. So we would be better off protecting all of our rights and freedoms and if people want the benefits that they think they will get from a welfare state there are ways through longterm contracts and insurance and so on to gain those benefits if we pay for the choices we are willing to make. Thats my case for libertarianism and i hope those tens of millions who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal well by the mind and find out if they are libertarian