这是奥派大佬Mises institute的Chairman Lew Rockwell在2010初发表的演讲。
翻译：MarkGreene
I'm finding it ever more difficult to describe to people the kind of world that the Mises Institute would like to see, with the type of political order that Mises and the entire classical-liberal tradition believed would be most beneficial for mankind.
我发现如今向人们描述米塞斯研究院所愿意看到的那种世界的样子正变得越来越困难了，而米塞斯以及整个古典自由传统都相信那种类型的政治秩序将成为全人类的最大福祉。
It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It's a fascinating thing to behold.
仿佛我们失去的自由越多，就越少有人能够想象自由会如何造福于社会。这是一个非常让人感兴趣的现象。
People can no longer imagine a world in which we could be secure without massive invasions of our privacy at every step, and even being strip searched before boarding airplanes, even though private institutions manage much greater security without any invasions of human rights.
人们已经不再能够想象一个我们可以安全地生活而没有在所有层面大规模侵犯我们隐私的世界了，即使在登机前我们都要被脱光衣服搜身，即使私人机构提供了更高的安全性而不会对个人的权利有丝毫的侵犯。
People can no longer remember how a true free market in medical care would work, even though all the problems of the current system were created by government interventions in the first place.
人们已经不再能够记得一个真正的自由市场是如何在医疗领域里运作的，即使当今制度下的所有问题都缘于政府最初的干预。
People imagine that we need 700 military bases around the world and endless wars in the Middle East, for "security", even though safe Switzerland doesn't.
人们想象着我们需要遍布全世界的七百个军事基地和在中东地区进行永无尽头的战争，都是为了“安全”，即使安全的瑞典从来不需要这些。
People think it is insane to think of life without central banks, even though these are modern inventions that have destroyed currency after currency.
人们认为一个没有中央银行的国家是疯狂的想法，即使中央银行制度是现代的发明，即使它已经摧毁了一个又一个的货币。
Even meddlesome agencies like the Consumer Products Safety Commission or the Federal Trade Commission strike people as absolutely essential, even though it is not they who catch the thieves and frauds, but private institutions.
甚至连多管闲事的政府机构像消费品安全委员会（CPSC）或联邦贸易委员会（FTC）在大多数人眼里也是绝对必要的，即使逮住小偷和骗子的并不是它们，而是那些私人机构。
The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies seems outlandish, even though we have a long history of both.
私有化道路和供水的想法现在听起来很古怪，即使关于两者我们都有着一个相当悠久的历史。
People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didn't create in America the world's most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.
人们甚至奇怪若没有公共学校孩子们该怎样受到教育，就仿佛自由市场本身没有在18世纪和19世纪的美国造就出全世界最光辉灿烂的文化社会一样。
This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom — the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself — is being eroded in our society and culture.The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration.
这张单子还可以开得很长很长。但是问题在于想象自由的能力——文明和人类自身的生命之光——正在我们的社会和文化中渐渐暗淡。我们拥有的自由越少，就越少有人能够想象自由的模样，也因此就越少有人愿意为重建自由而奋斗。
This has profoundly affected the political culture. We've lived through regime after regime, at least since the 1930s, in which the word "freedom" has been a rhetorical principle only, as each new regime has taken away ever more of our freedom.
这也深刻影响了政治文化。至少自1930年代以来，我们经历了一个又一个的朝代，单词“自由”已经仅仅成为了一个修辞手段，即使每一个新朝代都夺走甚至更多的自由。
Now we have a president who doesn't even bother to pay lip service to the idea of freedom. In fact, I don't think the idea has occurred to Obama at all. If the idea of freedom has occurred to him, he must have rejected it as dangerous, or unfair, or unequal, or irresponsible, or something along those lines.
今天我们有了一位甚至连在口头上应承自由理念都嫌麻烦的总统。实际上，我一点都不认为奥巴马的思想里有自由的概念。就算他脑海里曾闪过自由的念头，他也一定会否定它，把它视为危险、不公正、不平等、不负责任，或某种类似的概念。
To him, and to many Americans, the goal of governments is to be an extension of the personal values of those in charge. Isaw a speech in which Obama was making a pitch for national service — the ghastly idea that government should steal 2 years of every young person's life for slave labor and to inculcate loyalty to the leviathan — with no concerns about setting back a young person's career and personal life.
对于他，以及对许多美国人来说，政府的目标是那些手握权力的个人所持有的个人价值观的延伸。我有次见过奥巴马为宣传兵役制度作的演讲——那种恐怖的想法认 为政府应当窃取每个年轻人两年的生命时光来奴役并且反复灌输对利维坦的忠诚——毫不顾虑这会拖累一个年轻人的职业和个人生涯的后腿。
How did Obama justify his support of this idea? He said that when he was a young man, he learned important values from his period of community service. It helped form him and shape him. It helped him understand the troubles of others and think outside his own narrow experiences.
奥巴马是如何为支持这个理念辩护的呢？他说当他还是一个年轻人的时候，他从自己在社区服务的那段时间里学到了重要的价值观。这有助于他的成长和塑造他的人格。这帮助他理解其他人的困扰和跳出他狭隘的个人经验框架去思考问题。
Well, I'm happy for him. But he chose that path voluntarily. It is a gigantic leap to go from personal experience to forcing a vicious national plan on the entire country. His presumption here is really taken from the playbook of the totalitarian state: the father-leader will guide his children-citizens in the paths of righteousness, so that they all will become god like the leader himself.
哦，我为他感到高兴。但是他是自愿选择了那条道路。从个人的亲身经历到把一个邪恶的全民计划强加到整个国家身上是一个巨大的飞越。他在这里的推定的的确确取自极权政府的剧本：君父将引导他的子民走义路，如此他们全都会像领袖自己那样成为神。
To me, this comment illustrates one of two things. It could show that Obama is a potential dictator in the mold of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, for the presumptions he puts on exhibit here are just as frightening as any imagined by the world's worst tyrants. Or, more plausibly, it may be an illustration of Hannah Arendt's view that totalitarianism is merely an application of the principle of the "banality of evil."
对我来说，奥巴马的陈词有两个解释，它要么表明奥巴马是一个潜在的独裁者，就像斯大林、希特勒、还有毛泽东那样，因为他在这里表露的推断就和任何人类历史 上可以想象得到的最邪恶的暴君一样令人害怕。或者，更好的解释，它也许仅是汉娜·阿伦特思想的一个实证，即极权主义仅仅是“平庸的恶”原则的一种表现。
With this phrase, Arendt meant to draw attention to how people misunderstand the origin and nature of evil regimes. Evil regimes are not always the products of fanatics, paranoids, and sociopaths, though, of course, power breeds fanaticism, paranoia, and sociopathology. Instead, the total state can be built by ordinary people who accept a wrong premise concerning the role of the state in society.
用这个词组，阿伦特意在把我们的注意力引向人们是如何误解了邪恶统治的起源和本质。邪恶统治并不总是狂热者、偏执狂，还有反社会疯子的产物；诚然，权力滋生狂热、偏执与反社会思想。反而，这整个政权却能够由那些在政府的作用方面接受了错误前提的普通人所建立。
If the role of the state is to ferret out evil thoughts and bad ideas, it must necessarily become totalitarian. If the goal of the state is that all citizens must come to hold the same values as the great leader, whether economic, moral, or cultural, the state must necessarily become totalitarian. If the leaders believe that scarce resources must be channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning.
如果政府的作用是惩恶扬善，那它就一定会变成一个极权主义政府。如果政府的目标是所有公民必须持有和伟大领袖相同的价值观，不论是经济上、道德上，还是文 化上，那这个政府就一定会变成一个极权主义政府。如果人民被教导着去相信分配稀缺资源最好的方式并不是由生产者和消费者任凭自己的意愿来选择，那结局就一 定会是中央规划。
On the face of it, many people today do not necessarily reject these premises. No longer is the idea of a state-planned society seen as frightening. What scares people more today is the prospect of a society without a plan, which is to say a society of freedom. But here is the key difference between authority in everyday life — such as that exercised by a parent or a teacher or a pastor or a boss — and the power of the state: the state's edicts are always and everywhere enforced at the point of a gun.
乍看之下，今天许多人不会再坚决拒绝这些前提了。一个由政府来统筹规划的国家已经不再被视为令人恐惧了。今天让人们害怕的却是一个没有中央规划的 国家的前景，也就是说，一个自由的国家。但是我们日常生活中的威权——比如由一位父母或一位教师或一位牧师或一位老板行使的权力——和政府的极权之间有着 本质的不同：政府的法令总是在枪口之下强制实行的，不论何时还是何地。
It is interesting how little we think about that reality — one virtually never hears that truth stated so plainly in a college classroom, for example — but it is the core reality. Everything done by the state is ultimately done by means of aggression, which is to say violence or the threat of violence against the innocent. The total state is really nothing but the continued extension of these statist means throughout every nook and cranny of economic and social life. Thus does the paranoia, megalomania, and fanaticism of the rulers become deadly dangerous to every single person.
有趣的是我们几乎从不面对那个现实——比如你实际上绝不会在大学课堂里听到上述真相被如此平直的表述出来——但这就是核心现实。政府所做的每一件事情本质 上都是侵略行径，也就是说对无辜的人施以暴力或以暴力相威胁。整个政府实际上一无是处，除了连续不断将这些中央集权手段渗透进经济和社会生活的每一个角 落。于是乎，统治者的偏执、自大和狂热得以变得对所有人都是一种致命的危险。
It begins in a seemingly small error, a banality. But, with the state, what begins in banality ends in bloodshed.
它始于一个看上去很微小的错误，一种平庸。但是，一旦到了政府的层面，始于平庸的错误却总是以流血结束。
Let me give another example of the banality of evil. Several decades ago, some crackpots had the idea that mankind's use of fossil fuels had a warming effect on the weather. Environmentalists were prettyfired up by the notion. So were many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied because they had long ago conceded that there are some public goods that the market can't handle; surely the weather is one of those.
让我举出另一个“平庸的恶”的例子吧。几十年以前，一些奇怪的人冒出了这个想法，认为人类使用化石燃料对气候有一种暖化效应。环境主义者立即被这个概念煽 动了起来。同样的还有许多政客。经济学家们则大都失语，因为他们很久以前就承认了有一些公共利益是自由市场所无法处理的，当然气候就是其中之一。
Enough years go by, and what do you have? Politicians from all over the world — every last one of them a huckster of *symbolality*, only pretending to represent his nation — gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and plan its weather down to precise temperatures half a century from now.
经过了足够多的岁月，你们得到了什么？来自世界各地的政客们——他们中每一个家伙都是某种类型的政治贩子，仅仅假装着代表他的国家——在欧洲一个豪华的度假胜地汇集一堂，妄图对全世界征税并计划从今天开始的半个世纪之内让气温下降到某个精确的温度。
In the entire history of mankind, there has not been a more preposterous spectacle than this.
在整个人类的历史上，再也没有比这个更加荒唐的奇观了。
I don't know if it is tragedy or farce that the meeting on global warming came to an end with the politicians racing home to deal with snowstorms and record cold temperatures.
我不知道这是否是一场悲剧，一场讨论全球变暖的大会却以政客们匆匆回国处理暴风雪和破纪录的寒冷天气而收场。
I draw attention to this absurdity to make a more general point. What seems to have escaped the current generation is the notion that was once called freedom.
我把大家的注意力集中到这件荒唐的事情上来是为了说明一个更普遍的观点。对当今一代来说，似乎他们所遗忘的是曾经被称之为自由的概念。
Let me be clear on what I mean by freedom. I mean a social or political condition in which people exercise their own choices concerning what they do with their lives and property. People are permitted to trade and exchange goods and services without impediment or violent interference. They can associate or not associate with anyone of their own choosing. They can arrange their own lives and businesses. They can build, move, innovate, save, invest, and consume on terms that they themselves decide and define.
让我澄清一下我说的自由指的是什么。我指的是一个社会或政治环境，在这个环境之下，人们对自己的生命和财产行使自己的选择权。人们被允许没有妨碍不受暴力 干涉地交易和交换产品和服务。他们能够任意与自己选择的人结合或分开。他们能够安排自己的生活和事业。他们能够开发、移动、创造、储蓄，以及投资在任何他 们自己定义的事物上。
What will be the results? We cannot predict them, any more than I can know when everyone in this room will wake up tomorrow morning, or what you will have for breakfast. Human choice works that way. There are as many patterns of human choice as there are humans who make choices.
结果会怎样？我无法预言，就像我无从知道这个房间里的在座各位明天早上醒来之后，你们早饭会吃什么一样。人类的选择就是以这种方式来进行。有多少进行选择的人，就会有多少种选择的模式。
The only real question we should ask is whether the results will be orderly — that is consistent with peace and prosperity — or chaotic, and there by at war with human flourishing. The great burden born by the classical liberal tradition, stretching from medieval times to our own, is to make believable the otherwise improbable claim that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of orderliness.
我们唯一真正应该问的问题就是结果有序与否——安定与繁荣——或混乱，也随之戕害人类的昌盛。古典自由主义传统肩负的重任，从中世纪一直延伸到我们现代，就是让人们相信这个看似不可能的断言，即自由是秩序之母而非秩序之女。
To be sure, that generation of Americans that seceded from British rule in the late-18th century took the imperative of liberty as a given. They had benefitted from centuries of intellectual work by true liberals who had demonstrated that government does nothing for society but divide and loot people in big and small ways. They had come to believe that the best way to rule a society is not to rule it at all, or, possibly, rule it with the people's consent in only the most minimal way,
无可非议的，在十八世纪晚期脱离英国统治而独立的那一代美国人把必要之自由视为天赐。他们受益于数世纪以来由真正的自由主义者所进行的思想工作， 前人们证明了政府对国家没有任何好处，只会用大大小小的方式把人们相互隔开和掠夺人们的劳动果实。他们趋于相信治理一个国家的最好方法就是根本不要去治 理，或者若有可能，则在人民的认可之下，以最有限的方式治理。
Today, this social order sounds like chaos,not anything we dare try, lest we be overrun with terrorists and drug fiends,amidst massive social, economic, and cultural collapse. To me this is very interesting. It is the cultural condition that comes about in the absence of experience with freedom. More precisely, it comes about when people have no notion of the relationship between cause and effect in human affairs.
今天，这样的社会秩序听起来就和混乱没什么两样，不是任何我们胆敢尝试的事情，唯恐恐怖分子和毒品恶魔就会在我们的国家里泛滥成灾，造成社会、经 济，和文化的大面积崩溃。对我来说这种现象很有趣。这是一种在对自由的体验缺位的情况下产生的文化环境。更准确的说，当人们不再有人类活动自有其因果关系 的概念时，才产生了这种文化。
One might think that it would be enough for most people to log on to the World Wide Web, browse any major social-networking site or search engine, and gain direct experience with the results of human freedom. No government agency created Facebook,no government agency managesits day-to-day operation. It is the same with Google. Nor did a bureaucratic agency invent the miracle of the iPhone, or the utopian Cornucopia of products available at the Wal-Mart down the street.
对大部分人来说，只须登录互联网，浏览任何大型社交网站或使用搜索引擎，就足以最直接地体验到人类自由的结晶了。不是政府部门创立了脸谱，不是政 府部门在负责它的日常运作。同样的还有谷歌。也不是官僚机构发明了神奇的苹果手机，或者街角的沃尔玛这样能得到各种各样产品的乌托邦式聚宝盆。
Meanwhile, look at what the state gives us:the Department of Motor Vehicles; the post office; spying on our emails and phone calls; full-body scans at the airport; restrictions on water use; the court system; wars; taxes; inflation; business regulations; public schools;Social Security; the CIA; and another ten thousand failed programs and bureaucracies, the reputations of which are no good no matter who you talk to.
与此同时，看看政府带给了我们什么：车辆管理局、邮局、监视电子邮件和电话、机场的全身扫描、限制用水、法庭系统、战争、税收、通货膨胀、商业监管、公共学校、社会保障、中央情报局，以及其他数不尽的失败计划和官僚机构，不管你和谁说起，政府的声誉总是好不到哪里去。
Now, one might say, Oh sure, the freemarket gives us the dessert, but the government gives us the vegetables to keep us healthy. That view does not account for the horrific reality that more than 100 million people were slaughtered by the state in the 20th century alone, not counting its wars.
现在，你或许会说，哦肯定的，自由市场给了我们荒漠，而政府给了我们蔬菜让我们保持健康。那个观点没有考虑到这个可怕的现实，单单在二十世纪这一个世纪之内，就有超过一亿人被政府所屠杀，而这还不包括政府之间战争的死亡人数。
This is only the most visible cost. As Frédéric Bastiat emphasized, the enormity of the costs of the state can only be discovered in considering its unseen costs: the inventions not brought to market, the businesses not opened, the people whose lives were cut short so that they could not enjoy their full potential, the wealth not used for productive purposes but rather taxed away, the capital accumulation through savings not undertaken because the currency was destroyed and the interest rate held near zero, among an infinitely expandable list of unknowns.
这仅仅是最看得到的损失。正如弗雷德里克·巴斯夏所强调的，唯有考虑看不到的损失，才能发现人类为政府所付出的沉重代价：发明没有被市场化，生意 没有开张，人们的生命被缩短以至于无法充分发挥潜能；财富没有被用于有生产力的目的而被征用到它处；通过储蓄积聚资本无法实现因为货币被摧毁而利率被维持 在近乎于零，这张看不到的列表可以无限制拉长下去。
To understand these costs requires intellectual sophistication. To understand the more basic and immediate point,that markets work and the state does not, needs less sophistication but still requires some degree of understanding of cause and effect. If we lack this understanding, we go through life accepting whatever exists as a given. If there is wealth, there is wealth, and there is nothing else to know. If there is poverty, there is poverty, and we can know no more about it.
为了理解这些代价，需要一定的思想深度。而为了理解更基本和直接的观点，即市场有用政府无用，则并不需要很深邃的思想，不过仍然需要对因果关系有 一定程度的认识。如果我们缺少这种认识，我们就会抱着存在即合理的态度而浑浑噩噩的过活。富人就是富人，没有什么其他道理；穷人就是穷人，也没有太多的理 由。
It was to address this deep ignorance that the discipline of economics was born in Spain and Italy — the homes of the first industrial revolutions — in the 14th and 15th centuries, and came to the heights of scientific exposition in the 16th century, to be expanded and elaborated upon in the 18th century in England and Germany, and in France in the 19th century, and finally to achieving its fullest presentation in Austria and America in the late-19th and 20th centuries.
正是为了化解这种深深的无知才在西班牙和意大利诞生了经济学学科——工业革命最初的起源地——在十四和十五世纪，在十六世纪达到了科学解释的高度，在十八世纪的英国和德国被扩大和细化，以及十九世纪的法国，而最终在十九世纪晚期和二十世纪的奥地利和美国臻于完善。
And what did economics contribute to human sciences? What was the value that it added? It demonstrated the orderliness of the material world through a careful look at the operation of the price systemand the forces that work to organize the production and distribution of scarce goods.
经济学对人类科学的贡献是什么？它提供了什么价值？它通过仔细审视物价系统的运作、组织生产的动力、稀缺商品的分配来揭示我们这个物质世界的秩序。
The main lesson of economics was taught again and again for centuries: government cannot improve on the results of human action achieved through voluntary trade and association. This was its contribution. This was its argument. This was its warning to every would-be social planner: your dreams of domination must be curbed.
数世纪以来，经济学的这主要一课被反复教导给人们：政府无法改善通过自发的交易和结合而实现的人类活动的结果。这就是它的贡献。这就是它的结论。这就是它对每一个想为国家做规划的人给出的警告：你的统治梦想一定是受到约束的。
In effect, this was a message of freedom,one that inspired revolution after revolution, each of which stemming from the conviction that humankind would be better off in the absence of rule than in its tyrannical presence. But consider what had to come before the real revolutions: there had to be this intellectual work that prepared the field of battle, the epic struggle that lasted centuries and continues to this day,between the nation-state and the market economy.
实际上，这是一个自由信息，激励了一次又一次的革命，每一次的革命都源自这个信念：没有暴君的统治，人们的生活会好上许多。但是想想在真正的革命 到来之前一定会有的革命先声，一定会有为战场做好准备的思想工作，这场极权政府和自由市场之间可歌可泣的斗争持续了数世纪之久，一直延续到了今天。
Make no mistake: it is this battle's outcome that is the most serious determinant in the establishment and preservation of freedom. The political order in which we live is but an extension of the capacities of our collective cultural imagination. Once we stop imagining freedom, it can vanish, and people won't even recognize that it is gone. Once it is gone, people can't imagine that they can or should get it back.
毫无疑问：正是这场斗争的结果才是对谁能当权和自由能否保存起到最决定性的因素。我们所处的政治秩序不过是我们共同的文化想象的延伸。一旦我们不再想象自由的模样，自由就会湮灭，而人们甚至不会意识到它的消失。一旦自由消失，人们就无从想象他们能够而且应该把它夺回了。
I'm reminded of the experience of an economist associated with the Mises Institute who was invited to Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union. He was to advise them on a transition to free markets. He talked to important officials about privatization and stock markets and monetary reform. He suggested no regulations on business start-ups. The officials were fascinated. They had become convinced of the general case for free enterprise. Because they understood that under socialism officials were poor.
我回忆起了一位和米塞斯研究院有联系的经济学家的经历，他在苏联解体后应邀去了哈萨克斯坦。他们邀请他为向自由市场过渡出谋划策。他向那些官员谈 起私有化和证券市场和货币改革。他建议不要对创办企业进行任何监管限制。这些官员对此极感兴趣。他们对自由企业这个一般概念有着坚定的信念。他们明白社会 主义意味着官僚们也同样贫穷。
And yet, an objection was raised. If people are permitted to open businesses and factories anywhere, and we close state-run factories, how can the state properly plan where people live? After all, people might be tempted to move to places where there are good-paying jobs and away from places where there are no jobs.
可随后，却冒出了一个反对意见。如果允许人们在任何地方办厂办企业，而且我们也关闭了国营企业，那政府又该怎样适当的规划人们在哪里安居呢？毕竟，人们会被诱惑迁移至有好工作的地方，远离没有工作可干的地方。
The economist listened to this point,kept warning of the objections.He nodded his head that this is precisely what people will do. After some time,the government officials became more explicit. They said that they could not simply step aside and let people move any where they want to move. This would mean losing track of the population. It could cause overpopulation in someareas and desolation in others. If the state went along with this idea of free movement, it might as well shut down completely, for it would effectively be relinquishing any and all control over people.
这位经济学家听取了这个想法。他摇了摇头，说这就是人们会做的事情。过了一会，政府官员们变得更直接了。他们说他们不会在一边袖手旁观让人们自由迁移到他 们想去的地方。这将意味着失去对人口数量的控制。它会导致某些地区人口的过度膨胀而另一些地区的人口荒芜。如果政府任由这个自由迁移的想法实施，那政府也 会彻底垮台，因为政府实际上放弃了对人民的全部控制力。
And so, in the end, the officials rejected the idea. The entire economic reform movement foundered on the fear of letting people move — a freedom that most everyone in the United States takes for granted,and which hardly ever gives rise to objection.
于是，在最后，官员们拒绝了这个想法。整个经济改革运动于是就建立在了害怕人民自由迁移的基础上——在美国几乎所有人都视之为理所当然的自由，几乎从没人会提出异议。
Now, we might laugh about this, but consider the problem from the point of view of the state. The whole reason people stay in office is to control. You are there to manage society. What they really and truly fear is that by relinquishing control of people's movement, they were effectively turning over the whole of society to that they described as the wiles of the mob. All order may be lost. All security gone. People would make terrible mistakes with their lives. They would blame the government for failing to control them. And then what happens? The regime loses power.
现在，我们也许会对这件事情感到很可笑，但是从政府的角度来考虑这个问题就不一样了。你坐在办公室里的唯一理由就是控制。你当官就是为了管理国 家。你实际上和真正恐惧的就是当松开对人口迁移的控制后，会把整个国家交到一群诡计多端的暴徒手中。所有秩序都会失去，所有的安全保障都将不复存在。人们 会对他们的生活做出糟糕的选择。他们会指责政府没能履行约束他们的责任。然后会发生什么呢？政权就会失去它的力量。
In the end, this is what it always comes down to for the state: the preservation of its own power. Everything it does,it does to secure its power and to forestall the diminution of its power. I submit to you that everything else you hear, in the end, is a cover for that fundamental motive.
归根结底，这就是对政权来说最为关键的地方：保存它自己的权力。政府做的每一件事情，都是为了保卫它的权力，都是为了防止权力的缩小。我向你们保证所有你们听到的其他东西，到最后，都是为了掩盖那个最基本的动机。
And yet, this power requires the cooperation of public culture. The rationales for power must convince the citizens. This is why the state must be alert to the status of public opinion.This is also why the state must always encourage fear among the population about what life would be like in the absence of the state.
然而，权力需要公众文化的合作。为权力辩护的理论基础一定要让公民信服才行。这就是为什么政府一定会对舆论保持警觉。这也是为什么政府一定总会激发群众的恐惧心理，让人们害怕一个政府缺位的社会。
The political philosopher who did more than anyone else to make this possible was not Marx nor Keynes nor Strauss nor Rousseau. It was the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who laid out a compelling vision of the nightmare of life in the absence of the state. He described such life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."The natural society, he wrote, was a society of conflict and strife, a place in which no one is safe.
有一位政治哲学家让这成为了可能，他的贡献比任何人都要大，他不是马克思，不是凯恩斯，不是施特劳斯，也不是罗素，而是十七世纪的哲学家托马斯· 霍布斯，他编排了一个令人信服的，政府缺位的社会中噩梦式的前景。他把这样的生活描述为“孤独、贫穷、肮脏、野蛮和生命短暂”。自然社会，他写到，是一个 充满冲突和纷争的社会，一个没有任何人会安全的社会。
He was writing during the English Civil War, and his message seemed believable. But, of course, the conflicts in his time were not the result of natural society, but rather of the control of leviathan itself. So his theory of causation was skewed by circumstance, a kin to watching a shipwreck and concluding that the natural and universal state of man is drowning.
他的创作时期正值英国内战，而他传达的信息似乎是可信的。但是，当然他所处时代的冲突并不是自然社会的结果，而更接近于控制利维坦本身的结果。所以他的因果理论受限于时代环境，类似于看到一起海难就下结论说人类的自然和普遍的状态就是淹死。
And yet today, Hobbesianism is the common element of both left and right. To be sure, the fears are different, stemming from different sets of political values. The Left warns us that if we don't have leviathan, our front yards will be flooded from rising oceans, big business moguls will rob us blind, the poor will starve, the masses will be ignorant, and everything we buy will blow up and kill us. The Right warns that in the absence of leviathan, society will collapse in access pools of immorality lorded over by swarthy terrorists preaching a heretical religion.
然而在今天，霍布斯主义是无论左右两派的共同元素。毫无疑问，两派的恐惧各不相同，缘于不同的政治价值观基础。左派警告说如果我们不建立一个利维 坦，我们的前院就会被升高的海平面所淹没，商业大佬就会肆无忌惮的抢劫我们，穷人会饿死，大众会因得不到教育而无知，我们买的每一件电器都会爆炸和害死我 们。而右派则警告说如果不建立一个利维坦，皮肤黝黑信奉异端邪教的恐怖分子们就会作威作福，把国家搞得乌烟瘴气，导致国家的崩溃。
The goal of both the Left and Right is that we make our political choices based on these fears. It doesn't matter so much which package of fear you choose; what matters is that you support a state that purports to keep your nightmare from becoming a reality.
左右两派的共同目标就是让我们的政治选择建立在这些恐惧上。而你选择哪一边的恐惧其实无关紧要；重要的是你会支持一个自称能阻止你的梦魇成为现实的政府。
Is there an alternative to fear? Here is where matters become a bit more difficult. We must begin again to imagine that freedom itself could work. In order to do this, we must learn economics. We must come to understand history better. We must study the sciences of human action to relearn what Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Locke, Frédéric Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises,Murray N.Rothbard, and Hazlitt, F.A. Hayek the entire liberal tradition understood.
除了恐惧之外还有其他选择吗？这里情况就变得稍微有些复杂了。我们必须再次想象自由本身是如何运作的。而为了能够想象自由，我们就必须学习经济 学。我们必须要更好的理解历史。我们必须要学习有关人类行为的科学以重新掌握约翰·洛克、托马斯·杰弗逊、托马斯·潘恩、弗雷德里克·巴斯夏、路德维希· 冯·米塞斯、穆瑞·罗斯巴德，亨利·赫兹利特、冯·哈耶克以及全部的自由主义传统所理解的知识。
What they knew is the great secret of the ages: society contains within itself the capacity for self-management, and there is nothing that government can do to improve on the results of the voluntary association, exchange, creativity, and choices of every member of the human family.
他们所知晓的是历代的不传之秘：社会本身就拥有着自我管理的能力，在改善自愿的结合、交换、创新，还有每一个人类家族每一个成员选择的结果方面，政府是无能为力的。
If you know this lesson, if you believe this lesson, you are part of the great liberal tradition. You are also a threat to the regime, not only the one we live under currently, but every regime all over the world, in every time and every place. In fact, the greatest guarantor of liberty is an entire population that is a relentless and daily threat to the regime precisely because they embrace the dream of liberty.
如果你明白这一课，如果你相信这一课，那恭喜你，你是伟大的自由主义传统的一分子了。你也同时对政府就是一种威胁了，不仅仅是我们当前生活下的政府，而是 全世界所有时间和所有地方的所有政府。实际上，自由最伟大的保卫者就是一个群众整体，每一天每一日永不放弃地威胁着政权的统治，仅仅因为人们拥抱自由的梦 想。
The best and only place to start is with yourself. This is the only person that you can really control in the end. And by believing in freedom yourself, you might have made the biggest contribution to civilization you could possibly make. After that, never miss an opportunity to tell the truth. Sometimes, thinking the unthinkable, saying the unsayable, teaching the unteachable, is what makes the difference between bondage and sweet liberty.
最好的和唯一起步的地方就是从你自己做起。因为归根到底，唯有你自己是你真正能够控制的那个人。而对自由有着坚定信念的你，也许就能尽自己的力量对人类的 文明做出最大的贡献。之后，不要错过任何一个说出真相的机会。想不可想象之事，说不能说之话，教不可教之知识，有时候，这或许就会导致是奴役还是自由的区 别。
The title of this talk is "the Misesian vision." This was the vision of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N.Rothbard. It is the vision of the Mises Institute. It is the vision of every dissident intellectual who dared to stand up to despotism, in every age.
本次演讲的题目是“米塞斯的梦想”，这是路德维希·冯·米塞斯和穆瑞·罗斯巴德的梦想，这是米塞斯研究院的梦想，这也是世世代代敢于反抗专制独裁的每一位持不同政见的知识分子的梦想。
I challenge you to enter into this struggle of history, and make sure that your days on this earth count for something truly important. It is this struggle that defines our contribution to this world. Freedom is the greatest gift that you can give yourself and give all of humanity.
我要求你们加入这场伟大的历史之战，务必使自己没有虚度在尘世的岁月，正是这场斗争界定了我们对这个世界的贡献。自由就是你们能够为自己还有为全人类带来的一份最伟大的礼物。
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