 Can you guys hear me okay? Video and slideshowing? Hello, test, test. Okay, hey, good evening, everyone. It's 6 p.m. Central Time, U.S. Later for some of you I know. So let's get started. If there's any initial questions about last week's lecture, which I'll go over some of in a little bit, I'll be happy to take them now. But tonight, what I would like to concentrate on, I'll catch up on some of the things I didn't cover last time and talk about HAPA's views on types of socialism and the origin of the state. And I don't know if I'll have time to get to desocialization. So, by the way, I posted last week a couple of funny things to the forums about, well, drop it like a TAPA sort of rap thing by a friend of mine and also a fact about HAPA, which I thought were amusing. So, hope people enjoyed that. So let's go on here. So, quick review. Last class we talked about basically HAPA's place in the Austrian and liberal sort of literature and scheme. His influences, his style, his background, his basic orientation. And we talked about basic fundamental property-based and human-action-based, praxeology-based foundational concepts and principles which run through most of his work, various implications of the human-action axioms like conflict and scarcity, choice and cost and profit and loss and end the means and causality and the sort of methodological dualistic approach of Mises, which basically is looking at the causal world with the scientific method approach and more empirical approach. That is positing physical laws and then trying to test those laws to see if you can falsify your hypothesis, which is the sort of standard way most people think of science. But the Austrian view is that that's one type of science. Another type of science is the social sciences which are focused on, can anyone hear me? Or is it just Rick? He's having a problem. Okay, so I'll keep going. Methodological dualism, which looks at the causal world in one sense in which in the case of humans would be human behavior, just analyzing what emotions human bodies go through or trying to understand human ends and means and purposes. Excuse me, which is teleological realm. And from that realm, we know certain things are a priori. We know that humans have ends or purposes. They employ means. There's opportunity cost. They have choice. There's a presupposition of causality. If you didn't presuppose causality, you couldn't act as action-employed means, which are scarce means in the world, which are causally efficacious at achieving your end, or which are believed to be. So an operative presupposition of action would be causality as well. So these are the a priori things that come from this side of dualism. Then we talked about different property-related concepts like contract, aggression, capitalism, socialism, even the state, which are all defined in terms of this fundamental concept of property. I'm going to go to slide three. So today, we're going to continue the discussion of property, talk about how the state arises and what its definition is, and then talk about different types of socialism or statism. And if we have time, we'll get to de-socialization, which I doubt we will, actually. But that's okay. We can cover that next time. The readings would be primarily chapter 3, 4, and 5, and to some degree, 6 of TSC, the Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. Also, Hoppe's article on Banking, Nation-State, and International Politics, which is chapter 3 of his EEPP book. And finally, de-socialization in United Germany, which may not get to today. Okay, so let me just make one note. I don't know if I made this clear enough last time about the concept of property. Many of you may have noticed that this word is used a little bit carelessly by a lot of people, libertarians and others. It's used sometimes to refer to the scarce resource itself. Like you'll say, my car is my property. So they use the word property to refer to the thing that is owned. But technically, it's more of a relationship or a denotation of the ownership right. That's a legally respected right. Now, legally doesn't mean state law. It can be in private law. But basically, some kind of institutionalized, legally recognized relationship that is a right to control a given resource. So I think to be careful, we need to think most of the time of property as the ownership right in a resource, not the resource that is owned. And this usage sort of goes back to the traditional usage of the word property, which has been used for hundreds of years in liberal thought and classical liberal thought. Richard Overton in 1646 put it this way, talking about self ownership. Every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped. For everyone as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety, else he does not be himself. The propriety is sort of like proprietorship or ownership over yourself. It's not yourself. It's the ownership over yourself. And John Locke in 1690 in his Second Treatise of Government has this classic formulation, though the earth and all the interior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person and nobody has any right to it but himself. So we need to think of property as the relationship between an actor or an agent, that is basically a human being, and some scarce resource, including his own body, which is also a scarce resource. So property answers the question, who has the right to control this resource? It's not who has the actual control of the resource. Actual control can be thought of as near possession or so think of Crusoe on a desert island. He would actually have control of resources that he employs as means in his actions. But he really wouldn't have ownership because he wouldn't have any legal right, because the legal right is something that other people can respect. So the legal right is more of a social concept, which is compatible, by the way, with Ein Rand's view of rights as social devices. Now, there's a really good definition in Indianapolis. He's one of the world's leading civil law scholars. He's then in Louisiana. The civil law is one of the two great legal systems in the world. The common law, which is in England and many of the former Commonwealth, the Commonwealth countries like most of the U.S., most of Canada, et cetera. And then the other great legal system is that in the continent. So it's sometimes called the continental system in Europe. And also Louisiana and America for historical reasons. And in Quebec and Canada and Scotland, to a degree, actually, in England. That's called the civil law or code-based systems. And Ianapolis, now he's not a libertarian, but is striking how compatible his analysis is with the Austrian libertarian way of looking at property. And he defines in his treatise, which I shall show you. I love this. This is the West series. It's a civil law series from Louisiana. Property. Fantastic. Very expensive books, but they're great. So this is this book here. Such great works of scholarship. In any case, he defines it as, I have it on the page here. I won't read the whole thing, but basically I'll read part of it. Property is the exclusive right to control an economic good. It's the concept that refers to the rights and obligations that have to do with the relations of man with respect to things of value. And he even goes into here about scarcity. He says that some things are needed and because of the demand on them, they become scarce. And then laws help govern the use of these things. And then he says property rights are a direct and immediate authority. Now authority is sort of a loaded normative term, which means a legally recognized authority or right to control. He has another nice compact expression at the bottom of the page here on page five, slide five. Ownership is the fact, I'm sorry, possession. Ownership is the right to control, or you can think of the right to possess, but where mere possession is the factual authority that someone has over a thing. So even a thief would have temporary possession over a car he stole, for example, but he wouldn't have the right to control it. He would just have the actual, or the factual authority, but not the legally recognized authority. So that's how we need to think of property. And this is how Hans Hopper thinks about it throughout his work. Now, let's continue with what we were talking about last time about homesteading. So homesteading, or sometimes called original appropriation, would be assigning ownership. Ethan, did you get that? There's a thread there behind you. Assigning ownership to something that was previously unowned, a scarce resource that was unowned. Hold on a second. Okay, based upon a certain link, an objective link between the owner and the resource. So that is what homesteading is, and it's sort of reformulated by Hoppean, and Nizezian, and Ruck-Barty in terms. Now, this intersubjectively ascertainable language is more of a Kantian kind of language. Objective is how we would describe it. So he used those sort of sentences you could see here. So in Hoppe's terminology, in Hoppe's conceptual framework, any assignment of ownership to an unowned resource, other than by this objective link, that is by mixing your labor or in bordering it, would be basically the equivalent of just asserting by verbal decree that you own it. The problem with this is this is just a subjective opinion. It's something anyone can do. Any number of people can do this at the same time, and it doesn't suffice to establish any kind of link that's a unique link between the person claiming the ownership and the property. So it doesn't serve the function of property, which is to assign an owner to this resource so that conflict can be avoided, so that the resource can be used productively and peacefully, and as part of an economy and a society. So as Hoppe looks at it, to homestead something is to embroider. That's what you can think of it as in bordering, to produce borderlines. So if there's an empty field, you could build a house on it, put a farm on it, or put a fence around it. So you put a border up that others can observe in some kind of way. Possessing an apple would be in bordering it, showing that you own it, and what the limits of your ownership are by the fact of possession, for example. So there are different ways of in bordering things or homesteading them. Based upon the nature of the good, the nature of the use to which the human will put it as a means to action. Okay. Let's go on here. Now, I mentioned earlier there are several fundamental concepts, and some of them imply other concepts that are very fundamental as well. Scarcity is sometimes used by people in a sloppier way to mean things that are not very common, like not very abundant, like if there's some kind of disease among chickens and so we have fewer eggs being produced, you could say eggs are getting more scarce. But that's more of a colloquial, not a rigorous economic concept of scarcity. Scarcity does not mean merely a nonabundant. It means that the particular object is a scarce object or what economists call rivalrous. It means there could be rivalry over it. What this means is only one user can use this good at a given time, and if two or more people try to use it, they would have to have physical conflict over it. So you can actually think of a scarce good as something that is complicitable, something that is possible to have conflict over, something that cannot be used simultaneously by more than one person at the same time as a means of action. So you have to think of scarcity meaning this, and this is crucial to Hoppe's entire political framework and its economics. In conflict, what it means is physical, violent interaction and strikes where two or more actors want to employ the same means, or where they're attempting to achieve or use the same end thing, which is basically a means of action. But anyway, it's a scarce resource. So what is conflicting is actions. It's not desires, it's not interests. It's actions that conflict. Actions always employ scarce means, and when two or more actors seek to use the same scarce good at the same time, it's not possible. That is where the conflict is. So for example, people often use overly metaphorical or sloppy language, and they'll say something like, people fight over religion. But technically that's actually not true. People never fight over religion. Religious differences might be the motivation for the action. It might be the reason why you clash. But what you're clashing over is always necessarily scarce resources, including land or bodies or the property owned by people, like their money, whatever. So if one religious group invades another to convert them to their religion, they're actually physically using physical spears and axes and bows or guns or whatever against the land and property and bodies of the people that disagree with them. There's always a clash over scarce resources, whereas the dispute's motivation could be a religious difference. But with a fight, it's actually over. It's always physical means being used against physical scarce material goods. Imagine that everyone in the world were just some kind of intangible ghosts and could pass through each other and couldn't actually affect each other or harm each other. There would be no possibility of conflict or disagreement. And there would be no need for the concept of property. So again, always keep in mind about the museum concept of action as action is something that employs means, which are scarce resources that are causally efficacious at achieving a given end. And again, you can see that by viewing human action this way, all actions imply choice. Now, this doesn't mean that there is actually free will in some kind of ultimate sense. In fact, the question is really irrelevant. If you view another human being and try to understand what they're doing in terms of human action, that is teleologically, that as you understand them the way you understand yourself, as an actor having choice and values and preferences and goals and employing means to achieve end, then you are viewing them as actors and you're understanding what they do as action and teleologically. You're not viewing them as some kind of deterministic or mechanized cloud of subatomic particles following the forelaw of the physics. Theoretically, you could according to Mises and Hoppe. So this is an interesting comment here, which goes into an issue that's very controversial with a lot of people. It goes to religion. It goes to philosophy. It goes to the issue of free will and determinism. And in my view, it's not characterized this way by Hoppe or by Mises, but I believe the right way to characterize what they are saying is a type of compatibilism, which I actually agree with. Compatibilism is the view that in a sense both determinism and free will are true. And if you have a dualist perspective of human action, I think it helps to explain that because what it means is when you view people as human actors, you're necessarily presupposing and understanding what they're doing and if they have choice. So you can't really say they don't have choice when you're looking at them as actors. If you look at them as mechanistic meat robots, basically, then you're not looking at them as actors. You're looking at their behavior, not their action. And that would be the causal and possibly deterministic realm. So Hoppe says in Economic Science and the Austrian Method, one of his epistemological works, no scientific advance could ever alter the fact that one must regard one's knowledge and actions as unpredictable on the basis of constantly operating causes. You might hold this conception of freedom to be an illusion, and one might well be correct from the point of view of a scientist with cognitive powers substantially superior to any human intelligence or from the point of view of God. But we're not God, and if our freedom is illusory from his standpoint and our actions follow a predictable path, for us this is a necessary and unavoidable illusion. So in other words, it might be an illusion. Hoppe's not really taking a stance, but what he's saying is you cannot help but regard action as being uncaused or as being free, volitional. That's free will. Even if our bodies really follow a predetermined path as could be seen by some superintelligence outside of our universe or whatever. He's basically saying that to me, this is a type of compatriotism, because he's saying it's possible for both to be true. In the causal realm, we might be caused and determined. Therefore, in the teleological realm, we view our actions as being explained in the human action framework, with necessarily user actions being volitional or making choices. Now, means it says something similar in human action. We do not assert that man is free in choosing and acting. We merely establish the fact that he chooses and acts. Now, what does he mean by you can choose, but it's not free? I think what he's saying is you don't have to take this monistic free will approach and say that we're completely free. What he's saying is we choose and choice has a meaning. It means that the human actor evaluates more than one possible act he can perform. He makes a choice and thereby demonstrates the one that he prefers. Whether it's determined or not, it's really not necessary to answer. And so, means it goes on, some philosophers are prepared to expose the notion of man's will and illusion and self-deception because we must follow the laws of causality. He says something similar to what Hoppe said. They may be right or wrong from the point of view of the prime mover, which is God, or the cause of itself. But from the human point of view, action is the ultimate thing. We don't assert man is free in choosing and acting. We merely establish the fact that he chooses and acts and that we're at a loss to use the methods of the natural sciences for answering the questions why he acts this way and not otherwise. So they sort of regard human choice as a fundamental that you can't challenge, and whether or not it can be explained or somehow compatible with the apparent determinism that comes from a scientific view of the causal world, he doesn't really care about. It really doesn't matter. And I tend to agree with that as well. Now, at the bottom, I've already gone over here how dualism explains how you can approach things this way. Again, the various fundamental concepts of cost, profit, ends, means, and causality are all implied in action. What does that mean? Well, every action is aimed at a certain goal you're trying to accomplish at your end. And you're trying to alleviate some kind of uneasiness that you feel or make the world result in a state of affairs that's different than it otherwise would and that you evidently prefer. So if that happens, if you succeed in what you want to happen, then you achieve what we call a profit. Now, profit is not always monetary in general terms of the psychic profit. That means you're better off now, or at least you're better off. You assume that you will be better off when you perform the action. That is your ex-ante perspective is that the action, if success, if your predictions are right, will make you better off. That's the profit. Now, typically we speak of monetary profit. Now, that's an advanced economy having money and a market economy, or as we say, a catalytic economy. That would be catalytic profit. That's sort of a type of our subset of profit. Now, all action has to employ some kind of scarce means. That is some kind of means that can help you achieve the end you want. So you can see how this way of looking at action, which is really undeniable because the act of questioning is an action itself. Looking at action with this structure helps you see that these other concepts that are packed into it or built into it are themselves also undeniable. Now, one word that Mises and Hoppe used sometime was apodictic, A-T-O-D-I-C-T-I-C, apodictic or apodictic, which just means basically ineluctable or undeniable. Something that is so fundamental and basic is that you presuppose it in the very act of questioning it. So to deny it would be contradictory. Okay. Now, think of it this way. This is an important thing to get, which I mean, I don't think I understood this clearly until a few years ago, actually, because it's never made explicit, but it's very implicit in the work of Hoppe and also in Rothbard and Mises. So you can think of these fundamental concepts working together this way. All it has to do with property manipulation and ownership. Homesteading or appropriation is how we create new property titles and we do that by bordering. And you can call that a productive act because you're creating something subjectively into the world of commerce and human value that wasn't there before. In a way, before something is unknown, in a way it doesn't really exist. It's brought into human existence by the act of homesteading. So homesteading is the only way to create a new property title. Contract is the owner of property using his dominion over that thing to transfer the ownership of it. So contract transfers property titles. And we can think of that as a general concept that includes not only exchanges or even near-lateral commercial transfers, but gifts and bequeaths or bequests upon death by will, et cetera. Basically, it's a transfer of ownership from a current owner to a new owner, however you do it. Now production transforms owned goods. And we'll get to this in a minute, but a really important thing to recognize here and this comes into the intellectual property debate. It creates wealth and value, but it doesn't create property. So production means you own something and you work on it using your intellect, using your ideas about causality, using your ideas about what ends are possible, what things you can do with it, using your information and ideas about what possible means you can employ to change this or what shapes you can rearrange it into. Basically, you rearrange it into a more valuable configuration. So these are the fundamental property concepts, homesteading, contract, and production. So the way Hoppe looks at it and the way I agree is the proper way is to view property rights, first of all, human rights are the only human rights or property rights, or put it this way, all human rights are property rights because rights are always about who owns what, who gets to do what, and that's only a question that pertains to scarce goods. Anything else can't be conflicted over and there's no social problem to solve there. There's no need for a rule, there's no need for a norm, there's no need for a right, there's no need for a law. It makes no sense. So all human rights are property rights and property rights are necessarily only in scarce resources. This is why information is not ownable and this is why we have to be careful. I've already mentioned a few times how there's a certain sloppiness even. There's a certain sloppiness with concepts and words, which is okay usually, but you have to be careful not to let it lead you to a provocation on accident or to overuse of metaphors. So for example, Rothbard explained that all rights are property rights and that things we talk about, like the freedom of speech, freedom of the press are not really independent rights, they're just consequences of property rights. So as you can see from the previous breakdown on page 11, let me go back from homesteading contract and production back on page 12 now, that creation is not an independent source of ownership. This is a common view even among Rand who contradicted this somewhat when she's talked about LLC property, but Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe and even Rand were explicit about this. What they view is wealth is created by rearranging already owned factors of production or scarce resources. I have a blog post that discusses this in detail, which I have a link for here on this page, but I'll quote some of it on the following pages. So let's take Hoppe first, because he's the subject of the course, even though he came later than the others, I'll quote, Hoppe writes, one can acquire an increase in wealth either through homesteading production and contractual exchange or by expropriating and exploiting homesteaders, producers, and contractual exchangers. Now what he's doing there is distinguishing between peaceful and violent ways of acquiring wealth, but what I want to focus on here is the first half of that sentence. You can increase wealth by homesteading. Now that's true. If you acquire an unknown resource and make it your own, now you have something valuable to you that you didn't have before. If you have a contractual exchange, by definition, both parties to an exchange, let's say two people exchange a chicken for a pig. Each one demonstrates by his actions that he values the thing he receives more than the thing he gave up. It's actually not what conventional economists would say if it's an even exchange that the value of the pig is equal to the value of the chicken. It's actually not true. The guy that receives the chicken values that chicken more than the pig he gave up. The guy that receives the pig receives the pig more than the chicken he gave up to acquire it. So each one is better off after the exchange, which is why every contractual exchange actually increases the sum total of wealth in society, not by a cardinal number, not that you can measure utility, but you know that both parties are better off after. Lucas says this screws up the model, so don't say this. Yeah, you're right. This is a presupposition of income tax law. The way it operates, they quite often will tax you for the value they say of something by its monetary value. But this is actually unscientific because if I pay $10,000 for a car, if someone gives me a car and someone else would pay $10,000 and the IRS would tax me on $10,000 worth of value, well actually, the car may be worth more than $10,000 to me because I paid $10,000 for it so I value the car more than the $10,000. So you can see that these, the state actually requires unscientific economic principles. But now, I left out production. So production, my production hopper means rearranging something you already own to make it more valuable. That is an increase in wealth. So let me go to the next page and let you see what Rothbard and others said about it. So even Ein Rand wrote this. This is a fascinating quote which I don't think she quite realized the implications of it when it comes to patents and copyrights or intellectual property which she supported. She acknowledges here very powerfully the power to rearrange the combinations of the natural elements is the only creative power man possesses. Creation does not mean the power to bring something into existence out of nothing. Creation means the power to bring into existence an arrangement of natural elements that hadn't existed before. So you can see what this implies is you own some property and then you rearrange it to make it more valuable. You know, Apple takes plastic and metal and excuse me, silicon and turns it into an iPod. If you put it into the blender and see if it will blend then you turn it back into a useless hunk of matter but you have to own this matter to rearrange it into something more valuable. Now the Randians will say you're creating values and therefore you own these values. But of course you can see this is double counting or it's unnecessary. You don't need to say you own the value that you create. You don't need to own the product that you create to own the iPod that you fashion because you had to own the raw factors first that went into it and you own them because you already owned the property that goes into it. Rothbard says something similar. Man finds himself in a certain situation and you decide to change the situation to achieve your end but you can only work with the numerous elements that he finds in his environment by rearranging them to bring about the satisfaction of his end. Now some of the objectivists and Randians have a huge Rothbard of plagiarizing from Rand that he used to be in her orbit but let me show you what Mises said earlier than both of them about the nature of production. He says there's a naive view that regards as bringing into being a matter that didn't exist before as creation. So then he says this is inadequate. The role played by man consists solely of combining his personal forces with those of nature so that your cooperation leads to a particular desired arrangement of materials. No human act of production leads to more than altering the position of things in space and leading the rest to nature and that part means the reliance on causal laws that will get you what you want but basically they're all talking about the same thing. Now let's switch to the origin of the state the nature of the state and then we can talk about different types of socialism. So this is Hoppe's a quote from Hoppe. Let me begin with the definition of the state. Now this is one characteristic of Hans Hoppe which I have always admired. It's his ability to have very clear concise and essentialist definitions. He doesn't leave a lot of things to implication like a lot of writers do and making it explicit helps to clarify just what you're arguing and you'll see this also in Rockboard. Rockboard is a very clear writer. You can understand what he's saying. If you try to read a lot of political theorists of other schools even the Hayekin school sometimes but especially the leftist and the Marxist and others they are also very vague and slippery and they change definitions from minute to minute. So this is an admirable quality. So his definition of the state is really good here. What lets an agent be able to do the qualify of the state? He must be able to assist at all conflicts. Now remember this goes back to his view of conflict. There's conflict over the use of a conflict of more rivalries or scarce means. All conflicts among the inhabitants in a given territory must be brought to him for ultimate decision-making for his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to assist at all conflicts involving himself be adjudicated by him or his agent. Now implying this power to exclude from all others from acting as part of the judge the second defining characteristic of the state is the agent's power to tax. That is to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for his services. Now you can see that this actually applies to any state even in Menorque. And Ahan says in other places he combines the power to tax with the power to have a monopolistic decision-making power in a given territory. And these are actually sort of both sides of the same coin. And in fact either one is sufficient for the other. Imagine an agency that didn't have a monopolistic right to outlaw competition in adjudication services but it had the power to tax. Well, it has the power to tax then it can out-compete all other agencies because it can take money from the people and use it to subsidize its services. Similar to the way that public or state schools, government schools in the U.S. are hard for private schools to compete with and why private schools are a minority. Conversely, if you didn't have the power to tax but you have the power to outlaw competition then the agency could simply charge a monopoly price for its services which people will be forced to use because you're preventing them from using competing services. So that's the same for the tax. So basically, taxing implies monopoly implies taxes. Edward asks what about the mafia and the black market arbitration that escapes the state's jurisdiction? I'm not sure what your question is about it if you want to elaborate you can but I would say the state doesn't have to have 100 percent complete control to exist. That's obvious. Even now it's black market but the state just has to have enough to survive and prosper and stay around. You know, one difference between no, nothing is perfect. It's just sufficient to be an institution that can survive. The mafia is very similar to the state. The main difference is it's not seen as legitimate. In fact, that's the primary difference. It's not seen as legitimate by the people that it persecutes. It also basically basically taxes people and outlaws competition, violence, to some degree. But it's not seen as legitimate so it's always the extent to what it can get away with before people start fighting back is more limited. The state deludes people in the thinking primarily by democracy and the right to vote and by employing them and giving them benefits. Makes people, yeah, I think actually the state is like Stockholm syndrome. I actually think that's a good analogy to explain the mentality of people that believe the state is legitimate. They are basically victimized by the state, but they believe the state lies that they need the state to survive and to have a good society. Lucas mentions private arbitration. Yeah, but private arbitration that's open and legal operates under the sort of umbrella of state control and only with the state's permission. In fact, if you have an arbitration and there's a determination, you have your arbitral award and you want to enforce it. If the loser refuses to comply, then what you have to do is actually take that to a state court for ultimate enforcement. And the state actually will not enforce arbitral awards that it seems to be contrary to public policy. That is, if you try to escape, like, you know, let's say you've had a, you made your employees sign an arbitration agreement, the rules of which or the rules of the arbitration agreement or the agency that you agree to hear it, don't permit the employees to argue based upon environmental protection laws or human rights protection laws or minimum wage or pro-union legislation. Well, then the state's course simply wouldn't enforce that. So it's all basically puppets of the state or operating under the state's wing or control. So the conclusion to this quote by Hoppe, excuse me, based on this definition of the state, it is easy to understand why a desire to control a state might exist. Or whoever is a monopolist, the final arbitration within a given territory can make laws and whoever can legislate can tax. This is an inviolable position and I have a couple of links here. I have a link to Hoppe's article which this quote comes from and this thinking runs through a lot of his work and also a blog post by me which quotes this and elaborates on it a little bit. Okay. Now, how does the state arise? That is something that's different than a mafia that can only get away with so much. So Hans has a fantastic article which is now a chapter in the expanded edition of his economics and ethics of private property chapter three, banking, nation-states, and international politics. I can't go into the whole article here, but the fundamental thing to get from it for this purpose here is he goes into a systematic analysis of exactly how the state sort of insidiously takes control of certain institutional features of society to slowly have it tentacled in everything and to basically take control. So as he argued, the state takes over and corrupt many institutions and aspects of life, such as roads and transportation, right? I mean, all the roads in society are primarily state-owned, which leads, by the way, in Hans's view, which we'll discuss in another lecture, to forced integration. Because, for example, the roads the government puts up are free to use, makes it easy for citizen aid to travel across the country and the state has any discrimination laws so that the road takes you to a neighborhood that could be private and might have a restriction against people that are culturally different or whatever, but now they can enforce this and sort of ease people to get there. So it's a way of the state forcing integration on people, which has implications for Harvard's immigration views. Communications, you know, as soon as the radio waves started being privatized in the courts, in the common law, in the early part of the 1900s, well, sorry, we had 1900s, the FCC was created and basically appropriated and monopolized. I'm talking about the U.S. here. And now they're trying, of course, to regulate the internet and communications because communications is a... And of course, there's extreme censorship and more authoritarian regimes. What people are committed to read, what they're committed to say, what they're committed to talk to, freedom of the press, freedom of speech. Of course, law and justice, the courts, the police, health care now. Money is another extremely important thing. The government takes over money. These are all private institutions and most of the features that would arise if the state and city sleeves started taking over. The financial and banking sector, of course, and money. And education, another extremely important one. And that's explicitly for propagandistic purposes. So when the government takes over so many things like this, it starts getting its hooks into the entire fabric of society. And then finally, a big one, slide 19 now, would be democracy itself. So we have a system of state education which makes people sort of believe the myths of democracy and we are the state. And then the state redistributes state power itself, which makes everyone a shareholder of the state in a sense, a stakeholder of the state. My mom might be getting social security payments, someone else might be on welfare, someone else might have a job at the local prison, someone else may be manufacturing munitions in the defense industry that the army, the military buys, someone else may be going to a subsidized school or college. And so everyone starts thinking of themselves as part of the state, independent of the state and beneficiaries of the state. And they have a stake in, by their voting and by their lobbying to try to use the state to take from others to get for themselves. And that helps reduce resistance to state power. So when people view themselves as owners of the state or we are the state when you can vote and you believe the myth that your vote matters and you control things, when you're dependent on the state for your survival, then you're not going to resist the state expansion of power. As much as you would if it was, say, a monarch, a monarchy, or even a despot or a mafia, where the distinction between the ruler and the ruled is clear and the fact of the violence and the basically the theft that this ruler is committing is visible and evident. And you might put up with a king as long as he provides some benefits to you. You know, he's kind of harsh, he taxes you, you gradually pay it, but at least he sort of helps you for an army's away and does some kind of justice. So the role of these isolated state actors will be clearer, but not in a modern democratic state. Anyway, in the point of this article, this chapter is to talk primarily about money making. So that's why he concludes that, you know, with the monopolization of law and security production, traffic, communication and education. Oh, by the way, we can mention the TSA here, of course, and airplane traffic and transportation. Excuse me, what the government regulates. As well as the democratization of state rule, all features of the modern state have been identified, but one, the monopolization of money and banking. And then he goes in to talk about that. Of course, you can see how horrible that is as well with our current recession and economic cycles, et cetera, which the state creates and then the state comes in and rides into the rescue or uses this as an excuse to seize more power in emergency level or to print literally trillions of dollars of money and to hand it over to cronies of the state, like Goldman Sachs, et cetera, GM, the airline industries, and everyone just puts up with it because they believe the state lies, that the state can protect us from this horrible disaster, which the state itself, of course, has caused. Kido has a question. Well, actually, you don't have a question. Okay, here it is. Kido says, given Hoppe's definition of the state, will we then presume that rather than government per se, the state is more precisely a form of government, we can't accurately suggest that monarchy is a monopolistic expropriator by its nature, and neither is democracy both are governments. The state is by its nature a monopolistic expropriator. Well, okay, my view of this, and I think it's compatible with Hoppe's views. The word government, of course, is widely used by libertarians and others, again in a sloppy fashion, sometimes as a synonym for the state, and sometimes not as a synonym for the state. Holland tends to use the word state, which I believe is more precise. I would tend to think that the word government means, the best meaning of the word government is some kind of institutions of justice and law in a given society, whether that's a state government or whether it's a private government. So I would agree with you that in a way a state is a type of government, just some bad type of government. So I would agree with you on that, but that's why we talk about the state, because that's a little clear definition. And by the way, you might notice this too, so that when the state takes all these, has all this control over our institutions, they gradually infiltrate our language and our concepts with what I call classificationism. Basically, everything comes down to a state arbitrary classification, you know, like they'll say, is that a marriage or is it not a marriage? And if it is, then certain rules apply, certain don't. I mean, there's millions and hundreds of these things up. What an employee is, what if you're not an employee, then you're not some sort of rules. What money is, what, you know, what it means to be practicing law or practicing medicine. What income is, you know, what interstate commerce means, et cetera. I've got a blog post on this as well, which you can click on there. Composier, the state is fundamentally based on a mistake by the populist, that it rests upon societal consent, because it's always a small group, parasitically reaching off the society at large. So it could not survive. It doesn't have enough visible might to survive if every 90% of society saw it as a mafia. It couldn't get away with what it gets away with. So it's the only reason it exists is because people have a mistaken notion about its legitimacy. And this is because of ideological propaganda, which again, it's accomplished because of its control over media, communication, and especially education. And because of widespread economic illiteracy of the people, most people, I believe, are decent. And if they really understood the economic consequences of the law that they support, they would be much less willing to support status and socialist policies. And also because of the problem of vested versus diffuse interests, that is, special interest groups are motivated to lobby Congress, for example, to pass laws that help them. And it only affects, you know, everyone else in society a small amount. They don't have an organized interest in countering it. In this way, we get to a point of lorry, special interest groups, and basically a system like we have now where everyone is trying to get theirs at the expense of everyone else. By the way, I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist myself. I think Kappa is more sympathetic to them than I am. And Rothbard was far more sympathetic. But he does have a good point here, Rothbard does, and this goes back to the state ideology point. He says that, you know, the state tries to poo-poo the idea of conspiracies. And the idea, look at the bottom of this quote here, is that a conspiracy theory could unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the state's ideological propaganda. So he's saying that conspiracy theories are useful because they help people to distrust the state. And I think there's something to that, but that doesn't mean that they're all correct. Now, back to Kappa's essentialist definition of socialism. Remember, he defined it as socialism has to be conceptualized as an institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property claims. Now, you'll notice here that the standard definition of socialism talks about state control or collective control of the means of production. But Kappa looked at that as just one, he generalizes beyond that and says, look, there's nothing special, normatively or politically, about means of production. It's just one type of useful property. But there's lots of types of useful property. They all serve as means to mean that part of action, scarce means and a part of action. And so, and he also, the word institutionalized distinguishes it from private crime. Now, he's, of course, a libertarian opposed to private crime, views that as aggression, but it's just private aggression, not institutionalized. Institutionalized would have to be some kind of regular, systematic, repeated, sustained interference or aggression, committed by an institution in the ABC society that is seen as legitimate and therefore can impose these laws on people. And capitalism, correspondingly, is defined as a social system based on explicit recognition of private property and a contractual, non-aggressive exchange between private property owners. So, he defines it this way and some people are objected to this because they want to maintain the word socialism to refer to basically communism or state control of the means of production. But Hoppe's essential definition allows him to sort of see common threads in things that are less than full-fledged or outright socialism or communism and see the common threads between them. And basically, this goes back to his definition of the state. Basically, in Hoppe's terminology, the state, any state, even a monarchy is necessarily into the sense that it exists, is socialistic. But even a monarchy has to commit some kind of systematic aggression, which is socialistic. And conversely, socialism is necessarily a state. So, he basically looks at them and that allows him to look at it as a spectrum. Different types blend flavors of socialism, types of states, that is, which have different effects of society because they're different types of states, different types of socialism. So, this is why he says there must exist varying types and degrees of socialism and capitalism, that is, varying degrees to which private property rights are respected or ignored. Societies are not simply capitalists or socialists. Indeed, all existing societies are socialists to some extent. Now, he doesn't mean here that all societies have to be socialists to some extent. What he means is in today's world, because everywhere that there's a society, there's a state, then there's socialism. And he breaks it down into different types. And I'm only going to touch on some of his key identities and features of these because once you start reading into this, you get the hang of it. He breaks it down into the socialism Russian style, which most people would call socialism or communism. Socialism, social democratic style. The socialism of conservatism and the socialism of social engineering. These are, excuse me, chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 of TSC. So, why don't we do this? Let's talk, let's continue on for another few more minutes before we have Q&A or a forehand break and go into some of these so that we can get close to finishing. So, first he talks about socialism Russian style. Now, there's not too much surprising here. It's just that his framework allows him to first analyze the most pristine or paradigmatic type of socialism and analyze its effects. A lot of these are common to libertarian and Austrian critics of socialism. But basically, he first talks in the book around page 28 about how if you have any type of institutionalized socialism that is redistribution of property rights, right, then this is going to have bad effects on society. Even in the garden of Eden, it would result in reduced investment and also in non-productive personality tax. Basically, people will become more aggressive and that's because aggression will become more profitable. And non-aggression is not as legally respected and you can't profit from it as much. So, he said, even in the garden of Eden. But now in this chapter, he's talking about what he talks, what most people call socialism par excellence. That is the kind of standard thing they think of as socialism. A Marxist sort of social system for the means of production, which means the scarce resources used to produce consumption goods are nationalized or socialized. That is controlled collectively instead of being owned privately by private property owners like capitals. And you notice here that he's talking here about the means of production is a type of scarce resource or scarce goods. It's a means of action, but it's a subset of all scarce resources. It's the subset that is used to produce consumption goods, which are another scarce resource or scarce goods. Now, Hans's essentialist definition, he would include both of those, the systematic aggression against both of those as a type of socialism. But here we're talking socialism par excellence or Russian style. So just the typical type of socialism most people think about. The type that the Democrats will laugh when they say, it's ridiculous to call Obamacare, you know, socialized medicine, it's ridiculous to call that socialism. Now, in one sense they're correct that it's not really the state control of the means of production, but it does amount to an institutionalized interference with private property rights. You know, the taxes needed to pay for and regulations that tell people what to do or doctors, et cetera. So it would have similar effects to, at least similar negative effects to standard socialism. Anyway, Hoppe in this chapter analyzes many aspects of communism or this Russian style socialism. So for example, he looks at the economic effects and he breaks it down into three primary effects. And one would be there'd be a relative drop in the rate of investment and rate of capital formation. And the reason is when you socialize goods, you favor the non-user, the non-producer, the non-contractors of the means of production. So, you know, you basically get what you subsidize. And this raises costs for users, producers, and contractors so there's fewer people acting in those roles. That means there's going to be less original appropriation of natural resources, less production, and upkeep of the old factors and less contracting. And these are the ways that wealth is generated, remember. So there's less wealth. Now, this is true. This first effect, you know, is true of all types of socialism. Even in a minor key, you're going to have this effect to some degree, maybe not as extreme or as severe, but the same effect. Now, a second effect is it's going to result in a wasteful use of the means. So that's also a way of destroying wealth because when you use property for it to be not worth the most desired in, then you have less wealth being produced. To keep, to stay on track, let's skip over this. You can, if you read these chapters, you'll see he goes into a lot of detail about the intricate analysis of the different ways these different types of socialism affects society. So then number three, it causes relative impoverishment, a general drop in the standard of living just by over-utilizing the factors of production. And the reason is if you're a caretaker of property, then you have a different incentive to maintain it and use it effectively than a private owner would. This is sort of the tragedy of the commons to an extent, just a traditional incentive problem of socialism. He also mentions lastly that socialism Russian style has important changes in the character structure of society, changes people's personality over time. And this is true, makes people less alert to opportunities for profit, less productive. They don't care as much about anticipating changes in the consumer demand because they can't do anything about it or they can't profit from it as much. They don't develop as many market strategies. So people's initiative declines, their work habits decline. And then if the state has to reintroduce a little bit of capitalism because they're just becoming impoverished, it's too late to get the people to change. You've already ruined the whole character of a society. And in this chapter, let's go on to the next one. Socialism shows a democratic style. So as Hoppe argues, even if you have a moderate market socialism, you still can't prevent a relative impoverishment of the population if there's socialized production to any extent. So what he explains is that the failures of communism were too apparent and it was too unpopular. So a lot of these countries, even though they had the same egalitarian and anti-capitalist impulses, didn't want to put central planning in place. So they put a softer version, which is social democratic style. And there are two central features. So unlike Marxist socialism, private ownership and the means of production is not outlawed, is permitted except with some exceptions, right? Except for education, traffic and communication, central banking, and the police and the courts. And remember, in Hoppe's making a nation-state peace, we just went over, these are important ways the state gets its tentacles and control over society. And the second thing is the owners of the means of production only own part of their income that they can acquire from using these means of production. And then part of it goes to the state, like with taxes or some other kind of controls. And of course, this is going to have systematic effects, too. Similar to but not the same as, but similar to Russian-style socialism. There'll be less production, more impoverishment, less law formation, more leisure. People will value leisure more because its productivity is relatively less rewarding. So they're more lazier than more time leisure. And then people also shift their activities to less productive activities or gray market or black market activities or things that are not taxed or taxed relatively less. So it distorts the structure of society that way as well. Now, a really interesting shift is most people will recognize that social democracy is sort of a soft type of socialism, even though it's not outright central control of the means of production. But Hoppe, of course, shows that using the essentialist definition of aggression and statism that the city has is, of course, every state is socialist to some degree. And conservative policies and conservative type of governments and regimes also are socialistic, but in a different way. So he starts out here with a fascinating overview of the history of feudalism, which by the way is compatible with the left libertarian and mutualist type criticism that is common nowadays of existing property structures that came from feudalism or state favoritism in the past. I don't know if I mentioned earlier in another lecture that Hoppe's views on homesteading of easements is also compatible with the sort of left libertarian criticism. You know, his idea that if you have people in the community and they're traveling to the river, but they haven't really homesteaded the land, they might have homesteaded an easement over the right away over the land. And if someone then homesteads that land, they homestead it subject to the easement the right away. This is similar to some of the complaints a lot of left libertarians have. And the fact that this is built into Hoppe's work shows I think that some of their concerns are already addressed by anarcho-capitalists like Hoppe. So for example here you talked about, you know, the assignment of property rights to these feudal lords when they started acquiring all this property didn't come from actual appropriation or contract. They just were given a special privilege by the state or by the system, and then that allowed them of course to collect rents from the serfs and have extra market power and to develop these feudal kingdoms. And this is a type of socialism as well because it's an institutionalized interference with private property rights. Whose rights would it be interfering with? It would be interfering with the rights of the people that were actually using the property, for example, the serfs, basically taking their property rights from them. And of course this is a different type of socialism than Russian style or even social democratic style, but it's also going to have negative effects. Hoppe calls this aristocratic socialism. Now this is perfectly compatible with his other writings, which we'll get to in another lecture, about the relative superiority of some kind of constitutional monarchy, traditional monarchy, doesn't mean he's a monarchist, in fact he's not. And it doesn't mean that to the extent these monarchies are feudalistic like this that they don't have problems as well, they do. But you can still say one type of state is institutionally inferior or superior in different ways than other types. And as Hoppe knows these conservative states tend to use price controls, regulations, and behavior control, which are socialistic in Hoppe's framework because they interfere with people's use of their property or their bodies, which is a type of property. Finally, I'll pause here and take a break, but he also has a long chapter. We won't get into this too much because a lot of it has to do with his build up to his methodology and his attack on positivism. But he's talking here about in America and pragmatic practical societies, which are not really that principle thinking, but use a lot of the methods of the natural sciences of empiricism, including Carl Popper, where we have more piecemeal social engineering, which by the way is becoming more systematized. But one policy here, Social Security for example, how these of course have similar effects to the socialist policies of the other types, but different. So why don't we take a break here at 7 past the hour. Let's come back at 5 and at 15 past the hour, and we will resume with a few more slides and just in Q&A. I'll leave that shortly to you at 15 past. Next question about Hoppe's arguing that government are really the state. It's not necessary for law and justice enforcement. Yeah, he makes it explicitly in several places. I think it's in his book The Myth of National Defense or something like that. He's got a chapter or two in there on that. And he's got one or two other pamphlets or articles about this. And I'm going to cover that in a subsequent lecture to try his book The Myth of National Defense. Let me go through a few more of my slides here. Okay, so no, I've actually kind of finished what I wanted to go over here. He's got a nice article which I'll cover briefly at the next lecture on de-socialization in the United Germany. He also has an extended sort of discussion in the previous chapters we just discussed, comparing East Germany and West Germany. It's showing how the difference between those two is striking. It's a great laboratory case showing how sort of this example bears out some of his predictions, economic predictions about how socialism can affect society, culturally, personality-wise, spiritually, politically, and of course in very economic ways. Now what he does, you'll note that Hans is an a prioriist. That is, he's an Austrian in the Louisiana tradition who believes in the use of deductive laws, that is, a priori laws. What Mises does and what Hoppe does is they take a starting point, certain undeniable propositions like, for example, the action axiom for the a priori of action, and they deduce certain factionists that cannot be denied. And then they introduce certain contingent facts to make the analysis more tailored to what we have and more interesting, but these introduced facts are usually a little bit less controversial. They're not controversial at all. For example, the assumption is made that we don't have a barter economy, that we have a catalytic commercial, roughly free market economy with money. And if you assume that there's money, then you can make other deductions based upon your basic fundamental economic laws that hold as long as the assumptions are true, that isn't long as there is money. So this is a common technique of Mises and Hoppe. And so what he does in his chapters analyzing the effects of socialism is he says, listen, I'm deducing all these effects, systematic effects by basically pure reason, by deductive reason. Now, he can't say what the extent of the effects are. He can say, you know, if you diminish property rights in this following way, then you can expect to see these types of consequences. There's a tendency. He can't say what the extent or magnitude is. And what Austrians believe is that you don't really, you can't test or verify a priori laws, but you can illustrate them with historical examples. So that's what Hans is doing with Germany and East Germany, West Germany analysis. He's saying that, look, my preceding analysis stands on its own as a deductive exercise with certain empirical assumptions. But let's take a look at the West Germany, East Germany case to illustrate it, not to test it fully, but just to illustrate it and give an idea of the magnitude of some of these industries. So he also has, like I say, we'll talk in detail next time. And let me explain what we're going to talk about in the next one. We'll talk about the desocialization. In the next class, we're going to switch to ethics in Hoplitz's case about libertarian rights and argumentation ethics. We may get into a little bit of more political matters as well. So that's the reading sign. I'll post it on the course page later today. So we have plenty of time. There were some questions which I didn't get to earlier because I didn't stop all those. So if I've missed any that you want to repeat here or refer me to or if you have any other questions, I'd be happy to discuss anything or if anyone wants to discuss anything, go for it. Keeve Warren asked, what are my thoughts on geo-libertarianism? And I assume you mean Georgism. I think it's unlibertarian. I think it's based upon bad economics, kind of crankish views on value that Austrians disagree with. The idea of a single tax is insane, I believe. I mean, basically it's a type of socialism because it's a type of institutionalized interference with private property rights, that it's a right to land. You know, it probably would be better than what we have now if that's all you had, but it would, of course, metastasize and turn into a worse tyrannical state like we have now. So I don't think it's very sound. I don't think it makes any sense. I think it has a fixation on land with land as some kind of special type of good, but I don't think there's any economic case for that. I think land. Now, I don't know if Hoppe has written much on Georgism or I know Rockward did. Rockward demolished Georgism in some of his articles. But anyway, the idea of tax is a bad idea, and the idea that you don't own the, you know, the product or the rent comes from land because you didn't create the land you only improved on it or something like that. I think it's nuts. The libertarian idea is simply always to answer the question, who has the right to control the scarce resource? And the libertarian answer is the person with the better connection to it. So a piece of land is a scarce resource, and the original homesteader has a better claim to that land than anyone else, including this single taxi agency, whether it's the community or whatever. So I don't agree with it, and I know Hoppe doesn't agree with it. I know Rockward opposes it. So are there any other questions? Anything I missed in the scroll, if there are any questions I missed? If I missed it, you can call it my attention. I think most of this was your chatting among each other. I do see John posted Proudhon's definition of government. Let me see here. To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, et cetera. You know, I mean, this is this sort of leftist conflation of authority with tyranny on statism. Do I have this wrong? I have it on all participants. Let me see if I'm not looking at everything right. Is there something I'm missing here? I have the chat window open. That's all I can see. I don't see something by Michael. Oh, okay. Let me see what the forum question is here. Hold on a second. There's a Moodle forum question here, which I missed. I don't know how I missed this. I thought I had a subscription. Maybe it was just posted. Okay. This is from Eric Stabe. I'm confused by what seems to be a contradiction in Hoppe's TSC this week. Let me flip back to the slide. Is this what you guys are talking about, Eric Stabe? Quickly, I see John McGinnis has asked the question here of Hoppe's argument. I wonder why I'm not seeing this. Maybe he's not posting it to all. You've got to send all participants, I believe. Hoppe uses the argumentation theory, but says Moodle just took Hoppe to a new level. Will you discuss this? Yes, I will. It needs an epistemology discussion. I will discuss that. Probably two lectures from now. Okay. Let me go back to Eric Stabe's question. He thinks it's a contradiction in TSC. In chapters two and three, Hoppe speaks of how socialist economies force people to rely on family. Let me cut and paste this here so everyone can see it. This is from Eric Stabe. Okay. Socialist economies force people to rely on family relationships and persuasion to advance their economic standing. Wrack on ingenuity and skill. Later on, page 70, he says, people develop uniform and uninteresting personalities in the state's human creativity. These statements seem to be at odds. How can a person's behavior be at once? I might need to reply to this later. I have to think about it because this is sort of a little jumble. How can your behavior at once reacting to the same stimulus become more private and more political? Having to rely on interpersonal relationships to achieve advancement would seem to force people to become more personable and to interact with others. I have to look at it and see. Maybe someone here can have trouble concentrating on this right now. Someone else here have a thought on what he's talking about. Socialist economies force people to rely on family. I don't know what he means to advance their – I'm not sure what you're talking about in the first part. What I'll do is I'll either address this next week or I'll try to answer in writing that everyone can see later this week to answer that question. I'll look at the quotes you're talking about. Manjula Guru says, in the reading, socialism is said to be liberalism in the U.S. Can you explain this? I think you mean the terminology question. I've never quite understood exactly how this bizarre shift happened. I mean, from my perspective, the word liberalism used to denote sort of a progressive, pro-individual, enlightenment sort of improvement in the human condition free market classical liberalism is called now in the U.S. And somehow the leftist and socialist in the U.S. co-opted that term where its meaning has been changed in the U.S. where liberalism means basically social democratic socialism. Whereas in Europe, I believe the word liberalism still means what we call classical liberalism here. I mean, Mises had a book, liberalism is right, classical liberalism. I think in the American market they called it liberalism in the classical tradition so people wouldn't think we're talking about Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party. So it's just a terminology thing. It's bizarre. Libertarianism has more than one meaning. I believe it has a philosophical meaning, having something to do with free will. And of course, the word civil libertarian is usually a leftist sort of ACLU type term that refers to people that believe in personal liberty but not really economic liberty. So words just have different meanings. Edward Dem, do you prefer a term to refer to yourself as a non-left libertarian? Well, I actually, I mean, I'm sympathetic to a lot of the insides of the left and I'm sympathetic to the argument that a lot of our history came from the left tradition. There's also intertwining with the right in some ways. I think that the left-right spectrum is a flawed way of looking at things and I think they are both types of socialism and they're both wrong. And they both have more in common with each other than we have with either of them. And I don't think libertarianism is either left or right. And I personally, and Kafa has the same view. I personally get a little bit upset, but I resist the idea, the call among left libertarians for us to learn from our origins on the left. I mean, all for recognizing the insides of left libertarians, but actually the pure left itself, I think they're utterly evil. So is the right, but I think they're utterly evil and completely libertarian. And if anything, they have something to learn from us, like economic literacy and intellectual honesty and consistency. And the same with the right. So I just think I'm a libertarian. Now I used to say I'm an anarcho-libertarian, or maybe an Austrian or a Victorian libertarian. I don't even like the term anarcho-capitalist myself. But again, this is about Kafa, and Kafa does use the term anarcho-capitalist. He doesn't mean he's a capitalist in the sense that's criticized by the left libertarians. When they criticize capitalism, they mean the existing corporates-monopoly capitalist institutions we have in place now, which of course, so-called anarcho-capitalists are not in favor of either. It's just another semantic difference. John McGinnis asks, capitalism and libertarianism seem interchangeable synonyms according to Hoppe. I think so. I guess in the 60s and 70s and 80s, the big libertarians like Milton Friedman and Rand and even Rothbard, they all for some reason used capitalism as a synonym, or maybe a proxy form, like the type of metonymy, for a free market order with strong private property rights and a thriving free market advanced economy, maybe an industrialized economy. So it did become that way. And yeah, I think Hannes does use it as a more synonym. I think Danny says, Danny Sanchez for me uses it too, says some of the left libertarians don't like the good kind of capitalism either. I agree with him. This is my problem with their use of the word capitalism, because if you try to corner them and say, well, what we mean by capitalism is this, so we don't really have a disagreement, they will still disagree with you saying, be trained that for some of them it really is sustenance. For example, they will say that, well, you know, we're against authority of libertarians, authoritarianism and being bossed around, or pushed around by bosses, this kind of stuff, which sort of buys into this Marxist leftist view of human nature and the economy and exploitation and alienation from your labor and all these kinds of things, which I think is not, first of all, it's not part of libertarianism, and I don't think it's compatible with it. It's certainly not required by it. Kita Warren, how should we reply to the leftist assertion that hierarchy is bad and they don't really answer the question? How should we reply? Well, because, first of all, I think it's not a clearly defined term. What does hierarchy even mean? I mean, libertarianism has a clear conceptual framework. When we talk about scarce resources, property rights, aggression, these are all really clear. We oppose aggression. We think aggression is unjustified or immoral. Now, we have our reasons for this, but that is our fundamental view. And any kind of law that you want to set up that would prevent something that you think is bad, like hierarchy, if the hierarchy is not aggression, then a law against it is aggression, and we oppose that. So we have a really simple view. So if they would define what they mean by hierarchy, some types of it are wrong, like a state's hierarchy, or laws that impose state power, or they give power to some actors like unions, giving them the power to force businesses to negotiate in good faith with them, et cetera, then we oppose that because it violates property rights. This is the problem with leftists, I believe, is they don't really – they clearly – they don't have clear concepts. So, I mean, I don't have to say that if people don't want to be rational, they clearly – I don't know how to communicate with them, but I would say that it's obvious that some types of hierarchy, if you use a broad term, are justified. You know, natural hierarchy, family relationships, societal relationships. I mean, hierarchy just means some things are ranked higher than others in some ways. We can't be completely egalitarian. I mean, maybe given the Wolk Chamberlain example from Nozick's interview statement in Tokyo, where he says that let's say we have a completely egalitarian society where everyone is equal, but then we have freedom, and everyone wants to see Wolk Chamberlain play basketball because it's great, so they all voluntarily give him a quarter or a dollar or whatever. After a while, he's going to have an unequal distribution of wealth, yet it was done totally legitimately. No one's rights are violated. So, the only way to stop it would be to come in and prevent people from trading voluntarily with each other, but that would be a type of hierarchy, so you can see how it could arise. So, it depends on the process. Sure. Welcome, Keto. Sorry, did I miss a question? Any other questions? Something about luck here. I don't know who brought that up, but of course, that is basically the argument of John Wall. I don't know how many of you are familiar with him. He had a book called A Theory of Justice in 70-something, early 70s, one of the most famous political theory books of all time, and the book that came along with the response to it was Robert Nozick's interview statement in Tokyo, which I believe, and Hapa, by the way, if you look at the introduction to Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty, written by Hapa, the introduction written by Hapa, he's got a great section in there where he just totally devastates Nozick by comparing him and his approach to Rothbard. I mean, he argues that Nozick was more of a flashy kind of guy, a razzle-dazzle guy, a dilettante, not a systematic thinker, not a foundational thinker, unlike Rothbard, who was systematic and careful and rigorous. And so it's a little surprise that Nozick wrote his book and never responded to criticisms and recanted him as libertarianism to a degree later on. And actually, anarchy-state utopia is an argument in the sense of the state. Most people think it's an anarchist argument. It's not. It's an argument in the sense of the state, how an anarchist state could be justified. But in any case, John Rawls' argument that Nozick was replying to was that some people are born by luck with better skills or social status than others, and that's unfair that they can benefit from that. Therefore, we can justify imposing a type of egalitarian leveling effect on society, et cetera. Danny asks, well, let me continue this real quick. Jock says Rawls doesn't prove a rationale for having coercive mechanisms of distribution. You can diagnose the same problems as the vanilla ignorance, but still find volunteeristic ways of dealing with them. Yeah, I agree with that. But I think he, I don't know if he does, but I know that his argument is used to justify redistribution. Of course, I think it failed, so I agree that he doesn't actually provide a rationale. But I do think the veil of ignorance argument is very problematic. Yeah, Kathy Cuthbert is right. Harrison Berzerlund is the Kurt Vonnegut story. Actually, Hoppe cites that story in, I think it's in the theory of socialism and capitalism, or the other book that we went over tonight. One of his footnotes, he talks about that. It's basically the state imposing egalitarianism on people's looks or capacities or skills. You know, handicapping people that are better than others to make them unequal. Okay, Ganey asks, in TSC, Hoppe uses the term, conservative socialism, and in general uses a negative connotation of the term, referring to people using the state to coercively conserve their place in society, and later works to use that term in a positive way. What explains the shift in terminology? Well, I think he's, in the positive sense, I think he's talking about cultural conservatism. So he's talking about traditional culturally conservative values, like the importance of natural elites and family ties, and natural leaders, and private institutions like marriage and the home, and maybe small cultural communities that, you know, so he's using it in that sense there that he's in favor of, and he's explaining there how the state undermines and erodes that, and how in the absence of the state these things would be more important, and would supplant a lot of the institutional functions that are poorly accomplished by the state now. But I think in the first usage, conservative socialism, I think he's referring to feudalism, basically, and also the Republican or the conservative party's opposition to change and the use of the state to prevent change and to preserve people's place in society. So I suppose the word has many meanings, like a lot of word, and he's using it one new one place. I don't think they contradict each other. I think it's just a little confusing, but the same word is used in both. Yeah, Jock has a comment about European conservatives and being identified aristocracy and feudalism in sort of hopper's time. Yeah, I tend to agree with that. But like I said, he's got his views on monarchy. Most people sneer at this and say, oh, monarchy's ridiculous. But of course he's not in favor of monarchy. He uses that to criticize democracy. He's showing that the common assumption that we move from monarchy to democracy was the common view is that that was progress. He's saying that that common view is mistaken. He's not saying it's not better in any way. He's just saying that the common view that was this wiggish, unalloyed progress in society was not good. Jock says economically a private state is less capital destructive. Yeah, we're going to discuss that in one of our lectures. I mean, he even has a letter to the editor to Chronicles Magazine about 15, 20 years ago where he argues that private slavery is less economically destructive than public slavery. You know, nothing he's justifying either one, but he's explaining the systematic economic effects of those. So public slavery is kind of what we have now or what you have in communism. Everyone's a slave of this big institution. You have just massive destruction and impoverishment and waste. Whereas shadow slavery in the U.S. where there was an owner of a slave, you could expect the owner of the slave to have an incentive to take care of his property. I mean, it's horrible to talk about, but you can analyze these things in a way and basically a private situation or a public situation tends to be worse economically than a lot of these settings than a private one. Yeah, Jorim also does make that point. Anyway, if you look on Hopl's website, hoplenshopl.com under the publication space, you search for the word Chronicles, you'll see that letter. Just search for the word Chronicles. Any other questions? Edward asks about the is-all problem and argumentation ethics. Yeah, I'm going to go into that as much detail as I can and we can have a good discussion about the whole thing. Kathy, I think if you look at the letter, I think he uses communism as an example, unless you're talking about Yuri. But if you're talking to me, yeah, it's right here. And I don't have it in front of me right now. I'll just give you the link. Here it is right here. Oh, this is a long time ago, I think, before he was really well known. And this is just a letter to the editor too, to Chronicles. So I don't think he got much for that. Although his uncharitable critics could see from that if they wanted to. Danny says, is it true that Rothbard derived the homestead principle from self-ownership while Hopl does the opposite, deriving self-ownership from the homestead principle? Maybe ownerselves because we're first users of ourselves. I don't think that's quite right. I think, okay, and we'll talk about this next lecture more in the argumentation ethics. But my perspective on it is that I think Rothbard actually didn't derive it. Rothbard sort of states this natural case that we've done already in the first lecture here, like Hopl does as well. And he just takes it as sort of an intuitive, illogical persistencies from not accepting it. But I think it takes it as sort of a logical given that we own ourselves. Hopl, I don't think he says we're first users. That's his argument for property. Sorry for my poor parking. There's something I'm looking back. Hopl's argument is that you own a resource if you have a better link to it, connection to it than anyone else. In the case of owned resources, external goods. Yeah, the first user has this best connection to it because it was previously unowned, and you have a better connection than anyone else. But his argument in the case, and I wrote about this in my article on how we come to own ourselves. How we come to own ourselves. It's on my website. Hopl argues that the reason you have a better connection to your body is because you have direct control over it. Now in a way, that's just a way of restating the walking idea that you're a self-owner. If you think of ownership as an actual thing rather than a normative thing. You are the actual owner. You are the natural owner. The one who actually does control your body. So he has an example. If I want to raise my arm, I can just will it and raise my arm. So obviously I have a better connection to my body. I have an intimate connection with my body. The person who had my identity is instantly bound up with this body because I'm the one actually directly controlling it. That is his argument. And I think it actually is different than the homesteading argument, the first use argument. Because if you go by first use, then parents would own their children. Because the mother owns the matter in her body that grows into the baby. And when it's born, it's just coming from her body. She owns it. But Hans's view is no. The baby or the human, when he reaches a certain point, has self-control. So basically he reappropriates the body that you could say is owned by the mother at a certain point. It becomes owned by the baby or by the child at a certain point. So there's a shift in ownership of that physical resource from the parent to the baby. Because the baby has a better connection to it, not because of first use, but because of direct control. Any other questions? Tito asks, are children property? I don't view children as property and I don't believe Hoppe views children as property. The view is that children are self-owners, but there's like a continuum or a spectrum where they develop from a state where they need care and someone to be a guardian for them. So I think the view is that a child has rights, say a very young child has rights, but doesn't have full capacity to make decisions, et cetera. And so the presumption is that the parent who has a natural link to the child is presumed to have sort of the implicit consent of the child to be his decision maker for his interest, like a guardian, until he reaches a certain level of maturity. So the parent is a guardian. So if I believe that the Hoppe and Ron party of view would be that, you know, the parent abuse of the child, then the presumption is overcome that this human being is the one the child would, we can assume the child would appoint to be his guardian to exercise of affairs for him. And it would go to some third party who could adopt the child or rescue the child or whatever. Tito says, only stewards of the child. The word in the law is guardian or in the civil law tutor or two trips. So yeah, is there a claim to parenthood until the child reaches maturity? I think there is a claim to parenthood. The claim is, there's two different claims. There's a claim of the parent with respect to the child and that relationship with respect to the outside world. The outside world has to respect the child's rights and views the parent as the spokesman for the child. So, you know, the child doesn't consent to being abused by an outsider because the parent makes it clear that you're not going to do that to my child, exercising, speaking for the child. Between the child and the parent, I think that the parent doesn't own the child. The parent has the right by its natural link to the child to be the first one to be presumed to be the spokesman for the child. Now, I personally believe that the parent has obligations for the child. Positive, legally enforceable obligations, as I argue in that argument in that article, how we come to own ourselves. I actually am not sure that Hoppe agrees with that because I think he is pro-abortion rights, although he hasn't written much on it. But I think that my argument could be used to argue that at least some abortions are at least somewhat aggression because it violates your obligation to the right-sparing entity that you've created. But this course is not about my views. I mean, I'm happy to answer questions, but it's about Hoppe's views. Maybe we can ask Hoppe. I don't know if he's going to want to answer it because he asked me a long time ago to come up with an argument justifying abortion, and I gave up on it. How would circumcision be viewed in this regard? Well, look, I'll give you my perspective on this. Oh, well, Jay, I think that's about the child wanting to leave. Well, that's rock hard to view, and I presume that Hoppe agrees with that. But when the child is mature enough to say, no, basically, or I want to run away, then I think he has demonstrated a certain maturity. I mean, I think practically social customs and practical common sense would establish guidelines for that. I don't think it's going to be a three-year-old or a five-year-old. But in any case, about circumcision. I mean, look, I've read all the debates about this. My view is that female circumcision would be such a unnecessary and mutilating type of act that if the parent does that, the parent would lose their right to speak for the child, because most people would assume that the child would not appoint such a person to be their guardian. Male circumcision, I mean, my personal view is even if you're against it or you wouldn't do it yourself or you think there's arguments against it, I don't think it's so heinous and so obviously wrong that you can't say that's not within the parent's scope of authority to decide for the child. And most people that are circumcised, that I'm aware of, tend to be glad that they were or don't resent it, sort of blessing it and revert and retroactively, indicating that, you know, there's empirical evidence that think that it's reasonable that the child would consent to the parent having the authority to make that decision for them, even if it's largely in a cultural or cosmetic realm. So that's my view. Oh, well, some of you are talking about blocked view and evictionism. Again, I'm actually, Hoppe has hardly written on abortion that I'm aware of. Like I said, I believe he's loosely in favor of it, which we all have to be in the sense that we would not want to empower the state to have that invasive power to police these types of private matters. So as a practical matter, pretty much have to be pro-choice, legally speaking. But I wouldn't be surprised if he would take a dim view of it in the later stages, like I would. You know, whether he thinks that's a type of aggression or murder or just immoral or infamely, I don't know. Edward asked a question about civil law and common law. You said Hoppe had mentioned civil law is better than common law because it's written down and less subject to arbitrary interpretation by the state. And do I have an opinion of this? Well, actually, I'm not aware of him writing that. If you could find that, I'd be curious about it because I don't think he's actually ever written that. It doesn't sound like something he would say. Well, if you can find that, I'd be really curious. I don't recall anything like that. Now, I wrote a long article on the civil law in 1995 for the JLS when he was the editor. He published it, so maybe he was getting something from that. I'm from Louisiana, which is a civil law jurisdiction, and I have written a good deal on it, and I do think that the civil law is superior to the common law, but not because it's written down, but just because it comes from the Roman system, which has better legal, cleaner legal concepts than the common law system. Both the common law and the civil law are basically written down now. I don't think that, and I don't think Hans would think that being written down is really a superior aspect to it. Now, that is the view of some legal positives types, but if you find that I'd be happy to look at it, I'm actually curious. So if he actually thinks civil law is superior than common law in some ways, this is news to me, but it could be for the same reason as I do. I think it's just better because it's a more scientific, more rational foundation for law. Yeah, please let me know. Yeah, exactly. Kathy says the Constitution is written, and where did that get us? And I know Appa just discussed it with the U.S. Constitution and views it as a mistake, so I don't think he would fix it on the written aspect though. And again, like I said, the common law is written down now. Cases are published in written form, and there are treatises that summarize and systematize and categorize it in a written form, so I don't think that's a difference. Yeah, Jock talks about how the origins are about monopoly, I mean the common law across the land. Yeah, of course there's elements of that in civil law as well. In Roman law, there was one law, now I'm forgetting the term, there was one law for the Roman citizens and one law for the outsiders. There's actually a Latin or some kind of term for that. Use gentium, I think, use gentium, use gentium, some other term for the other. Anyway, but actually this helps to develop a common law that wasn't like the monopoly of a king's law. It helps the Roman law develop a magnificent body of legal that it has developed into. But maybe someone can Wikipedia that term and make sure I'm thinking about it, but I think we'll use gentium and anyway. I'm just curious, I'll try to find it and talk about it next class. Well, we're almost 30 minutes over. I don't mind going over, but I know some people are very late and people listening to the lectures later tend to get annoyed if we go too long because they don't have any predictability. So we have to answer a couple of questions, but I think we should cut it off soon or by the hour at the latest. Any other questions? Okay, it's getting late for everyone, so thank you guys. I enjoyed it. Good questions, and we will pick this up with argumentation ethics and rights next week. Thank you all much.