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This is David Gay. I gave a speech at Liberty Fest in NYC on Saturday, about the
relationship between liberty and virtue,
and it hasn't been uploaded to YouTube yet, so I figured I'd just share it with you now.
You've probably all heard that we need the government to keep people from harming
each other;
that people need to be forced to do the right thing;
that libertarians are a bunch of hedonists who just want to indulge their immorality;
or the best one:
that people only support Ron Paul and Gary Johnson
because they want to shoot up ***
and have sex with prostitutes.
Well, we all know that these are just lies created to grow the power
of the state
and people's trust in its glorious goodness.
We know that the state is the greatest collection of the immoral -
the murderers
thieves and rapists - and they only get away with it
by pretending to protect us from all of these same evils.
But what about us?
What sort of movement are we?
What sort of individuals are we?
Which principles guide and motivate us?
We are blessed to have a truly philosophical movement,
grounded in a genuine, uncompromising dedication to the principles of pure
liberty.
We don't just have politicians and pundits - thank goodness -
but economists, historians, and philosophers, who have developed
our understanding of the goal that we strive for.
So, unlike others,
we can see where we came from without state-colored glasses,
and we have a picture of what's possible in a future without the guns of government
dictating humanity's every move.
So I'd like to get a little philosophical with you today,
and I want to discuss the basic concept of liberty and virtue.
True liberty
is the lifeblood of the fullness of human achievement.
It is like the soil that nourishes and upholds the tree;
it is like the air we breathe,
so vitally important to our being.
But it's what we do with that liberty that makes all the difference.
These days,
a lot of people believe that you need the government to tell you what to do -
you need laws in order to behave rightly.
Anyone, any one of you, can tell us that that's nonsense. That's madness.
In order to do what's right, we need liberty.
At the same time, in order to have liberty, we must have virtue.
What do I mean by virtue?
I mean doing the right thing as a matter of principle.
Noble character traits like
generosity, patience, courage, temperance:
these are classic virtues.
And opposing these are vices,
which a virtuous person seeks to eliminate from his character:
laziness, dishonesty,
cowardice, and envy.
Now tell me,
which of these lists -
the virtues
or the vices -
best describes our statist friends?
The vices, of course.
When you grow up under a powerful government, it's easy to cultivate your
vices.
You envy those who are wealthier than you. You sit back and let the government
take care of you and others.
You sign up for an "Obama phone."
You engage in all sorts of behavior that keep you fat, happy, and unquestioning.
But it's hard to cultivate and develop your virtues in this environment.
In fact, you might say it's impossible.
Can you be generous to your neighbor by stealing from another neighbor?
Of course you can't.
So you can't be charitable through taxes.
Can you be responsible with your money, and save it, invest it wisely, when it's being eaten
away by inflation?
I suppose you could try.
Can you raise your
children and educate them when they're being carted off to state brainwashing
prisons five days a week?
Fundamentally, when every important decision is made for you,
and every action you take is out of a base sense of duty,
"patriotism,"
"just following orders,"
it is impossible to be a morally responsible and
virtuous individual.
In a country where
legal
is right and illegal is wrong,
it is impossible to be virtuous.
In order to be virtuous, we must be free to make our own judgments and choices, and
be responsible for the consequences.
In order to be virtuous
we must have
liberty.
The opposite of liberty is bondage, subjugation.
Our virtues need the waters of liberty in order to flourish.
Statism is the rot that sucks away our liberty and withers our
virtues.
This is the fundamental evil of statism.
It converts reasoning, morally responsible individuals into unthinking,
amoral, irresponsible cogs in a machine.
And there are plenty of cogs out there who are perfectly content with that.
Vices are easy,
and they're right at home with the government.
The lazy,
the imaginative, the greedy, the fraudulent, the bloodthirsty: they all find a
base -
a home and base of operations in the state.
That's exactly what welfare laws are all about,
as well as copyright laws, drug laws, currency laws, taxes, and wars and much,
much more.
It's all about satisfying the vices of the people calling the shots, and the
people willing to serve them.
The state is not just an impediment to virtue; the state is the center of vice.
Statism is inherently violent and inherently vicious.
There is no way to reform the vice
out of a system based on involuntary compliance, for the simple reason
that slavery
is immoral.
We oppose the state, and we promote
liberty.
I mean we really need to be promoters of liberty. We need to sell it; we need to
live it; we need to show it really means.
We oppose the state because it is vicious, and violent, and immoral.
Well, guess what!
That means that to oppose the state, we must be virtuous,
and non-violent, and moral.
You can't win against the bad guy without being the good guy, because if
you're not a good guy,
you're the bad guy.
As I mentioned earlier, in order to have virtue we must have liberty.
Now I'll go one step further and say that's precisely the purpose of liberty.
We're not free individuals so that we can wreck our bodies and relationships,
neglect others, lie and cheat and get wasted and die.
What would be the point of that?
Yeah, you're
"free" to do those things, if you call that freedom,
and you should be free to suffer the consequences. But that's a pretty dismal
view of liberty.
Now, the reason we are free
is so that we can reach our full positive potential as human beings.
To be truly human is to make conscious decisions,
undertake conscious action, and to bear responsibility.
To be free and fulfilled human beings means to cultivate relationships, discipline
the mind and body,
invent opportunity,
deal nobly with others, and leave an honorable legacy to our children -
in short, to get rid of vices
and develop virtues.
Yes,
you're free to waste away if you want to - free to fail, free to sin, free to be miserable,
and free to suffer.
But if you want to know what liberty is really about,
look at the virtues.
Think of them in positive terms.
You are free to make a positive impact; free to be a whole, decent, and moral
human being, and free to reap the benefits.
Vice is slavery to immorality; it's not liberty! Vice is the destruction of
liberty.
If you choose that route, and abandon the pursuit of virtue, and act out of selfish
hedonism,
then you will get no real benefit from liberty -
and, believe me, the cause of liberty
will get no benefit from you.
Our moment is not growing because people getting wasted, being lazy, getting
themselves arrested for no reason,
or any number of those
horrible vices.
It's growing because of the excellent example of virtuous people - people like
Ron Paul or Professor Tom Woods. No one can charge them with seeking to limit your
liberty
to do whatever you want.
And yet,
how do they live? Look at how they live: with character, with decency
and virtue.
To live up to what liberty truly offers, we must be free from the state. But we must
also be free from vice,
bad reputations,
and anything else that hinders our full positive potential.