 Guido opened with some jokes. I'm not going to have any jokes, but I'll open with a little lighthearted humor. This is my iPhone's ringtone, my default ringtone. My wife really loves that. Restaurants. Okay, my topic is my title is selling does not imply ownership owning and vice versa a dissection. So I want to explore two related beliefs which I think are fallacious and they stem from confusions about core libertarian principles and confusions introduced by the sloppy use of language and overuse of metaphorical thinking. And by the way, I did touch on this topic in less detail at the PFS here in 2011 when I talked about a bunch of libertarian misconceptions and also in libertarian controversies lecture from Mises Academy about ten years ago. So the first one. Ownership implies selling. Walter Block uses this a lot. In fact, I heard him say it last week again in Nashville at the Libertarian Scholars Conference. So the idea is this. If you own yourself or your body, you should be able to sell it. So voluntary slavery contracts should be enforceable. And if the legal system does not permit voluntary slavery, then it means you really don't own yourself. Right? So the implicit assumption there is that one aspect of ownership is the right or ability to sell. Fallacy two. Selling implies ownership. So some contracts that we're used to are exchanges of own things like a simple one like an apple for an orange, 10 chickens for a pig, one ounce of gold for a horse or $3 for a cup of coffee. Now we also have labor contracts where it's considered to be a sale of a service which implies that you own your labor because you sold it. And also is the sale of knowledge, information or know how like teachers who get paid to give information, publish your speakers. And this argument is also used to argue for intellectual property. People say, well, if you can sell your ideas, you must have owned it. So intellectual property is a legitimate concept. Similarly with Bitcoin, the idea is that Bitcoin can be possessed and sold. So it's also said to be owned by the proponents of Bitcoin, of which I'm one. Now, let's revisit some elementary categories of libertarian thought. So first of all, action is what when humans in the world employ means or scarce resources as tools to help achieve their ends or goals. And when there's society, there's a possibility of conflict. Now it's good that we live in society because we have the division of labor, trade and intercourse with other people. But there can also be conflict among actors or humans in the use of these scarce resources, including our bodies because of the nature of these resources. So what this means is the scarce resources which we employ as human actors in a purely economic sense are precisely things over which there can be conflicts. So sometimes to avoid confusion in recent years, I will refer to these things as contestable or conflictable resources. They're the types of things over which there can be conflict. Because quite often intellectual property proponent will say something like, well, I don't know about you, but good ideas is pretty scarce. So they can't say good ideas are conflictable, though. Now in civilized society, property or ownership rights are assigned to reduce this conflict. So what are property rights? All rights are human rights and all human rights just are property rights because the very purpose of property rights is to avoid conflict over scarce resources. So ownership means property rights. So to own a thing is to have a property right in the thing. So it's actually better to refer to property as the relationship between a person and a thing, although over time we sometimes are careless with language and we will refer to the thing itself as property. Like we'll say that car is my property. But precise language would be I have a property right in that thing, in that car, or I own that car. So ownership and property rights. A property right in a thing gives the owner the right to use it. This is what property rights are. Now to be more precise, which is this procedure is not necessary for today's discussion, but owning a thing actually does not give you the right to use it, but it gives you the right to prevent others from using it. It's an exclusionary right. As a practical matter, that usually gives you the ability to use the thing. So for example, if you own a gun, that means you can prevent anyone else from using the gun. But it doesn't mean you have the unlimited right to use the gun because other people have property rights, and their property rights prescribe your actions. So I can't use the gun to shoot someone. Now most people make the mistake of saying, well, this shows that property rights are limited. But this is actually not not correct. The reason I can't shoot the gun in my neighbor is because he has a property right in his own body. And it's a limitation on what actions I can perform. It's not a limitation on my property rights in my gun. In fact, if I was if I had a stolen gun, which I didn't own, I still couldn't shoot my neighbor. So the ownership of the gun is not limited by property rights. This mistake is used also to argue for intellectual property because people will say, I'll point out that intellectual property rights restrict other property rights. So they're actually an infringement of property rights because they're they're effectively an unconsented negative servitude. Because if I have a patent, I can prevent you from using your factory to make iPhones. So that's a limitation on your use of your property. And the response will be, well, all property rights limit other people's property rights. But that's not true. Property rights limit only actions. And the owner of a factory making iPhones is not committing any action that invades the borders of anyone else's property. So that's why that's that's another fallacy. It's a related fallacy, but not the one I'm addressing directly today. So libertarianism property rights. So the purpose of property rights is to permit conflicts over the use of scarce resources to be avoided. So they slime these exclusive rights so that others can avoid the conflict. So how does this work? The property rights are assigned in accordance with whoever, which whoever actor has the best link or connection to the resource. This is the only way you could have a workable system of property rights, because any system of property rights has to be voluntarily respected. And for it to be voluntarily respected, it has to be seen as objectively fair, which means it can't be based upon arbitrary differences like I have the right to you and you don't have the right to me because I'm me and you're you. That's a particularistic rule. Or I have the right to your land because I'm stronger. Those types of arguments and justifications are reasons are not justifications. There has to be an objective best link. So how does that work out? In Western private law and in libertarianism, which is a far more consistent working out of this, there are basically two types of links. The type of link applied to your body, which is a unique scarce resource, and the type of link applied to external resources in the world, which were previously unowned. So for the body, the link is a self ownership link. You own your body and the reason is because of your direct control over it, which I'll get to in a minute. And then for scarce resources in the world, they're always owned first by someone first using them from their own state. That's called homesteading or original appropriation. And then ownership can be transferred for two reasons. Contractually, that's a voluntary transfer of title of the resource to someone else of your ownership title, either by sale or by gift or rectification, which can be seen as a subset of contract because it's also a transfer of title from an owner to someone. But it's because the owner committed a harm, like a tort against the victim and gave him a right to recover some of the aggressor's property. So homesteading contract and rectification are the basically the only three principles. So these four principles are how we determine the best link. And this the core of all property rights in every socialist system and every law that deviates from this, they always end up deviating deviating from this in one way or the other, including intellectual property. Now, so we commonly say self ownership. This is another phrase that can be misleading because you can have people object to it and say, well, how can you own yourself because that's a religious view because it implies that yourself is different than your body or something like that. And they'll criticize it that way. So to be precise, self ownership is just a shorthand for body ownership because your body is a scarce resource. Your self is not a scarce resource. Self is bound up with the concept of personality and the person that you are, your identity as a person in the world, as an actor, as an agent. So every person is the presumptive owner of his body. This is the basic libertarian rule. Now I say presumptive because it's not absolute. The right can be lost by committing aggression because the victim has the right to defend himself during a crime or to retaliate after. And when they do that they are using the body of the aggressor without his consent. So he's in a sense lost ownership of his body to the extent that the victim needs to be able to use force against the aggressor. So the basis here is not homesteading but it's the direct control over your body. This is the best link between a given actor and the resource of his human body. And actually I think the first person who is explicit in explicitly recognizing this was Professor Hoppe in a German publication in 1985. You actually weren't explicit about this in your in your later English book but it's implicit in there. And if you remember I found you told me about that passage and you translated it for me for my article. And so Hoppe's argument is that you own your body because you directly control it. So each this gives each person or actor logical temporal priority or precedence as compared to any anyone's indirect control. What that means is if you were to enslave someone or claim to own their body the only way to control that body is by coercion by directing threats of force to get them to act the way you want them to act. But in that case they're the ones still directly controlling it and that always has precedence and it's a better link than the indirect control I can exert over you by coercion. Not to mention that the coercer himself would be in contradiction because he claims ownership of his body for the purpose of being the one who can punish you or threaten you. So this is what the best link means here. It's not homesteading although people think it's homesteading. It can't be homesteading because to homestead means you're an actor in the world and you find an unknown resource and you appropriate it to yourself. But this presupposes there's already a person with a body. So it's impossible to imagine that you homestead your your body unless you have some some religious view where the soul is goes down there and grabs it but that's not the domain of science as I think Guido and Mises would agree. We could make an analogy. We could say that when a child wakes up at the right moment when he becomes sapient enough to be said to have rights he homesteads himself but it's really it's really a loose analogy. It just means that's the point in time in which he's a person with rights. It's not like his body was unowned and he just homesteaded it. Now for external resources these are things that are previously unowned. This is a key point and they're external to the human body so they're not part of people's bodies. So in this case as I said earlier the best link is determined by the three principles. First we have original appropriation or homesteading. What this means is you possess something which is an economic category. It means to be able to use or manipulate. Mises I'll get to this later but Mises calls it sociological I'm sorry calls it catalactic or sociological ownership but what he really means is possession. So mere possession like Crusoe on an island he can never own anything because there's no society to have norms with respect to. He controls and he uses things he possesses these things as means but he doesn't own them. In society you can also do the same thing you can just possess something and not intend to own it and you pick up a stick and throw it away or you can possess it with the intent to own and you take certain steps to transform it or to put a berry up around it or to as Hoppe calls it in border it which basically means to put up a visible public link between you and the thing demonstrating to everyone this thing is no longer unowned I'm owning it. So this requires the merger of the combination of actual possession or transformation or in bordering with the intent to own. So those two things are essential to owning a thing that was previously unowned and then once you own a thing you can contractually transfer it to someone by your intent and I'll get to the mechanics of that in a moment and then again rectification if you have to transfer something to someone to compensate them for damages you caused them. Okay. Oh and by the way this formulation of rights that I just went through this way of looking at the best link and the breakdown between the body I'm happy that I was able to help the Mises caucus in the US get the this basic formulation put into the Libertarian Party platform last May and the Reno reset we call it. I won't read it here but it's basically exactly how I put it and the reason was there was no definition of aggression in the Libertarian Party platform it was just implied getting back to the problem of confusing selling and ownership thinking there's a necessary relation between them how do we sell it an external resource that we own like the contractual title transfer we talked about early. So when you own a resource because the ownership requires the merger of possession and the intent to own you can lose it by losing the intent to own by making it clear I no longer intend to own this it's called abandonment. So if you acquire a thing you can unacquire it and because of this ability it gives you the right to sell because you can basically abandon it in favor of someone else. Imagine you're on a tree and you have an apple and there's people walking you can kind of toss the apple to whoever you want you can direct this you can direct the rehomesthetic in a fence in effect. You know so if I have an apple I can and I give it to you to hold temporarily you're the possessor but you're not the owner but I'm the owner but I'm not the possessor so ownership and possession is distinct but if you're holding my apple and I abandon it now you're holding an unowned apple and you can just re-homestead it right away so that's how the mechanics the juristic or legal mechanics of why and how you can sell things. So the way that we come to own unowned resources is the reason why they can be sold so it's not an incident it's not an aspect of ownership per se it's an aspect of the way external things come to be owned. Now what about selling yourself like Walter Block thinks we can do so external things can be sold because they were previously unowned or acquired by an actor owner who is already a self-owner and they can abandon it but your body rights don't arise by homesteading or by your intent to own yourself they arise because of the best link based upon your direct control so if you try to make a contract I promise to sell or I promise to be your slave forever those words do not change the fact that I still have the best link to my body and because my words are not an act of aggression which is the only way to come to own someone else's body if they commit an act of aggression then promising to be someone's slave is simply not enforceable because they doesn't transfer any title to anything you still own your body you can always change your mind in other words. So Rothbard seems to notice this in his kind of convoluted arguments about this in his contract theory but he it's implied and I think Hans later clarified it maybe unknowingly but so Rothbard wrote it is true that man being what he is cannot absolutely guarantee lifelong service to another under voluntary arrangement thus Jackson at present might agree to labor under Crusoe's direction for life and return for food and clothing but he cannot guarantee that he will not change his mind at a certain point in the future and decide to leave in this sense a man's own person and will is inalienable and cannot be given up for someone else for any future period so I think the reason he focuses on the fact that the will is inalienable is Rothbard senses that that's the reason you own your body although he never quite says it explicitly but he gets really close I mean it was the what's the relevance of the fact that your will is inalienable to the fact that a voluntary slavery contract is the the only relevance could be that your direct control or your will is the reason you own your body okay so again after you promised to be a slave you still have direct controls you're still the owner and you have not committed aggression so you can always change your mind okay now what about the other fallacy owning what you sell okay in a simple exchange for two material resources that are both owned by two different people like an apple for an orange or an apple for a silver coin the sellers do own what they sell okay there are two title transfers the orange changes ownership and the apple changes ownership but in a sale of service labor or information the contract in legal terms only involves one title transfer this is in legal terms whatever is quote paid to the person performing the service so if I give you a chicken to pay you for giving me a haircut the title to the chicken transfers to you but you don't transfer title to any labor to me it's not like there's a bucket of labor which I'm handing over to you so these are actions not things that can be owned so labor or services or action or things that we do with things that we own like our bodies or other owned resources they're not themselves owned resources so you don't really sell labor so why do we describe it this way now here's where I think the reason for the confusion I think the reason is we have to keep a mode similar to what Gita was mentioning earlier there are different modes of understanding for different realms of phenomena and different conceptual frameworks so for example in the tele logical versus causal realms we have human action and purpose of behavior on the one hand versus causal laws of nature on the other we have praxeology versus the empirical methods the scientific method we have apodictic or a priori versus tentative or contingent knowledge we also have normative or juristic right legal types of realms of understanding versus factual so we have human laws and norms versus empirical facts I'm getting to the point so now Mises was careful to distinguish the juristic or the legal or the should from the factual but he used the word ownership in both which is potentially confusing so he said regarded as a sociological category so he this in my in socialism 1922 he changed the word to catalactic later probably because he hadn't come up with it yet I don't know but he calls it the sociological or economic category of ownership is the power to use a good now that's possessed that's what we would call possession or control and then he says the sociological and juristic by which means legal or normative concepts of our ownership are different ownership from the sociological point of view is the having of a good it's just what Crusoe could do so that's natural or original ownership and it's a purely physical relationship of man to goods but the legal is the should have who should have it who has a right to it this is where property rights and law come in okay so and then later in human action he he goes on in a similar vein so as I said earlier it's better to distinguish ownership and possession to use those words rather than two senses of the word ownership because of me could potentially confusing because people say they own bitcoins but what they really mean is they possess the bitcoins they say they own their brain their minds but you know your mind is just an epic phenomena of your physical brain which you own your brain but you know you can change your you can change your mind but you can't change your brain they're different they're different concepts a dead body has a brain but it doesn't mind there's a well-known Roman law civil law scholar who passed away fairly a couple years ago from Greece but he was a Louisiana professor of Yiannopoulos and he you know he also defines in the civil Louisiana civil code also defines possession as actual control or the factual authority a person has over corporeal or a material thing I like I like these of these of these of phrase eologies and again calling Bitcoin possession ownership is one reason for the confused idea that it's ownable so if you say I possess a Bitcoin that's fine but it doesn't apply that you own it plus bitcoins can be sold and so people think if you sell something you must own it so that's why they make that mistake Yiannopoulos also points out something I mentioned earlier that the accurate use of the word property should be the designation of rights people have with respect to things in other words property is not the thing itself is the relationship between you and the thing I have a property right in the thing I'm the owner of the thing okay so why do we refer to a sale of labor information when I already pointed out there's only a one-way title transfer of the payment made to the labor former why do we call it that what happens is just like in the way the word ownership is used in both senses sometimes in a in to mean possession or economic ownership or juristic ownership or real ownership we use the word sale in that in that way to sometimes we use it as economists to describe the structure of a given human action and sometimes we use it as lawyers to describe the rights that are transferred okay so in the law sell refers to transferring title to an own thing so you don't literally sell your labor you just perform your labor but in in economics it can be used to describe or characterize an action so all action involves an actor using scarce means to pursue some goal or purpose so we try to describe what someone does we try to discern their goals and also the means that they're using so that's what history does as well right what you know was mentioning earlier we try to understand the axis of people so when we say as an economist a sold his labor to be this is just a concise way of explaining the practice a logical nature of that action we're saying why a perform the action his labor well he performed it to get money from be we're describing his mole his goal his goal was to get money from be that's why he engaged in the means of using his body to perform an action which he knew would satisfy be and why did be transfer owners with his money today or he could see he actually did legally sell his money today to induce him to perform an action so there's only one title transfer so in this case the economic and the juristic uses of the word sell different because in legal terms be transfers money to a conditional on performing an action there's only one title transfer the money that was transferred but in economic terms a sells his labor to be in exchange for money and be sells his money to a exchange for a's look a's action so we can use selling in an economic sense but we should be careful otherwise you might end up just buying intellectual property thank you very much