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