A friend of mine recently found a link to a video that a man named Jim Turney did of a talk I gave in Monterey in February 1991. It’s at the annual convention of the Libertarian Party of California. The quality of the video (you will have to judge the quality of the talk) is quite high. The talk goes about 36 minutes with about 13 minutes of Q&A.

A few notes:
1. David Boaz, who introduced me, was an excellent speaker even then.
2. My glasses were the kind people work back then and my hair is a very different color now.
3. I notice that I was a slower speaker then. I got some tips from a speech coach a couple of years after that and, as a result, have learned to speed up my talks and not say, “uh.”
4. I brought along a local friend who is not an economist and not a libertarian. His name is Fred Jealous and I’ve written about him here. You can see how different our views are by reading this editorial he wrote and my letter to the editor in response. His son, Ben Jealous, by the way, whom I’ve known since he was 16, is president of the NAACP. Fred hadn’t known who the audience was. When he and I were leaving after the speech, he asked, “Was this an audience of economists?” “No,” I said, “why?” “Because they seemed to understand a lot of economics,” he answered. Interestingly, Fred reminded me that I had left out one of the most important parts of the Wall Street Journal article on which I had based this speech: that if Saddam Hussein had managed to hold on to Kuwait and even push into some of the other countries, and had used this market power to raise the price, people in other countries would have produced more.
5. Notice my criticism of Mike Boskin between the 23:00 and 25:00 point.