Thank you to all these people for having us. Great job. Thank you very much. Very relevant book really appreciate it. Our authors will be signing in the back of the store and we think each of you for coming tonight and that you come for our next event. Thank you all. Thank you all for coming. [inaudible conversations] booktv is on twitter and facebook. Tweet us twitter. Com booktv. Or post a comment on facebook. Com booktv. First of this week indicate institutes david those present his thoughts on libertarianism. And discusses his popularity in the u. S. Day. We are excited to have with us this morning our speakers this morning david boaz, executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, he played a key role in the development of the libertarian movement. He is the author of this new book the libertarian mind a menifesto for freedom and editor of the libertarian reader. He is a provocative commentator and leading authority on domestic issues such as education shoelace, taking the reauthorization of the elementary secondary education act, drug legalization, the rise of libertarianism. Former editor of new dog magazine executive director of the council for competitive autonomy. Prior to joining cato he has written lots of different publications. His other books include the politics of freedom, and the cato handbook, many articles in the wall street journal, New York TimesWashington Post it cetera frequent commentator on National Television and as an example of davids thinking, for many isnt articles he wrote, washingtons parasite economy. If you want the federal government to tax and borrow, transfer 4 trillion a year. If you want to build housing for the poor and finetune economic ropes, if you want to supply americans for retirement security, then you have to accept such programs come with incentive problems, politicization corruption, waste and multi parasite class. That is an example of a provocative quotes from david, and were excited to have him with us this morning. Thank you all for being here. You want to if you see something here, there are couple seeds and i understand there is now breakfast in the back. The raven group, they graciously invited me to be guests at a lot of their breakfasts please do lunches but he got me to one of his breakfasts, that is a good thing. As you heard the book is the the libertarian mind a menifesto for freedom published by simon and schuster last week, sold out the first day on amazon of the you never know how many copies amazon actually had. Let me talk a little bit about libertarianism and the book the libertarian mind a menifesto for freedom and how this relates to what i know or what concerns on the left of many of the people in the audience. Libertarianism is the philosophy of freedom, Political Freedom, personal freedom Economic Freedom, and that means libertarians tend to cut across left right boundaries. I tried to write the best accessible overview of libertarianism, and there are many great libertarian books from john locke to richard epstein. Hopefully it is more accessible than a lot of the more scholarly books are. I wrote it for libertarians who want to have a better understanding of our own philosophy, libertarians who might want a book to give to their friends who say what is this of you are always talking about and also i wrote it for tens of millions of americans who i think all fall into the category though we might call fiscally conservative and socially liberal or fiscally responsible and socially tolerant. Those people i think are broadly libertarian if you think in general the government should be smaller in the economy and general government should leave people alone in their personal lives, whatever details in this book you might not be ready to accept, that means you really are essentials a libertarian. One of my goals in the book is to help those people understand they are not on the red team, they are not on the blue team, their really part of the broad libertarian constituency. I say tens of millions of americans, i actually have a statistical evidence that, david kirby and i advocate a quince is to have published various studies under the theme of the libertarian vote, gallup poll for some years now for some year asked people two questions. Do you think the government should be involved in promoting traditional values or is it not the role of the government to protect or 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 . They classified people who give one set of answers as liberals, one set as conservatives and people whose acting government should stay out of both of those areas as libertarians and they find recently 20 to 24 of americans fall into the libertarian category. David kirby and i added a third question because we felt those questions were too easy so we added a third question to the array of questions and we got only 13 to 15 of americans falling into the libertarian category but we also had zombie ask a question for us on one of his polls and that question was would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal also known as libertarian . And the answer to that was 44 said yes. That is a pretty good abound for the libertarian vote in america, if you define libertarian as fiscally conservative and socially liberal 44 of americans are willing to accept the term. In the book i have what i consider the core chapters on but intellectual history of libertarian is some going back to the bible and up to Milton Friedman and ayn rand on individual rights, what rights do we have as human beings, chapters on individualism, pluralism, toleration, law, civil society, economics and the market process and then of course i have introductory and concluding chapters that put it in a context of contemporary american politics. The quotation about the parasite economy you heard at the beginning was drawing from that. When you create a government as big as the one we have got, mostly done for idealistic reasons at least by some people theres a bootleggers and baptists element, people who want government to be big because they believe it should take care of people and other people want it to be big because they know theyre very talented at getting a piece of what the government as. If you want a government that big you will get incentive problems, politicization, corruption, wastes, 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 favor lower taxes, less regulation, more tolerance toward gay marriage and marijuana, more skepticism about endless for morris the boat is mostly about the deeper principles that underlie those policies but it does have the longest chapter in the book on contemporary policy problems ranging from endless foreign wars to health care and Economic Growth. Because of the venue we are in here, high want to Say Something about tensions between moderate liberals and libertarians. I see various liberal magazines with lots of attacks on libertarians and i suppose it is fair to say libertarian magazines have lots of attacks on modern liberals. The first thing that libertarians say when we talk about liberal libertarian tension is we are liberals, were descended from the classical liberals. We consider ourselves liberal in the sense of john locke and adam smith and Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill and somewhere around the end of the Nineteenth Century a split occurred among liberals not so much on principles of free speech, religious freedom, extending the promises of the declaration of independence to more and more people but on the issue of economics and the governments role in the economy. We are still liberals but now we have to call ourselves classical liberals because otherwise people wouldnt understand. 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 libertarian leanings Tea Party Conservatives coming together in the Virginia Legislature to fight things like drones, license plate readers, wiretapping, and i thought that was interesting to see even in richmond there could be this alliance between the aclu and the libertarian republicans. There is a lot of that going on. A lot of talk especially since ferguson but long before that about Police Misconduct, the way the police treat minority communities, Police Militarization and the Cato Institute was way ahead of the game [speaking in native tongue] institute being a flagship libertarian institution on Police Militarization and we have also for some years been running a web site called Police Misconduct, you have 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 much easier in the days of the internet to find examples of Police Misconduct and record them. You can find examples that can be categorized by city state and so on. Libertarians and liberals agree on 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 as an ongoing issue. The war on drugs, something libertarians have been critical of for many years and we work with a lot of liberals on those issues, and as a surveillance all of those things came out particularly after ed snowdens revelations, many of you remember the amendment in 2013 to rein in a very small part of nsa surveillance and one of the striking things about that amendment to me was it came close to passing in the house, but like a lot of attempts to change the system, it got 200 votes, but no way it would get 218 votes. Republicans and democrats what you had coming together and was civil libertarian democrats, libertarian leanings tea party influence republicans to vote for reining in the nsa when the centrist establishment in both parties supported every nook and cranny of the surveillance state. The amendment only went after one little granny and still couldnt get that passed. There was a subsequent amendment that was milder that did pass, libertarians, Tech Companies and liberals Work Together to fight a couple years ago, dont ask me to explain what those are but i know my colleagues at the Cato Institute who did understand Technology Issues were very active on them. Corporate welfare, immigration gay marriage, all kyushus libertarians have been working together wrong with liberals. I did a Little Research and concluded catos callers may very well have been the first thinktank scholars to endorse gay marriage, oppose the patriot act oppose the iraq war starting in 2001 and published the first study on getting out of iraq. We have a long record on these issues. It is true libertarians believe in free markets and limited constitutional government, we believe Economic Growth is stronger and poverty would be reduced more rapidly if we had a much stricter reliance on a limited federal government and free markets than a lot of people in washington believe. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and strictly limited government. I do believe there is the bigger market for this than a lot of politicians and pundits recognize. We are starting to see some of that recognition. Before 20139 never saw headlines talking about the libertarian wing of congress or the libertarian faction of the Republican Party liberals, libertarians unite to stop bill so i think theres a growing recognition that i do believe is still the case that there is 2 4 of the American People who wrote will say and prompted that they are libertarians but maybe 20 or 40 of americans who it is explained to them as you generally believe government should spend less and tax less a year generally believe government should leave people alone on issues like marriage and marijuana, that it is a much larger number. One of the things i want to do with this book is reach those people. That is my introduction to libertarianism and the libertarian mind and i am happy to engage in discussion. Identify who you are or who you work for and answer questions. In legal center. To hear you undress when you talk about free markets, divided between the 1 and the rest. When you talk about free markets are you concerned about the grueling economic gap in our society, there is no role for the government to try to deal with the economic wage gap in particular. The second is a question of money and politics, you see the crony capitalism, your view on the Campaign Finance system and where kato comes down in terms of trying to address a system that has a freemarket that is not exactly free but has candidates raising millions of dollars from a small number of people. Let me talk a little about inequality. I do write about that a little bit in the book. The way i would look at it is what is the real problem we are concerned about . I think the real problem is poverty, and secondarily stagnant middleclass incomes. From my own point of view every day the price of microsoft stock goes up the wealth gap between bill gates and me gets larger but i have a tiny bit of microsoft stock so i am a little bit better off. He is a lot better off. I am more interested in me being a little better off than in him being a lot better off so there may be people who are interested simply in the gap. I am more interested in how well people are living. What im interested in our policies that improve middleclass incomes and poor people have a greater chance of getting out of poverty, getting into the working class, the middle class and many of the policies that are proposed to deal with inequality would actually slow Economic Growth, reduce the creation of jobs and that would be a bad thing. I would say theres a lot of crony capitalism in the system, there is a lot of economic activity, theres often an assumption the government intervenes in the market to help the poor and middleclass and libertarians are against that and that is a bad thing the lot of Government Intervention in the market is not even intended to help in the middle class. The programs that are supposed to generally dont but a lot of the programs arent even intended that way. They are intended to protect incumbents and those can be people with lower middle class incomes like a taxi cartel, people trying to start new competitors to the unregulated taxes and being blocked by the cartel, spreads in the state legislatures and city can alsos and existing stagnant regulations. One of the things libertarians want is break up these systems that protect people and that the higher end you have too big to fail and wall street bailout and Automobile Company bailouts and all of those things are potentially good for the owners of capital but not good for a free market, not good for Economic Growth not good for people dont already own big banks libertarians are very much against the wall street bailout and all of that so protectionism is another area that protects the incumbents. If you are a big business that has to compete with importers thing you dont like imports but if you are a consumer you should like competition and imports libertarian stand on the side of free trade and the consumer is. U. S. About Campaign Financing and so on. Imac First Amendment absolutist and i believe spending money to advance your political ideas is an exercise of your First Amendment rights. What i think studies show Academic Studies is there is not much good evidence that Large Campaign donations, Large Campaign spending, actually influences politicians. People give money to politicians they like rather than politicians doing what theyre funders want. However, what we do know is most Campaign Spending goes to incumbents but incumbents dont get defeated unless their opponents have a lot of money. If you want to protect incumbents then you pass the laws that incumbents have been passing like the Mccain Feingold act. If you want to see more rotation in office there are better ways to do it. Allow challengers to raise enough money, put term limits on the incumbents. I would like to see putting a term limit on the president , we have term limits on those governors, we should do the same for legislators in congress and the state legislatures so i would rather stick to the First Amendment, allow people 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 kinds of things the Dole Foundation which had an overpurpose to help handicapped people and it was a way to carry, you never stamp out all those things so