 Hello, Stefan. Hey there from Ritje. How are you? I'm doing just fine. So first of all, as I said to you before, I will introduce yourself to the Italian audience and as I just am reading now from your website, you are a registered patent attorney, a labor Italian theorist and lecturer and the director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom and the founding and executive editor of Libertarian Papers, and of course, you are a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. And so as as the introduction says, you are a specialist of legal stuff, like international, sorry, intellectual property, patent and all these things. Would you be able to explain a little bit about your background and just briefly do? Sure. I'd be happy to. Yes, I'm an attorney and a longtime Libertarian and Austrian student of Austrian economics. I live in Texas. I'm from Louisiana, which is a civil law state similar to Italy and France and the continental legal traditions. So my legal training was from Louisiana State University and the civil law system. But I've long been interested in Libertarian theory and economic theory and I say for over 20, 25 years. And I have been heavily involved with the Mises Institute and with the sort of more radical Austrian related and anarcho-capitalist worth body and type theories and also those of Hans Hermann Hoppe. And started a Libertarian journal a few years ago, Libertarian Papers. And my legal practice is primarily as a patent and copyright and intellectual property attorney. So that's my legal expertise. In terms of Libertarian theory, I've always been personally interested in economics and legal theory and rights theory. And not so much in intellectual property theory. I just started writing about it because it wasn't really settled yet in Libertarian theory. And I wasn't comfortable with the theories I had heard about patents and copyrights. And when I started practicing in that area as a lawyer, I started thinking as a libertarian more and more about it. And I finally, after doing a lot of research and thinking came to the conclusion that the reason that the previous arguments in favor of patent and copyright, like by Ayn Rand and others, the reason that it was unsatisfactory was because that they were actually wronged. And that there had been a big mistake made early in American history and early in the American and the worldwide libertarian movement in assuming that patent and copyright are legitimate types of property rights. And my conclusion is that they're not and that they're actually nothing but anti-competitive state grants of monopoly privilege, which undercut property rights and undercut the free market and undercut competition and in fact are explicitly aimed at reducing competition. You'll see supporters, you know, we can't have a regime of unbridled competition. We have to tame competition with these laws and that's exactly what we do. So that's basically my approach on this. Oh, that's good. So for what I understand your libertarianism basically is strictly linked to your specialization in legal things. Am I right? Well, I would say not. I would say that my legal knowledge has helped inform my arguments, maybe make them a little more sophisticated and take into account things about law that confuse other writers, but I don't think you need to be attorney to understand this stuff. And in fact, I think usually most attorneys are worse than the average layman on these issues because they have absorbed a good deal of legal, legal positive. Yes, I see. As Bruno Leone wrote so brilliantly about freedom and the law. So no, I was a libertarian long before I was an attorney. It's just that I'm interested in legal theory because I can write about some of it, but really it's just rights theory. Okay, I see. Yeah, in our website, libertarianation.org, we recently talked about your book. It's called Against Intellectual Property. So you were asking about what's the basic argument against IP for those who had not heard this argument before or it approached it? Basically, yes. So I would say that, and look, when I came out with this argument of my own in 2000 or so, it wasn't as pressing of an issue, but in the last 10 or 11, 12 years, it's become more of an important issue and I've written more articles on it, other people have, and so I've seen different ways to sort of explain this. So I'll kind of give you a little summary of I think the best way to look at it. And I think it's this. First, we shouldn't take the government's labeling of things for granted. And when they call it property, it doesn't mean that it is or should be. And if we understand the origin of these laws, and basically intellectual property is a term the government uses and lawyers use to refer to several types of legal systems, primarily patent and copyright, but also trade secret and trademark. And every one of these systems is different. And the two that are of most concern are patent and copyright. So let's just look at those. If you look at the history of these, these basically arose during the age of mercantilism and protectionism and state censorship in the, say, 14, 1500s in Europe. And they were explicitly recognized as, in the case of patents, monopoly privileges granted by the state that had nothing to do with invention. For example, in England, someone would get the monopoly on playing cards, even though they didn't invent playing cards. Of course, the crown would grant this for favors, you know, to give a favor to this company who would owe the crown loyalty back the other direction. So basically it was impoverishing consumers and harming competition and harming competitors for the sake of a relationship between the patentee and the crown. And in the case of copyright, it arose because of the advent of the printing press and the state and the church's loss of control over what, you know, could be present. Right. So they were losing their control of what ideas could be presented to the masses. So the government established the stationers guild of the stationers company, which had a monopoly on the printing press. And of course they would only print what the government or the church approved of, et cetera. And finally these things became enshrined in legislation in the case of patents in the statute of monopolies. They weren't afraid to call it a monopoly. And the statute of monopolies was meant to stop this practice primarily because of all the abuses, but it carved out an exception for inventions. So they said the crown can't grant all these monopolies to their friends, but the government can still grant monopolies if there's an invention. And in the case of copyright, it was the statute of Anne in 1709. This is in England. And that basically gave a monopoly to authors instead of the publishing guilds, which had previously had it. But the primary reason was so that authors could be free to publish their works so they didn't have to get permission from the guild. So copyright originally was meant to, in a way, give the author the freedom from censorship by the state. It wasn't really meant to give them a monopoly over it so they could stop publications of the works, but just so they had their permission to do it. And in the case of the statute of monopolies, it was again meant to restrict, radically restrict the power of the government to issue monopolies. And so when the United States was established as our current form, a clause was put in the Constitution in 1789 that authorized the Congress to grant patent and copyrights to promote inventions and writings of authors and things like this based upon these existing models. So it was sort of a utilitarian thing. It was never considered to be a natural right. It was just a civil right. And it was just based upon the hunch or the assumption that if we have these kinds of laws, maybe it will promote, you know, novels and books and paintings and musical innovation. But it was not based upon the empirical evidence. It was just an assumption. And the original law in the U.S., which has become the model for a lot of the modern IP systems of the world, was about 14 years originally. And the 14 year period for patent and copyright came from the assumption that you need to protect a merchant from competition, from his competitors for about the length of two consecutive apprenticeship terms. You know, they had apprentices back then. They lasted about seven years. So they said, well, if you have protection for 14 years, you have time to train two apprentices and what you're doing. And that's enough protection from competition. But then there was a backlash in Europe and in the U.S. over the next, say, 50, 100 years against these monopolies. And so the advocates of these monopolies and the government and the advocates, which had at this time gotten to be dependent upon these monopolies because they could protect themselves from competition, started using the term property to describe it because for pure propaganda purposes, they just called it a property right because everyone was in favor of property. So this is why we started calling them property. But just because the government and special interests call it that doesn't make it so. You could also, of course, call your right to receive welfare payments from the state of property right, but that doesn't make it make it so. You might depend upon it, but it doesn't make it so. So the basic problem as I see it with patent and copyright is that it's the state giving the right to a person to tell someone else what not to do with their own property. Basically, in civil law terms, it's called a negative servitude or it's a veto right, right? Now, in private law, you can acquire such a right by contract. So for example, you could pay me to agree not to build my house more than 30 feet or 15 meters tall. And so you now have a partial property right over what I can do with my property, but because I agreed to it. But what the state does when they grant a patent or copyright, they're giving a negative servitude to the holder of the patent for the copyright over the property of everyone else in that jurisdiction. So if I'm given a patent over, you know, a steam engine, then I can prevent my competitors from using their own property to make a steam engine shaped in a certain way. And the same thing with books. So basically the problem is that these grants of copyright and patent or infringements of property rights because it takes away my right to control my property that I used to have full rights in it. And now the government has given a partial control right to someone else. So in effect, it amounts to censorship. It amounts to trespass is what it amounts to. It's a redistribution of wealth and of property. Now, there's a lot of other arguments against these things. Abuse, empirical reasons. For example, there's no empirical evidence whatsoever that these rights promote innovation. In fact, there's every evidence that they hinder it. And it gives the state power and it gives the state the power to censor us and literally censor us. For example, just the other day, the famous movie, The Godfather and the novels by Mario Puzo. The estate of Mario Puzo wanted to authorize a sequel to Godfather and Paramount Pictures is suing them under copyright because they have the assignment of that to stop them from writing this book. Now that is literally censorship. That is using the power of the courts to block the publication of a book. And this has happened many times. And of course, giving this power to the hands of the government and the special interests is dangerous as we see in this recent SOPA case, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which the government could use as an excuse to have almost complete control over who can post on the internet, which is very dangerous for people who believe in freedom and the power of the internet. Yeah, in your book, page 44 against intellectual property, actually, you talk about something like that. You say, basically, you're talking about John Goldmagnon, like caveman. Basically, he built a log cabin on an open field. And basically, other people are trying to imitate him. And we start to build in the whole cabins. But the problem is, he got a copyright on that. And basically, he is telling the other neighbors not to build the log cabin of the same shape or the same design of his log cabin. Basically, it becomes, like you say, a partial owner of a tangible property of the others. Yes, because he can stop them from. Yes. Now, of course, most advocates of IP like Ayn Rand would say that's a ridiculous example for two reasons. They would say that these rights can only apply in an industrial society. But it's a little bit hard to understand why what they believe is a natural right only comes to exist in modern America, but didn't exist in early society. And number two. Should be universal and it should be. It should also be perpetual because regular natural rights do not expire. You could pass your property onto your children and then their children and you could have a house or a castle or a car that lasts for thousands of years, theoretically. So Ayn Rand and most advocates of IP come up with an argument that it should be finite like last 20 years or something like that. And I think they come up with that argument for two reasons. Number one, they realize there's something wrong with making it perpetual because we would still all be paying royalties to the heirs, you know, to the descendants of these cavemen. Every time we wanted to cook food with fire or use a wheel or whatever. And number two, because the U.S. Constitution put a limited time on it. And Ayn Rand and others have till this point in time viewed the early U.S. government as an almost libertarian model for us to follow. Like we almost got it right. So whatever's in the Constitution must be presumptively libertarian. And I think that's just a mistake. The Constitution was not libertarian. It was a centralizing document. It's full of contradictions. It's just a piece of legislation crafted by special interest groups and politicians. And we have to stop thinking, in my opinion, of the U.S. as some libertarian exemplar and of the Constitution as being a libertarian guideline for the kind of society that we should have. Yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah, basically talking about U.S., basically you introduced me, my other question. In some interviews, and also now, you are accusing U.S. basically to force other countries in the world to use their legal intellectual property system. Right. Give me some example of this. And why do you think the U.S. are doing this? I mean, I don't think we're worse than other countries as a general matter. It's just that we happen to be the richest and most powerful because of an internal free market over the last 200 years in certain historical circumstances. But as Professor Hoppe points out in one of his books that when you have a relatively liberal internal economy, then that tends to make the government more imperialistic because they have the resources to get away with it. And you can see that in the U.S. history, although the propaganda is that we're peaceful and democratic. We have a war about every 10 years over the last 200 years and people always come up with an excuse for every one of them. But it's the case. So the U.S., actually because of its dominance for about the last 75, 100 years has thrown its weight around and has become extremely imperialistic in terms of, or the better word would be extraterritorial. We basically assert our laws extraterritorially more so than any other country in the world that I'm aware of. For example, our tax laws. I don't think there's a single industrialized nation where the government claims the right to tax its citizens when they don't even live in their country and earn income in that country. But the U.S. does. So even if I move to some country that doesn't tax me at all, like say Singapore, then the U.S. will tax me on the difference. And we're also very, very extraterritorial on our antitrust laws and our drug laws as well. In fact, there's a law being proposed right now that will make it a crime for an American citizen to plan while in the U.S. to go to a country that has legal drugs and use the drugs. So for example, if I'm planning a trip to Amsterdam, let's say I'm a dentist and I have a convention in Amsterdam. If I'm there, I plan to smoke some marijuana because it's legal. That is actually a crime under, or that is a proposed federal crime in the U.S. to plan to do something that's legal when you get there. And that is insane. It is insane. But by the same token, the IP laws have been pushed by the U.S. government at the behest of the special interest groups like the movie industry, the MPAA and the music industry, the RIAA and other content creators to twist the arms of other countries to adopt ever stricter U.S. type copyright and patent laws. For example, Bosnia, Spain, Canada, Russia, China, Panama, other countries just in the last few years. The WikiLeaks scandal revealed a bunch of cables from the U.S. State Department to Spain where basically the RIAA and the MPAA were writing Spain's laws for them. And often we do it under the guise of a trade agreement. What they do is they do something sneaky. A treaty is usually negotiated out in the open where people can see what's coming. But if you do a trade agreement, which is usually bilateral but not always, it's done in secret. And then the government just approves it. And so they sometimes put these provisions in these trade agreements that really should be part of a treaty. And they do it under the guise of a trade agreement so that they can escape scrutiny. They did this in the ACTA, which had to be exposed by the law professor in Canada, Michael Geist, and a sort of WikiLeaks type expose. And then Barack Obama, our president, signed it the other day without even getting the Senate's approval because he said it's not a treaty so we don't need the Senate's approval. On the other hand, the theory is that it's binding upon the U.S. and international law so it's still really a treaty. And right now there's a negotiation going on with the called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It's going to be a multilateral trade agreement between the U.S. and several Asian countries. And it will force them to adopt these types of laws. In the case of Russia, Russia has long wanted to be part of the WTO, the World Trade Organization. And the U.S. is saying, no, we're going to block your membership until you adopt U.S. style IP laws. So we use our weight quite often to try to force other countries to adopt U.S. style laws either with just pressure or with bribes or with trade agreements or even with treaties like WIPO. So a couple of months ago, I think not just a month ago, there was a case of the shutdown of a mega upload website that was distributing some, well, quite a lot of millions of files of music and videos with copyright. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Why they did it? Well, we know that why, but how they did it? I think it's quite incredible that they were able to act on another jurisdiction, another country's jurisdiction and do what they did. It was really incredible for me at least. My understanding is that, I think it was the FBI, worked behind the scenes for months trying to build their case and to get the cooperation of other governments, including New Zealand, of course, where the arrests were made. And also, I think Hong Kong and one other country, I forget the other country, maybe France or Singapore. And so it wasn't technically a violation of sovereignty because they got the countries, they got New Zealand's permission to do it. But of course, could you imagine New Zealand police swarming with black helicopters, 69 SWAT officers onto Houston, Texas and arresting some citizens over here? We wouldn't put up with that. So that's another example of extraterritoriality. But I think what's going on is you have the movie industry and the content industry. I mean, it shows that the government is in their pocket because the government doesn't really care. They're just doing this for power and to please one of their big donor bases. So I think what's happening is you have the possibility of piracy and that changes the business model that these content producers have been able to rely on. And they don't want to adapt. So they always go to the government to try to get the government to basically protect them from competition so they don't have to adapt. Sometimes they're successful, sometimes they're not. I mean, they've had to adapt to color television and radio and movies and, you know, the whole deal. Video VHS players and cassette recorders for taped music and now digital music and CDs. And they hate it every time there's a change. And so they're resisting the change. And so they're trying to basically stop piracy, but they know they can't stop it because there's going to be other sites that spring up. But they want to put the fear of God into regular law abiding citizens to try to just ring a little bit more extorted cash out of them to make them, you know, pay for a song or a movie three or four times over their lifetime instead of getting it once and just using it. So I think that's what's going on there. And the problem is that now you have other, let's say more legitimate business models whose legal viability is now in doubt because, for example, Dropbox, which is a popular service here, which people use to store stuff in the cloud or any cloud based or even YouTube. Now the question is, are these services even legal? Are they basically, you know, under the threat of a government takeover like happened to mega upload? And so if that happens, we're going to lose a huge benefit of the wonderful ability to share information that the internet provides us. And basically you are introducing my next question that is basically you say that intellectual property and corporate basically it's a humbling innovation. And basically because all these companies are basically trying to be friends of the government and to avoid people to copy their books or music, they are basically humbling innovation and they're stopping this beautiful, wonderful world that is the internet specifically. Yes, and I think there's other ways you can look at it as well. I mean, the entire justification for these laws, according to the advocates of them is that it is necessary to and promotes innovation. So because these laws are at least at first glance, they're an infringement on liberty, then you would think that the burden of proof is on these people to prove their case. And of course they have never tried to or been able to. Every study that I've seen by empiricists and economists concludes that, you know, we have no proof whatsoever. In fact, it looks like these things hurt innovation in several ways. It distorts innovation. I mean, for example, remixing is very frowned upon. And so lots of musical forms and movie and audio visual forms that might borrow use remixing to build upon previous styles probably never arose. So we have what we have what Bastiat talked about the scene and the unseen. I mean, we see what we have, but we don't see what we're missing in the terms of invention and innovation. You know, if you know that Apple and Microsoft and Samsung and Google have the smartphone smartphone industry locked up with an oligopoly because they have the patents. They can sue each other and make deals and settle. But small players can't enter the market because they don't have a big war chest of patents that they can use as a retaliation. And so they basically just don't even get into that area because they know that it's futile. So if a company chooses not to try to innovate and make new cell phones, then they're not innovating. So innovation is lost because companies are afraid to even try to make a product in an area. And why would you spend R&D research and development dollars on a product that you can't sell? So there's no doubt that some innovation is lost because of patents. And the other thing is it's pretty clear that these things act like a huge tax on society. And of course, when you when you rob society of wealth, then there's less means available to engage in R&D and innovation in the first place. So there's a lot of reasons to believe that these these legal systems put a damper on innovation and freedom of speech. But the thing is, sometimes when we talk, when we libertarians talk with other people that are no libertarians about these issues. And sometimes also to some other libertarians that are in favor of intellectual property. Sometimes what they say is that basically you are leaving other people to do some plagiarism on other people work. And so is there like a third way like something in between like an alternative way to see this to avoid plagiarism. But at the same time to leave people to copy work. Well, let me let in this I don't I don't know if this is a language issue or not because I have this problem even here in the US. First of all, intellectual property laws are extremely technical and complicated and it's hard to be an expert and understand them all. So you will have people confusing different types of IP quite regularly. So for example, like earlier you use copyright for something that should be patent. Now, you know, that's understandable because no, it's OK. It's just people don't really understand how these laws work. And yet they have arguments in favor of them. And so for example, plagiarism really plagiarism just means representing that you are the author of some work when you're not. And that has almost nothing to do with copyright copyright. Typically in a typical case of copyright, let's say I copy the latest Steven Spielberg movie. I mean, you know, I'm not going to say I wrote it because no one would believe me and it wouldn't get me anything. You know, I just copy the exact movie and I just give it away or I sell it. If I don't describe the title, then no one will know what they're getting and they won't bother copying it. So copyright infringement doesn't require plagiarism. And plagiarism, I believe is a very minor problem because even in a copyright free world, almost no one would plagiarize because they would be a laughing stock. It's a sort of a non problem. So for example, you could tomorrow publish one of Plato's early books under your name. That doesn't violate copyright law because that is now in the public domain. But if you put, you know, Fabrizio's Republic online, who would buy it and why? Yeah. And if they did, then they might have a claim for fraud. And so to the extent you're doing it on a mass scale, you're going to be suffering a lot of damages and these problems are self-defeating. So I would say if you stick with patent and copyright, the only way that you could have that would protect it would be by private contract. And some libertarians have argued that you could create something similar to patent and copyright by using contract. Murray Rothbard suggested this might be possible to some degree and other libertarians go much, much further. But the problem is patently copyright by their nature or what's called in rim rights, their rights against property, their rights go against the whole world, whether you have a contract with them or not. Just like your right to not have your home broken into or your car stolen doesn't require you to have a contract ahead of time with the thief or the trespasser, it's just a right of good against the world. And that is how people that advocate IP view it. And there is just no way to create that with contract. You'd have to get a contract with everyone in order to keep the secret from leaking out or keep people from copying it. And furthermore, let's say we imagine a model where you publish a novel and you require everyone that downloads a copy of it from Amazon to sign an agreement saying, I promise I won't use this book in a way you don't approve of or I won't copy it or I won't share it with people. And if I do, I owe you a million dollars damages because if the damages are $10, it's not going to be really a disincentive. So who would buy a book really? What consumer would buy a book, a $10 book that is going to give them potentially a million dollars in liability and that they can't learn from and use and share with their friends? I think they would just move to the next publisher. So I think that these contractual models could never get everyone and they couldn't get many people in the first place at all. I think the solution is for people to recognize that in our world of the internet and copying that there are good things about it and bad things about it and not necessarily bad, but there are challenges to the business models of the old days that didn't exist in the past and people have to adapt. You have to accept that if you release information into the world, which you do, like let's say you release a new invention, a new product with an innovative feature. Well, you're doing that because you want to sell products and so you're going to trumpet this feature. You're going to tell your customers, this new ink pen has a great system of delivering ink, so buy me. But of course, if it's successful, then that's going to send a profit signal into the market and it's going to attract competition. That's how the free market works. And of course, you're going to have imitators and emulators and that's how competition on the free market works. So emulation and copying, which are not plagiarism, it's just imitating what people do that is popular with consumers, is going to happen and you have to realize that's what's going to happen when you start selling this product that pretty soon your profit margin is going to be eroded and you have to be prepared to keep innovating or find some way to keep your customers loyal to you. So you just have to find a way to accept the fact of copying and find other ways to make a profit. Yeah, sounds good. I agree with you completely. Now, something completely, well, not completely different, but something that is related to last month's of Republican primaries in the States. What do you think about Ron Paul and what do you think about libertarians that are trying to get into politics? Well, of course, you have to distinguish between what we call small L libertarians and big L libertarians. Capital L libertarians is a member of the libertarian party and that's the type of person that believes in or is interested in or involved in electoral politics and voting. Personally, I'm an anarchist and I don't vote and I don't see much hope for electoral politics. I don't blame some libertarians for trying that, but that said, I would say that Ron Paul has been a very unique figure in American political history and he's about as good as you could ever expect, I think, for a politician that has actually gotten elected to a significant office. He's a force grade, he's a good libertarian, he knows Austrian economics very well, but I think he has zero chance of winning and I think the best thing he's done is to introduce people to ideas of limited government and Austrian economics. Although, you know, the one negative is that his constant refrain is we have to get back to the Constitution and I agree with him that if we were to have a more strict interpretation of the Constitution, we would move in a more libertarian direction. But number one, I think that's unrealistic, the Constitution is not self enforcing, it's just a piece of paper and if you put the people in charge of enforcing it, in charge of interpreting it, then of course they're going to give it a maximal interpretation and even if we were to adhere to it to the letter, we would still have a very big, unlibertarian, central state. So I think that the one danger of talking about the Constitution is you give the state legitimacy because people say, well, you do have the right to vote and well, we do have a Constitution that does set some limits on the state. So I think the best thing he's done is to publicize these ideas and to make people realize that maybe the pro-war kind of views a lot of Americans have is not good. So I think he's a great guy but I don't see much hope in electoral politics for saving us. My view is that the only thing we can count on is a gradual enlightenment of the populace and I'm a little bit pessimistic that we can do that from just preaching to people because it hasn't worked yet but I do have some hope that economic literacy can improve over time by just by osmosis because for example the fall of communism in 1989-90 taught people something. Most people now, even if they're sort of socialistic or leftist, they know that central planning just doesn't produce prosperity. They know this. They're not fully consistent but I think the overall worldwide economic literacy went up dramatically after the fall of communism. So my hope is that with increasing prosperity over time because of the internet and technology and population growth and some countries emerging out of totalitarian states like China, that over time we will just have more and more wealth and more and more freedom for practical reasons and people will just sort of get used to that idea and gradually become more enlightened to the point where the government's legitimacy gets more and more restricted. That's my hope. But the problem is that now governments are trying to stop the internet and they're trying to control it because they understand this wonderful tool for the enlightenment of the masses. So in the future there's going to be a struggle between the freedom of the internet and the government that are trying to stop it. So I think a front line for us libertarians I think is going to be to protect the freedom of the internet. Even before, well, I wouldn't say before the real world issues but I think it's one of the front lines where we should fight the most. I agree. That's why I think it was heartening that you had this massive uprising in the U.S. over SOPA and now even ACTA and I believe even in parts of Europe now there are some protests in different countries against ACTA. In a way this is the internet seeing an error and trying to route around it. So my hope is that the government, which is incompetent if evil, will always be behind and by the time they really wake up to the threat that the internet is it will be too late for them to stop it. Maybe you'll have a dark net, maybe you'll have an underground internet which won't be as good as what we have now but it may be enough to let us outrun the state and finally outrun it all together. Yeah, probably, yeah. But there are other two kind of libertarian schools out there. The one we talked about is the Rome poll. So trying to get votes and to be voted for a presidential election and trying to change things from within the government. But there are the type of libertarians that are trying to escape from the government. Just thinking about, for example, Patrick Friedman and his institute. Seasteading. Yeah, thank you. What do you think about this strategy? Do you think it's a winner strategy or? Well, I think it's worth trying. I'm glad that people are trying and there's also some kind of experiment being tried and I think Honduras with these kind of free trade zones. They're thinking about setting up. I just don't know. I think that the ultimate problem is that the states have, they're seen as having legitimacy and they're seen as necessary by the people. And as long as that's the case, let's say the US and the Western powers will stay in power and they'll have a lot of military might. And they're only going to let these little regimes get away with so much. So if some Caribbean nation decided to become a tax haven and a drug haven and a pornography haven and a data haven, then they would probably be nuked. Yeah, next day. So there's only so much you can get away with. So even if you have this floating island nation, I think they have to be careful not to ruffle the feathers too much of the big states. And so the more successful they are, the more dangerous, the more imperiled they are, maybe. I don't think that's, I think part of the problem with that solution also is that, and you also have something in New Hampshire in the US, the Free State Project. The problem is that the people that are able to do these things tend to be people that have less to lose. I mean, if you are a successful member of society, you have a job and a lot of influence, that's because you're playing by the rules and you're rooted into the community. And it's going to be a big cost to you to give up your $500,000 a year job in a big city like Houston, let's say, and move to New Hampshire where you can make $20,000 a year selling soap or whatever they do there. So the point is it's going to tend to attract people that are not always the most successful in society and maybe more marginal to some degree. I mean, I don't want to put down the people that are trying it. But I just think it's sort of internally limited and how successful it can be because of that. I mean, who's going to go move to a cruise ship just for freedom? Someone that doesn't have a lot of economic prosperity already. So I think the powerful people are always going to be the ones. It's the same reason the candidates for the Libertarian Party tend not to be the best candidates because the people that have really good political skills have more to gain from joining the Republican or Democrat Party. So I think it's worth trying, but I don't know, maybe if we can one day have space travel that's really affordable, maybe someone will just go off and start their own colony. That's the way to do it. Yeah, I hope so. Just now, the last question, and then we can finish this nice conversation. What do you think about the future of Libertarianism? Because, okay, I'm pretty young, I'm just 30, but since Libertarianism has been in the public, there's been so many changes because we know Mises Rothbard and Rand were just writing books and there was no possibility for them to spread this idea. But now, our generation has this powerful tool that is the Internet. Do you think we are existing right now only in the Internet and we are disappearing from the real world? And is this dangerous or do you understand what I'm saying? Yes, I do. I've heard those kind of criticisms of the Internet. I don't agree with them. I think that there's been a wonderful melding of the real world and the Internet. People use these social networks as part of their lives and I think there's nothing wrong with it. And I think it is the most powerful potential tool of all human history, maybe, maybe next to the printing press or something. So I think there's a lot of hope there because of that. And I also do have some hope because the young people I see today, and not just the Ron Paul types, but young people now seem to me to be more soft Libertarian than in my youth, which is only 20, 30 years ago and certainly more than 40, 50 years ago, they tend to be pretty understanding of economic freedom and also very socially tolerant, which is a soft Libertarianism. And I think they're also getting to be very resentful of all the burdens that the older generations have placed on them for the debt and social security obligations and the social welfare state. And it may take a while before the older generations die out or lose power that the younger generations can finally start to rebel, but that is my hope. I'd say the young generation is my biggest hope. And, of course, the Internet makes access to ideas of liberty at all levels, you know, popular and Lurockwell.com to Mises works to blogs and, you know, online courses and speeches makes the information more available. So I think that this is the biggest time for optimism ever. And at the same time, the state has gotten more dangerous as well. So my hope is that we keep growing and that people become, as I said, ever more economic. See, I think the only hope for humanity is that if people become economically literate, because I believe that you can never have a society unless most people are decent in their impulses. And I think most people are. If they aren't, then we're doomed and we're just going to have, you know, fighting and chaos. But I think the problem is people don't have consistency or economic literacy. If they had that combined with their natural decency, then they just wouldn't approve of most of these legal policies that we have now. So I think over time, economic literacy really is the most, um, most important thing. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I agree with you. And what about the libertarianism today? Do you think we should be able to communicate more between countries? I know that it's a shame that there is like this language barrier that sometimes limits our communication. For example, now we are using the internet and you are in Houston, I'm in London, and it's quite incredible that we are communicating right now. Thanks to the technology. Do you think we should put more efforts, we libertarians, and communicate internationally between the United States or Europe, within Europe, or even with other countries like developing countries in Asia? I do. I do. Well, I think we're doing, a lot of us are doing that already. Um, maybe we should try more, but I think it's developing nicely. I remember when I was, um, I lived in London for a while as a student. And I was just amazed by the, the, all the international students say across Europe, who because of your railing or inter railing or whatever you call it over there. Um, probably the prospect of bombing each other would be more inconceivable to them than their parents' generation. Um, so I think that's a good thing. And I think you see something like that happening on a global scale now with the internet. Um, one thing I've always loved about the libertarian movement and the Austrian movement is when I go to Auburn, Alabama for Mises functions, or when I go to Modrom, Turkey for the property and freedom society functions of Professor Hoppe. There are people from all over the world there, usually Europeans, but, you know, different nationalities. And I have never once seen any jingoism. Everyone listens to each other for their ideas. And, um, you know, if an American speaks about something, he might be the one criticizing America or if someone else is criticizing US, he doesn't get offended. And the same thing with other countries is there's almost no, um, nationalism left anymore among these, the young people interested in ideas, which I've always loved. Um, so I think we've come quite a long way, even in my lifetime, and I think it's a good thing. And I do think the internet is one of driving forces behind that now. And, you know, when you have more and more libertarians, I mean, there was only maybe a couple dozen in the world, 40, 50 years ago. Now we have so many that, you know, you could speak to me and then you can probably find a volunteer to easily transcribe the, um, you know, the lecture into Italian. And even if you can't, you could probably pay someone on some really cheap service on that you could find on one of these websites somewhere. So it's more and more possible to overcome these barriers. And plus it seems to me that English is becoming a pretty de facto second language, which I don't know if it will be English, but it seems like it is for now. I don't think it's going to be Esperanto. So it's good that there's at least there's one language most people will learn as a second language. And so they can find ways to communicate. So that's how I see it. But I think as a person, as an individual, we have an obligation to seek the truth and to try to do the right thing, even if we think it's hopeless right now. Because, you know, think of people like Mises who fought for liberty during the fascist years. And I think things are much more hopeful for us than it was for him. So we have really no excuse not to keep fighting. Yeah, not to try. Yeah. Okay, Stefan, thank you very much. It was really nice to talk with you. And hopefully now we can publish your interview in our website, LibertarianNation.org. And well, after a couple of days trying to translate this in Italian, but thank you very much and see you next time. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Good luck with your group. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Bye.