 Okay, why don't we go ahead and get started if you guys could settle down. So before I jump in, let me do two housekeeping announcements. First, many of you, I've said this privately, but just officially say once, well I've got y'all here for this last big talk that I'm giving. I'm at the Free Market Institute, which is located at Texas Tech University and it's a PhD granting program. So if you're interested in getting a PhD in economics and you wanna study with faculty and even do a dissertation that is Austrian, then we're a program you might wanna check out. We have funding and so forth. So I just wanted to officially say, the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech, check that out if that pertains to you. The other housekeeping announcement, just wanna talk about this for a second. So this is, yeah. All right, so this isn't a joke. There's good news and there's bad news. We just wanna be transparent. Unlike the GOP healthcare approach, we're gonna be fully transparent here. So the good news is we wanna make sure you know what this is. It's not like these are students who love Austrian economics and they also like to play around with the guitar in the garage once well. These are professional musicians coming in. They play in California, New York City, Nashville and they've come here for this event. They also happen to be libertarians and love Austrian economics and economics in general. That's why they associate with me. And so that's what they're here. But again, these are professional musicians that they're sure we're gonna put on. The problem is we just found out about this yesterday. There's an issue. I'm hoping it doesn't matter. I'm still gonna talk to you later. But it's possible that with the venue, they're having some trouble with the city and the fire code. And so it's conceivable that we can't get everybody in there all at the same time. So what we're doing is for sure, if you're going bring your name badge so that, cause we're telling the bouncers, okay, make sure the only people you let in are our people to at least make sure it's all our group. I'm not saying you have to wear it like walking around on a Friday night. I like Austrian economics. You don't have to do that. You know, girls, you can put it in your purse along with the six billion other things you have in there. I didn't really understand that situation. But okay, so just wanna make sure. So if especially it's a, the venue's gonna be great. I'm not trying to discourage you. It's gonna be awesome. We got a nice stage. There's a big dance floor. So especially if you're eager to dance tonight, come out. But the sooner you get there, the better in terms of making sure we get in there. And also, if you do happen to get there and you can't get it. I mean, there's plenty of stuff on Auburn on a Friday night. Where this place is, it's literally right around the corner from where Sky Bar is for those of you who've been going out there, right? So if you get there and you can't get in right that moment, you know, there's all kinds of stuff you can be doing. Maybe later, somebody else will be. It's sort of like fractional reserve banking, unfortunately, all right? Fractional reserve concert. All right. Okay, so today we're talking about the market for security just to clarify what this is. It's a, you know, a lot of these ideas we've been talking about, private is eight of things. And sometimes, you know, you take the logic and say, all right, a lot of people say, yeah, sure, I get post office, clearly free market incentives work there. Entrepreneurship, you don't need a monopoly. Even roads, not a big deal. Schools, clearly, okay, all this stuff you can think about charity, sure thing. But a lot of people when it comes to the law, you know, police protection, legal opinions, legal ruling, so forth, it seems like that clearly has to be something issued by a monopoly agency, right? And military defense also, that seems like something where yikes, I don't know about, you know, just turning that over to the free market, that seems kind of scary, all right? So this is, we do this later in the week and we don't want to scare you away early on. I think at this point, most people are familiar with this. It's not so radical. I do want to say though, it was about, this was over 10 years ago. I went to, I was still a grad student at the time and it was like Wednesday night or something and people are all sitting around talking. And there was this woman who was middle age that was, you know, there attending and she, in the middle of the conversations, I mean, the stuff I'm hearing this place is pretty radical. It's like, this sounds like anarchy. And everyone was like, awkward, you know, so. All right, so let's go ahead and just, let me just say as a blanket announcement, I mean, it is, I'm gonna try to focus on the positive case, another like building the stuff up and showing you how it would work. But again, for those of you who went to my economics of the stateless society talk, it's funny that the burden of proof is on us. Now here, it's more understandable why that's the case, but all the problems we have with monopoly and having the political system in charge of some service, that all still applies here. So it's always the case when, you know, you're in this situation thinking about one versus the other, there are all those standard reasons why other things equal. You would certainly want to have a service provided not by one group that's suddenly ordained to have the monopoly and be in charge of this. And also think of it this way, if you would be leery about letting the state be in charge of wheat production or healthcare, you know, because, oh geez, those are really important things. I wouldn't want, I wouldn't want a bunch of politicians in charge of whether I get fed or not. It's odd that you're gonna let a bunch of politicians be in charge of whether you go to inside a cage for the rest of your life or whether you get shipped off to war or whether they're gonna protect you from incoming ballistic missiles, right? These are pretty important things too. And so it's weird that if you wouldn't trust them to be in charge of lollipop production because they would screw it all up, they can be in charge of nuclear weapons, all right? So I'll say that just as the outset to frame it, but now I will take these obvious objections head on because again, this is obviously more difficult, both conceptually and practically than some of the other things like having mail delivery be privately produced. Another thing just that confuses people sometimes, so I personally am very sympathetic to pacifism coming from the Christian tradition and sometimes that confuses people. They say, Bob, you wrote a lot about private law and military defense, but I thought you, there really is nothing, there's no contradiction there and the reason I'm stressing it is just because I wanna make sure part of what you get from me says you is the distinction between what libertarian theory says and what your own personal value system is. So let me just quickly use an analogy. I also, with my value system, is think that being a heroin addict is immoral, that you're wasting the gifts God has given you and so on. Libertarian theory doesn't say it should be a crime to use heroin, right? So libertarian theory says you can't put someone in jail or use other kinds of physical force to prevent someone from using heroin or being a heroin addict, but that doesn't mean we have to say, hey, I'm not judging, do whatever you want, right? It's not just like the difference between vanilla and chocolate ice cream. It could be, I can't prove to you necessarily that it isn't like that, but the point is libertarian theory, per se, isn't about that sort of question, just about the acceptable use of force in certain situations. When are you allowed to use force to stop somebody from doing something? So I personally, even though I'm gonna be talking about this stuff, would not probably pay a lot of money to private defense agencies that are gonna use missiles and so forth in a free society, and I would be free to do that. I wouldn't be taxed to fund something, but as an economist, I can tell you what I think the market would likely look like. Just like as an economist, I could say if they legalized drugs tomorrow, here's what the market would look like. Well, they probably wouldn't legalize it on a Saturday. It'll probably wait till Monday, but if they legalized drugs on Monday, I could tell you as an economist what that market would look like, and it certainly wouldn't be me endorsing the consumers in that market. I'm just telling you what it would look like. All right. So I'm gonna spend more time, I think, in this talk on private law rather than private defense because to me, the conceptual challenge with this stuff comes with private law, right? Whereas if you stipulate that framework, if you just for a minute assume you could have voluntary relationships when it comes to legal rulings and so forth, or at least what would that mean to talk about introducing competition in the legal system? How could that work? I think that's the thing where there's the real stumbling block, right? Just the idea of the rule of law sounds like there's gotta be one agency that promulgates it, whereas military defense, that seems more like a practical problem. And so that's part of the emphasis I'm gonna give here in this talk. Before I forget, let me just mention, in case you want further reading, because at the end I might be rushed and I might forget to say it. So, Ethics of Liberty is a great spot for this sort of thing. Hans Hoppe has essays on private defense. I have a pamphlet called Chaos Theory, you can look up, I also have it, in essay called The Possibility of Private Law. Okay, so that's some reading where here I'm obviously gonna have to just skim over some of these topics quickly just to give you a broad taste of it, but those are some things for further reading. Okay, one way of trying to approach this is I wanna disarm you a little bit because admittedly things like, gee, you wanna have the rule of law, right? It seems crazy, how could there possibly be 19 different legal codes? I can see how there'd be competition in the fast food industry, and you've got Burger King, you've got Taco Bell, you've got all this stuff, but it seems weird. What does it even mean to say that we don't want a state monopoly when it comes to the legal code? So let me try to get you out of that mindset by showing you we don't have a monopoly in other areas where that same objection superficially might seem to work, but then it's pretty silly you can see, all right? So for example, when it comes to the science, so something like physics, we don't have a monopoly. It's not like there's a world government body that says this is what the acceptable body is that promulgates physics. Physics is a science, a field of open entry, right? But notice it's not haphazard, right? You could go around, there is a fact of the matter, a consensus, let's put it that way, of who the authorities are, right? That word authority, we can say there are authorities when it comes to physics right now, but it's clearly not based on coercion, right? It's not that they're in charge because ultimately they have more guns than anybody else, and I don't wanna dwell too long on it right now, and also even scientists might ultimately disagree philosophically about what's the nature, what constitutes that authority, how do they get it, and how do they demonstrate it, and why do people defer to them? But I hope we can all agree that, yes, there are people who are, the community would recognize and say they know a lot about physics, and these other people don't, and even within the physicists themselves. Of course there might be peddling rivalries and they might disagree and say, this guy's a genius, and somebody else will say, nah, he's a fraud, but there they would be petty personal disagreements. They would realize that yes, this person knows the standard stuff. He knows basic physics compared to some person off the street, all right? And again though, notice that there's no coercion involved there, and even though, and also throughout history times when science has been politicized, and we've seen this even in relatively free Western countries, right, with climate change debate and so on, but there's more famous examples of the Soviet Union and biology and so on about the politicization of science, and clearly that's not good for science, right? So the scientists themselves recognize you ultimately don't want state coercion involved in this stuff. They might say, oh, I wanna get my subsidies and so on, that's just because they want money. You can see how having political authorities say who are the good scientists and who are bad, that even scientists would recognize that wouldn't be a good idea, and of course, I think we all recognize throughout history that wasn't necessary. All right, so you might say, okay, fine, I grant you, you don't need this monopoly agency in charge of running science, and notice, science is very orderly, okay? It improves over time. I think we all agree that scientists know more now about physics and chemistry than the scientists from 1800 did. So there's definite progress there. There's open entry, so there's clearly a sense of freedom into the field of science. So typical arguments about why we need one group in charge of issuing legal pronouncements or deciding who owns that house over there, you realize, okay, if you thought that, if you thought there needs to be one group that has a monopoly to be able to say who's the legal owner of that house across the street, because otherwise it would be anarchy and people would be fighting and there would be no consensus. We wouldn't know, this group would say, Jim Smith owns that house and I'm saying, that sounds superficially plausible, like yeah, how could private legal systems work if different people are claim, and so again, what I'm just trying to say is, notice how silly that worry would be in the context of science, that well, gee, what if some physicists are saying that the moon has more mass than the sun and other ones are saying, how would we know? All right, are we gonna go measure it? That would be silly, you would realize, well yeah, maybe you couldn't really explain how they do know, but I think you realize that yeah, physicists are pretty sure about which is more massive than the other and there's no real fundamental disagreement on that and they didn't need to settle it with guns back in 1972, that they settled that question. Just like Tom and I like how sometimes people talk about states' rights and they say, wasn't that settled by the Civil War? What kind of argument is that? But all right, that's a separate thing. Now you might say, all right, I get your analogy, Murphy, with science, but the reason that's not a great analogy is that science, those are laws of nature that you're talking about, so there's experimental evidence if one physicist is saying one thing and somebody else is saying something else, there's experiments, you can make observations, it's empirical and so that's not really a great analogy for private legal rulings where to say who owns that house, that's not like a fact of the world, the way the mass of the moon is kind of an objective fact. So that's not really a great analogy. Okay, what about then the definitions of words? That's clearly not a fact of nature, that's a human convention, right? Humans through our actions, our speaking patterns and writing patterns, we determine collectively in some sense what words mean, right? And notice it evolves over time. If you try to read Shakespeare, it's clearly English but it's a different kind of English from what people right now with their LOLs and so forth, right? So you see how language evolves over time but yet at any, does that mean, oh, it's just anarchy, you can say whatever you want? No, at any given time, there is a fact of the matter to see is this sentence grammatical, there's a fact of the matter, okay? And now also, I mean, you can push this analogy as far as you want and actually I think language is a pretty good analogy for legal codes because it has all the, or it has several of the attributes that you would want where there's clear cut cases, you know, say, I've done gone to the store today, that's clearly not grammatical, right? But if somebody says, oh, who'd you go to the store with? Some people might say, oh, that's ungrammatical. You can't end a sentence with a preposition. Other people would say, eh, actually, a lot of people do it and the usage has made it change. It's fine. Or with whom shall I go to the store today? You know, some people say, I can say with who, it's fine, right? So I'm saying there's disagreements there and at any given time, some people might be sticklers, but so it's, I think it's very analogous to private law where there's certain things that are clear cut that the community is gonna recognize immediately. Any expert in the field is gonna say, yeah, you're just out in the park and some mother's pushing her baby in the stroller and you pick up a rock and go and drop it on the baby, that's illegal, that's against the law, right? And no serious legal scholar is gonna say otherwise and you can say, well, how would you know that? Well, how do you notice that I done gone at the store today is wrong? You know it's wrong, how do you know it's wrong? You know what I'm saying? So it's, we can get real philosophical, but there's no doubt that just going and dropping rocks on babies is wrong, okay? I mean, unless the baby attacked you, but. So by the way, one of the baby crawlers, he's got a lot of drool going on. So I'm just saying this. I don't wanna get in on this jacket. All right, so, okay, but I'm being serious. So you see there, whereas it's sort of like, okay, what if somebody is running at me with a knife? Can I punch him or something? And I think probably most legal scholars in the kind of culture that we're talking about, with a lot of us, let's assume we're talking about the United States, if everyone read Rothbard all of a sudden and just went anarcho-capitalist, what kind of legal system would arise in that framework, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about right now. So in some other culture where people had vastly different religious views and it might be different what a private legal system would produce, but I have in mind something like Western Europe or the United States, if the major change was simply, they thought, oh yes, we don't need to use coercion in the legal system. Let's try and make everything voluntary with a market. But other than that, they had their same opinions about property rights, all right? So in that kind of a framework, I believe at least early on in the first few decades of that type of a system, clearly all the reputable judges, the ones who had business who were working as judges would agree if somebody is run up to me with a knife and is trying to kill me and I pop them or something that that's not, I haven't committed a crime. They say, no, that's justifiable self-defense. Now where they might start to say, what if somebody's running up to me and they don't have any weapon and I pull out a gun and shoot them in the head, now it starts to get a little bit grayer, right? That's kind of like saying, do I have to say with whom shall I go to the store and some people might disagree? Okay, so I'm trying to show you that that's the kind of disagreements where there would be. So it's not that when I say there would be a fact of the matter and consensus, I mean on real standard, easy to answer black and white questions and then there would be gray areas. But notice, in case that troubles you, you're like, aha, see, there wouldn't be a rule of law in your system. You're already admitting there'd be, well there's disagreement right now, right? If you go and even in the United States, there's not the rule of law meaning the same rules apply to everybody. In certain states, you can get the death penalty, in other states you can't, okay? In certain states, one type of thing might be a crime altogether, in other states it might like the legal drinking age or something could be different theoretically. Okay, so notice there's not the rule of law and certainly if you start going from country to country around the world, things are different. Okay, so introducing the state and that apparatus doesn't give us the rule of law anyway. The way, if what you mean by that is every single human being has to have the same laws applied to them and later in the lecture, I might come back to this point but when you start thinking through, okay, yeah, but I really would like as much as possible for there to be consensus in the same rules. I think actually a market would give you that more so than the state system because with the state system, often what can happen is the groups in contiguous regions might have elections that only pertain there and then the representatives could go past the law so you could have fundamental differences from this state to that state, like can places sell beer on Sunday and you just go two miles and all of a sudden the rules totally change, right? And so that kind of thing I don't think would differ just like opinions on grammar and so on, you wouldn't think would have such quick, sharp distinction if you just go two miles one way and all of a sudden things are totally different, generally speaking. Okay, you might say, all right, I get your dictionary analogy. Let me say one more thing about this because this is again, I think the best analogy for picking something that's obvious we can all think about, what does a dictionary itself do, right? The actual dictionary, the publishers of dictionaries, are they defining words, right? So if Webster's publishes a new edition and it comes out and you look up the word UP, UP and it says moving towards the floor, would you say, whoa, I had no idea, right? You wouldn't do that. You would say they got the definition wrong. What a bunch of idiots. And people would like tweet it around and make fun of them. Nobody would say I was, I stand corrected. They would all be making fun of look at the stupid typo that somehow slipped through their editing process. Webster's gets the definition wrong, right? They would be a laughing stock. They would have to quickly correct it. What if for some reason they didn't and what if that error or that type of error was for more obscure words where it wasn't obvious to people what the word meant but actually they were giving what the experts said. What the heck? No, that's clearly not what that word means, right? Like what if they had oxymoron? Paul Krugman, right? That might seem plausible to many people but you'd realize, no, that's not the definition. What is it? So what would happen? Webster's would go out of business. They would stop being the go-to people that publish dictionaries. It's not that all of a sudden people wouldn't know what words meant. It just means that company would go out of business. They would have for some foolish reason squandered their position and some other authority would rise to fill the vacuum and people would go to them, okay? So again, notice there, it's not that the people publishing dictionaries or style manuals for grammar usage, you know when you're writing a term paper and you say, oh gee, let me go see. The teacher wants me to use the Chicago manual and you go look up how do I cite things for the works that I cite? What's the format? Do I put the author for it? Do I put it the date parentheses? What do I, that stuff, yeah, there are facts to the matter. There are conventions, but again, if somebody botched that and started just saying stuff that was totally wrong, they would fall away. And notice also that again, there's competition within there. It provides uniformity, but then if there's some new standard that arises and eventually people say, yeah, actually that's more convenient, right? I've even noticed that in my career, the way we cite papers has changed, right? Now you just do like the author's name in the year in parentheses. It looks kind of ugly compared to the old school way, but it's more efficient, right? It's easier just to look things up that way than having a footnote or something and saying Ibbid. That's just cool, you guys flip back 19 pages to see what's the Ibbid referring to, all right? So again, it might seem like I'm saying something kind of trivial, but that's a crucial point that Paul Krugman is not an oxymoron right now. The crucial point is that the companies that codify these things, that's what they're doing, they're codifying definitions. They're saying what the community knows these definitions are through their usage patterns, all right? So similarly, in a private legal system, if some judge has people come before him or her arguing a case, what is the judge doing? The judge is rendering an opinion, right? Notice that's the actual word we use. Even in our current system, the judge writes an opinion saying this is my interpretation of the relevant facts of this case and how the law applies to this particular dispute. That's what a judge does in principle, in essence, and that's what a judge would do even in a private legal system, all right? So I'll come back to this in a minute. So how would the judge know what the law was? Well, they would go to school, just like now how do experts in grammar know what the right word usage is? Well, because they study it and so on, and there's books written on it by authorities. But again, it's not that any one group has the power to make definitions. They're merely codifying things. Even though the community over time does have the power to change definitions, right? We as English speakers kind of control what English words mean by the way we use them, and that's how language can evolve over time, just as in a private legal system, it would have to evolve too, right? That in the year 1500, they didn't have property rights regarding radio spectrum. They wouldn't even know what that was. Whereas there is some scarcity involved and so there's an issue of am I stealing something if I have a pirate radio station, right? So I'm not taking a stance on those issues, but clearly that's something that the legal system would have to talk about once people began using radios and broadcasting signals, and then if somebody else was interfering with it, there was some issue there about it. Do we need property rights in the electromagnetic spectrum? So the legal system would have to evolve too. And so I'm saying that just because that happens doesn't mean therefore, oh, there's gotta be some group in charge of it with a monopoly. It doesn't mean that. Okay, you might say, okay, fine, yes, the dictionary, that's a better analogy, or language is a better analogy than natural science was. But the other problem Murphy with this thing is there's not a lot at stake. The definition of up, it's not like billions of dollars stand to change hands based on that. And so you wouldn't expect Websters to be corrupt. That their business is just codifying language just to help us communicate. It's not, there's not really a big issue there. Whereas property titles, the people in charge of defining who is the owner of that house, that's a big deal. And so we might worry about corruption there. Well, I mean, yes, that is true. So that's why the analogy is not perfect. It's not that spoken language is literally the same thing as property titles. But let me push that. Or do you really think, so here I've got just various definitions of physical constants. So what if I have a contract with somebody and I say, I'm gonna spend, I agree, I'm gonna spend 10 ounces of gold to buy three cows. And so then the guy gives me his three cows and I give him an ounce of silver. And he's, what are you doing? The contract said, I said, oh no, when I wrote 10, 10 to me is what you think of as this. I just use a different definition. And yeah, for me, gold, that's not the yellow thing you think of. I'm thinking of the silver thing. So there you go. Or I would hold up the silver coin and say, this is gold to me. That's what I would say that'd be right. So suppose I get my brother-in-law to agree and say, yes, I'm Earl, the person in charge of definitions and weights and measures in this jurisdiction. And I agree that that's what those words mean. Is Earl gonna be a reputable member of the community who people are gonna listen to when he says that what 10 means is this quantity? No, no one's gonna listen to him. And even if somehow if we had enough guns and we're pointing it and say, everyone agrees, right? And they're like, yeah. Everyone inside is gonna know these guys are just stealing from us. Okay, so it's not gonna be where the community, geez, we just don't know what 10 means. Huh, there's an honest disagreement. No, everyone's gonna know what 10 means and that they got ripped off. And so I'm saying just like with dropping the rock on the baby in the park and so on, there's gonna be standard things of the legal code that the community will know. All right, and it's, yes, we can get real philosophical and say, well, how do they know that, man? Yes, that's an important question, but you know it's wrong to drop a rock on a baby and you know some guy paid money to the person that everybody thought owned that land, got wood and so forth, lumber, built a house and all these things and that's been in the family for six generations and someone else walks up who's never been around and says, oh, that's my house and I have 15 guys with guns who agree with me. Maybe he's gonna get away with it just out of fear but no one's gonna think there's some honest disagreement now with the property titles. Okay, there's gonna clear cut black and white cases that everyone's gonna agree on and yeah, there will be borderline cases of disagreement and you'll need expert opinion and judges might even overturn other judges' opinions but that happens right now, right? So it's not that introducing the state solves the problem of genuine honest disagreement. Getting rid of a monopoly though does allow the fact that when there's clear cut cases where true experts all agree on something, we can at least be sure the legal code will endorse that whereas right now there's all kinds of crazy stuff that people with their common sense know is absurd and unjust and yet that goes through as legal. Okay, let's give it walk through a specific example, the TV thief. All right, at some point I'm gonna have to change this because people are gonna be like, what's a TV? But you guys do know what a TV right here. So I come home and I see somebody walking out of my apartment and they have a TV and they run away and I get inside and my TV's gone. All right, so what do I do? I have footage on the camera showing the person leaving. It looks like it's my neighbor who lives down the street from me. I'm pretty sure I know. I go and I peek in and he now is looking at a TV that looks very similar to the one that I just had stolen. Okay, so what do I do? I could now in terms of standard libertarian theory and probably your own personal moral code, if I'm absolutely sure that that's my TV, I can, I have the right to just kick in the door to give me my TV and a guy says no and I can go and grab it. And there's question about what can I do? Like what if he, you know, says over my dead body? I'm like, oh yeah? No. So there's a question about what could I do if he really tries to get in my way and stop me? But clearly if it's truly my TV, I can go take it back. But the question, but that's not really the issue, right? So if I did that, right, if I just kicked the door or if I went to some agency that has a bunch of real burly guys who have flak jackets and stuff and said, hey, this guy stole my TV, they're not just gonna follow me down and on my say so kick in the guy's door and go retrieve it because the community might say, whoa, what are you doing? You're stealing that guy's TV, Murphy, what are you? Right, so I need to first prove to the community or demonstrate good faith that that really is my TV. Not again because of some deep-seated moral reason, I might be absolutely sure that it is my TV and so long as I'm right, I think most people with their moral system would agree, yeah, I can go retrieve my actual TV from the thief, but the question is that would be reckless, that would be a silly thing to do in a community and there also might be contractual things. Like if I'm living in a gated community, I mean there might be things I sign going into it saying in the events of a serious dispute with one of your neighbors, you agree to submit to arbitration, there could be stuff like that so it's not so much from a natural rights reason but perhaps I've signed something saying in a situations like this, I'm agreeing ahead of time how to handle it. But even if I don't have such a contract that pertains, nonetheless in the interest of getting along with the community and not making people worry that maybe I'm a hothead, it would be good for me to do it the right way, go through the proper channels. So what would I do? I would mask as much evidence as I could. If I had a video footage, I have the receipt from Best Buy, when I bought that TV, did all the stuff I can do and then there would be experts available who specialize in small amounts of theft, right? Did there be certain experts who specialize in labor disputes? If employees think they're not being paid enough or they're vacation times, there'd be employees who are judges who specialize in product, some of the product blows up on you or something, you get a shock from the other people on that. Environmental law, there'd be all sorts of different experts in various areas. So I would go to somebody who was listed, who was reputable, known in the community for excellence and fairness in rulings pertaining to cases like breaking and entering and small amounts of property theft. So I would go present all the evidence. Perhaps I would even say to the person, my neighbor, say, okay, look it, here's something, there's 10 people in this zip code who specialize in this. I'm willing to take my case to any one of them you pick and what the person, no, no, I'm not doing it. No, those guys are a bunch of frauds, I don't trust them, I don't trust judges. Now I'm getting more and more evidence of the community would start to say, okay, I think Murphy's in the right, this guy's the thief, right? So either the guy agrees or not and then I go to the judge and I get an official ruling, right? So I go, I'll tell you how stupid I am. I've been doing this talk forever and I used to use Hans Hoppe as the legal thing and I think, what am I doing? There's literally a judge who comes to me as you. I'll use him instead, all right. This is the second year I've had that epiphany, all right. So have him issue the legal opinion, okay? So again, it's not that the judge in this case is defining what the property title is. It's not that the judge has the authority to create my ownership and say, ah, I dictate or I issue a, by fiat, I declare that that TV is Murphy. No, he's saying the evidence I've seen and my understanding of property law is irrelevant in this context. The facts of the case, in my opinion, I believe that yes, the preponderance of the evidence comes down in the favor that Robert Murphy is in fact the rightful owner, something like that, all right. So then I go, this is crucial and this is where I think standard expositions on what's called anarchal capitalism. I mean, not that they're wrong, but I think it's, I empirically, I disagree empirically about how the markets would organize themselves and I also think it sounds more palatable to the outsider when we say it this way. I don't think it would be the same company that would decide who's in the right and then also execute enforcement of that decision. I think these would be separate things. The legal opinion's one thing and then the agency that has big strong people with, you know, flak jackets and whatever and those big plastic, you know, things that police use so they get, you know, protection shields and so on. I think those would be separate agencies. I mean, they're quite distinct functions but I don't see why it would happen to be the same agency. So I would just take his ruling, his opinion and then go to one of those reputable agencies and say, look it, here's this, now will you come and get my TV? And then they say, sure, okay. So then they send in the goons to come get it. It's Tom DeLorenzo. It's hard to see in the back because of the lighting but it's Tom DeLorenzo, all right. So you see how that's different. So again, that company, so how does he stay in business? Either him as a sole proprietor, as an expert at large or working for a law firm by issuing fair, issuing rulings that are quite fair in the eyes of the community. If it were ever discovered that one of the sides in a case was slipping him money under the table and that's why he'd be out of business, all right. So I can't guarantee that won't ever happen but the penalties to him, the incentives for him are a lot swifter and sureer than they would be for a government or a state system where the judges are, either they have to win an election every once in a while or they're appointed by the political process. Okay, because it's not that you get rid of corruption by having politics be involved, obviously not. And then how would these people stay in business? Right, the people who take, so for one thing is they wouldn't act on cases that hadn't been decided upon by a reputable judge or some other entity that was known to give trustworthy legal opinions, right. They wouldn't just go bash down somebody's door because some client showed up with a bunch of money and said, hey, I need 10 guys with guns, come on, we're going. That's, they would not be a big reputable company in the community. There might be a little petty gangs and so on just like there are right now. I'm not saying that thing would be unheard of but to be a big reputable company that people just know, oh, that's where you go to have an enforcement of a ruling to retrieve stolen property, they would only act on rulings done by reputable judges also notice when they do kick in the door, are they going to like send in chemical weapons that have been banned at international warfare that might kill any children in the house? Probably not, right. And what I'm alluding to is that that's what, you know, the BATF Janet Reno did back with Waco. If you don't know what that is, just go look that up. All right. So all sorts of horror stories about police called police, overreaction, police doing things too aggressively. I'm not talking about necessarily cases of brutality but just where they use more force than they really need to to bring somebody into custody, things like that. That sort of stuff, even whether or not it's legal or not in this world, right? Maybe there would be some sort of thing where the legal code would say, oh, yes, if you're trying to enforce a just property decision and the person resists or gets in your way, even if that's it, they're gonna go out of business, right? Cause it just looks bad. If you send in a bunch of people and there's a 15 year old sitting there playing video games and he says, hey, what do you got? And they say, shut up. And they just, you know, smack them and knock them out. And he goes to the hospital. That's not good for business. Whether or not that the person gets in legal trouble for doing that, right? Certainly the company is gonna get rid of the person and the company is, you know, it's gonna engage in better training and so on. I don't think they're gonna use, you know, particularly strong armed tactics. I think they will try to just resolve the situation as peacefully as possible. Okay. So because of competition. All right. Handle that sort of case. Now let me move on here. I know there's all sorts of questions just from the TV example, but let me move on to hit some other topics. So would there be prisons in a free society? So on one hand, that seems like an, you know, an oxymoron that seems impossible. How could it be? But on the other hand, you say, well, wait a minute. When we say free in this context, what do I mean? I'm saying a society where the default presumption is we always respect people's property rights. We never try to steal or aggress against somebody. And you might say, well, okay, then everybody's for a free society. No, they're not. Everyone is not for a free society. Well, they are, except you'll say, oh, so even when it comes to state employees. And they'll say, well, what do you mean? I say, okay, so you agree. Like, if I don't support the stuff that U.S. empires or the military is doing overseas, I load the deck there. If I don't support the stuff the U.S. military is doing overseas, I don't want to pay for that. You know, so I'll just, I just will reduce my taxes, right? No, of course not. We're gonna take more. And if I don't pay, then ultimately people will come and throw me in a cage, right? So there it's not that they think I've broken any other laws, committed crimes against my neighbor or so on. It's just I've refused to pay for a service that I never agreed to. So that's what I mean when I say a free society is one in which that sort of thing doesn't happen. It certainly doesn't happen institutionally the way it happens in a status society, one that has coercion as a central element in it, not just as something that happens once in a while and we try to minimize it. So in a society like that, could there be prisons? I think there would be a lot less of it than there is in any kind of state analog given the same type of people. So with all this stuff also, I know I'm trying to throw a lot of information at you. Let me say, well, I'm thinking of it with all these things, you want to be doing apples to apples. You want to say the same type of people with their value system, their proclivities, the violence, their willingness to engage in public discussions before they rush to use their guns to settle a matter. Hold those things constant and just say, would a group who believes in the state versus ones who say, no, we just, we can't use that. It's unacceptable, it's immoral. We refuse to anoint this group that has monopoly coercive power over the rest of us. Those two groups, then how would things play out? That's really the issue. So I think the free society, analog of that same population of people, there would be a lot fewer people in prison per capita. But if it were to happen, how would it happen? So here, I don't think we need to get tied up with the question of, well, gee, how would, like from a natural rights perspective, it's kind of tricky to say, how can you go like tackle somebody and put them in a vehicle and then put them in a cage and hold them there for 10 years and not hold them there for eight? Like that's not enough, but 10's the right number or holding there for 15, right? It's a lot of the stuff we think of is in terms of imprisoning people, it seems kind of arbitrary. And so I think there is a big problem there in terms of standard libertarian punishment theory, and how would you get that to pop out of the other end of the analysis? So I think fortunately, you don't need to worry about that, that just remember in a free society, every piece of land, every square meter is owned by somebody, right? And so everybody clearly has the right to say who can and cannot be on my property. So if there's some guy running around and the judge has ruled that, yes, you know, all these people we keep finding dead, we think it's this person, he's a serial killer, then you as a store owner can say, I don't want you in my mall, you know? Just the whole serial killing thing, you know? Hey, more power to you, but just I don't want you on my property, okay? I'm not saying what you're doing is wrong, just not on my property, right? Everybody can say that all the apartment, you know, no one has to rent them an apartment, they would be pariahs, okay? So again, now you can, we can talk about the family members of the deceased, can they hunt them down? Yeah, there's all that stuff. I'm not minimizing, but I'm saying clearly, you can say if there's some wanted criminal and people know this person has been ruled by a reputable court to be guilty of murder, multiple counts of murder, no one's gonna hire them, no one's gonna sell food to them to get out of here, right? So there'll be social pariahs, so what would happen to those people? I'm saying there would be oases of relative, you know, guarded freedom, if you will, where companies would arise and they would say, hey, people like that, you can come here, now we're gonna patch you down and give you a new outfit or make sure you're not smuggling weapons in or whatever, we might have you, you know, heavily restrict your movements, but when you come in here, you can work and we'll interview you, see your skills, we'll provide you with a workstation, what have you, and you can be here, all right? We'll try to rehabilitate you, particularly if it's a religious or sort of philanthropic organization, but it could also just be a profit maximizing business. There could be people out there who have good job skills, it's just they have anger management issues, right? And so it's just like, you wanna build a bridge that way, you know, but the guys are really good engineer, it's just you don't wanna be around them when you disagree, all right? So there could be places like that where they could earn money, right? Cause think of it right now, it's so wasteful what the state system does, you've got people sitting there breaking rocks or making license plates, right? I mean, it's just, that would drive you crazy too. You think we're gonna reform somebody, you know, have them doing completely useless things, well, they know they did something wrong, right? And so in this kind of framework, there might be this big pending judgment and say, yes, you killed this person, you owe that person's estate, whatever, $400,000, okay? And so now maybe you work that debt off and you live in this restricted thing because the community doesn't trust you, but maybe once you pay the thing off and you're perfectly model citizen inside this community for 10 years, psychologists sign off on it, maybe then you get more and more freedom, other places have degrees of okay, yeah, you can be over here, some elementary school is not gonna hire you to be a third grade teacher, right? Which maybe you can live in an assembly line, you're working in an assembly line and live in an apartment where there's other adults and they know that with the situation, okay, you get the idea, I think that system would be much more humane and would be truly more likely to rehabilitate people because they actually could feel like they paid their debt and could get out with their lives whereas what the state does right now, you do some petty crime, you get thrown in a cage mixed in with people who are killers, right? That's not gonna, that's gonna mess you up and the guards don't protect you in there, right? That's a horrible system, right? Designed to just produce more crime. Okay, the other thing about this is it's kind of like the hotel California, all right. So, but notice there's competition here, okay? And so there's not gonna be the guards beating up prisoners because if there were, the people would just go to a competing place, right? Is these places are trying to attract residents, right? So yeah, it's like a prison but it's a very odd type of prison where the people want to be there because they know at least I can be here and people will let me step on this property and not think I'm a pariah. Okay, in two minutes, I'm gonna do private defense. You guys ready? Hold on. Okay, now it's a private law, I said that's the hard part. Private defense, again, go to my pamphlet chaos theory to get this. It's insurance companies, right? How does that work? So a picture of big city like New York City, insurance companies, if a big skyscraper burns down, how do you have fire insurance? Okay, so what if there's a chance that some outside country state is gonna have their battleships come in and start shelling it? You could have insurance to protect against it. So that's where the funding would come from. You don't need taxation. You could have billions of dollars going through big, huge companies from people buying insurance against being invaded by a military or having your stuff blown up or being captured or killed from an outside military, whether state or private. And then it would be the insurance companies now that would have the incentive to go ahead and fund things, missile-based land or surface-to-air missiles, things like that. I don't think there would be huge standing armies. They certainly wouldn't have swastikas. That would just be horrible for business. Why would they do that? But I don't think there'd be large standing armies. Just why would you, you wouldn't need them. That would be crazy, just like in general, businesses try to produce their services and products with as little manpower as possible to keep labor costs down, all right? So the whole enterprise of military defense, I think in a private setting, you would have all the advantage of economic calculation and so forth in that setting. All right, you'd have competition. There would be prices. So let's say there's an outside state that's getting ready to invade the insurance companies would run the numbers and they would say, okay, we've got hundreds of billions of dollars of our insurance, our clients property insured on the line here. We stand to lose hundreds of billions, us as the insurance company. So you know what, if somebody could knock out one of those enemy choppers, we would be willing to pay $15,000 for that. We've run the numbers. That's how much it would help us. If somebody takes out one of their infantry, we would pay up to $1,200 for that. So there would be market prices bounties on the opposing forces and it would be specific and it would be quantitative and the numbers wouldn't be arbitrary. They could run it and say, oh, because they can do this much damage to our stuff and lives would also have a property value too in terms of the insurance, life insurance. Okay, so that's where the numbers would come from. You would get market competition. Different firms would enter. Last thing I'll say, you wouldn't have all your eggs in one basket. For some reason people say, oh, a bunch of people who read Rothbard a little group of anarchists, how would they have stopped Nazi Germany? Well, they wouldn't have, but France didn't stop Nazi Germany either. Okay, so it's having a state doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't make your troops better. It doesn't make them shoot better. It doesn't give you more tanks. We know in any other area, having the state in charge cripples it and the same would be true here. All right, thanks everybody.