 So I'm Robert Murphy. Let me welcome you guys to the Miesin Institute. I haven't had a chance to talk to you yet. I hope, as every people have been saying here, I hope you do appreciate that the thing about the Miesin Institute that's sort of special is it's not merely that there are academics here who are accomplished scholars in their respective fields of expertise. But if you go to most conferences that are populated with economists, if you look in the back section during a main lecture, people are either checking Facebook or they're dozing off. And here, that's not the case. The people are fairly good lecturers, in particular, judging Napolitano last night. I mean, I just go to his talks just to watch. How does he give a public speech to see? How does he just take control? So one thing he did at just again, pointing these things out, if you notice, when he was going around the crowd with the microphone, nobody's dozing off in that situation, are you? You're wrapped with the tension in case this crazy guy puts the microphone in front of my face. What am I going to say? And the other thing he did, you'll notice, he told each of you how you were going to die. Did you catch that? He gave you two options. Now, the special thing, he didn't mention this, but as an incentive to take his special course here at the end of the week, he tells you specifically whether you'll die in the public square or in prison. So you don't have to worry. OK, what am I talking about today? It's the economics of the stateless society. So one way of thinking about what is it that happens in, let's say, applied, some people call it extreme or radical libertarianism. Most of us here would just call it being consistent, right? Or like saying, we believe in liberty for real. And so this is the thing that happened, like my personal odyssey. I was a libertarian in high school at some point, and then I was reading Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, and that got me in economics. I got ahold of Milton Friedman. All this is great stuff. And then I got Henry Hazl's economics in one lesson, which was, oh, wow, I love this stuff. And then he mentioned Louis van Mises in the beginning, like I think he dedicated it to him. And so I just kept reading. And then somehow I got ahold of Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty. And I remember saying to my parents at the time, wow, this guy doesn't even want there to be taxes. Ha, ha. And I was thinking, that's crazy, right? Yeah, I know there's got to be low taxes or maybe a flat tax, but come on, the government has to be there to spend money on military and defense and police and whatnot. So I think that's what happens with a lot of people is the reason they don't take, let's say, Rothbard's views to their logical conclusion. It's not for some principled reason. It's not because they say, I'm against a lot of tyranny, but a little tyranny's fine. Or I'm generally in favor of respecting people's rights, except once in a while on Sundays. That what it is is they just say, this wouldn't work. A society that was based fully on respecting property rights where you really didn't initiate aggression, at least on an institutional level. Obviously, people are flawed and depending on your world, you're going to think they're either evil or at least always capable of doing the evil thing. And so you're never going to get a society where everyone totally respects property rights forever. But the point is if you endorse what we now think of as a political state, the existence of that, then you're saying institutionally, there should be an agency that can initiate aggression, at least as those terms are normally defined. And that's always the test to use. And I think other people have presented this to you already so far this week to say what libertarianism does, or at least in the tradition of Rothbard, is to say if something is not acceptable or moral for an individual in the private sector to do, well then just because you win an election doesn't all of a sudden give you the right as a politician to do the same thing. So if you have a neighborhood or just use the playground test, right? I have a son and we was taken to the playground and there were sometimes kids there that had cool bikes or things. And if my son wanted to play with that stuff, it wouldn't be enough for him to say, well, they're not using it. I mean, he tried that on me once. He said, they're not using it, right? It wouldn't hurt them any. They're over there on the swings. That kid's bike is just sitting there. What's the big deal? I'm not going to take it. I'm just going to ride it around. And I had to point out, I said, no, it's his. It's not yours. You got to get permission, right? And it wouldn't matter if there were a hundred kids there and 80 of them voted that, yes, my son ought to be able to use the kid's bike because after all the kids not even using it right at that moment, that wouldn't matter, right? And if you suggested that to the parents, they would all be horrified at that idea because they would get, no, that's the kid's property. And the kid should share, right? That's another tenant of good parenting or at least parents who haven't read I and Ran probably is to say that, is to say, you know, you're supposed to share. So clearly the, if my son had asked the kid and the kid's mom was standing right there, she would say, no, Jimmy, yeah, he's, you're not using it. Let him borrow the bike. But the point was strictly speaking, it's the kid's property. And so that's logic extending through to the state. So what I'm gonna do in this talk is just run through several topics to show different areas of application to try to get you to see how free market economic thinking could apply in these areas. Because again, just to come back to finish that train of thought, I think most people, it's not a principled endorsement of the existence of this institution that violates everyday notions of property rights, namely the state. The reason they think there has to be such a thing is just for practical considerations. They say, well, society wouldn't work without it. We'd get taken over by some foreign country or serial killers would run around or the mafia would take over what have you. And so that's why they endorse this thing. So in an effort to push back against that mentality in this talk, I'll just run through several main areas to get you to see how could these things flourish or these types of institutions work in the absence of a state. Okay, on this topic, let me just make a few distinctions before we get going. So one is the distinction between law versus legislation. It doesn't quite fit in with the rest of my talk, but since I'm going over this stuff, I think it's important for you to hear this in case it doesn't come up later this week. So law is something that, if you just mean like a regular convention or a pattern that people adhere to either out of custom or out of an inner sense of morality or because they fear some supernatural punishment. It doesn't really matter what the motivation is, but if it's rules that people in a society generally obey, law in that defined that loosely had to exist for civilization to exist. You can't have a civilization without having some notion of law that people obey. But the modern notion of legislation, meaning legal rules or what we might call statutes that the human authorities promulgate and they can differ based on their, I could say based on their whim, but that would be kind of loading the deck, whatever they could carefully consider and have parliamentary procedures and whatever. But the point is the idea that human political officials can change what the law is, that is a more recent innovation. I'm not enough of a story to tell you exactly when that change happened, but the point is there was a long period of human history when everybody knew full well there were laws and you could be a criminal and the king's job or the tribal chief's job was among other things to punish law breakers, but that those same political authority figures did not think they had the authority to change what those laws were. They just, either they didn't think about them, they just took them for granted or they might've thought they were from God or what have you. But so make that, make sure you understand that distinction. So that's relevant in this broader picture when you wonder, how could there be a legal code or legal system without state officials telling us what the law was? I'm just pointing out that that's a relatively recent innovation in human affairs. And by the way, if you're familiar with Friedrich Hayek's book Law, Legislation and Liberty, it's not that Hayek was being redundant because he wanted to get a bigger word count in his book, he was saying those are distinct things, okay? Other passages from Hayek would lead you to believe he was trying to pad the word count, but not the title of that book. Okay, so another important distinction is is for profit versus not for profit. And again, this is, let me just go ahead and bring this next one up as well. And that ties right into this distinction between a narrowly conceived market versus the broader, let's call it, civil society. And again here, don't get caught in the trap of if someone's, if you're talking about some kind of particular thing that's a good element of a free, or let's say of a good society, and then we're debating whether a free society would produce this thing or not, don't get caught up in trying to think, oh yeah, there's gotta be some profit seeking business enterprise producing that thing as it maximizes shareholder value or else we need the state to do it, okay? Don't fall into that dichotomy and that trap that in a free society where property rights are respected, there could be a whole range of not for profit institutions, civic associations, fraternal organizations, just what we'd call charities, philanthropic organizations, providing things that people are falling through the cracks and being helped by these agencies or these institutions, even though it's not that some firm is maximizing shareholder value by producing that thing, all right? So again, just make sure you don't fall into that trap. What we're contrasting a stateless society versus a free society, or sorry, stateless society versus one that has a state in it, it's, again, not the difference between profit versus not profit. Okay, a couple other things. If you're getting into an argument with somebody about this stuff, always remember the calculation problem, right? So if you're talking about some government institution, some agency that's doing such and such and your critic is saying, oh, the free market couldn't possibly provide those services, don't just fight on the terrain of, well, how is the market gonna go ahead and provide that, also look at the incentives facing the government institution and not merely standard stuff like saying, well, how can you trust the people in power? Right, so you guys have already had Joe Salerno's lecture on calculation, right? So it's the same thing there, like take the historical argument over socialism and what Mises brought to the table there and just expand it into all areas, right? So just to review historically, before Mises came along, the arguments over socialism, people would say, hey, you can't trust any human with that much power. That's just dangerous, look at what Lord Acton said. If you give a group of people the power to run the economy, they're gonna abuse that power, they're gonna put their enemies, they're gonna assign them to Siberia, they're gonna starve them, they're not gonna give them good posts in the universities and whatever. People can't be trusted with that much power. That's a perfectly fine objection, but if you have a very naive view of humanity, you could say, well, no, we'll have the right people in charge, okay? And then another objection was to say the incentives that if you distribute, you get the total amount produced, and then you distribute it to workers based not on their input or their merit, but based on family size or some other criteria, people aren't gonna work as hard, right? Why would you show up to the factory and give it your all if the amount you're getting in consumption goods is not directly tied to your effort the way it is under capitalism? And that's also a valid objection against socialism, but the socialist came back and said, well, there's gonna be a new socialist man. Yeah, people right now are like that greedy and selfish because they've been brought up in this horrible capitalist culture that's dog eat dog, and you gotta just be grasping and get everything for yourself because that's what capitalism teaches you you have to do to thrive under socialism. People will relax and just be happy to produce for their fellow man. So again, it was kind of hard to falsify that before the experiments. So Mises comes along and just says, I stipulate all that, that the planners are wonderful people who really wanna help their subjects. I'll stipulate that the subjects are good comrades and we'll do whatever the central plan asks of them. Like, what do I do? What factory you want me to go to? What farm you want me to work on? And he said, still there's this calculation problem that they just would not know even after the fact whether the plan made good use of the resources because there's no way to read, I'm paraphrasing, there's no way to reduce it to a common denominator. You can't really tell the cost of the resources you're using up if there aren't genuine market prices. So there's no profit and loss test. So that was what Mises brought to the argument over socialism as a whole system. And I'm saying you can do it even more piecemeal and just when it comes to some particular thing like a fire department or a police department or whatever, soup kitchens, trash collection, whatever it is that the government agency is responsible for doing, you can again apply this calculation argument, right? And you're gonna be successful and that's why he's giving you the thumbs up. He's saying, don't worry, you're gonna win the argument if you go that route. Okay, more generally, it's what has been called the nirvana fallacy. This is Demsitz, the guy who came up with that term. The point is typically what happens in these arguments is the critic will come up with all kinds of ways that the market approach to whatever the issue is you're debating is gonna be suboptimal, right? So yeah, in general, you can certainly come up with hypothetical scenarios where the market is not going to be perfection. But the point is that's not what we're debating. We're not debating whether the market versus perfection is good or bad. We're debating market versus an involuntary parasitical state apparatus doing the same thing. And so just make sure you're doing an apples to apples comparison. Okay, let me give you some real world examples of little mini stateless societies in operation. Now for all these things, I'm not gonna show you a bridge club in Somalia or something. What I'm gonna be showing you is, that would be a voluntary organization in a stateless scenario. What all this stuff is gonna be embedded in a broader geographical region that's dominated by a state, admittedly so. But the point is a lot of the intuition people have for why a stateless society wouldn't work doesn't really apply in these things. So what I'm trying to get you to see is this isn't all just pure science fiction in the heads of Rothbard and some of the other theorists. You can see this stuff approximated in the real world and it's just staring you in the face, but we just sort of take it for granted. So one thing is just a modern hotel, especially one of the more luxurious ones that have many floors and all sorts of facilities. Notice that, and this is something I didn't even think of until fairly recently, it's not just that there's a lot of services. Like if your toilet doesn't work in the hotel, they don't outsource that. If it's a big enough hotel, they probably have plumbers that are on staff because they don't wanna have to wait for someone to show up and charge them overtime or whatever, they have people in house doing that. So the hotel provides all sorts of amenities, climate control and there's all sorts of things. There's a fitness center and so on. Again, depending on how big it is, there might even be laundry and so on internally that they take care of food and so forth. But even beyond that, there's also a distinction between public and private regions. Especially if it's a nice hotel, the lobby might be pretty luxurious and have a fountain and so on and in seating where anybody can sit there and even if you have people visiting you that can kinda come and they can go to the restaurant that's right there or whatever. But then clearly there's areas of the hotel that are private in the sense that only you're allowed to go in there because it's your room. So even within the universe or the society formed by the hotel, you can see there's this distinction. So again, hearkening back to, don't just assume if something is public that therefore, oh, it must be the state providing it, you can see that that distinction holds up and something is common every day as a hotel. Okay, another example would be an office park and these things, so what will happen is a developer will come in, will buy this empty plot of land that might not be located near anything major, build up a bunch of office buildings and then realize that it will be more conducive to productivity if the employees in all these offices don't have to drive 10 miles to go to lunch or to go drop their dry cleaning off or whatever and so again, depending on the economics of it and the numbers, they might have more and more of the services that they might need to access during the day within the office park. Okay, so there's like planning, if you will, within that, but the point is it's all private and of course they're guided by the profit and loss considerations. Okay, there's parking, there's also, they would have security of some kind so they wouldn't want people, if they stay late and they're walking to their car at two o'clock in the morning, it's not good for business, for the tenants who are renting the office space, it's not good if their employees feel vulnerable at night so they're gonna, it's in the interest of the people running the office park to provide security, make sure there's good lighting and stuff like that, that there's maybe fences around or gates to make sure that random people from outside can't just come and go. Okay, Disney World, that's another good one, right? And so here, if you sit back and think about it, they do, there's a lot of stuff, it's like a city, it is a city, right? It's a kingdom as it were, a magic kingdom, right? And so, I'm not endorsing monarchy, by the way. And so, but again, think of it, I mean, there's, I went there with my dad one time and when I was a little kid and we were driving around, yeah, actually I wasn't that little, but we were going around and he was, this isn't a joke, he was marveling, not at, you know, Space Mountain or like, oh, look at it, it's goofy, he was going, how do they move all these people around? He was like talking about the monorail and stuff and he was just amazed at like the logistics of it and how they move everybody around. So many people without there being long lines and stuff, you know what I mean? So if you go to New York City and you were taking the subway, it would be a nightmare. You'd be miserable, but in Disney World, they know that they don't want their paying customers sitting around being miserable, just trying to get to the ride, no, you're miserable waiting to get on the ride, but moving around, it's pretty fast, okay? So again, they have to do that and it's all fairly behind the scenes, right? So they do have security there, right? But yet you walk around feeling safe, even though there's lots of tours there, a lot of people, you know, foreigners who maybe aren't that street savvy compared to some people that are from dangerous areas of New York and yet they walk around probably with a lot of cash on them and you don't hear about rampant muggings at Disney World, okay? And again, but it's also, you don't want to feel like you're in a police state, right? Again, you want to feel like this is a magical place and you're walking around and it's all fun and games and you're in a movie and so it takes a lot of effort on their part to produce that feeling or that environment and again, this is showing the benefits and how private property can produce this sort of outcome and what I would say is I think a lot of people would see some of these examples, let me just do the last one and then I'll make this point and the last one is a cruise ship, all right? If you've never been on a cruise, you really don't know what you're missing. When I was, before I went on one, I was thinking just get jammed with a bunch of people on this little thing and go around the water, that's ridiculous, why would you do that? I would want to go somewhere, but I was wrong, cruises are awesome and it's amazing though, when you sit there, there are floating cities that produce all sorts of, they have medical services, the security, what have you and again, it's its own little city and it's largely, again, it's under the laws of some state somewhere, depending on where it is. I mean, there's periods where it's in international waters but the point is you can see that that's certainly not micro-managed and if you get how the logic of this sort of environment works, you can see lessons for the broader world and realize that you can generalize this stuff. So I think some of the critics would say, yeah, sure, these things all work but look at you, you're doing a selection bias there, these are all things where people with money can spend it and so yeah, we know rich people, if they have their own little enclave and keep all of the riff-raff away, they can certainly have a workable society but come on, we need something that's a, but the point is I would say part of the reason the general mass of humanity is poorer than the kind of people that take cruises all the time is because of statism, right? It's not that it's just a fact of nature that there's all these billions of people living near poverty and then there's these pockets of people who are the rich upper-class capitalist overlords, that's no, it's the result of statism and so if you generalize this, so I guess the way the critic would interpret it if our vision of the world is right and we had general freedom spread around the globe and all these societies looking like this or that worked as well as these particular examples just started sprouting all over the place, they would say, well, sure, you just guys got lucky that everyone got rich all of a sudden and it was like, well, yeah, that's what a coincidence, freedom and prosperity. Okay, so let me just run through now some specific examples of goods or institutions that we might be concerned about or wonder how would these things be provided and so one way to categorize this first set that I'm gonna talk about is generic public goods, so things like lighthouses, even something as straightforward and commonplace as like jungle gyms or parks for local communities and even something like fireworks and so the economic definition of a public good, it has two components to it, it's non-rival risk and consumption and non-excludable, okay, and so the first one, non-rival risk and consumption means that if one person enjoys this thing that doesn't detract from the ability of other people to enjoy from it or to enjoy it, so like something like fireworks, if you go out in your backyard and you look up and you see the fireworks that your local town government shooting off, you're seeing that doesn't reduce the ability of somebody else to see it, whereas if somebody produces a big birthday cake, if you eat one piece of it, that's one fewer piece to go around, okay, so that's what the non-rival risk and consumption means and then the non-excludable, that's probably self-explanatory meaning that it's difficult to keep certain people from, given that you're gonna produce it, it's kind of available to everybody, you can't pick and choose who gets to consume it or not, so they're something like if you're gonna build, if the state builds missile defense, right, like a thing that if an incoming Soviet warheads coming and this is back from the 1980s, what, when I grew up, how they were, you'd think about this, like all those Soviets, they're just itching to nuke us and thank goodness Ronald Reagan's standing in the way and so if you build something that an incoming nuclear missile's coming in and some kind of defense that knocks that out, everybody in that region benefits from that, it's not that you can have some people benefit and other people not, it's kind of like if you're knocking out incoming missiles, everyone at least in that general vicinity benefits so that would be non-excludable. Now in practice, mainstream economists apply the term public goods to things that those criteria do not apply to and that just, I guess they're being lazy, like people will say roads are public goods, well no, you can easily keep people off of roads, right, and also it's not true for at least certain ranges, if you get on the road, then it's more congested and it reduces the attractiveness of it to somebody else, right, so it really doesn't make sense to talk about roads being a public good, but in any event, that's what the definition is, so the ironic thing about these things and these are supposed to be canonical examples of stuff that you need the state to provide because clearly, you know, how could private business, for profit business provide a public good, right, that if you do it and try to sell it to a few customers, well then you can't stop everybody else from using it, that's the reason why public goods allegedly need government provision, but yet each of these things have been provided by the private sector, okay, if you're familiar with the Independent Institute, their logo is a lighthouse precisely for that reason because historically, I think Ronald Coase had a paper where he talked about how lighthouses were provided, so even there, you would think, if you just thought about it for five minutes, that yeah, how could the free market produce lighthouses because once you build the thing and it's shooting the light out to tell ships, you know, here's where the coast is, be careful or whatever, that how could you just give the light to ships who had paid you in advance for that subscription service, how could you, but Ronald Coase has an article where he explains how actually this was privately provided and so, and there's other examples too of, again, Disney World has fireworks shows and so it's not that clearly you need the state to provide this stuff. So, and also I think John Gotti, that one of the mob bosses in Long Island used to do fireworks every 4th of July, so see, it could be the mafia providing it, so we don't need the state. So with this stuff, and this kind of touches back on the calculation problem with the nirvana fallacy, strictly speaking, I don't want you to go unarmed, a sharp mainstream economist is gonna say, okay, you're right, strictly speaking, the argument is not that a free market is totally incapable and will produce zero lighthouses and zero roads and zero fireworks shows, we're just saying they won't produce the optimal amount, right, that they'll produce some of it, but there's clearly a range where the marginal benefits to the consumers would exceed the marginal cost of the supplier, but yet they won't produce up to that point because they can't get the revenue from their customers because it's not excludable and so there's lots of free riders, blah, blah, blah. Again, yeah, you can draw curves on a blackboard and denote that, but again, it doesn't follow therefore if the state is in charge of doing this, they will produce the Pareto optimal amount either and you don't have to be too cynical just to walk through and say why in the world would you think citizens voting every two years or whatever and who the mayor is when they have a choice of two candidates that are campaigning on the basis of 37 different issues, do you really think what's gonna pop out of that is the Pareto optimal amount of fireworks displays? You know what I'm saying, it's just to even say that's ridiculous. Okay, what about social insurance which is a more general term in the US we call it social security? So here, the worry is that in a free society people are not going to provide enough for their retirement or they're not gonna buy enough insurance for things like if the breadwinner dies and then there's the widow or the widower, don't wanna be sexist and taking care of the kids and whatever and so a lot of people, certainly United States think that one of the problems that came to national consciousness during the 1930s, remember during the 30s when the free market was tried and failed, that's not really what happened. In the 1930s was that oh my gosh, people just they weren't providing enough and so out of a sense of paternalism the US federal government has to come in and establish what we call social security so forcing workers to put money into this system to then provide for them either when they retire or if they die early and that kind of stuff that their children and so forth can get these beneficiary payments. So there's obviously a lot wrong with this besides just the abstract violation of liberty. For one thing, certainly in the United States the problem is if you calculate what's the rate of return on your retirement portfolio just taking their numbers at face value, let's assume they're actually gonna give you what they're promising, it's abysmally low compared to what you could get an alternative investment and the primary reason for that is it's a pay-go system. Also you could call it a Ponzi scheme, right? Where they're, so the money they're taking out of workers paychecks, it's not that they're going out and investing them in the S&P 500 and they're earning, the government's got this huge portfolio earning returns that they're managing like their portfolio managers on behalf of the people who are going through their working career. No, they spend the money and other stuff and that's where this term, the trust fund comes from that the treasury it's not stealing the money. Come on, no, it's borrowing it and it's putting IOUs there and so the Social Security Administration is sitting on hundreds of billions, I don't know the exact number I've stopped my head right now of treasury bonds issued by the government. So if you are a private company and you had treasuries that would sort of make sense that this separate institution owes you money but when it's the government itself, owing itself money, that's hardly reassuring, all right? So that's part of the, so the answer is, the specific answer is that they haven't been investing those funds on your behalf, earning interest somewhere that they can pass on to you, you know, less their management fee, they're not investing at all, they're just spending it and saying we're gonna take money from future workers paychecks to give to you when you retire. And that's incidentally also why these schemes are so vulnerable to demographic shifts, right? If you had a genuine private sector retirement where you were taking, when you were working and putting aside money and investments, you know, you're buying real estate stocks, gold coins, whatever, and you were investing in things, then by the time you retire, it wouldn't matter if the proportion of retirees to workers shifted radically during your lifetime because the money you would be getting in retirement as a flow of dividends from your stocks or, you know, if you had bonds would be maturing or if you had bought a bunch of life insurance or whatever, all that stuff, the reason you'd be earning that is that you were providing more capital to people making workers more productive. And that would just be your, you know, your earnings from that and there's time preference involved and so forth. But the point is it's not that you would be skimming off the top of what other people were producing, output itself would be bigger because of the capital accumulation you had contributed to during your working careers. You were saving and building up your own portfolio. And so again, it wouldn't matter whether demographics shifted or not because output would be higher precisely because of all these capital goods that you brought to the table when you were 70. So as opposed to what happens with Social Security where there is no stockpile of extra capital goods that can be earmarked and said, oh, this is because of all the saving this guy did during his working years. No, the government already squandered that. There is no extra capital goods. And so that's why it's a pure transfer. And so if the working age pop or the workers shrinks relative to the retirees which is what's happening in the US then that's why the pinch comes in and the finances of Social Security. Okay, zoning regulations. So here again, people would think that in a free society, this is one of the objections I hear that, oh my gosh, in a free society cities would be just chaotic and there'd be pizza shops here next to nurseries, next to dentist's office, next to apartment buildings and that'd be crazy. It's hard for me even to state the fear properly or with a straight face but they have zoning regulations and people think that that's what you need. And so one of the things these do is separate neighborhoods into commercial versus residential, right? So they're zone to commercial or zone residential. And that's why if you go to major cities in the United States, at least I don't know internationally how much this is true but you will see like the financial sector shuts down after six o'clock at night on a weekday, right? It just turns into a ghost town whereas the apartment buildings are all bustling with kids running around and stuff but if you wanna go get a pizza or something it's you gotta walk 10 blocks or whatever, right? You can't take your dry clean there. There's where people live and then there's where businesses are. And so one of the problems of this the name here is Jane Jacobs. She was a very famous author and advocate of American cities. And so she spent a lot of her career showing how these sort of city planners were ruining cities and spawning crime and whatnot. And so on this one in particular until you think through it it might not even occur to you but that spawns crime, just that idea of zoning commercially versus residential because originally like when the immigrants would come into New York City and they would have a restaurant and then live right above it, the family was always right around the business. And so there's always gonna be someone there watching the premises and so as the kids are growing up the parents are gonna insist that they play right there so that they can kind of keep an eye on the kids while they're running the family business. And so there's much more security there. It's what's called natural surveillance where there are always eyes on the premises and so on. And so unsavory types aren't gonna be hanging around there because they're gonna know there's always a responsible adult around and it's just not worth it. So someone's gonna see you if you do something criminal whereas when these financial sectors turn into ghost towns at 6 p.m. now if you happen to be walking around there and some mugger sees you there's nobody around to see it. Okay, so there's that element tying in with that. Jane Jacobs was also a huge opponent of the typical approach to what we call housing projects. All right, so again, you'd see these in certain areas in New York City, where the heck was I? I was in Kansas City once and I was just talking to someone on the phone and I was walking and the neighborhood just changed like that. And I said, I need to go. I need to keep my wits about me here. I mean, it was like the neighborhood really shifted. Like all of a sudden you've realized you were not in a good neighborhood. In the way these things, part of what's going on here, just the social dynamics, so they're low income housing and that's the whole mentality. The ostensible purpose of these things is to provide affordable housing. New York's really expensive place to live. And so the city government said, let's use tax dollars, we'll buy a plot of land, we'll build this big apartment unit and the criteria to be able to live here is you can't make more than a certain amount of money. Because otherwise it would be subsidizing people who make a lot of money to live somewhere for cheap. That'd be crazy. But so then what ends up happening is there's people in these areas and then look at the design of them and I don't know what they were thinking that maybe all we wanna use the land efficiently but the point is what ended up happening is there'd be like teenagers and stuff hanging around on the bottom talking to their friends and all of their parents would be 15 stories up and they wouldn't be able to really monitor them very well. So in terms of this compared to the original arrangement where apartments were interspersed with businesses and they're more spread out instead of these like austere command towers in terms of just keeping responsible adults near teenagers to kind of make sure nothing really crazy, that breaks down here. And so it's no wonder then that these kind of buildings then there's all kinds of drug gangs and stuff that hang around at the bottom and they just turn into areas that are not safe at all. So it's the exact opposite if you were trying to help people who were in a bad situation. Now, yeah, they have a cheap apartment perhaps but they also live in a building that they gotta walk through a bunch of drug gangs just to go home at night, right? And so Jane Jacobs was a big critic of that and was trying to show how these city planners who were patting themselves on the back for caring about these at-risk communities were actually doing things that were causing crime rates to skyrocket and they weren't and she also pointed out that they weren't responsive at all to the evidence. She was showing reams of statistics to say, look at what's happening in these communities after you come in and help them and the politicians didn't care because in her explanation they didn't really care about the results, they just wanted to have the voters think that they were doing all of these noble things. Okay, who will build the rose, right? Everyone's favorite question. So here, I mean, Walter Block is obviously the go-to person on this and I think he even has a talk on this he's got books in the library or in the bookstore for this but historically in the US, again, this isn't science fiction, it's not merely that we can just as libertarian theorists run through and say, well, historically there were privately provided roads, they were called turnpikes and it's true the rate of return on them was lower than in other ventures of comparable risk but they did that because they knew that these roads would bring in certain types of business or they would facilitate commerce, right? And so in this, I'm gonna have a book here at the end and point it out to you guys, they would have subscriptions, right? So they would, it wasn't that you had to pay to use the road necessarily, sometimes you did, sometimes you didn't, but the idea is they needed a bunch of up from capital to build the road and so they would go up and hit prominent business owners or citizens of the community and say, hey, can you kick in for this project so they'd get a bunch of subscribers or shareholders to build the thing and then it's true, they knew going into it, the rate of return on their investment wouldn't be that great but either out of a sense of civic duty or because if they had some kind of business that relied on traffic to work, they would do that, they'd realize, okay, yeah, I'm not gonna earn a lot on the road per se but it'll help my business and so on or if they had something where they needed to take it to market and they were like, making something in a factory or something and they needed to get to a bigger city, it would certainly be worth their while to contribute to get a good thoroughfare constructed. Okay, let me speed up here and run on time. Utilities, here, the standard mainstream argument against this is that they're called natural monopolies and the idea is that you don't wanna have 15 different companies competing to build power lines on your road, that's just a huge waste and so they're saying in a free market there's gonna be a natural monopoly. One firm is gonna do it first and there's gonna be a huge gap where they can charge what they want, monopoly prices, because for another firm to come in and then lay the same pipelines or the same power lines and whatever, it's a huge hurdle to entry and so that's the rationale for the government granting monopolies to local companies but then regulating their prices. All right, so a big problem with that again is that they don't do it the textbook way in practice if what the utilities are saying to the regulator, what the regulators are saying to the utilities are you can charge cost plus a little bit of return on your investment. So what happens is if they wanna raise rates on electricity, they'll go to the government, show them their books and say see, our costs have gone up such and such, natural gas prices or whatever and so we wanna have a rate hike and the regulators either sign off on it or not. Well, if what you're saying to them is will let you charge based on what your costs are and then a little markup, there's no incentive for them to watch their costs because they can just pass it through and there's no competition by law. Another obvious flaw with this model is that think of all of the interruptions in service because prices are too low. In the summers, there's rolling blackouts and things like that, that you never see Budweiser say in the middle of July everyone don't drink so much beer because we gotta conserve, that's not happening. Hot dog companies don't do that, right? But publicly regulated utilities do that all the time. They'll say, hey, there's a water shortage, don't water your lawn or they'll say, set the AC higher if in an office setting, tell your employees they don't have to wear ties because we have to conserve. So when things are placed under the jurisdiction of state provision or a private company is given a monopoly and then regulated heavily in terms of its pricing, you get these absurd results that would be ludicrous if a private business were doing them. Okay, firefighting. I was gonna put a picture of a bunch of firefighters with their abs and stuff, but I decided that might be a little bit inappropriate. So sorry ladies, you can go Google that later if you want. Um, so he, he, no judgment up here. Okay, so I like this, the classic example of this and I guess got two more minutes here. The classic example of this guy crashes in ancient Rome. I don't know if this story is true. He was a military general and the story is that Rome didn't have a firefighting service. It was just him. And so the somebody's house would catch on fire. He would come up, roll up with his firefighting crew and then bargain with the owner and buy the house, you know, pennies on the dollar or whatever units on the, on the, whatever their unit of currency was. And then, yeah, there you go. And then, and then put the fire out once he was the proud owner of this thing. And he would do it for the surrounding buildings too that were presumably at risk of catching fire. And so that's supposed to prove how horrible is, but what's ironic about that is that's, that's not inefficient in terms of mainstream economics, right? That's just a transfer. And so it's better that he rolled, if that story is even true, rolled up and did that as opposed to not existing at all and just letting the place burn down. Now, I think if that story is true, there clearly had to be regulations or, you know, prohibitions because that would just have to happen once and everybody could see how ridiculous that was. And then why wouldn't competitors do the same thing? Or why wouldn't people make a deal with him beforehand and say, okay, for a monthly fee, if my house catches on fire, I'm not gonna, at that moment, bargain with you, I'm just gonna go ahead and pay you ahead of time to put out the fire, all right? But the point is clearly there's no reason that you couldn't have private provision of fires, fighting services. And again, look at what states do in practice. I was in New York City in grad school once and somebody's fire alarm went off. And it was like, you would think the place was under attack. There were literally 50 vehicles that rolled up and all these firefighters was walking around and it was clear because they had nothing to do, right? The thing went off and they had to, they liked to drive all their cool vehicles around and they wanted to show it up, you know, to justify their budgets. And so the point was that, you know, there's clearly a huge response to things so that it wasn't a very good use of resources. Okay, let me see here. We've got one more minute, protection of wildlife, private markets, right? If you Google African white rhino, you'll see how private property rights were used to this thing was virtually extinct in 1900. There were like 20 of them in existence on some private reserve. They brought in markets and then they flourished. Okay, later in the week, we don't have time right now. Obviously I'm gonna go through judicial and law enforcement if you wanna see that it's a more esoteric topic. And then the last thing is here's three books on these types. This one that they don't have here, they have these two here. If you're interested in the stuff that I've just touched on here, if you wanna see them. So the final conclusion is that freedom is not only a good idea, but it also works. All right, thanks everybody. Thank you.