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Hello, I'm talking to James Lark,
a professor of applied mathematics from Virginia.
You're also a libertarian.
And you gave a splendid speech yesterday.
Can you introduce this speech to our viewers?
Yes, thank you very much.
I gave a lecture entitled "Are you ready to rumble?
Preparing intellectually for the battle."
The purpose of this speech was to
provide a description of the major things
that those people who are advocates of liberty
need to do in order to be effective advocates for liberty.
There're certain things that we must learn in order to be able to
counter or to answer the many reasonable questions that we face about
how would a truly liberal order operate.
How would a society based on individual liberty and personal responsibility actually work in a real world. Because many people, unfortunately,
Many people, unfortunately,
don't understand how market arrangements can actually produce
the sort of goods and services that we would like to see.
So it's important to those of us who wish to advocate
for a truly liberal society.
We need to be able
to understand the sort of reasonable questions that we'll receive,
and we need to understand our economics, history, statistics, and data analysis
to be able to help our friends and neighbors
understand these ideas.
Ok, so, first, it's to understand economics?
Yes, I think anyone who wishes to understand human affairs
has to understand basic economics.
I think it's some kind of illiteracy of our society
in the US and in Poland or China
that people don't understand economics,
and that people in the mainstream media don't mention this issue.
Absolutely, there're various concepts that I mentioned during my lecture yesterday.
E.g., the notion of opportunity cost.
Economists frequently distinguish between price and cost.
Price is the value you pay in zlotys, dollars, or euros in the market place.
The price of an automobile may be so many euros.
However, the cost is what you forego
in order to get that car.
How many beers you're forgoing to be able to get the car.
Economists distinguish between a market price
and the cost that you actually bear.
What people need to understand is
how much does this cost in terms of their forgone opportunities.
How much does it cost in terms of
the value of your labor to be able to obtain these things.
Many people don't seem to understand that distinction.
The second topic is history.
It's obvious, I think, that we have to learn from history.
And the third one is mathematical reasoning.
Exactly, I think people need to understand
that one can use statistics,
and get a better view of how the world actually operates.
However, if you don't use statistics properly,
and you don't understand the limitations,
or the assumptions that are built in,
you can actually find that the statistics you use
are misleading and can lead you to a very bad conclusion.
Yes, and statistics is not intuitive,
so the people can't understand that there are certain traps.
That's correct.
Most people can actually learn economics, history, statistics,
but they have to take the time and trouble to do so.
They also have to discipline themselves
to be scrupulously in terms of
how they understand these things.
It's one thing to understand your history, and it's another thing to
let your political passions govern
how you interpret these things.
We have to be scrupulously honest and fair
in terms of understanding these issues.
James, were you born as a libertarian or
has something influenced your attitude?
I think that
I grew up as someone who was really not interested terribly in politics.
However, when I became older, I realized that
if I want to understand how the world works,
first of all, I need to learn some economics.
And then I need to learn history and to understand data.
I came to these ideas of true liberalism, market liberalism, or libertarianism,
because I had certain moral values
that it wasn't legitimate for me to initiate force against others.
That it is legitimate to use force to defend oneself and one's property.
But one can never initiate force against others.
And that includes commission of fraud.
I can't engage in a contract with you
and misrepresent the terms of that contract.
Fraud, in my opinion, is a form of force.
So I had certain moral values
that said "it's not appropriate to initiate force."
But would a consistent application of these moral values...
would we have a society
- if society is based on individual liberty and personal responsibility -
lepszym? would that be a better society?
Than what we now have
where government basically initiates force in all manner,
and people use government in many cases,
in my view, to initiate force against their neighbors.
It took me a while to think these things through.
But I eventually came to the conclusion
that a society based on liberty and responsibility
would be no worse than what we now have,
or likely to have under competing institutional arrangements,
and in many ways it would much better.
People would have the liberty to pursue their lives
their way as long as they didn't violate the rights of others.
I think that that sort of society
is much wealthier, happier, and healthier society.
And it's one that where, I think,
many more people will actually be able to benefit from the fruits
of the hard work of bright people who are creating wealth.
But the problem is, I think, that we're born as
creatures that look for someone to protect us.
And so we came to this conclusion,
because I did it also when I was in my forties.
So our main problem is to transmit our knowledge
to the young generation, to the young people.
That is correct.
And in many cases
the ideas that we're trying to explain
are counterintuitive.
People don't easily pick up on those ideas.
For example,
we talked yesterday about the notion minimum wage,
the government setting for that you can't pay people less than this.
Well, if you have minimum wages, in many cases what you're doing is by setting that minimum wage
you're pricing people out of the labor market.
If someone can't produce value
of sufficiently high quality to go over that minimum wage,
then, essentially, you're telling people who will hire
"don't hire them because they aren't able to produce
value that is worthy of that minimum wage."
So an effort to have a minimum wage
may hurt the very people that you want to help.
But this is counterintuitive.
People have to understand some basic principles of economics
to understand this point.
And many people, for whatever reason,
don't seem to want to take the time and trouble to think things through.
Perhaps because thinking is hard.
You may also find, as you think thing through, that you come to a conclusion that basically tells you
you've been acting in a bad way for many years.
Ok, thank you very much for this interesting interview.
Thank you.