Libertarianism versus conservatism between interns from the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Topics include the role of marriage, pornography, and the governments responsibility to restrict and regulate certain drugs like marijuana. Was hour to have debate edited by charles koch. Moderated by charles koch. Thank you all for joining us this evening for the libertarian versus conservative debate. And the student Programs Coordinator at the Cato Institute. Honored to institute tonight, as the heritage interns go head to head with the cato interns to debate is libertarianism or conservatism superior political philosophy. Which political philosophy provides better answers todays most important political questions . Each of us has had much to agree upon, limited government, free markets, individual liberty are pillars of the philosophy we both value and uphold, which have led us to the same policy preferences and conclusions often. Yet, what each of us envision in a free society often does look quite different. Policy preferences surrounding foreign policy, immigration, drugs, sex work, emerging technology, marriage and family, to name a few, create cleavage that emerges between differences between our political philosophy. As we have seen in todays political climate, seldom are these differences laid out in constructive civil discourse. Free speech has been under threat by those who claim the harms of certain kinds of speech outweigh the protection, that there is a more sensible approach to the regulation of this kind of expression. Tribalism has sown skepticism into the very institutions that have brought absolute power under the rule of law, that have and enshrined our inalienable human rights for the preservation of freedom, which brings us here tonight on this stage, as an opportunity for the exposure and articulation of ideas, values, disagreement, discourse and debate. These insurgents these interns have worked tirelessly to parse out these policy difference through rational debate, but before we begin, i would like to mention a few housekeeping items. After the conclusion of this debate, join us outside in the Winter Garden as well as the second floor for a reception. Also, join the conversation throughout the debate by using the hash tag lvcdebate. We will draw your questions for the debate portion. And if you are on snapchat, check out our special snapchat feature. If you send snapchat to catoinstitute, one word, they will be featured. The opinions are those of the debaters and not the Cato Institute nor the Heritage Foundation. We would also appreciate your participation in our postdebate survey that you will receive by email. In the spirit of debate, another debate on whether capitalism or socialism have better benefited women, will be held here at cato september 16 at 6 30 and i would encourage you to attend or watch online. I would like to express my thanks to our incredible conference staff for putting this event together, Elaina Richardson and Colleen Harmon of the Heritage Foundation, for their hard work, coordination and collaboration, Matthew Feeney and will for their debate preparation. And a big thank you to charles c. W. Cooke for moderating, the editor of National Review online, and the author of conservatarian manifesto. His work focuses on free speech, the Second Amendment and american exceptionalism. Charles is a frequent guest on hbos realtime and has appeared on msnbc, fox news and foxbusiness. He emigrated to the u. S. And became an american citizen in 2018. He lives in florida with his family and their dog, a black lab. Please welcome charles c. W. Cooke. [applause] charles thank you very much for coming, thank you to cato and heritage for having me and asking me to moderate this debate. It is a pleasure to be involved in an argument about political ideas that doesnt ultimately come down to the question of whether the participants are french or not. I think i keep being invited back to do this because other than boris johnson, it is busy now, because i wrote a book on this topic in which i attempted to tease out the differences between conservatism and libertarianism, and offer a way forward where possible. I was not, i suspect, invited back for my predictive abilities, given that i wrote that americas next president might be a quiet, retiring, humble, noninvasive kind of guy who would remove the celebrity culture from National Politics and reduce the executive branch to the role the founders imagined. Then we elected donald trump, who my colleague Kevin Williamson has described as a man with the sensibility halfway between caligula and liberace. My wife doesnt allow me to place bets over five dollars anymore. This does remain an important debate, especially at this moment. Because we are obsessed with our two Political Parties and the presidency, our political culture has a tendency to flatten all nonleft ideologies into the right. The Cato Institute is often described as conservative when it is no such thing. Heritage is presumed to be on board with every libertarian innovation, when it is not. Anyone who doesnt want to vote for a democrat is put into the same camp. A good example is different jurisprudence approaches and political views, neil gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh seemed to be indistinguishable during their respective hearings. That tendency during the last Supreme Court term has led to complete shock among commentators when they noticed how much they diverged, which is to say we are not here this evening to ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but to ask more foundational questions, such as whether angels actually exist, whether, if they do, they should be dancing on pins in the first place, whether dancing on pins is good or bad for society, whether pins make us safer or we need more robust pin control, whether injuries sustained as a result of pins should be paid for by the pin dancers or anyone else. This is not going to be a pinfree zone. Before we start, please dont clap or boo during the debate. You can share and boo and throw your clothes at the end, and make sure your cell phones dont ring, and if they do, these dont answer them. I have equipped the debaters with tasers, and they will know what to do. The resolution tonight is, is libertarian or conservatism the superior political philosophy . We start with an Opening Statement from the conservative side, followed by an Opening Statement from the libertarian side, followed by rebuttals from each. Thank you all for coming. We are hosted in an an auditorium for economist friedrich hayek. A quote he once said was if man is to do more good than harm in efforts to improve the social order, he wont shape the result is a craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather cultivate growth by providing the appropriate environment, like the gardener does for his plants. He has two choices, he can abandon his plants to subsist alone, shrivel up and die, or number two, the gardener can water his plants, place them in sunlight and give them rich soil so they can bloom. The point of hayeks garden is this, when the government sets the right decisions, the Political Community flourishes. That is not to say the gardener will micromanager engineer his plants cording to a landscape design, but he can create the environment where they produce fruit. Conservatives and libertarians have enjoyed a mutuallybeneficial alliance. We have rallied support for the free market and defeated communism, but in the tradition of the founders, conservatives recognize unfettered liberty must never come at the expense of our society and our humanity. At the heart of todays debate is a central question, what kind of country do we want to live in, and our descendents to inherit . Conservatism is a political philosophy designed to perpetuate the blessings of liberty to the next generation by creating an atmosphere of moral virtue and law, faith, family and responsibility. Unlike the axiomatic no sides fits all ideology called libertarianism, conservatism is a balancing pendulum with order on the one end and liberty on the other. Libertarianism ignores the tension between order and liberty. The end result is excessive liberty and almost no order. In the name of live and let live, libertarianism removes the social scaffolding around our society and the moral compass from our nation. And we see what happens when libertarians try to implement their ideals. Always and everywhere that libertarianism causes societal decay, libertarians said legalize drugs. Entire regions of this country suffered under the opioid epidemic. The libertarians said, the right to abortion is a liberty as fundamentalist property. Abortion became available on demand. And life and liberty was robbed from 60 million innocent unborn. The libertarians said, open the borders. The american taxpayer foots the bill for illegal immigration, either by forfeiting his job or his money to a larger welfare state. The libertarians said, marriage doesnt matter. Children got trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and fatherless, broken homes. Libertarianism is a utopian ideology that wants to build an impossible society, but the ideal world libertarians want is not worth striving for. It is the farthest stretch from anything our Founding Fathers envisioned. We will set the record straight on the founders vision for america. Looking back to hayeks garden, americans dont want a broken plan of itemized individuals, we do not want weeds and briars to tear up our inherited plot. We want a thriving garden. [applause] good evening, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to come to cato or watch online. I want to thank our moderator tonight, charles cooke, at the Heritage Foundation, for coming to the lions den. As we weigh the merits of these two philosophies, we must consider, what is the purpose of government . Volumes of text may not provide a full answer, but the declaration of independence provides the best answer. Governments are instituted to secure the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is the libertarian vision for government. Libertarianism does a better job than conservatism at securing these most vital rights. Libertarians recognize each adult has the right and responsibility to make decisions about how best to go about their life, so long as those decisions do not infringe on the rights of another. Libertarianism resists that most basic human desire to impose beliefs on another through force. And force is essential to understand. We do not reject the fundamental importance of virtue, but believe liberty is the best means of achieving such a virtue. We cherish the vital role of Civil Society in an old republic, so clearly identified by democracy in america. If the imposition of moral values by force of laws not only unethical, it crowds out the essential roles of Civil Society. If we abdicate responsibility to some conservative in washington who think they know liberty, or some progressive that believes they can transform society, all will be lost. A conservative who believes government can centrally manufacture a Virtuous Society falls victim to the same conceit of a marxist who centrally plans the economy. Virtue imposed by force is hardly virtue at all. Rather, virtue must be inculcated by Vital Community institutions. True liberty, when Civil Society is allowed to flourish, sustains virtue. Thinking about good governance, we hold a lot in common with conservative friends. We believe in the rule of law and a vibrant judiciary that ensures contract and property rights, so fundamental to any free society, are upheld. We recognize a criminal Justice System that ensures those who infringe on fundamental rights face discipline. We believe in a military that provides for the national defense. But we have a different conception about the limits of government than conservative friends. Accordingly, i have one request for the audience tonight. Be wary of what George Orwell would call political language throughout this debate. Consider what the true ethical implications are, when conservatives argue for social intervention to uphold the social order. Smart drug policy means locking somebody up for choosing to put something other than alcohol into their body. Protecting marriage is stopping anyone who is different than i from getting married. Protecting our liberty means propping up a despotic regime like that of saudi arabia. Lets be honest about what certain conservative principles truly entail. Libertarianism stems from a deep intellectual humility that we may not have it all figured out when we enact policy. Rather than unilaterally decide on some policy, libertarians place faith in what adam smith called natural liberty. The natural liberty that emerges when fundamental rights are protected is how best to ensure society prospers. That, not government coercion, is how we preserve life and liberty and give people the best chance at securing happiness for themselves and their posterity. Thank you. [applause] charles now we will have twominute rebuttals, first from the conservative side. Caroline our opponents talked about moral values, saying that we conservatives fall victims to authoritarianism. But it is libertarianism that backfires and invites the slippery slope of Government Intervention we all want to avoid. The problem is the individual choices that libertarians hold so near and dear sometimes produce largescale unintended consequences that can rot Civil Society and leave ordinary people stock picking up the pieces. Drugs have not just stolen freedom from individuals, they have debilitated entire regions of this country, from appalachia to the rust belt. So when the social fabric starts unraveling, who but the government is called to stop it . That is the problem. It is the state that will get involved to cure societal ills libertarianism created, because libertarianism atomized as individuals to seek meaning in the state. We must ask ourselves, is it really authoritarianism to protect our National Sovereignty by securing the border . Is it unjustified to deter foreign aggression abroad so we dont face invasion or extortion tomorrow . Is it really a violation of Civil Liberties to get people off of welfare and out of poverty by promoting marriage . Is it to radical to want to get drug addicts off the streets and parents off drugs so children arent driven into foster care . The deception of libertarianism is that if we fail to care for our Civil Society and take individual freedom to its extreme and balk at the chance to save our country, the only freedom libertarianism preserves is the freedom to decline and fall. [applause] no matter how pretty the language from conservatives is, fear mongering isnt an argument. This is a debate and we are here to make arguments. You need to keep in mind what is an argument on what is something that sounds great but isnt supported by facts. Libertarianism is supported by facts. If you look at the data we are going to give you throughout this speech, for example in regard to opioids, you will see that by limiting government restriction on drugs, you do see fewer drugs, you see more people not doing drugs. That is hard data. The other important thing you need to remember, none of the conservatives tell you why the government needs to be doing all these different policy decisions. The most effective way of not being addicted to drugs is going to narcotics anonymous, going to church, being involved with your families and communities, to see what they can do for you. At its core, libertarianism is about the belief that freedom is something that is important. By no means is it unlimited. That would be a bad policy that is once again not supported by the data. But when we look at institutions, we believe a society can have pluralistic values. We believe religious freedom applies and extends to jews, muslims and mormons as much as christians. At its core, when conservatives talk about family values, they talk about one type of family. That is why you should prefer libertarianism, because we believe you should be wary of considerations the government makes for you. We dont have a lot of say in what happens in washington, what happens in our government, we do have a say for what happens in our personal lives. And libertarianism is the only political philosophy between the two of us that believes you have the ability and you have the right to make choices for your own life, your family and your and communities. That is why you should prefer libertarianism to conservatism. [applause] charles we now move on to specific topics, each side will speak for two minutes on each topic and there will be one minute each for rebuttals. The first topic, libertarians will start, does government have a responsibility to restrict citizens from consuming drugs known to cause addiction and harm . Sam conservatives say drugs do harm. We concede that point. Now what . The question is whether government has a responsibility to restrict drugs, and we respond no. Do you know the most dangerous drug . The Global Commission on drug policy looked at several dimensions on harm at nearly every category, alcohol, a drug aimed by the government to be appropriate for people to consume, was deemed most harmful. The United States tried to ban alcohol in 1920. Prohibition didnt work. Here are the effects it brought. A 24 increase in crime over the course of one year in 30 major u. S. Cities. A 45 increase in drug addiction that spohn the creation of mexicos oldest drug cartel. A burdened legal system, and a 50 increase in deaths from alcohol from