 So, let me first thank Hans Hoppe and Gugchen for having me here, speaking for the first time at the Property and Freedom Society, and let me apologize first for my poor English, but I have been studying it at Italian State School, so you can understand. So, let's go through the subject we chose with Professor Hoppe last year, and as I finished my presentation half an hour ago, so you can understand that it's a well-thought subject. So, let's call it a standard libertarian view of the confrontation between two different attitudes of cope with the problem of scarcity in society, which are, it should be supposed to be one by one, but I don't know why it doesn't work like that. Anyway, we have this dichotomic presentation of the two different ways to cope with the problem of the acquisition of wealth in societies. Hans Hoppenheimer was not a true libertarian, but anyway, on his fundamental distinction between the economic means for the satisfaction of needs and the political means for the satisfaction of needs, such libertarian thinkers like Albert J. Nock, Ludwig von Mises, and Marie Rockberg built a lot of their social philosophy, and in a very short way, for those who are not familiar with Franz Hoppenheimer, there are just two methods to acquire wealth. One is work, and the other is robbery, and work and exchange on one hand and robbery on the other side, and in Franz Hoppenheimer's very effective words, the state is the organization of the political means, the fact that political power is necessarily the appropriation of wealth, given nothing in exchange. And for those who are familiar with the thought of Iron Rand, I'll remind you the Howard Roark's courtroom speech in the Fountainhead when the hero of this novel, and perhaps many of you have seen the movie with Gary Cooper Kerrigan, there is a very effective speech by the main character, and when he states that the creator's concern is the conquest of nature, the parasite's concern is the conquest of man, the creator deals with men by free exchange and voluntary choice, the parasite seeks power. So there's an essay by Hans Hoppe on Austrian and Marxist struggles, because Austrians and Marx share the view of the history of mankind as a struggle between exploiter and exploiter. The main difference is that for Marx, the reason for the exploitation is main due to economic factors, while for libertarians and Austrians the causes of the exploitation are due to political fact, to political reasons. I went into a letter of Karl Marx in which he acknowledges that the idea of class struggle came to him from previous bourgeois historians and economists. So I wondered who were those bourgeois guys who inspired the Marxian view of the history as the story of class struggle, I don't know why but this slide goes as it should. The first guy is the French sociologist and the count of Saint-Simon, he was a French aristocrat, and with his distinction between workers and idlers, according to Saint-Simon, he is composed by two conflicting classes, workers on the one side, travailleurs in French and on the other side, the idlers, les oisifs. The former are those who produce wealth and the latter are those who live at their expense by willing political power. And we have two followers of Saint-Simon, Antoine Bazar wrote a book at the beginning of the thirties, that's important for what we are going to see. In this presentation of the doctrine of Saint-Simon, they stated that the history of man is a story of exploitation. So we will see why it is important for the anticipation of Marx's statement in the manifesto. Another interesting French guy is the brother of Auguste Blanqui, the well-known French socialist and revolutionary. If you go through France, you'll find in every French city squares and streets in honor of Auguste Blanqui. If you are a socialist in France, it's much more likely to have streets and squares than if you are a classical liberal. And this French guy confronted in two principles, fighting in the story of mankind. And he calls those principles the principle of exploitation and the principle of freedom. And the fact that in every society there are two parties struggling, the party of the people who live by their own work and the party of the people who work or throw others work. And among the means through which people can live on others' works, he includes taxation, monopolies and tariffs. Those are the main political means in the Hopenheimer's words. And in Blanqui's view, there's a contrast between animals and humans. Between animals, animals are bound to devour each other. It's in their nature to do that, to survive, to struggle for survival in that way. For human species, there's something different because this struggle is inside the human species. It's not a way to struggle between different species, but it's a behavior which is inside the human species and which introduces a difference between that part of humanity which devours the other. And why I stressed before the fact that I was wondering on who were those bourgeois thinkers who anticipated Marx in his view of the story of mankind as a story of class struggle? If you remember the slide of the Sensimons' followers with story as the exploitation of man on man, and if you take the sentence of Blanqui, which is from a book of 1837, and if you take the very beginning of the manifesto of the Communist Party of Marx, you can realize that almost literally Marx copied the words of Alphalte Bazar and of Blanqui. So the beginning of the manifesto is almost a plagiarian reproduction of an idea of class struggle, but a class struggle in a bourgeois, according to bourgeois reconstruction. So one of the thinkers who first gave us almost a scientific study of political parasitism, of this distinction between producers and parasite working in human society is this French economist and profiteers, those of whom who comes to Rome and go to visit the church of Saint Louis of the French near Piazza Navona to see the Caravaggio's pictures in that church can say hello to Bastiat who died in Rome in 1850, his birth in that church. And in an essay from the economic sophisms, he writes a true physiology of the title of this essay is the physiology of Plander, the name Bastiat gives to parasitism. And he states very clearly that human beings have just two ways to cope with the problem of the satisfaction of needs, one is production, he calls it also property and work. On the other side there is Plander and he makes for the first time in the social sciences a true typology of Plander, Plander by force, like war, and he states that from a scientific point of view theft and conquest are the same thing, theft is individual conquest and conquest is collective theft, but nobody defends thieves, but a lot of people defends conquerors, but there is no difference from a scientific point of view from conquest and theft. And the other one is slavery. There are also kinds of Plander by fraud like theocracy in ancient society and monopoly, what he calls governmental Plander, the fact that we can use the power of the state for Plander, our other countrymen. So why that? Because there is a fundamental distinction between private transactions which are free exchanges and public transactions, those services which are provided by public power. In public transactions there is a cleavage between the service and the payment of the service because nobody pays directly for a public service. We pay through taxation, through an indirect way. So that's the way in which governmental Plander has its origin, the fact that we can use political power for private interests and the state is an incentive to use force in order to live at the expense of others, like the very well-known phrase from his essay at the state runs, the state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else. So Plander can be achieved also through political power, not only against but mainly through political power. From a historical point of view it's interesting that in the dictionary of political economy at the middle of the 19th century there is the entry parasites and the distinction between three ways of obtaining the economic resources, one typical of capitalists, another one typical of work, the other one typical of parasites defined as those people who live on others' capital and work, just to have a, to fix the fact that in the French culture of 19th century those concepts were very well known and Gustave de Molinari was the intellectual heir of Frédéric Bastiat and he is very interesting in his philosophy because he was an economist, he was an economic journalist actually and in his sketch of human history it distinguished the fact that at the very beginning mankind's fight for the survival, the strong survives and the weak perishes. When human beings begin to fight each one against the other in order to satisfy their needs they, that's the beginning of political competition and that's the beginning of the state. The state from the very beginning is nothing more than a firm of exploitation with a very effective expression de Molinari understands the fact that politics is the twin brother of slavery. Politics begins when the victorious group of men doesn't kill any more the vanquished but enslave them, that the moment in which politics and the states are originated and he was a rather optimistic guy, he thought that the age of the state will come to an end with capitalism which would have replaced the exploitation of men over men by the production of an abundance, a limited abundance of goods so that productive or industrial competition would have replaced political competition and were bound to disappear from human relationships. He had this vision, this view of history as the story of the deliberation of property. Anyway, it's true that like Marx stated that the history of human society is the story of class struggle but that's true that the history of human society is the struggle between exploiters and exploited but who are the exploiters and who are the exploited? The exploited are those who just want to enjoy the properties and the exploiters are those who use political power in order to seize others' property. And that's interesting the fact that he states that when mankind discovered agriculture and farming, a man learned to exchange with nature, stopped to be the parasite of nature just to take from nature but in order to exercise agriculture and farming he has to exchange with nature so he began a relationship of exchange with nature. He learned also to be a parasite of other men. When man stops to be a parasite of nature begins to be a parasite of other men. That's rather paradoxical but that's the way it goes according to de Morenari when mankind learned from animal breeding, learned man breeding, slavery. Slavery is the projection of animal breeding into the relationship between human beings. de Morenari was also interested in the work of contemporaries, the very beginning of democracy in countries like France in the second half of the 19th century and he knew very well the fact that political struggle within the state is the struggle for a loot and political parties are a group of men who struggle between them in order to seize the loot which is represented by the state. And so the greater the loot, the stronger the struggle, the higher the incentive to participate in political life in order to seize the loot. One of my favorite thinkers is this strange Hungarian intellectual who lived in the 19th and 20th century. I found the English translation of one of his main books on the internet, The Interpretation of History which is a very interesting book because he is the first social scientist which uses the term parasitism for the political means for the satisfaction of human needs. He distinguished between parasitism and the direct struggle against murderous and hostile nature. He was not among the founders of the environmentalist movement because he reminds us that we live in a habit of scarcity and man in order to produce the needs, the goods he needs has to struggle against nature and he distinguished several kinds of of parasitism and the subtlest way of kind of parasitism is that of the state. I love this guy because in this book The Interpretation of History there are sentences like the origin of the state lay not in the family, not in the whole, but simply and solely in the camp. The beginning of the state was not sympathy but the desire for blood and plunder. It was not any gregarious instinct that brought men together but the perception that they were more likely to get possessions of their neighbors good together alone. So the state originates from the collective use of violence. At the very beginning that's where the state takes origin from the collective use of violence and war is an acute and exclusive form of parasitism was the law of the cause of the formation of the state and for long it's only even today it's principal object. And you can see the fact that he includes the state as the subtlest form of a plunder of parasitism is very interesting because he reminds us the fact that taxation is the substitute for war loot. The fact that war loot is the product of armies. Armies are the collective use of violence. When mankind organizes the first armies, armies need to be feed. Warriors are people who are subtracted from agriculture and farming. So they have to be feed but the fact that they are armed guys means also that they have the possibility to force other to feed themselves. So what's interesting is that this parasitic attitude of the state doesn't stop with the democratic stage of modern state. He thought that as the state is the way in which the majority is plundered by a parasitic minority in the democratic state it's quite the opposite. It's the majority of people who exploit the minority. And this distinction between minority and majority reminds me the fact that in that very age in the social sciences there was the school of Italian elitists of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. Gaetano Mosca his main work has been translated in English with the title, the effective title, the ruling class. And Gaetano Mosca was the guy who stated, he called himself the first. The first web stated that in every political organized society the few rule over the many. That's a constant of human life. And so in his view all the history of mankind is the story of a conflict between the ruling class the few who's got the power and the rest of society both wanting willing to become part of the ruling class or to replace the ruling class. So it's true that history of mankind is a story of struggle but it's a story of class struggle around the power which object is the power not the economic exploitation as in the case of Marx. And the other guy of the Italian the school of Italian elitists was Vilfredo Pareto which draws a very interesting distinction between the different ways in which within society man can live at others expense. Force for example illegal violence or like as Bastiano taught us through legal violence like in the case where the majority the majority rules can be oppressive. But in his view there are also what he calls torturous way in which the few can plunder the many. That's the main characteristic of the society in which we live in. He knew very well the fact that classes conflict inside our societies and he knew very well that the different classes have different economic interests. So the main economic interests which contrast classes is the fact that when taxation comes on the scene every class try to ship the burden of taxes on the others and when public expenditure is on the scene every class try to be the beneficiary of public expenditure. So it's taxes and public expenditure which are the causes of the conflict in a class struggle inside our societies. Like almost in a Marxian language Pareto define class struggle at the great fact which dominates human history. All human history can be understood as a class struggle a fight under two different ways. That of economic competition which is the productive way in which in which different classes confront each other. And the other way is political parasitism is a governmental plunder like Bastia taught us. Because there are different kinds of plunder. There are different kinds of different ways by which men can satisfy his needs. One is work work but work is painful. The other way is mere violence but violence can be dangerous to wait for a wanderer in a world that can be can be dangerous. So there is an easier way which is democracy. Participate the electoral process by which we can we can benefit from the from governmental plunder. So all those guys have taught us that we are we can draw a theory of of political parasitism from all these conceptual elements. These are the conceptual elements of a more comprehensive theory of political parasitism I'm working on. The first one is political realism of the fact that which teaches us the fact that power is a social relationship of command and obedience. And that political power is exercised in societies but some men over some other men. There are people who have got power and people who have not power that main distinction. And one other important insight is the fact that politics originates historically when the victory in war stops killing the defeated enemy in order to enslave him. Slavery is thus the twin brother of the political order. Hence the very the origin of every political community strictly linked with violence and violence plays a fundamental role in the subsequent life of such political association. And also another element of the of this comprehensive theory of political parasitism is the fact that exchange is a positive sum game while plunder is a zero sum game or even in its worst case even a negative sum a negative sum game. And another important element of this theory is the relevance of scarcity in in in human society. And another one is the fact that we can draw a real libertarian class struggle theory. I mean the fact that we can understand human history as a real struggle between different and conflicting classes as a useful tool to grasp the true nature and development of our society. Just to to to conclude this presentation can we derive any sociological laws from this theory of political parasitism? We can try to to to do to derive some sociological laws from political parasitism. You know we have the the the the school of italian elitists which teaches us the fact that the few can exploit the many. The democratic state according to Nordau as I as I said before in the democratic state according to Nordau it's the many who exploit the few. But there is a paradoxical fact that Bastia and Pareto teach us the fact that actually in democratic society it's the many who try to exploit the many because every every social group try to participate to plundering rather than be the victim of plunder. And that's what we can call the system of mutual plunder. Actually the present democratic society are a system of mutual plunder. That's what a an italian philosopher of law Bruno Leone called the legal war of all against all. And from what I I try to to present here we can confront two different views on the on the use of these tools of political parasitism. One is the optimistic view of Frederic Bastia and the other one is the pessimistic view of Frederic Bastia. Bastia was a rather optimistic guy. He was he was sure that both plunder by force and plunder by fraud should stop in a way or in another. He was very faithful of the fact that in the long run the parasitism by force should be stopped by the fact that in the long run the force would pass from the to the side of the many. And he was also optimistic on the intellectual nature of intelligent nature of man. The fact that the victims of plunder in the long run will be aware of the fact of being victims of plunder. And so they would be able to stop this process. In contrast to the optimistic insight of Frederic Bastia stands the pessimistic insight of Wilfredo Pareto who was who stated that that under a system of neutral plunder like the one we live in in our democratic society there is no escape in the fate of man or you are either hunter or prey. You cannot choose. You cannot you cannot choose. If you stop decide to be neutral you'll be like a lamb in among the walls. So there is no way to be to to stay to to be neutral in a in a in the system of universal of neutral plunder. And the other way is that the fact that he contrary to Bastia he was pessimistic on the fact that the victims of parasitism could be aware of being the victim of parasitism and could have the force to stop parasitism because in the in the human societies the interests which prevail are the organized interests like those of lobbies while the non-organized interests like those of taxpayers are bound to be defeated in this system of neutral plunder. So Pareto was convinced the only way to stop parasitism was the the fact that parasites are enough clever and enough farsighted to understand that if they go too far in plundering the victims of of of this political parasitism society as a whole will be ruined and so themselves will be ruined. So there is no no way to stop this fact otherwise than betting on the on the clever attitude and the farsightedness of of the of the plunderers plunderers themselves. And if we consider that the motto of our ruling class in our democratic societies is that in the long run we are all dead. I think that unfortunately Pareto was quite right in the fact that we we it's very difficult to to be optimistic or optimistic on the future of our of our society. Let me conclude this this presentation with the reflection of the fate of capitalism. The fact that the problem with capitalism derived from its success from the success of capitalism itself the free market economy has produced an abundance of goods and services that is unprecedented unprecedented in human history such wealth not only provides a formerly unimaginable standard of living but it is an incentive for parasitic attitudes and behaviors. The more social wealth that exists in society the greater is the temptation to acquire it through political parasitism. The capitalism is thus the victim of its own economic success. This is why the contest between producers and parasites is a never-ending story and parasitism is the typical attitude of the state hence the only way to defend the free market and our liberty from any kind of plunder is to totally dissolve the state. Thank you.