 Hey Tom. Let me turn up the sound here. Can you hear me okay now? No, I cannot hear a word you're saying. I installed one of these new Southern filters. I've got some really nice filters on mine. I've got for example this, uh, this, yeah, uh, oh, somewhat misleading filter that I've got here. Oh, that's how's that. Is this better or should I use? That is very cool. That, that beats, that beats my halo because it's more, it's more believable that you would be connected to a place like that. Well, I just sent to the architect or engineer for the house that we are building in Thailand my dream bookshelves because we have a room called a book room. We would have called it a library, but that's okay, which will be just floor to ceiling bookcases on every face, no windows, and an H bookcase in the middle to maximize the book. And I want to have a ladder and a former, definitely a ladder because that presupposes a former so I can get a computer. You could put the former in the Dell. Yeah, no, that's right. But I'm a Mac guy. Don't use Dell. Yeah, I know you're into the old Scottish enlightenment thing. It is true. So what are we going to start with? Okay, well, I'm going to start by introducing you. Uh, let me pull it up. So, uh, welcome back to the Gora Cafe for more coffee and philosophy. Today I'm pleased to have with me my friend Tom Palmer, who is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, vice president for international programs at the Atlas Network. He holds the Georgian Jaeger chair for advancing liberty, also at the Atlas Network. He's had various other positions, but one in particular was director of student affairs at the Institute for Humane Studies back in the late 80s, early 90s, which is where and when I met him. He's the author of globalization and culture, homogeneity, diversity, identity and liberty from Berlin's Liberals Institute in 2004 and realizing freedom, libertarian theory, history and practice from Cato in 2009. He's also edited a number of anthologies such as the morality of capitalism, after the welfare state, peace, love and liberty, why liberty, self control or state control. He's also co-edited with William Galston of forthcoming anthology, truth and governance, religions, religious and secular views, and I'll have links to all this good stuff in the description. And he also wanted me to mention that he is a former smuggler into communist ruled countries, which is the kind of lawlessness we find truly shocking here at the Gora Cafe. So thank you very much, Ron. So I wanted to get some bio background on you, where you're from, where you grew up, how you got educated, how you got interested in the liberty movement and the various aspects and facets of it that you're interested in and that kind of stuff. So who as to where I grew up, it's one of those things I haven't completely gotten around to yet. So it's still an ongoing process, but I live lots of places as a kid and went to University of Southern California in 1973. I left high school, so I didn't graduate. I hated it. It was for me an unpleasant experience. But I was told by one of the school counselors, God bless that person, that I could go to college without a degree. So I went to University of Southern California, met quite a number of interesting people, set up a libertarian club there. We campaigned for legalization of marijuana. I'm in the university. I'll sound in this in this library. Yes, I apologize. I'll close the window there. Campaign for legalization of marijuana. And it was interesting, no one in our club, the Libertarian Society, smoked it. But some of the kids in the club campaigning against legalization were users. We were all motivated by principle. They were motivated by the idea that they should be allowed to but not other people. And that was not a good experience for me. I was very young at the time and I learned something I've since shared with very young high school students considering going to college. Having such a big age gap can be difficult. And so I left after a year and did libertarian work, various kinds. Ended up working for Libertarian Presidential candidate, Roger Lee McBride in 1976 and doing student organizing for the Libertarian party that time. And then went back to school at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. It took me more than the average time because I would leave and work and earn money and do libertarian stuff and then go back to school. Then on a kind of a, Wim isn't the right word, but an impulse. I went to Catholic University of America for philosophy and that was a wonderful experience also at St. John's College in Annapolis was for me, was a very good thing that I needed in my life, which was to be surrounded by old people would say, we are old and wise and these are the things you should know and you should read these things. And that's what I needed at that time in my life. Then Catholic University was such great scholars, but I decided I didn't really want to immerse myself in Latin and then write a dissertation on Henry the quibbler and Belgian monk of the 13th century. So I did the masters there wrote an intellectual property law, which they willing to accept for the master's thesis, kind of applied philosophy, if you will. And then with various other things that I did went to Oxford University and did the doctoral degree in politics. In between I did a lot of traveling, lived in Austria and then Germany and then obviously England for Oxford. And during the time of communist oppression in Europe, smuggled books and photocopiers and fax machines and and helped to knit together a network of classical liberal thinkers. How do you smuggle a copy or fax machine and I think I can see how you do a book, but you know, other things are very heavy and we don't get easily in the under the seat in front of you or in the overhead compartment. Well, you bring them in your checklist, get your on the train. One of the things I learned from the bureaucratic history of the region, which preceded communism also, was to always insist on papers. Papers are very important, especially if they have a red stamp on them. And never admit to anything when you're arrested, you never admit to anything, you say, absolutely not. I won't sign anything. I refuse. That's as true here as it is Yes, there's something to that shot up if you're stopped by the place. And so on one occasion, I had gone into I'd been in Czechoslovakia and had met with Austrian Czech rather libertarians. I'd been at a birthday party for Swedish Hayek at the hundreds comma the chamber of commerce in Vienna. He was not there. He was quite ailing and was in Freiburg. But we had a wonderful presentation and Carl Milford, an economist who is the grandson of Rudolf Hilferding, the famous Austrian and the Marxist theoretician who debated with Bumbaverk on the Marxism. Carl Milford, who was very strong classical liberal gave a presentation. And there was this rather lonely Czech scholar. And he came up to me and he said quietly looking around, he said, I've been Hayek fan. And so we talked and I was able to introduce him to some of the Austrian liberals of the time, one of whom was married to a Czech lady, quite elderly people. And so he went out to Mises's old hangout, the Grüne Anke, the green anchor restaurant. I think it's a Pizza Hut or something now, but the time it was still restaurant, an Italian restaurant. And the talk then we kept in touch. And I went to Prague and was given one of eight Sami's copies of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Czech translation, translated by Tomasz Ježek. And I smuggled that out of Czechoslovakia into Austria and then went to a photocopy shop and made 100 copies. So now there'll be 108 copies and took them back along with a photocopying machine, 5000 sheets of paper, because at that time, photocopiers and papers were very rigidly controlled by the state apparatus. You had to account for what you would do if you got 30 sheets of paper. And because they knew what would happen to them, otherwise people would have dissenting ideas and share them. So when I went back, I took a trained compartment and I looked for one that was kind of empty. There were two tiny little Czech ladies in it who were going back because after a certain age you were sometimes allowed to leave the country and come back, come and go if you were thought to be not threatening and they hoped you would leave also, so they didn't have to pay you a pension. And so I picked the one with two tiny little Czech ladies with little teeny bags and I put all of this stuff over. It's unbelievably heavy. We stopped at the border and uncame the guards with the police dogs and all of that. And they said, what's that? Who is this little ladies? Look down, I said, that belongs to me. Take it out. Take it all out and put it out on the side of the train, that has the train. And I said, this is unbelievable. I have an official invitation from the Czech and Slovak Federal Socialist Republic Academy of Sciences and I have to deliver lectures at the Prague School of Economics, which was true on some kind of technical question. And I think they'll be very annoyed if I'm delayed any further and I had the paper with the red stamp on it that had been sent to me in Austria and I said, I demand to talk to the bureau chief for the border police. And I absolutely insisted. And he finally said, well, we would not want to disappoint you, the director from the Prague School. And he snapped his fingers to the soldiers, put it all back, speaking in Czech, which I didn't understand. We were speaking in German. And I'm pretty sure what they said was, as they were lifting 5,000 sheets of paper and photocopying machine in boxes, which I had disguised with layers of gifts, ladies' cosmetics, which were common to take to women in communist countries because their cosmetics were terrible, and children's toys for kids of friends of mine. And I could tell the soldiers were saying, what the fuck is in this box? But they didn't question, put it back, and we finally, after a long delay, went on. And once I was stopped in Moscow, I had the two photocopying machines in my Czech luggage, and they demanded, why do you have two photocopying machines? I said, I have an official invitation from the Academy of Sciences of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to deliver a set of lectures at Moscow State University. I always travel with two photocopying machines. How can I make notes for the students? It's not possible at the university, so I have to bring the copying machines and paper to make notes for my lectures. And I think they'll be very disappointed if I'm delayed any further. And then they just, because you'd just be very aggressive and insistent, they just think, oh, God, what if this person has friends? I really don't want to be on the Tajik border, is my next assignment. So they just finally say, just go. So that's how you do it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Did it ever not work? For me, it has, it always worked. I should add one more thing. There was very little risk to me personally. I would be expelled, stopped, harassed, interrogated, which happened a couple of times, very unpleasant. And if they'd wanted to, they could have expelled me from the country. That's probably the worst that would have happened to me. A local person could have suffered much graver consequences. And that's one of the reasons why I was advised by friends, don't ever talk or say who you're meeting or anything like that, because it's going to be bad for them, not so much for you. Hey, well, backing up a bit, how did you get interested in libertarianism in the first place? It's long enough ago. I have to ransack my memory a little bit. But one of the seminal moments was getting literature from the Foundation for Economic Education when I was LAD, and also an organization that went out of business years ago that was based in San Diego and California, World Resources, something like that. And they published this little book, The Incredible Bread Machine. I didn't realize it was a San Diego connection. Yeah, I think it was something that World Resources incorporated, which was set up by an entrepreneur down there to promote the ideas of liberty. And I had gotten through the post Solzhenitsyn's books and then this incredible bread machine. And I also got the literature from Phi. And that was not going into the candy store, because once I read Bastiat, I don't want to sound religious, it wasn't, it was a conversion of the mind. Once you understand opportunity cost, the world looks different to you. There's no magic. There isn't any magic in the world. And politicians can't just make things happen by saying it and shower benefits on people. And Bastiat had that as one important virtue, the idea of opportunity cost. You might still be a socialist or a statist, but you wouldn't be a dumb, thoughtless one. Let me put it that way. The burden is on someone to show that there'll be net benefits to these inner interventions, which normally socialists and interventionists don't bother to meet that burden. It doesn't even occur to them that it's a burden at all. I apologize for that. And then the other element was the way in which he used humor. And that's grown on me over the years. I've appreciated it much more. He wasn't angry and mean-spirited. He was friendly and playful and humorous. And that's something that I've come to appreciate as I've gotten older. The other thing though is that he demystified the state when he talks in what is seen, what is not seen, which I think is really a very important essay. I'm not alone in thinking that lots of economists have said this essay was deeply insightful and should be read today by entering students of economics and so on. He talked about Mr. Protectionist wanting to stop the importation of iron products from Belgium. He always has little jokes about Belgians in his stories. And he says he's going to go to the border and strap on his sword and get the musket and pistols and go kill anyone trying to satisfy his own interest rather than Mr. Protectionists. Then it occurred to him, well, maybe not, because maybe they would fight back and instead of killing them, he would be killed and that would be terrible. So he said Mr. Protectionist resigned himself sadly to just being free like everyone else when suddenly a great idea occurred to him. He said in Paris there is a law factory. I can go there and get them to make a law for me and I will make the people who pay the higher prices for my goods also pay the tax to hire the soldiers to stop them from buying at cheaper prices. Marvelous. Well, I thought one of the things that they did besides the humor in it is it reminded us that when we talk about controlling our borders, we're talking about force. When you talk about, as I remember years ago, people saying, well, we think drugs should be illegal. I'd say, well, what does that mean? Well, it means society doesn't approve. So you can put up a billboard to say that or have a petition or make a documentary saying I don't approve of marijuana use. What you're saying is you want to use force to smash down someone's door, brutalize them, point firearms at them, discharge them and kill them if they resist you. And if you're successful, dragging them and locking them in a cage, let's just be honest about what it is. That's what you're proposing when you say you want marijuana to be illegal or any other victimless crime. And I think Bastiat put that so neatly to me. It was really transformative to just see the world, the new kind of Gestalt, the new way that the world can show up to us. So Bastiat was the most important key for me. I read lots of other people also. I read that one very, very long sitting when I was 14 and I liked that. That was very exciting. And that's a good thing for teenage boys and girls to read. And then maybe mature a bit as they get older and branch out to other thinkers. And certainly I think that the one who's had the longest lasting impact on me, someone that I just continue to learn from because he always startles you with something new, is Fridjish Hayek. And I'm in awe. I'll leave you with one thought as I'm rambling on, but something that impressed me very much when I was a young man and I met Hayek a couple of times. He wouldn't remember me because of the age difference and status and so on, but I greatly admired him. And at one lecture where I heard him speak, he said something so striking. I was really impressed by this. Someone stood up and asked the kind of pointed question. And Hayek said in his Austrian-British Melange accent, he said, I guess from the form of your question, you believe such and such. I could explain what it was, but it was a kind of technical question in methodology and psychology. And the questioner said, yes, that's right. And Hayek said, I also was of this opinion for about 50 years, but I've been thinking about it a great deal lately. And I think it was a fundamental mistake. And I thought, wow, I want to be like him when I get old. Always rethinking. So he believed something for about 50 years. And then he was rethinking it. It was mistake. And that impressed me so much. And is one of the reasons why I admire Hayek tremendously and continue to learn from him. By the way, when you were telling the thing about what you liked about Bastia, that he sort of makes concrete what's actually involved in having a protectionist policy, it reminded me of this passage in Khandid, I've always liked the Voltaire, where he describes Khandid first being conscripted into the army and then being arrested for desertion. But he doesn't use those terms. He just says, he meets some people in a bar who forced him to sign this document and saying that he will always support this king. And then he goes, they try to get him to shoot people. And he tries to make use of his legs and they come in and some people come in the camera way. So he describes it all in terms of the concrete things that are happening to Khandid. And which of course is the only categories that Khandid himself has. And Khandid doesn't really understand all the institutional geopolitical structure of what's going on. So it's just in terms of these people came and they did these strange things to him and he tried to take a walk and he did more strange things to him. Well, stripped away, having stripped away all of the ideological coverings, if you will, and made it bear exactly what was involved. I remember there was a similar occasion years ago, the political, right-wing political activist, Phyllis Schlafly, remember who she was? I remember. Quite brilliant person. I found her idea is very disagreeable, but she was an extraordinarily intelligent person. I think Harvard Law School graduate who traveled the whole country constantly telling women that they should be at home with their husbands and children. She had to sacrifice in order to save everyone else. But she also was a strong defender of sodomy laws. You can't have people sleeping with people of the same sex. You just can't. And was challenged on this, as I recall, society expressing its moral condemnation. Again, my response is, well, sign a petition or hire a sky writer to put it in the sky or something. But one of the other defenses was these laws were not very often enforced. And that was quite striking to hear a conservative say that to officially endorse arbitrary government and corruption, in effect. If you really think it should be illegal, it really ought to be enforced. Now, one could have discussions about what's the cost and the marginal enforcement and so on. But to say, oh, it's almost never enforced is to say it's enforced arbitrarily, which is to say it really is just violence and power. You cannot defend this as law or it's compatible with the rule of law. And I've come across that view before about various kinds of morals legislation where people often say, I'm surprised so often I'll hear people say, well, I don't care that much whether it's enforced, but needs to be put stated into the law as a way of society expressing its preference officially by making it illegal. And I'm less concerned with that wheel with when or how often it actually gets enforced. Yeah, it was a bit like me on multiple levels. But yes, Anita Brian, who wasn't maybe the sharpest knife in the drawer, but did show some integrity. If you remember, she was the one who led a campaign against homosexuality. The orange juice queen and so on. And what happened to her is I recall the story was unjust. The state of Florida was implementing or whatever the county, some agency of government, discrimination principles that would have or could have, I should say, required their fundamentalist Christian school to hire openly gay people. She objected to that. It was my understanding this did not apply to the state schools or to other institutions of government. So it seems to me just the reverse of what would have been the more just outcome. But she launched this campaign. And when asked why she wanted people to be in prison, she said, well, these men should be sent to prison so there wouldn't be any more homosexual acts. Yes. And someone explained that rape was common in prison. And that same sex rape was a anticipated feature of imprisonment. And apparently she didn't know that. And that helped her. Sorry. What year was this that she wouldn't know that? I mean like approximately was this in the 70s, I think late 70s and have to Google it to be sure. But she did change her view on these matters, which I think showed at least some. I guess she should be held in solitary confinement. Well, presumably there would have been at least a consistent position, evil but consistent. But she apparently in her naivete was unaware that how common rape was, particularly when in situations where people are confined together and these acts of violence are then perpetrated. The vulnerable. But at least she came around and she didn't she didn't know that. More than just rape. And people often say, violent people can have to be restrained from committing acts of violence separating them prison. But they still are committing acts of violence. So they just say, well, I don't care about people who are victims of acts of violence if they're in prison because they probably had it coming or something like that. But still, you know, cash and pretend. Well, it's also not my view. I mean, one of the things that was raised years ago about the fall in crime and some people argued. So starting by 1993 homicide and violent crime begins to fall the United States for quite a few years. Some people said, well, it was the get tough policies that was imprisoning people. And at that point you had to say, well, then we should ask, was the net experience of violent assault reduced? And it's not entirely clear. I'm not a fan of prisons in general. I'm not saying they're not any people who should be isolated from the rest of us. But prisons do tend to be schools for violence. They don't seem to do a very good job. And certainly when it comes to victimless crimes, they shouldn't be imprisoned at all. But even in the case of crimes of assault or theft of property and so on, there ought to be alternatives to imprisonment. It's awful. Simply, it's an awful, awful system. And we were talking about the violent crime rate we had. We should include not just, you know, the violent crime is happening outside of prison and violent crime is happening in prison. And also, of course, things that the government is doing should also be included in that list. That seems reasonable. Becomes a measurement problem at that point. You know, I did some work years ago on the question of how many people are killed by the police in the United States? And by the way, we don't really know. The Department of Justice issued a report. It was not reissued when I found that it was quite startling because they had found the numbers of police officers killed by criminals. And the definition of criminal included killed a police officer. So no question it might have, it's conceivable in some of those cases, it was self-defense. And then the other category was felons justifiably killed by police. And the defining feature of a felon justifiably killed by police was a person killed by a police officer. That's it. And that reminds you of cases where someone is arrested and the only crime they're charged with is resisting arrest. Yes, it's a kind of, you know, there's a certain paradox there. Yes. But you must have other difficult questions for me. How high is the sky? Yes, higher than I can touch. That's actually, that is an interesting question because as a kid, I remember reading some science book that said, and sort of blew my mind at the time, although I'm not sure it's really true, or whatever would count as true in this case, is that the sky begins right at the ground. The atmosphere, if that's how you define it. Yeah, I'm not sure whether that really captures the ordinary language meaning of sky, but it, you know, it was sort of a mind-expanding thought for me, even if it was. Well, it actually features a little bit in discussion of the rule of law. And now the name escapes me, but the first primary commentator on Roman law, whose work really formed the foundation for much of the later organization of jurisprudence, discusses laws that are, that cannot be laws. One of them was impossible to perform. The example was he gave a legal obligation or requirement to touch the sky. And that such a law didn't even qualify as a law, because it would be impossible to follow it. And then he adds on things that have opposite or contradictory obligations and so on. Yeah, I'm about to teach a philosophy of law class this summer. And, you know, so what counts as a law and what are the criteria for this being a law again, one of the main things we, we talk about, things I talk about, whether they'll talk about it remains to be seen. Gaius, by the way. Pardon? Gaius was the counting. Let's see. You were a participant in a gun control case. You want to talk about that? It was a kind of an interesting case. I was not the primary driver by any means. What had happened was many years ago, I was walking with a colleague and we were threatened with murder. A large group of young men, don't remember 19 or 20 and the ages, little hard to remember, let's say anywhere from 16 to 25. And they said, we're going to kill you and they'll never find your bodies. These were phrases that stuck in my mind. For some reason. So I told my colleague to run and we ran and then we got under a bright lamppost, which is where you want to do this. And I turned around and leveled a firearm at them. And the moment was very tense and I've had guns pointed at me a number of times and I know what it's like on the other side. When a gun is pointed at you, all you see is the barrel and you get this tunnel vision experience. That's all you can see and you become less rational. You don't say witty things like you like they do in the movies and so on. And I just said, I said, stop there or I'll kill you. Look, I said, you just back up to the other side of the street and go the other way. What was interesting was the first thing words out of his mouth was, do you have a permit for that? And I didn't think of any clever repartee as a concept at the moment. Later you think, oh, I could have said this. Well, no, I just didn't. I said, just go the other way. And a number of friends knew- Do you have a permit to kill you? Yes. Well, no witticisms occurred to me on that occasion. It's very, very tense. Years later, I was approached by a friend who was a firearms instructor who said, you know, I've heard that there's this legal case and I should point out one of the reasons for the attempted murder was faggots or queers or faggots in their neighborhood. Irony is my colleague to the best of my knowledge was not homosexual, I am. But they just- I was going to negotiate with one and so that's, you know, you'll be a snuff. But in any case said, well, there's a lawsuit being contemplated to the District of Columbia's ban on firearms, which would come in 1977, I think, or the end of 76 or January 1st, 1977, around then. And would you be interested? Well, and it turns out the person who was the motive engine was Robert Levy, who's a colleague of mine, and was finding a group of plaintiffs who could present an up and down simple constitutional case. No criminal records have a sympathetic story to tell. So African-American woman who used firearm to chase people out of her home and so on. And so I was one and had a story to tell. I'm quite convinced that I would not be here talking to you today if I had not been armed with a firearm on that occasion. I'm very happy I didn't have to discharge it, but I'm also very happy I had it because I'm pretty sure I would have lost all of those 39 years of life had I not had it. And so I became a plaintiff, became a complicated story as it proceeded up to the Supreme Court. But Clark Neely, then it instituted for justice, and now at the Cato Institute. And Bob Levy, who was a legal scholar at Cato Institute, now the chairman of the board, were the real drivers. And then Alan Gura, the lawyer who argued the case, really brilliant lawyer. And my role was to be on script, if you will, in discussions with the media as a plaintiff. And I would always talk to the lawyer first to Alan say, okay, how do I answer these questions? Because I didn't want to say things that would be harmful to the case. I wanted to speak in a very intelligent way about the law. It was a lawsuit. And for example, it was not saying that there could be no regulation of firearms. You can have time, place and manner regulations for freedom of speech. I can't show up in front of your house with a brass band at four o'clock in the morning to wake up the whole neighborhood and claim it's just free speech. It often seems like that's happening here. But those happen in this neighborhood I'm in right now. And so I was very careful on that. And I even ended up debating, if you not in a formal debate, but in a television interview, the lawyer for the other side for the District of Columbia government was a very intelligent, thoughtful lawyer. He did the best he could. But he kind of phoned it in. And privately, to me, he said, well, I think you have really a very strong case here. I asked him a question on television. I said, let's just be honest now. It's 2.30 in the morning. You're at home with your spouse, your kids are sleeping in their beds, and you hear a window just been smashed and someone has climbed into your house. What do you want in your hand? A telephone or a firearm? You get to pick one. And he said, that's not for me to decide. I said, sure it is. I'm asking you, what is it that you want in your hand? Of course, that's for you to decide. And he didn't want to answer it because it's clear what the answer is. Or as they put it, you know, when we say, well, call the police, I say, well, fine, they can come and do the chalk outline of my dead body. But I'm not interested in that. I don't want to have a chalk outline around my body. Period. In any case, so I was inbound in that. We won at the Supreme Court level on the right to keep and bear arms, but the District of Columbia government refused to live up to the ruling. They said, okay, okay, okay, you can have a gun in your house if you register it, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you can't carry it. So then we had another lawsuit. And this one I was plaintiff. And we won that one. I had gone to get a concealed carry permit and they refused to even acknowledge my presence at the police department where you could register a firearm. I said, I want to get a concealed carry permit. I want to register this gun, which I brought to them, which I intend. They said, what we do with that, I will carry it loaded in public for purposes of personal defense. Now wouldn't allow me to get any paperwork, refused to show their names, took off their name badges and their police badges. I couldn't even get a number and so on. So we proceeded with a lawsuit to vindicate the right to bear arms as well. So now in the District of Columbia, you can carry a firearm with a concealed carry permit. So that's a change in the law we brought about very peacefully. And contrary to what all of our advocates said, oh my God, they said there's the murder rights going to go through the roof. It didn't. It continued to fall after people were allowed to legally own firearms and to bear them. In fact, the entire period of falling homicide rates corresponded or coincided with increase in firearms ownership, increase in concealed carry permits, and general liberalization of firearms laws. I don't claim causal efficacy of that. Some people try to argue that. I'm not so sure that the decline in homicides was because of the liberalization of the firearms laws. What I do know is it is not what the other side predicted. Yeah, whether or not it caused it, it did not cause the opposite. It didn't cause the opposite. Now maybe there's a counterfactual, it might have fallen even faster, but that's a very weak argument to make and highly implausible. Yeah, and this really is an example of the question of what is seen and what is not seen. Crimes in which a gun gets fired are crimes that are seen. There'll be some kind of police report about it usually if there's a gun fired. Crimes that are prevented because a gun is there, but isn't fired, doesn't need to be fired, ordinarily aren't seen. Now yours was seen because you ended up justifying as part of the court case. But it didn't become part of the crime statistics though. Yeah, there are lots of cases where someone shows a gun or it isn't even show it, but is known to have it or is believed to have it or whatever and someone is deterred. And that doesn't make it into the statistics because it's the things that are prevented rather than things that happen. So of course they're not seen because you have to have counterfactual goggles to see them. So that's one of the things. It's a topic that is important to me. I'm not a gun nut or I don't sleep with my firearms or give them names or anything like that. She has a name. So does this. Call it Vera. Which is the image that most advocates of gun confiscation have as a people who on firearms are stupid. They're primitive. They're uncultured. They're weird and so on. And that's not my experience with firearms. The vast majority of firearms owners are responsible people. One of the things that I have always stressed is the importance of fundamental rules of handling a firearm and learning those and showing great respect because it's a tool that can kill people. And so it's not something that is a toy or something intended to be cool. It's a tool with the function. And you have to know how to respect that. People who have not been around firearms often are afraid of them. They think they're like snakes. If you see one on a table, it's going to jump up and hurt you. And as a consequence, they think we'd just be better off if they didn't exist, except none of those people ever favor disarming the police. Ever. They do want someone with firearms around, but they think that somehow the police will always act in a way that is safe and respectful of other people and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's remarkable that many of the people who hold that view are also marching in Black Lives Matter marches and so on. Understanding the police can be violent and dangerous, but then they maintain with the other lobe of their brain that they're always respectful and well trained. And you have to have them maximally armed. I think a more reasonable approach would be allow citizens or let's say just people, not only citizens, but peaceful people to own firearms to keep them for self-defense. And then look to diminishing the violence on the part of the police. Number one, get rid of victimless crime laws. They have to be violent to enforce those. And then the second thing I would rather live in a situation where it's not expected that the police will be armed. That you can have law enforcement of various sorts, including traffic cops and so on. Why do they have to be armed? Let's assume that we're not going to litigate or argue about whether you should have the little stickers on your card to indicate your car is registered and you've paid the tax. Why do we have to have an armed assault unit stop you because the little sticker expired? It doesn't make any sense to me. Dependers of police all say, well, police have like the most dangerous job in America, but they don't. It's not even on the top 10. I mean, I'm not saying that it can't be a dangerous job. Sure. But I mean, there are, and they often, and the argument for police having like special rights that people don't have is, well, we need this protection. But you know, being a, you know, being a coal miner or deep sea fisherman or something like that is firemen, park ranger, they're launchers. Being a firefighter is way more dangerous than being a cop. But in saying so, I don't disrespect anyone who wants to become a peace officer or a security officer. But I, but I do think it's a mistake to assume a that all of them should always be armed. Be that we should recruit them out of the military. So they go essentially from a combat situation. They're then trained as if they're occupying soldiers surrounded by enemy hostiles. And use the term civilian for non police. And you know, police are supposed to be civilians. Well, there's an old phrase, which I wish we would recover not merely the words, but the substance of a peace officer. They're supposed to help to keep the peace. And that's a difficult job. And I respect that I'm not the cop hater or anything like that. It is a difficult job. We're keepers of the peace, not soldiers. But what we have instead is people are no longer trained to be police officers, to be peace officers. They're trained, they're trained instead to enforce obedience, obey me. And if you don't, there'll be terrible consequences as we saw with the army lieutenant who was pulled over in Virginia or North Carolina. Now I forget, but I think Virginia in this year, get out of the car and it was over a license tag issue, which was visible that it was correct. He was in the window of the car. It was correct. You could see it in the body camera footage. They pulled him over. It did seem there's strong evidence. This was a DWB arrest, a driving while black arrest and obey me. Do what I say. He had his window down his hands up where he could be seen. And he said, to be honest, I'm afraid to get out of the car. The answer was you ought to be. Well, this is one of the reasons why so many people fear the police. Why do we have armed trigger happy men looking for a violent confrontation, pulling someone over because of a little license plate issue, which seems to have been bogus in any case because you could see that it was correct on the footage from the cameras, and then escalating it to what could have very well been a fatal confrontation. There's no justification for that. And you don't have to be a radical libertarian to agree. That's nuts. Oh, it helps. Well, it does help, yes. It helps in that the joke, but seriously, it helps in the sense that it helps to sort of demystify this distinction between state action and ordinary people. That's right. But as a pointer, it ought to be something, maybe there's a kind of a core moral truth of libertarianism that everybody understands at some level. Don't go around pointing guns at people. Don't threaten them with death and terrible violence. Don't be a bully. Don't be brutal to people. And I think most people get this. The difference between someone who's a libertarian, someone who's not, is that the libertarian is the one who actually lives the moral experience and embraces it intellectually that other people use in their day-to-day lives. The vast majority of people, when they want labor services from someone, they don't conscript them. They don't march them off as Candid was and point firearms at them. They do, as I say, if they want something another person has, they don't just take it from them or smash the window and take that thing that they want. They go on and they negotiate for it. They offer something else of value or even they might just ask for it if they're someone who's in need and so on. They might try to give them a national argument to persuade them that it would be a good idea for them to do this. And sometimes that even works. So people in the vast majority of people, almost all the time, will live that way. But they don't embrace it with their minds as a creed, as an ethic that should guide our behavior and then apply it consistently to everybody. That there's no group of people who get to call themselves commissars or presidents or legislators or county commissioners or whatever it happens to be, emperors and god-kings who have legitimate powers that the rest of us couldn't possibly have. I mean, people think that it's the emperors and the god-kings that framework that's what's holding society together. But in fact, it's actually the normal libertarian interaction of ordinary people is what holds society together. I mean, as as you know, as attend to Lehuetti pointed out in the 16th century, the the rulers are vastly outnumbered by the rule. There's no way that by pure force they could actually be maintaining all this social order that social order has to arise from from below. Or as Thomas Payne says in the in the rights of man that the great part of social order is not the result of government, but of essentially a combination of self-interest and sympathy, as he puts it. That said, having formalized systems of law and adjudication of disputes is very important. Yeah. Oh, sure. And government can provide that. And I'd rather live in a social order in which government provides that than in one in which no one provides it. More peaceful since the revolution, I see nothing but death and chaos. So as a simple example with sort of thoughtless anarchists, if you will, say, oh, just the state's always bad. The less state you have, it's always better. Well, I think that through a little bit. Yeah, everything comes in better and worse version. Right. But as an example, though, if you had an opportunity to go live in Somalia, not Puntland in the north, which is not so bad, but Mogadishu, where there isn't really a functioning state with a monopoly on coercive power. It's not even remotely close to that. I wouldn't advise it. Now, not every not every anarchy is going to be preferable to every state. Well, that's right. I mean, I'd much rather live in Belgium, which has an irritating nanny ish intervention estate that's too big and so on. My Belgian libertarian friends complain about it all the time. I'd rather live there than in Somalia. So there's something to be said for limited government. If what you have available to us is a menu of options, I would like government to actually provide the service of defense and of a legal system. I don't think it has to be a monopoly. Obviously, self defense is part of that. And there are more private security guards in the United States than police officers. And as a general rule, they don't kill anyone because they don't have qualified immunity. They don't have special powers. They're there to protect shopping malls, homes, people, whatever I'm lecturing on this stuff. I sometimes ask people, what do you think would happen if the number of private security guards ever became greater than the number of government police? And sometimes they'll predict some, you know, some terrible result. And now I have to look them in on the fact that it's already happened. It's been true for for quite a long time. And their behavior is different because the incentives they face are different. They don't have these immunities. They don't have this. There's no sovereign immunity for their employer. And they don't have qualified immunity as agents. And so they are responsible for what they do. And as a consequence, they can be problematic too. But absolutely. I mean, I'll give you another example of a group that has a very bad reputation. And if you look at the big picture, I don't think it's deserved even though there are particular colorful cases that are. And that's bounty hunters. And if you, I don't know what the latest data are, but what they were through the 1980s, more fugitives who are out on bail were returned by bounty hunters than by the police. Sorry about that. Yes, they heard me saying that. So I expect the door to be knocked down any moment now. bounty hunting is a complicated profession that we agree bounty hunting is a complicated profession. But, but then, but what's remarkable is that because bounty hunters, although they do have some powers that normal citizens don't have, like to enter a rental home, whereas even the landlord normally can't do that. They can do a few things like that, but they do have personal liability if they harm another person. So what do they do? If it's a question of bringing someone in, they wait until three o'clock in the morning when the person stumbles out drunk to urinate behind a tree and they say, okay, I got you. They don't want confrontation. They don't want to be on the news. They're not trying to increase the police department budget by having a perp walk. They want to get back like repo men. They want to get back the car to the car dealer where the person stopped making payments a year and a half ago or return the fugitive without harming the person. Because if they cause harm, they bear the liability. Well, unsurprisingly, they're much less likely to be violent or to hurt people. The police are dogs. It's pretty much all the same to them if they bring you back as a living entelechee, a living entity, or a dead piece of meat. It's not a big difference to them, but for a bounty hunter, it's all the difference in the world. If he kills you, now suddenly he might be guilty of murder. He also will bear the responsibility for that. They don't want that. And so even much of the current enforcement of law, setting aside victimless crime laws and things of that sort, is already in the hands of institutions other than the state. It's not some fantasy of only we could have that. We already do. And to the extent it's present, it seems to function more effectively and more morally and in a way more conducive to good and just society than the agencies of the state. I know there's a hard one to convince you on, Rod. I don't see how we could do without the Janissaries. Your current job involves a lot of travel. Not in the last year. No, not so much in the last year, although you did have that 14-day quarantine in Thailand during which we kept trying to arrange this interview and it didn't work out. But ordinarily, when we're not having a pandemic, you have a little bit of a thousand miles a year. And boy, are my arms tired at the end of the year. Yes, so I do travel a lot. It's a great part of my job. And I think I'm somewhat well suited to it because I don't like being in one place for a long time. I don't know why, but this is one reason why an academic career teaching, I think, would not have been as interesting to me because you end up, if you successfully get a long-term appointment or tenure or whatever, you're in the same place for a really long time. And I think that would make me start to feel uncomfortable or nervous. And I like traveling and I like beating people. Well, if you can manage to have them to avoid teaching in the summers, then you do get summers free, which is a lot longer vacation than most people get. That's when you're supposed to be doing your research, of course, in the library. Yeah, but you're doing it in the British Library. Well, that's right. You could leave your marks there. Or nowadays a lot of it you could do online is a wonderful thing. And of course, in the summer courses I teach, the ones that my summer courses are online, even during the non-pandemic period they're online, which means that if I could afford it, I could be teaching them in Paris. Back then, not going to be up here right here in Auburn, but that is one advantage. Another technology in particular makes it a nice deal for academics. But the world is going to heal from the pandemic, so the harm caused by the virus and the harm caused by many policies that were not well thought out and were destructive. And the world will heal from it. And I think that's a lot of the ways that we do things are going to be different going forward. I imagine I'll be doing a lot more video conferencing than I did before the pandemic. I really didn't do very much of that. There'd be Facebook video or FaceTime calls to people, but not conferences and presentations with PowerPoint and all that sort of thing. Or seminars where you have people participating and a moderator calling on people and moderating a discussion. So I do think that's going to become a much more important part of a lot of our lives, certainly people who are involved in ideas and writing and research and so on, much more so than in the past. But I do look forward to the world turning back on and being able to be back in physical space with people. This is something that I think has been a psychological harm. Many people have suffered from the isolation and the inability to be in the presence of other people. We are social beings. I think your friend, Harry Stottel, made that point. And for the vast majority of us, it means we do like the company of other people. Yeah, I'm in this reading group, which we always used to meet in person and meeting online, which has its pluses and minuses. And the minuses, it was always nice to get to get to see each other and then we'd all go out to dinner afterward. And now we just see each other on Zoom. On the other hand, the advantages that we can bring in people who aren't local, we're going to have friends come in and so that. So once we're back. I'm looking for hybrid views. Yes, that has occurred to me that we could meet again in person with the people who are out of state. We could just set them up on our laptops or on the table and get the festival for us. It would take a new evolution of our etiquette to be able to acknowledge the people on the screen with the same courtesy and attention that we do with the person sitting across the table or next to me. But I think that's going to happen. And so I'm looking forward to getting on the road again. I was very happy and fortunate. Unlike many of my friends around the world, I was able to get access to vaccination. And I do hope that that'll be made available rapidly to much of the rest of the world. I was talking to friends in India recently. Many of whom have been very sick from this virus. And one friend, she just in the matter of a couple of days, one friend lost her father and another lost his grandmother and his mother to the COVID. So this is really terrible. And I look forward to vaccination becoming more widespread. And I'll add one little point maybe to be a little provocative. I think this actually is a real public good situation. And I do think that advocates of liberty need to think deeply about these questions about communicable diseases, about the threat that someone as a carrier could pose to other people and that there is a public good. It doesn't always follow that the state should be the provider or the sole provider of it. But there is a real public good characteristic to wanting to make it possible for other people to have vaccination. It's not only good for them. It's also good for the people who pay for the bill. And so I think that helping to ramp that up is going to be important. What I find disturbing is the kind of thoughtless and dumb commentary that you hear this, why don't we just give it to everyone? Well, there's something called the inelasticity of supply that current producers are producing pretty much at maximum capability. And it's not easy to turn a furniture factory into a vaccine manufacturing factory. So we have even in capital. That's all right. The heterogeneity of capital. That including human capital, the ability to actually work in such a facility takes a great deal of training and knowledge. But I do hope that they will continue at maximum production for some time to be able to vaccinate people in low income countries. And I'm quite happy personally to contribute to make that possible. And I think that there is an argument that could be made that even state provision would be appropriate insofar as it's a defensive mechanism. I don't think that's the automatic default position, but I don't think it's something we would just rule out off the bat that there may be a very serious, authentically public benefit in a way that most goods that are claimed to be public goods by politicians are not. They're just obviously not if you look to the definition of what is a public good costly to exclude. And it's non rival versus consumption benefits most people. They just they just by public could they just mean something that benefits everyone or almost everyone they do. But I don't think they even mean that they just think things that benefit some people a big enough group to have a political coalition. I'm hoping to see is a little bit more questioning of the necessity of the of some of the FDA's restrictions because they lifted a lot of FDA restrictions to make these vaccines happen. How many other cases are people dying because they have not allowed? I think that's a very good question. And we have seen with the pandemic in the US and a number of other countries as well as an emergency measure lifting restrictions on provision of medical care. So telemedicine is a fairly obvious one or states waving licensing requirements for medical professionals. I mean it's it's simply crazy that the United States the various states license you and if you're an electrician in one state you couldn't go to another state and be an electrician because electricity is different in the different states or some it's just doesn't it's just pure protectionism and and guild legislation. But a number of those things have been gotten rid of certificates of need laws which are really odious restrictions on supply are under attack Mercatus Institute and quite a number of Liberty minded groups in the US are trying to get rid of those and restrictions on telemedicine licensing restrictions and so on. One example I like to bring up in this context was the incredible harm that was visited on Americans by the FDA and the CDC about testing. Thailand was the first country to have I think the first one to have an effective test it was the first country outside of China that positively reported novel coronavirus infections. They're going through a wave right now but their hospitalization fatality rate is a small fraction of the United States or Brazil or other countries. But they had a test and they used this for test and trace pretty effectively early on. It was offered to the United States and one of the great lines from one of the directors at Centers for Disease Control was we thought we didn't need somebody else's test. So they spent a lot of money to develop their own test to be then licensed by the FDA to give a monopoly to the CDC. No one else could produce tests even though a lot of people could have done it. I mean all you had to do is send over the internet the instructions for how to do it. Not that hard. Well so it wasn't allowed then CDC produced it and they were all contaminated and when they then sent them out to regional centers and they run a test on the test what they do is they use it to determine if there's COVID in a glass of purified water. And surprisingly all glasses of purified water I think was something like 26 out of 28. I might be wrong on the numbers but close to that. We're contaminated. Oh well what is the disease spread then? It's in our breast bodily fluids. In this case it was a test that was contaminated. So Americans lost 45 days during which they could have benefited from testing. And I'm not a epidemiologist but it's my understanding. I thought everyone was one now. Yes well everyone on Facebook certainly and Twitter is an epidemiologist but it's my understanding that that could have been put to good use that time to limit the spread of the disease and as a consequence many thousands of lives could have been saved that this is a quite plausible playing out of that scenario but almost no one has concluded oh government failure they screwed up they're responsible for all those thousands of deaths and I think we should be honest about this and hold them accountable and in non-inflammatory language call them for the murderers they are. That's a joke. I don't get it. So you know anyway getting back to your travel job so what do you generally do when you get to these countries and you meet with sort of liberty-minded students and what happened? It depends on where if it's a country where we don't have much of a liberty movement fortunately those companies the number of such countries are becoming smaller. I would as they say beat the bushes and just try to find people interested which meant doing internet searches including finding people to search in the language of that country for anyone who's blogging or writing about ideas of liberty in particular names of people whether it's Hayek or Basiat or someone like that or or terms you could put into search engines and find people and then following leads do you know someone there do you know someone there and I've been able to assist people to start organizations so on Central Asia and elsewhere finding bloggers who are writing in the Russian or Kyrgyz or Tajik about libertarian ideas and helping them to set up organizations I sometimes go and it's like the old Mickey Rooney movies I'd say why do we have a put on a show why don't we set up an organization I did that back in 1989 in Prague with the people I'd met at the university and through this one contact who had the red Hayek in the illegal translation the Hayek fan Miroslav Shevchik was his name and set up the Hayek club that they had there and then the liberal institute which still exists liberal in the Institute of Prague is ongoing very I have spoken there as well yeah so that came out of that and they're one of the people I delivered the photocopying machine and 5000 sheets of paper too so I've done that in a number of countries and then when we do have active partners I am very frank I'll say and personally to them I'm your trained monkey I'm here to help you advance what you want to do so if that means meeting with business people in your country to help to raise money because it brings some foreigner who says yes this is a good group they're doing a great job they meet world standards I'll debate socialists or fascists or others on television if you want to add if it's do something in English or radio I will give presentations I'll talk to your student groups and I'll also sit down and work on business plans because one of the things about an organization and the liberty movement a think tank or a club or a magazine it's a business is not a for-profit business typically but it's a business if you can't do budgeting effectively and you have a year's budget and you run out of money in the middle of August but then you you can't keep producing your product you can't organize things you can't put out the magazine so how can we work on a realistic budget how can you do strategic planning and I spend a fair amount of time sitting down working on on those skills and helping them to develop a business plan so in Afghanistan for example when I had gone there I had some leads from various people and showed up and I just met a lot of people and it's it's difficult to to pick the people you can really trust who really believe in these ideas who really have the passion for it and in a few cases I've been fooled or made wrong decisions in Afghanistan definitely not the case our partners there are wonderful the Afghanistan economic and legal studies organization they have a number of other organizations that have come out of this they're principled they're very brave people as you could imagine to advocate these ideas that women have equal rights with men and so on in a country such as Afghanistan and when I had met with the professors who set this organization up I had about three thousand dollars in cash with me that I brought to help to start something and I said well we've been through all these things what is a business plan what's a strategic document what's your mission statement what's your vision statement and so on I said well I think we're on the same page I have some money I could leave to help this get started and the one professor said oh that's no we don't need to do that we think we understand what needs to be done we will meet amongst ourselves we will write our document in our language then we will translate it into English and we will send it to you and if you think it's a good project then we would be honored to be your partners and I said those are the kind of people you want to work with and they are people of extraordinary nobility I am in constant awe of the afghan libertarians and what they're what they are doing so that is an example where it was about finding the people working through a business plan and then they did all the work they they've created a radio station silk road road radio they reach huge numbers of people in the country through over a hundred radio stations around the country they work with government civil society university students women's groups business association chambers of commerce they work with religious authorities in advancing a vision of a free society that is compatible with the majority islamic faith of the country and I'm very proud of them and I'm and I'm proud to be on their advisory board as one of one of the foreigners involved with the group yeah I I haven't done anything on that scale I've done a little bit of lecturing and meeting with libertarian students overseas but uh you know I did it in Reykjavik and in Prague and those are not you know those are not exactly groups that were at risk I also did in Istanbul which is a little bit you know a little bit more at risk but you know not exactly you know Taliban level risk but uh but anyway those who those are I guess it's a you know Reykjavik uh and Prague and Istanbul it's like the the full the full range of yeah of Europe and you meet such wonderful groups one of the groups I'm also very happy to uh work with and to assist and I'm a donor to them students for liberty uh I think that they have such a good approach to the world they're not angry they're not mean they're not nasty to other people yeah the one of Reykjavik it was the european students for liberty group yes that's right um the other places it was other people but well but they're very active in all of those places and they they publish stuff in Czech and Slovak and also in Turkish and so on uh it's a wonderful group and one of the things that they uh advance as a part of their culture if you will the organizational culture is we don't go fight the battles with other people we want to win friends for liberty we don't want to defeat our enemies uh in the debate and smash them and crush them and all that kind of ugly language which was a little bit of a heritage of Murray Rothbard smashing and crushing yes out and so on hatred is my muse he says I um it's never really been mine at least not most of the time it's highly counterproductive and as a psychological matter um I don't think it's a logical proof of the sort that some people would demand but as an observation it's very difficult to uh be an advocate of liberty if you're full of hatred all the time hatred is more likely to lead to the enemy mentality uh and to looking for conflict for its own sake and I think that that is one of the unsavory elements that Murray Rothbard introduced was this very hateful view of the world and instead we should try to uh as I said make friends for liberty to convince to persuade people not to smash them uh but to help them to see things differently and when I teach little mini courses on rhetoric at public speaking and writing I stress that the most satisfying kind of victory that you can have is not when you've humiliated your opponent and trampled them into the ground and stomped on the prostrate body although there is some satisfaction in that I would admit but a far greater lasting satisfaction is when you leave the person dignity and then later on six months one year six years you hear that person repeating your arguments to someone else that's a much more I have had that experience that you're right that is very very fulfilling it whereas the other approach what you succeed in creating is an enemy because that person will hate you and all that person's friends will hate you and people who witness you treat that person that way will conclude you're a nasty person and much better to show respect and to allow people their dignity and hope that you'll win them over to the cause of liberty of course you yeah is that a good note to end on then Rob yeah that now this is a good note and we're we're getting about the length of time that my uh that my my creaky video system can handle a length of an upload and I do apologize for the sirens and the noises that I'm currently are you the cause of the sirens sorry are you the cause of the sirens I don't believe some then I don't think an apology is necessarily required very good even in my beautiful library that you see here the outside world does intervene well you may be in a library but here I am in Athens the the source of the ideas in your library so I think you know this this is a month that I I would be actually in Athens for a conference I try to get to uh were it not for you know the current unpleasantness and I understand what I think the world will come back and yeah I've got friends who are having a wedding in in California that was originally scheduled for like April of last year and then moved into December and then now it's moved to this coming December and it looks like this time it will actually happen and I'll actually be able to get out and it will be nice I do hope so and I do hope that with the wider vaccination that if we can reach this herd immunity whatever percent that is that people talk about that we'll be able to return to normal life I know I have some friends who are pessimistic they think that people are going to become or have become enured or accustomed to submission and uh not being with other people and to being afraid and so on and I don't know I think people are very restive uh yeah I think people want to get back into life um I recognize the danger like all crises these powers of the state will tend to increase uh politicians will use every crisis to attempt to expand their powers and this of course is no different but I do think that there's a thirst for just normal life and the normal experience of liberty and the presumption of liberty to do what you damn well please but what is yours without having to ask permission of other people uh and I I hope that we return quickly yeah and although Alabama doesn't have that better rate of uh uh vaccination yet uh the university does uh I think you know everyone at the university has gotten there they're shot and getting a shot uh and I've had my my double Moderna right well we're we're Moderna brothers then because yeah I keep saying Moderna I keep saying Moderna like it's something of some kind of Italian uh you know it sounds like a uh interior decorating company Moderna Moderna Moderna Moderna brothers from Moderna anyway all right so it's good to talk to you and I look forward to seeing you again in person someplace sometime uh uh wherever it happens to be and you too all right thank you very much rad take care bye