00:00  Thank you so much to everybody who's giving me such a warm welcome here.  I'm privileged and grateful to be here to join this great conference.  So far we've had so many great ideas, and I want to thank you for including me in this as our topic today is about inclusion.  As you've just heard, I'm the author of a couple of books which I brought to show.  The first is Economic Freedom and Social Justice: The Classical Idea of Equality in context of racial diversity so I'm actually going to be talking about the classical ideal Bobby quality but I'm going to be explaining how that has been corrupted as it were by the Socialists who are in charge of implementing equality I also have another book which extends those ideas to the debates about historical Injustice it's called redressing historical injustices because you often hear people saying what about my historical grievances so that's what I address in this book together with my Mises colleague, David Gordon. 

01:17.  So we heard earlier about the long walk through the institutions, the long march through the institutions of the Marxist scholars, and what I want to talk about this morning is about how that long march has walked through the legal institutions by small steps, twisting and turning the legal concepts so the concepts are the same.  So if you look at the legal framework, you think, "Oh this is nice.  This is equality. This is fairness."  But the meaning of those concepts has been changed by this long march through the system, and some of you may be aware that critical race theory, critical theories, critical social justice, started in the law schools as critical legal theory so by now we have judges on the bench who are schooled in critical legal theory.  So when you say to them "equality," you may think that you're only talking about equal opportunities or fairness.  But what the judge is hearing is DEI.  So that's really the message that I want to put forward today, and I'm going to draw upon Murray Rothbard to suggest that we must reject egalitarianism altogether.  There is no such thing as the good form of egalitarianism and the wicked form of egalitarianism.  Egalitarianism is to be rejected altogether from the legal system, and again this links to what we've heard from some papers earlier. This is not about private morality.  You may think to yourself that you want to be an egalitarian because this is your preferred worldview. That's not what we're talking about here today.  We are talking about the policy framework, the legal framework, which is enforced by coercion and that is the system we are saying ought to reject egalitarianism altogether.  As many of you will know, Murray Rothbard's view of Liberty was different from Hayek's view of Liberty so Hayek conceptualized Liberty as an absence of coercion so what Hayek would say is you can have your ideals if you want to but you don't coerce people into following your moral ideas and Murray Rothbard conceptualized this as a defense of private property self ownership and private property you infringe upon people's rights of self ownership when you try and force them to promote whatever egalitarian ideals you may think are good ideals.  So that's essentially the message of my paper today.  In the preface to his book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, 1951, Ludwig von Mises warns us of the threat posed by socialism to individual freedom.  In particular, he says, "We must be concerned with the desperate struggle of lovers of freedom, prosperity, and civilization against the rising tide of totalitarianism.  So we are the lovers of freedom prosperity and civilization, and our concern is to see the threat posed by the rising tide of totalitarian barbarism."  And here's the thing about barbarians.  If they marched saying, "I am a barbarian and I'm here to take over all of your institutions," we would not have a problem.  Everybody would say no.  The problem we have is that they march under the banner of social justice.  Some people were asking earlier why is Marxism so successful it's successful because it marches under the banner of ideals that people love. When you say social justice, ordinary people they're not Marxist or socialists, but they want to promote Justice.  They think this is nice.  This is why they are beguiled by this idea and this is something that Frederick Hayek was trying to argue against in his book, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, 1973.  In his second volume where he talks about the Mirage of Social Justice, 1976.  He says social justice is an empty slogan. When people say social justice, you assume that you know what they mean.  You assume that they're just talking about good things that we should do to be fair, be inclusive, be diverse, but it's an empty slogan.  And Hayek says that it is used as a pretext to justify socialist policies.  They call it social justice but it's really socialism, and Hayek says that the reason they do this is so that they don't have to justify what they're proposing.  And so they don't have to give reasons because when you say this is for justice, this is for social justice, people don't ask you, why, why should we have social justice?  It's a self-evidently good ideal, and Hayek says this is the reason why they call it social justice. But the idea of social justice is still viewed as morally compelling to most people.  They think it means moral fairness.  Everybody wants to be fair.  I've never heard anybody saying I'm against fairness.  So this is the problem and one message that I have tried to put forward is that fairness is not synonymous with equality.  So in the book that I was just showing you, I'm talking about the English common law framework and the English common law framework is based on Notions of reasonableness.  So many legal concepts are based on a test of reasonableness.  To give an example of the duty of care, have you shown the care that we would expect you to show in the circumstances? The test would be "What would the reasonable person do in the circumstances?"  So that's a test of reasonableness, and we may think of that as a test of fairness, treat everybody fairly.  This is not the same thing as equality. Equality in the legal system is based on comparison. You're not asking if people have been fair, you are comparing different groups and asking if the two groups have been treated the same. So, if you treat your employees equally badly, you haven't violated the law because you haven't discriminated.  To give you an example, when the Equal Pay claims were brought in England, as some of you have been following the news about how equal pay bankrupted the city of Birmingham, but before that there was a great equal pay claim in the BBC where the women broadcasters asked, "Why are we paid less than the male broadcasters?" And the BBC said, "Well, it's because the male broadcasters bring in a bigger audience.  That's why we pay them more," and the women said that's not allowed as an excuse under the Equal Pay legislation.  So they sued the BBC for violation of the equal pay rules.  And how did the BBC resolve this?  By cutting the pay of their male broadcasters.