Cato University has been great so far -- all the people are really interesting, and I'm losing my voice from all the discussions.
Internet access isn't as easy as I'd hoped, and even when I pay the daily fee I can't reliably get online from my hotel room... so there's going to be less blogging than I'd intended. I can't get to gmail from the business center here because they're using IE 5.0. I'm going to see if I can install Firefox....
One of the things that bothers me a bit about libertarians is that they're deathly afraid of slippery slopes. I agree that they're something to be wary of, but as Eugene Volokh has argued many times, sliding down a slope isn't inevitable. Libertarians want to create a world in which government is so limited that they'll never have to fight for liberty again, but fighting for liberty is inescapable. I'd rather work for the best good (life, liberty, &c.) now, even if it means we'll have to fight against a slope a little more later on. We can win now, and we can win later, because we're right.
I've noticed that tendency among libertarians myself, although I don't think of it in terms of slipperey slopes specifically. My sense is that libertarians want to create a set of political institutions which will somehow make it impossible for people living under them to lose their freedom. This is a project doomed to fail because people have free will.
Over the long run, the only way to preserve freedom is for each generation to work to teach their children about what it is, why it is valuable and what is needed to preserve it. Institutions will follow (or not follow) from that foundation.
"Liberty is like money, once you stop working for it most of it goes away."
Me (just now)
Indeed, Bernard Bailyn, in his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, showed that the founders we fully aware of the eternal tug of war between what they called power and liberty. It was up to a moral people to both infuse institutions and individuals with power and safeguard against infringements upon liberty. They saw the actions of the British after the Seven Years' War (Stamp Act, Townshend Duties) as such infringements and took action. It is the fact that we must maintain constant vigilence over our liberty that must not be overlooked. There is no final utopia that will ever be reached. No libertarian perpetual motion machine that can be invented. It is a continuous struggle.
I agree with every word of that except "because." No one has ever won any battle because he was right. Many have lost because they smugly assumed they would win because they were right.