For the last few days various people have been asking me what I thought of the big LA/LI conference last weekend that several of us have been going on about, here and in other Britblogs. How good was it? (Lowered voice: What was wrong that should be better next time?)
What I think is that these things are hard to organise, and especially so if you also have a life you’re fighting with full time. Since I have little in the way of a life to fight but did little to help, I’m not entitled to criticise. LA Director Chris Tame (who has a very aggressive life to contend with but who nevertheless did the bulk of the organising) deserves all the credit going for what went well, and none of the blame for any defects.
Nevertheless in this posting, I want to focus first on my one big regret about this event. Things happen the way they happen and all that. Some speakers let you down and others have to be juggled, and so on. But, I wish that Richard Miniter‘s speech at the final dinner, so well described here by David Carr, had instead been one of the conference talks that it was originally intended to be. First, if it had been there would have been a chance for questions. And second, if there had been questions I believe it would have become clear that although this man undoubtedly spoke very eloquently and interestingly, he did not really speak for the libertarian movement as a whole, and in particular, not for the European libertarian movement, which is just as split about US policy towards Iraq as libertarians are in the USA.
When you make a speech at a closing dinner and you use the word “we”, that ought to mean all the people present, in this case libertarians of all the various brands represented, not the current US government and all those in the world who currently support it. On my left was a French lady who opposes US policy with extreme vehemence. On my right an English gent ditto. “Outrageous – a statist rant”, is how he put it, politely but firmly. Everyone agreed that it was an eloquent speech; not everyone agreed, to put it mildly, that it was libertarianism in action. Although to give Richard his due, I got the distinct impression that he also would probably have preferred to have given his talk during the day rather than at the final dinner.
My question to Richard would have concerned neither the wisdom of US policy, nor its degree of libertarian justifiability. (In my wimpy way, I pretty much accept both, in the usual Samizdata style albeit with less certainty than some here.) I would simply have asked why the official, public justifications of the war still now emerging out of Washington, involving much talk of Weapons of Mass Destruction, are so different from what he told us were the real reason for going to war, which is that the big Islamofascist terrorist networks are all Iraqi financed and backed, and taking them out means taking out Saddam Hussein. Why hasn’t that been said before?
Maybe it has, but I missed it. Maybe it hasn’t, because saying it would endanger the lives of lots of intelligence sources? Maybe saying all this too loudly, too soon, would have turned thousands of ruthless western journalists loose on such sources, when as it was the only people looking for such sources were over-stretched and clumsy Iraqi spooks. Maybe the UN wouldn’t allow a mere terrorist hunt, but would, on account of its already resolved resolutions, allow a chase after nuclear and biological weapons. Maybe, maybe. I would have liked to have heard Richard’s answer to that question. I still would, come to think of it. (For a further taste of what such a question session might have been like, see the comments on David’s report.)
But I don’t want to be negative only, and if that means trading brevity for positivity, so be it.
I thought Stefan Blankertz was outstanding. Over on my education blog I have referred at length to this talk, which is also available in its entirety at Christian Michel‘s Liberalia website (which in general is much to be recommended).
I still owe Samizdata’s readership a report of Terence Kealey‘s talk that says something other than that the man has a pretty voice, and I will try to do this any day now, while for now just asking you yet again to accept that Kealey’s talk, about government spending on science, was indeed superb.
The best thing of all about the conference was the number of people present who were both young and intelligent. There were wrinklies present, and quite right too. And they were plenty of men of a certain age, such as me and most of the other Libertarian Alliance crowd. But mercifully, there were younger people present in strength also, with interesting hair-dos and from every European country you can think of. Two of the speakers, Francois-Rene Rideau (France) and Alan Forrester (Scotland), were even very young. It’s important to give our best young talent a chance to address a biggish libertarian audience and for them generally to be made much of, and that would still have been true even if the particular talks these two gave hadn’t been nearly as good as they were.
But the real purpose of conferences, of course, is not just to learn at the public events but to network during the social interludes and social set-pieces like the final dinner. The best contact I made was with that French lady I sat next to at the dinner, who is, among many other things, the person who wrote this. What with her and with guys like Rideau, there might soon be a truly effective, totally uncompromising libertarian movement in France, not messed about by committees of incompetent French philosophy professors who couldn’t run a sweet shop for a day without bankrupting it. And France, for all that we Anglos always say we hate it (personally I love it – I’ve been there twice this year alone and I can’t wait to go again), is one of the great intellectual prizes on the planet. Think of the havoc that French intellectuals have caused in academic USA. Just imagine if they turned themselves around and started to do a comparable amount of good to academic USA. Yes, it is worth thinking about, isn’t it?
And that’s what conferences are for, to make you think and to recharge the batteries. So, mission accomplished. Congratulations to Chris Tame and to all who assisted him.
