 Now we're live. Hi everyone and welcome to another Yaron Debates Europe. So today the discussion will be on the topic of libertarianism. So many of us in the Objectivist universe we started first time our first contact with the ideas of freedom was through the libertarian movement. At the same time there are some differences. So these are the topics that we will discuss today. So with us we have Tam Laird. Tam is a leading figure in the Scottish Libertarian Party. Now Scotland, if you know anything about the country, is not the most fertile ground for libertarian ideas. So well done Tam for standing up for these ideas in a hostile environment, I would say. And you all know Yaron. Yaron is the chairman of the board of the Andron Institute and the host of the Yaron Bruxo. And unless you're living under a rock, you've probably seen Yaron on GB News on Friday. Last time I checked the Twitter video had something like 50,000 views. If you haven't checked it, go to his YouTube channel and check the whole segment. It was a sensation. So without further delay we're going to start with Tam. He's going to have 10 minutes to do his introductory remarks. Then we go to Yaron and then there's going to be some inter-panel discussion and then we're going to go to questions from the audience via Super Chat. A big thank you to the Andron Institute for supporting this debate series with Yaron. And without further delay, Tam, the floor is yours. Thank you. Libertarianism. Okay, I'm going to explain exactly what I mean because it's good to define what you're talking about before we've been getting to these things. And although most of the people out there will be libertarians, some of them may not be and some of them who think they are may not be and some of them who think they aren't may well be. So Libertarianism. PGO Rourke once said that it was like we were conservatives alike to get high or we were capitalist hippies. But they're funny terms, but I don't think either is accurate. So what is libertarianism? I suppose there's the movement and then there's the parties. And I'm leader of the Scottish Libertarian Party. So we're a political party where we hold a menarchist position and we engage in the political system. Some of us are uncaps and arco-capitalists. I myself lean towards an arco-capitalist capitalism, but we are a menarchist party. So you have to be, if you're engaging, that's the rules of the game when you engage in the political system. So there we go. So but the movement wider, people would regard people like Yaron has been part of the Libertarian movement in a wider sense. I'm sure he'll give us his reasons why he isn't. Even the Tea Party movement would be regarded as within the Libertarian framework. More conservatorians, even like the aforementioned PGO Rourke would be regarded as libertarian in some senses. But let's just talk about primarily the political philosophy. It's primarily a political philosophy born out of the Enlightenment era. It's a philosophy, if we have government at all, how it should be and what are its limits? It's a term stolen from leftist anarchists. And in the UK, the term is still associated with Americanism and it's seen as some sort of foreign idea. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was born here, in my view, here in the UK. Adam Smith, it's certainly through the economic sense of the word and other Enlightenment figures. So as I say, we stole it from left wing anarchists. It has its roots and individualism and classic liberal ideas about the rights of man. It doesn't have a single foundation of originator such as John Locke and the idea of natural rights. That's part of it. But it's something that grew organically and what we have today. It's for the greater part predicated on the rights of the individual and the concept, at least, of individual rights and liberties. Look after the rights of the individual and you can't fail to look after the rights of everyone. Self-ownership, property rights, without which you really have no other rights when you get down to it. First thing everyone owns, even an untouchable living in the gutter in India, as far as libertarians concerned. First thing that that person owns is themself. They have self-ownership and that means that they cannot be touched, harmed or should not be touched, harmed, abused, used, unless they give express permission. It's about individual sovereignty. So no one is allowed to use me, enslave me, force me to do anything against my will, touch me without and for express permission or consent. And this is at the heart of libertarianism. And that is what results in our view about government. Government being, in a sense, a nature force, it should be kept to a very bare minimum with minimum powers. What libertarianism is not, it's not a religious philosophy or a panacea for life's ills. It doesn't tell you how you should live your life. I openly admit I don't know exactly what's best for myself a lot of the time. So how in the hell am I going to know what's best for someone else's life? Someone different to me in race, religion, background, tastes, I don't know. We have the humility as libertarians to admit that your life is yours. Live it as you see fit as long as you don't impede or infringe on the rights of others to do the same. Certainly government doesn't know what's best for your life. It's not, it's often confused with the free market conservatism. There is some overlap but conservatives are generally paternalistic and most conservatives that I met feel that the role of government is to make people good, i.e. to encourage people or to force people to do what the right thing. You take drugs, that's a bad thing, you know, so we walk you up for that. So that would be one of the differences there. So incorporated into that is the non-aggression principle. Don't use force or violence to further your ideas or further what it is that you want to do, okay? You don't use violence against peaceful people to achieve your goals. Not to be confused with pacifism, which means you never get engaged in violence or violent conflict. You are allowed to use violence in order to defend yourself because this is part of libertarian philosophy as well. You own yourself, you're allowed to defend your property. So you're allowed to defend yourself with violence. It can also include third party defense but you do not initiate the use of force with peaceful people. You have the right to life. So in other words, no one should harm or kill you if you aren't a physical threat to anyone else. You have a right to property, which again I said is the first thing you own is yourself and anything else that you acquire without theft, fraud or the use of force. Libertarians oppose taxation accordingly, especially when it's involuntary taxation. If I agree or I contract to pay a contribution, that's a different matter and that would be a violation of property rights if it's involuntary. Right to contract in terms of who you enter into an agreement with what you put in your body, what job you do, what medical treatment you seek. It's entirely up to you because you have a right to do that as an individual. The right to free speech in a public domain. I have a right to say what I like in a public domain. At this moment in time, I'm part of this podcast. You guys are in charge of it. If at any time I say anything that you think is over the mark, you can say Tom, you can either stop saying that or you can leave the podcast. That's entirely up to you. You have the freedom to do that in this thing that you've set up. But in a free and in a public domain, government should certainly, should not be put in restrictions on what people say. Right to liberty unless you violate someone else's right to work and the right to learn. So as libertarianism good or bad, well what's good, what's bad? Who would say the free speech is bad? Well, some people's feelings get hurt when you say things that offend them. Sometimes you could say something that somebody else may take as an encouragement to go out and do an act of violence. Is that responsibility? I think not. Fossil fuels, are those a good thing? I think by and large, yes, although they have caused some harm, anybody who found a starving man would think it would be a good thing to give him a square meal. However, if you don't know anything about medical treatment, you'll probably go and kill him if you give him a full meal and be starving. So therefore a good thing would be bad in that situation. So what is good? Is it good intentions or is it good results? I think with good results overall, libertarianism, the freer that a society is, the less government interference, the more prosperous the society becomes. So sorry, I've lost the thread here. Free markets, free speech, free expression, and free people maximize human well-being and flourishing, all of which are preferable to government overreach and the infringement of individual rights and liberties. And I think libertarianism promotes that, fights for that, stands for that, and that ultimately is a good thing for the individual and it's also a good thing for people in general. So Yaron, is there anything wrong with the things that we've heard? Sure. So first, thanks Thomas for joining us, really appreciated. And let me say on issue by issue, Thomas and I will probably agree on many of the political stands. I don't know if all of them, but certainly on most of them, we would be in agreement. But the problem is that the idea of libertarianism and the concept of libertarianism is ill-defined. I mean, even Thomas had a hard time or Tom had a hard time defining it at the end. We heard no definition and even the people under this big umbrella, Adam Smith is a libertarian, but he supported a central bank. The libertarian support a central bank. Supporting a central bank excludes you from being a libertarian. Tea party, oh my god, I mean, I was there with the tea party, but the tea party was pro-medicare and so security. And in any respect, a lot of things that I think Tom on an issue by issue would completely disagree with. I've seen communist libertarians, I've seen socialist libertarians, I've seen obviously anarchist libertarians, I've seen left anarchist libertarians, I've seen right anarchist libertarians, so-called anarcho-capitalist, maybe that's for another day why that is a contradiction in terms. And then of course, there's the bleeding heart libertarians who are, by the way, philosophers for the most part. So if you go to the bleeding heart libertarian website, these are real deep thinkers who have, and yet many of them stand by UBI, universal basic income. They stand by some kind of welfare state even in this libertarian political ideal that they have. Tom is not a pacifist. I'm very happy to hear that, but there are many libertarians who are pacifists, literally pacifists, particularly when it comes to Fon Posse pacifists, attack him. I mean, I've read their articles out on the Mises website and other places. I mean, real pacifists. I certainly am not. So what is it? What is the core? And here I think, and I think this is a fundamental problem, even though everybody agrees on supposedly the non-aggression principle, but do they, the Tea Party certainly didn't agree with it. You can't have Medicare and Social Security without aggression. Adam Smith didn't agree with it. The Scottish Enlightenment generally didn't agree with it. There was a lot of aggression, a minimal aggression, better than anybody else. I'll take the Scottish Enlightenment any day over pretty much anybody, but there was still aggression. The communist libertarians might claim to be, to uphold the non-aggression principle, but I would worry about them ever reaching power if they would stick to that. I doubt it. So the main problem with the, or one big problem with libertarianism is that it's not clear what it refers to. It's not clear whether it has a consistent set of ideas and a consistent set of principles, which I think is problematic. Now, if you start your own kind of political party like Scottish libertarians, maybe you can then delimit, okay, these are the things we stand for. But as a movement, particularly globally, it's very ambiguous and difficult and contradictory in terms of what they stand for. You know, I know you mentioned all the different things that people called libertarians. I think PJ O'Rourke stole his definition from Iron Man because Iron Man talked about libertarians being hippies of the right. That was so deficient in the 1970s and the idea was not, I think, just that she, you know, she agreed, for example, on something like drug legalization. It's the relish with which libertarians often take drug legalization because they so want to be using them that I think she objected to. But this is really the fundamental issue I have with libertarianism and that is that it is an ambiguous political philosophy at best, but it has no real foundation. It has no philosophical foundation. It has no moral foundation. It has no epistemological foundation. And this is, you know, it's based on, for most people, based on this, you know, basically on a kind of subjectivist approach. We want everybody to be able to do whatever the hell they want and who's anybody to intervene and let them just do it and we're not going to judge. Tom said that a little bit, right? If you have your religion, you have your this, you have your that. We're not going to judge you. You can do whatever you want. It's live and let live, but it accepts implicitly a very subjectivist approach to morality. I think such an approach, anything related to subjectivism is very dangerous and ultimately can easily lead to the violation of a non-aggression principle. I have a problem with what the non-aggression principle even is. Is it a principle? What's it based on? Why not be aggressive, right? Almost every philosophy in the world accepts aggression if the goal is a good goal, right? If the purpose is a good purpose. So why not? What is the justification for the non-aggression principle? I don't think libertarians have one. I think this is a real flaw in the libertarian movement. Self-ownership is a problem. Who owns you? I mean, it's a circular argument, right? Ownership is a concept of self. Self owns, right? But what are you owning if you are the owner? It's philosophically a very unsatisfying concept. You have sovereignty of yourself. That's a different concept. Self-ownership is a tricky, a tricky, a tricky concept and very difficult to justify out there in the world as the non-aggression principle is. If good can be achieved and you don't want to define good, none of us, right? The whole point of libertarianism, a part of the point of we don't want to define good for you. So if I can show you that good could be achieved, my good could be achieved, our good could be achieved by using force. Then what's the argument against that if we're not in the business defining good? So you can't really have a political theory. You can't really have a political ideology or political philosophy without some definition of good, not a political philosophy that's universal. Again, you can hold a certain view, but it's not universalizable, is that a word? You can't make it universal unless you have a view of what the good is. Individual rights are a concept that is based on a philosophical identification, based on an identification about your life, about what is good. So for example, there is no such thing as individual rights unless you understand that what is good is that individuals should have their capacity and have their ability and it's right for them, right in a moral sense, to make decisions for themselves. But that's a moral statement. That is a statement of what the good is. And that reason is the means by which they should do it. And the enemy of reason is force. Therefore we should ban force from human interaction because it's not good for individuals in the pursuit of their happiness. But that has a lot of goods in it, has a lot of morality in it, and indeed individual rights at the end of the day is a moral, not a political concept. It's a concept that bridges morality to politics. As a consequence, I think it's this subjectivism, it's this lack of willingness to identify the good and to delve into morality and to identify objective standards for human well-being. That is, there are certain things that are objectively good for human beings that we can dictate, if you will, not dictate in terms of force, but dictate in terms of ideology, in terms of ideas. It is the unwillingness to say these set of ideas are the right ideas at the foundation that make a concept like anarchy and suppose an alcohol capitalism possible, because an alcohol capitalism is the exactly rejection of any kind of objective standard. It is the view that anything goes, literally anything goes, because now there's no government even to protect individual rights. So even individual rights are gone once you accept anarchy. If my police force, the one I hire, doesn't believe in individual rights and can get enough subscriptions, it might dominate an individual rights out. They're irrelevant. So anarchy excludes individual rights, rejects individual rights, and it rejects any kind of objective view of morality and objective view of human life, an objective view of what are the standards by which human beings need to flourish. So I would love to see a libertarian movement, libertarian party, that delimited what it stood for, that made clear what it was about, that rejected things like anarchy and things like the Tea Party and even Adam Smith, if necessary. And it accepted the idea that any movement towards liberty, any movement, any real success in terms of changing the world towards freedom and liberty is going to require the identification of clear moral ethical standards. It's going to require a clear identification of a philosophy of liberty, not just politics. Politics is a derivative. Politics is the last thing that matters in the end. What matters ultimately is why liberty, why freedom. We have to be able to answer that question. And to answer that question is a moral answer. And we need an ethic. And this is Ayn Rand. This is what objectiveism provides. And I think the rejection or the evasion of Ayn Rand by libertarian intellectuals and leaders over the decades has done a lot of harm to the movement, to whatever movement there is, has done a lot of harm to the ability to promote these ideas. What libertarians need is some objective morality and an objective view of the world. And that's what Rand provides. So I encourage libertarians to embrace Rand. Thanks. Thank you, Yaron. So let's do this now. So, Tom, you heard Yaron's objections. You have three, four minutes to address them and then Yaron can reply to you in a direct manner. I think in Libertaria or Libertopia, there's no conflict because Yaron can live his objectivist life and create his objectivist community. And after everybody sees just how prosperous, just how crime free, just how moral and ethical his community is, people will emulate it. You know, they want to emulate it. I don't see how you could make objectivism universal without some use of governmental force. And in terms of government taking care of individual rights and liberties, out of all the governments there are in the world, I mean, I could pick maybe a handful and say that they take care of individual rights and liberties to any degree that I would say good. Even in the U.S. at the moment, even with what you would think would be the cast iron constitution that the U.S. created, the government simply ignores the constitution. So in other words, the government exists in an anarchist relationship with its people because who forces your government? All it's the people. Well, the government's got all the guns, all the planes, all the tanks and the so-called legitimate use of force and violence, which you don't have. So as far as the government being some sort of guarantor of your individual rights and liberties, I don't think it works too well. But and furthermore, to say that, okay, libertarianism as a movement or as a concept or as a philosophy may not have any ethics as yarn or may lack ethics as yarn as insisted. But that could be said of many different types of political philosophies. Good God, socialism. You know, you meet a socialist, they'll give you 20 different reasons why 20 other socialists aren't really socialist. Conservatism, conservatism is the same. It has the same sort of divisions. There isn't a political philosophy out there that has some sort of unified idea. And the ones that did, the ones that got closest such as communism and fascism, well, we know where that ended up. And it all comes down to, I mean, through being a libertarian, I may not have sort of hard and fast ethics about according to Yaron. But I have my own as let's say as a Christian, I have I have ethics that derive from Christian beliefs and Christian morality. And I might think that abortion is a clear violation of an individual's right to life. Somebody else who's a libertarian may decide, well, no, that's actually not a life yet. And it's all about individual right to choice. Those two ethics are in conflict. But I think in a libertarian society, that person who wants to have abortion and kill children, there I said it, they can gravitate to a unit or a part of society that allows that and is fine with it. And I can gravitate to another one where we don't have that and we reject that and we reject people within our midst, you know, just like the Amish have their way of life, just like there are Muslim communities that have their way of life, have your way of life in as much as you do not infringe aggressively on somebody else's. And I think as a philosophy, it's, you know, libertarianism is not a destination. Sorry, yeah, it's a journey. It's a pathway to what I believe would be a better world and a better relationship between people and their government. The closer it is to libertarianism, the better it seems to be in my view. And that's the only defense I can offer. It's not that your own doesn't make some salient points about maybe a lack of robust and concrete views on ethics. Well, maybe that's true. But I think in the, certainly within the party, we have enough room for varying views as long as we all agree, our party has a constitution. So anybody who joins, the first question you're asked before you join the parties, I have read the party's constitution and I agree with those things therein. And if I take part in any party political activities that can be viewed at least as a contradiction, a direct contradiction of those values and those and that constitution then, you know, you'll be asked to leave the party. And we have, we have expelled one member in our entire existence so far. And that's not bad. And on Twitter, I'm pretty tall. I haven't blocked anybody yet. Been blocked a couple of times, but I haven't blocked anybody yet. So I think all opinions, all ways of life, as long as you don't harm other individuals, are permissible. But permissible does not mean I share the view that it's okay, you know, knock yourself out. It's a good thing to do drugs. I don't personally hate drugs. Up until about 10 years ago, I would have happily been part of a, you know, what do you call those guys in South America that go around assassinating drug dealers and, yeah, none of the cartels, the, the, yeah, they're like, yeah, they're like vigilantes who go around killing drug dealers and use, I would have happily done that 10 years ago because I saw this, that is an evil that has to be stamped out. But at the end of the day, who am I to tell somebody else what to do with their body, what to put into their body, what to take, what they do after they take the drugs, what they do, what behavior they conduct after they take the drugs, that's a different matter. You don't get any, there's no get out plus, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know what I was doing because I was out my head on drugs. No, you chose to take the drugs, you are ultimately responsible. So there is an ethical element to libertarianism. Whether Yaron thinks that that derives from any concrete position, that can be debated. But the ethical positions are there at least, but they're not there to be enforced on other people. I'm not prepared to commit violence against my neighbour because of the way he treats his dog, for example. I don't have to talk to him, I don't have to deal with him, I don't have to do business with him, but I'm not going to, I'm not going to commit violence against him because I don't like the way he treats his pets. But I don't have to agree and I don't have to support him. That's all I would say. Let me remind two people that they can ask their questions via super chat, either to Tam or to Yaron. So Yaron. Yeah, so look, we agree on the fact that you're not going to force people to be moral, but Tom being is up a good issue, the issue of abortion. If you truly believe that abortion is killing children and your neighbour is engaged with it, or your neighbour has to kill my children. Well, so what if they kill children after they're born? Do you not care because it's their neighbour, I'm not dealing with it, right? It's over there, it's not me. They've got their police force enforcing their ability. What if they sexually molest children? What if they do a lot of things that we could think is uprooted? But children particularly who can't defend themselves, they don't have full rights in the sense of being able to engage in activity. The responsibility, the parent, the parent doesn't care, right? The parent either kills them, abuses them, whatever. Who's going to protect them? Or do we say we don't care? I mean, this is the subjectivism. My view is, you know, my view is abortion is not killing, but if my view was yours, if my view was abortion is killing children, then I would want to live in a society, I would insist on living in a society where abortion was not allowed. Don't confuse society with state borders and government. But of course it is. You know, society is the environment, the social environment in which you live. If you're in a society right now, I mean a society right now where I disagree with a lot of it and fighting it, right? But it's not that you can assume that because I live my way and they live their way, we're in a different two societies. Borders matter in that sense because I can separate myself from people over there by a border. They do their thing, I do my thing, I don't intervene. And that's fine. I have no problem with competition between governments, right? Competition between societies. What objective is the idea that you can live in the same society and have all these different laws applying to you or not applying to you. It is, it creates real problems where rights are really going to be violated because one police force has a different conception of rights, for example, abortion, than another police force. And I think you have, you know, this can be expanded into many things. Now there are other problems, of course, with anarchy that have to do with the unsustainability of that equilibrium. Hostile takeovers from business take on a completely different connotation when you're talking about police forces and what hostile means. I believe anarchy is a perpetual civil war and a perpetual madness ultimately leading to authoritarianism. But beyond that, Tom mentioned that socialists don't have ethical theories. They all disagree. Not true. They all disagree. Yes, I mean, that's part of life. But they all share an ethical theory and that's why they're so successful. If you look at socialists and why they've been so successful throughout the last hundred and since Marx, certainly it's because they share an ethical theory. And they share an ethical theory that a lot of people buy into and therefore drawn to socialism of one degree or another. They might disagree about the details. But the fundamental idea that your moral responsibility is to serve your neighbor, your moral responsibility is to help others, your moral responsibility is to each from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. That fundamental concept is prevalent in the entire society. And as a consequence of that, socialism keeps wearing its ugly head constantly because it appeals to people's morality. Conservatism is the same way. Conservatism does share a basic view of morality and is in its very common. It's very successful. One of the reasons conservatives have a hard time fighting socialists, really real conservatives, not the kind of ridiculous people who call themselves conservatives today is because they share much of that morality. If we share that morality with socialists, it's very difficult to convince anybody. And it's definitely very difficult to build a society around an idea of freedom. We need a vision. We need a ideal of morality. Not one that we will impose by force, but one that we will argue for everything we do is argue for, right? We believe in argumentation, not in force. But if we can't project a moral ideal to replace the moral ideal of socialism, we can't beat the socialists of all their different varieties. Yeah, we're going to disagree maybe on implementing the moral strategy in here or there. But we still have to have a moral philosophy without it and a real idea of what the good is. Without it, we will never be successful in convincing anybody of our politics because morality trumps politics every time. People want to do what's good. And if what's good necessitates violence, I mean, how many people out there object to lockdowns? Almost nobody. Why? Because the outcome is good, they say, right? Almost nobody object to lockdowns. I mean, you poll after poll after poll shows. I don't buy the polls. Who's doing these polls? Never mind the polls. How many people went out to demonstrate? How many people challenged the lockdowns to action? Almost nobody. So, you know, I talk to people, not just people like us, who have an appreciation of liberty. Oh, no, they think lockdowns are good. Why? Because there's a goal. The goal is a good goal. That is to eradicate this virus. And therefore they're okay with force, coercion, being implemented. And you can see this, how many people are okay with government mandates against a million different things. Why? Because they see a good goal, a moral goal as an end. And if we can't challenge the moral goal, if we can't challenge the morality of it, then it's a dead end for us. We have no ideals. Debating everybody just on politics will go nowhere. Well, I agree with that sentiment at least. And so let me finish with this one thing, and then I'll, yeah, I mean, governments violate individual rights all the time. We know that the founding fathers did in America, particularly did a pretty good job of setting up a constitution that was as good as they could. But that was the 18th century. We could do a much better job today if we were, if we were going to do that, a much better job. The knowledge that we've accumulated the last 200 something years is astounding relative to what Adam Smith, even Adam Smith and certainly the founding fathers had at the time. But I would rather live in the United States today with all the violations of rights, including the stupid lockdowns and everything else than live in a country in a world today with no government. The differences are vast. I mean, you really want to live in Somalia? I mean, everybody can. Somalia has no government. It has anarchy and anarchy in Somalia is going to look like anarchy anybody else. And it's not. And by the way, they are libertarians out of George Mason who think Somalia is a pretty cool deal because I don't know, they have cell phones or something. So no, if you place anywhere in the world, if you create anarchy, I would rather live in any government today as much as they violate rights than in those anarchistic societies or take Iceland of the Middle Ages that David Friedman loves so much where violence was rampant and people killed each other for almost nothing over almost nothing. So or Ireland, which is another one, supposedly, I don't know what you feel about the Irish. So maybe I shouldn't raise this issue, you know, the Scots and Irish, but Ireland is often brought up as an anarchist heaven once upon a time. I would rather live in England today than in Ireland of the Middle Ages and the anarchy that they had and the violence that they engaged in. So I would rather live in most modern countries today than any countries in the Middle Ages, you know? Yeah, but there's a reason we achieve modernity. And I would say that without the state, you don't achieve modernity. So no, it's not an accident that anarchy didn't achieve modernity in Iceland and Ireland and other places. And modernity didn't come in the Middle Ages when you had city states. Modernity came during a period of the state where countries actually exist, because I think you need a monopoly over the use of a territory force, which is what a good government does. All right, I went over my time. Sorry, Nikos, you're muted. Let's go to super chats and Tom, you'll have the chance to reply to these things because some of them are reflected in the super chat question. So super chat from Phil, question to both of you. Is a written constitution and an elected head of state important or just any relevance? How would it affect individual freedom? So Tom, let's start with you. The issue of constitution, you mentioned it earlier so you can elaborate. Well, I think if there's going to be government, then it should be constrained by a constitution. The idea that the government can do what it likes when it likes is an anathema. So it should be constrained by the constitution. I think the problem is, I mean, Jaron talked about we have much more knowledge. The idea that having more knowledge makes you somehow more moral. Something like 40% of death camp guards had PhDs. The idea that the more knowledge you have that somehow makes you more moral, I think, is an absurdity. And I think the founding fathers of the United States were in a kind of unique position. Most of these people had came from Europe and came from a position where they saw the excesses of the state and they created a constitution that tried to curb that. They knew what the state out of control looked like and they knew what tyranny looked like and they knew the kind of things to put in the constitution to prevent it. Fast forward now to Scotland. Scotland has ambitions to tear itself away from the United Kingdom and enslave itself to the European Union. So it's going to have two constitutions. It's going to have the European constitution, which is, I'm not even going to go there. That's a whole different discussion, but it's certainly not anything that I would hold up as libertarian. The Scottish government now is looking at making its own constitution and they're talking about putting things in there like you have a right to medical care. You have a right to food. So if I have a right to food, why the hell should I buy any? You know, I should just turn up at your house and you have to feed me because I've got a right to food. So this is the kind of things that people are putting into constitutions these days because it's all about buying votes. It's a bribeocracy and the nicer, the more you can make your constitution look as if it's going to take care of you from cradle to grave and you won't have to put any effort in, then the more successful that seems to be in a bribeocracy. So I think, yeah, a constitution is important, but it's also important what that constitution says and therein lies that the problem, the devil's in the detail. We'll get back to the issue of Scottish independence time before the end because it's an interesting issue. I saw you were involved in the past and I assume you're in favor of the idea at least of Scottish independence. So let's put a pin on it. We're going to get back to it. So Yaron, constitution and an elected head of state. Well, first let me just say that if Tom assumes that PhDs means they've increased knowledge, he's completely wrong. PhDs is a sign that your knowledge has been dissipated and your IQ has been sucked out of your brain. Our educational system does not convey knowledge, it destroys it. But, you know, and this is, Nikos here has a PhD and so do I. So I think we're both testaments of at least experiencing what they tried to do to us, if not succeeded. But this is part of what I find with libertarians. Of course, it's about knowledge. It's all about knowledge. Knowledge is everything. And knowledge does lead to more morality. You can't compare, you can't expect somebody 3,000 years ago to come to the same conclusions that we come to today. It's about data. It's about thinking. It's about knowing what works and what doesn't in the world. It's about morality and learning from reality what is moral and what is not. It's all about that. I mean, this is where religion comes in. God did not just send us all the data that we needed. We're in the Old Testament or the New Testament or whatever the latest version of a statement happens to be. No, we have to constantly learn from reality to figure out what works and what doesn't and what's good and what's not and what's right and what isn't. So of course, we have a lot more data than we had 250 years ago. We know now, for example, how reason can shape industry and can shape our lives and can shape our standard of living and quality of life. We know the impact of all kinds of ideas because they've been tested and they've been tried out. The sad thing in the world is that people don't learn from history and from their own knowledge. They don't take it seriously because they shape their understanding based on their morality, based on their ethics. And this is why it's so important for us to be teaching and conveying a new view of morality so that they can take reality as it is, not shaped by the perversions and distortions. I mean, even the idea of buying votes. I don't think the European Union is doing it to buy votes. I think they're doing it because this is what their philosophy demands. Now, they're also buying votes because everybody agrees with their philosophy, but they've basically destroyed the concept of rights philosophers have for the last 100 years. They basically says a right is something that you're granted by the government. It's not something inherent in human nature. And therefore, they make up rights because they want the government to have a greater and greater impact, not just to buy votes, partially to do that, partially because they're power hungry, partially because philosophically they believe that you, Tom, cannot take care of yourself. You don't have the competence to take care of yourself. You're sitting in a cave to use Aristotle's analogy, and you have no clue and you need philosopher kings to tell you how to live your life. Now that's a very deeply philosophical view about human nature, but human beings, about epistemology, who can tell what's true. That has to be challenged. The only way to challenge that is philosophical. We have to adopt a philosophy. Otherwise, we can't win. Back to the question of constitutions. Look, at the end of the day, you get the government you deserve in a sense. That is, if the people don't live up to a particular standard, they're not gonna, no constitution will stand the onslaught of bad culture, of bad people. Politics is indeed downstream from culture, but culture is downstream from philosophy, so everything is downstream in that sense from ideas. But what a constitution does, even in a society, a good constitution does, even a society that's corrupt like the United States, what it does is it slows it down. The status, that's why in Europe, you can have 400 rights. I think your constitution articulates 400 different rights. You can have that because there was no founding constitution that had the American language. So you have hate speech laws in Europe. You can't have that in the U.S., even though probably 55% of the population want hate speech laws, you can't do it in the U.S. because the constitution is still there. So the constitution slows down the deterioration. It doesn't eliminate it. It's still gonna be there. We're still gonna get less and less right, but I will take a country with a good constitution any day over one without one. And ideally, if you have good ideas, you still want a constitution just in case people forget the ideas. You want something to limit government, even when we're a little lazy and don't have the full diligence in terms of keeping our eyes on what it's doing. Another question from a friend related some way to Scotland. Are we going to need another renaissance in these islands, let alone Scotland? Or can the Enlightenment pick up where it left off? So Tom, you mentioned that Scotland was the epicenter of the Enlightenment in a way there was a Scottish Enlightenment. And yet today we see Scotland being the world capital of the nanny state. So most of the horrible nanny state ideas some way or another, for example, for people who don't know, there was this idea by the Scottish government that in every family there's gonna be a state bureaucrat who's gonna make sure that you're a good parent. So how do we change this? Can we still use that steam from that Enlightenment, or do we need a new renaissance? And how would that look like? That's the most important question. Well, I think it can't take place without two things happening. First of all, just to let people know that that act of parliament, it was called the named person. And what they wanted was to put a state guardian in every family. So the state would be the third parent in the family. Now that was defeated. The Supreme Court in the UK knocked it down. However, it hasn't gone away. They're gonna come back with it because it's what they want to do. And they managed to get their hate crimes bill enacted. That is now an act. So you can, in Scotland, you can be, you can be imprisoned for what you say in the confines of your own home, and you can be imprisoned for what literature that you own in your own home. So that's the situation we're in. So in terms of getting the like, people in Scotland don't even know that prophets have no honour in their own household. People, if you asked a hundred people in Edinburgh, even though he's stat you stands here in Edinburgh, if you asked people in Kirkcaldy, across the water, where he's from, who Adam Smith was, I would hazard a guess, maybe one in 50 would have an idea, maybe one in a hundred. Really? It's not something that we that we teach in the schools. And here is the first problem. Unless people in Scotland start to withdraw their children from the state education system, there really is little hope because the state has your children from the age of five years old until they're 16 years old. And that's a lot of time and a lot of propaganda. I mean, it's an onslaught. They spend more time indoctrinating children than they do educating them. Unless you withdraw your children from that system while you still can, because they are looking to go down the road of Sweden and Germany and make homeschooling a criminal offence. Unless you do that while you stick in, there's really no hope because how else? How are you going to compete with the state propaganda machine that is constantly telling your children what it wants them to know? So do we need a continuation of the Enlightenment? Absolutely. Do we need an Enlightenment revolution in Scotland? We absolutely do. But I think the first thing that needs to happen is people who have any awareness of what's going on to remove, I mean, I know Libertarians who still got their kids in the state education system. We complain about the state education system. We complain how bad it is. And yet during lockdown, all people could say is, when are you going to let the kids back into school? When are you going to let the kids back into school? Really? What did your kids ever do to you that you want to send them back into the state education system that you complained about on a day-to-day basis? So that's one thing we need to do. And the other thing is to try and get control of taxation. While the government has the ability and the right to take your income and take your property at will, it's a very difficult thing to fight against. So I think we need to grip on those two things, the state education system and the state's ability to tax people at will and to take the property at will. So then why those accession terms? So wouldn't it be then that you would secede into a socialist island basically? So you go from a very bad non-state which is the UK to the hotbed of socialist authoritarianism that would be Scotland? Yeah. I don't, for a start, I don't think that the United Kingdom is going to be, in the end, any guarantor of not going down that road. They're making their own way to these ideas. You know, it's happening. They're just behind Scotland in terms of implementing these things. They have their own versions of these acts that are currently being formulated in red and parliament. And yeah, I get this idea. Well, look, Tom, an independent Scotland is going to be even more left-wing probably. And yeah, and I fear that. But do you know what? It might need to happen. It might need to get worse. People might need to see what socialism actually looks like and feels like before they actually get it. Because we've never really truly had it in Scotland the way, you know, you talk to Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, they know what socialism looks like. They know what it is. Here in Scotland, we still have some romantic idea about what socialism is. And, you know, Jaron was saying it has some moral. Yeah, they pose, they posture this morality. It's about taking care of the weak. When really it's about digging, keep putting your hand into the pot and doing nothing to earn it. You know, Judas banged on about how your money could feed the poor because he liked to dip his hand into the pot and steal from it. You know, he didn't really care about the poor. And most socialists are the same. They don't really care about the poor. They just see it as a way of empowering themselves and enriching themselves. So I fear a socialist Scotland as much as the Unionists do. But I think the idea that the UK will prevent it is feeble. And in the end, I think we might need to go through that, unfortunately, in order to experience exactly what it looks like. Right. Thank you. Jaron, do you want to comment or shall we go to more questions? I'll just say, you know, I'm against this balkanisation and every little ethnic group having their own state. Apart from Israel. Yeah, well, Israel's a problem. I mean, it's I don't think it's healthy. I don't think it's good. This is part of the problem. It's part of the problem in the world right now. We don't have universal principles. And, you know, Tom gave the perfect example of why I think Scotland should stay in the UK. And that is the UK Supreme Court overruled a really, really, really evil law that the Scottish government passed. Now, it's true that in 10, 20 years, maybe the UK will be in the same place. But at least you buy yourself 10, 20, 10, 20 years of that. And I also would challenge this idea that people learn once they experience socialism, they learn and they become better. God, I wish that were true. But we've had what 42 different socialist experiments in the world so far. Anybody with eyes can go and look and see and and and and it's exactly there and nobody learns. Nobody learns and you get mired in there. So the slower your progress towards socialism, the better. And it strikes me Scotland would, you know, would benefit enormously from not rushing into the hands of the of the socialist right now. Who knows what will happen in 10, 20 years as the UK tries to catch up. Maybe you'll have influence and the UK turns around. I don't know. But very, very dangerous. And I generally see this splitting up of the world into into small political units as a negative and not a positive and something that will create a lot of problems down the road. You'd agree, though, that if Scotland gained independence with the declared principle that we want to be freer, then you would be in favor of such a cessation, no? Yeah, I've, you know, if, you know, that's a fantasy, though, and we know it's a fantasy. And what does it mean? What does it mean? We want to be freer, right? You know, braveheart, which of course was also about Scotland. He yells freedom. What was the freedom? I want to be ruled by Scottish King instead of be ruled by British King. Who the F cares? What king you ruled by? What matters is not to be ruled by kings. That's what freedom means. Freedom means abandoning the kings. So if Scotland, you know, what we have to, I mean, this is part of the problem. Part of the problem is we don't even own the definition of freedom. Even the definition of freedom is in dispute. I don't consider the ethnic group being able to vote for their own dictator, an issue of freedom. Okay, now we go to the last stage of the show, which is my favorite one, which is the one difficult question to each one of you. So the question, the difficult question from Kevin Kahn is actually from the audience. So, oh, before that, one of our friends says to paraphrase Rand, there are no conflicts of interest among men who want to be free. So maybe he means our two panelists today. But let's go to the difficult question for Kevin. If abortion is killing, what is the correct punishment for violating the rights of the unborn? And this question is to you, Tom. Well, it'd be exactly the same punishment as violating the rights of the born. So if you kill someone who is, you know, if you kill someone five minutes after their born, what would be the punishment for that? Should be life, should be ten years, whatever we decide the punishment is for that, then it should be exactly the same 10 minutes before they're born, if it's a deliberate act of homicide. So that's in my society, that's in my group of people who want to carry out that. Somebody else may disagree. I'm prepared to force that contractually in my group. You live in my community, you've contracted to live in my community, you've contracted to that we don't kill children in this community, and we punish people who do. That's fine. I have no issue with separate communities carrying out their own forms of punishment on if it's contractual. Let me push you a bit more on that, Tom. So what is the community down the road, though? Let's take it to the logical, let's say they say we contractually agree to Sarialo. But what about that community next door? These guys are not Sarialo. So what if then, let's say your contractual agreement becomes weaker and weaker and weaker, and the Sarialo contractual agreement becomes stronger and stronger, or the Christian fundamental is whatever. So what's your defense then to that expansion? Well, if I have the right to defend myself, I have the right to arms, then I can defend my own borders. Okay. So yeah, good luck. Come and try and take what's mine. If I give me an FN file, I'll defend my own borders. Don't give me it. Let me buy one. Okay. So Yaron froze, and I don't think it's because he froze from the answer. So let's see. And he froze just before I asked the difficult question to him. Oh yeah, that old trick. Okay, Razi, have you got any message from Yaron? Is he coming back? Actually, before he comes back, let me ask what somehow I wanted to ask Tom. Oh, here he is. Okay. You're still new to Yaron. I was complaining about you guys' weather, but we just got hit by a tropical storm. It's crazy outside, and the internet went down for two minutes. So, I was just about to ask your difficult question. So we asked Tom's difficult question. So the difficult question for Yaron is, so someone would say, okay, you spend so much energy against libertarians or whatever. If Ron Paul was president, and if let's say we had the senate of Ron Paul's and the congress full of Ron Paul's, wouldn't you get 97% of the things you'd want from politics as you'd envision them? You'd be free to pursue your happiness. What's the problem? Well, I mean, the two problems. One is I don't think Ron Paul can win because of the arguments do not address people's actual concerns, and you can't win in a vacuum. But more than that, no. I mean, for example, Ron Paul has expressed his pacifist views about anti-American views in foreign policy. I think it would be disaster. If he won in terms of, for example, the kind of terrorist attack that we experienced in I think the weather interfered again with Yaron. So I can't accept that Ron Paul's anti-American and I can't accept that point. So I have to say that, you know, and I don't see him as a pacifist either. I agree that he's not a pacifist, but he does believe so. So he puts more moral blame, let's say, for 9-11 on the American foreign policy, rather than on the people who perpetuate it. I don't believe that. Yeah, I mean, it's not, yeah, I'm back. It's not just a foreign policy. It's, you know, for example, Ron Paul would probably ban abortion, which I think would be horrific. Yeah. He would leave it to the states. Let's be just. He would say, I leave it to the states. Yeah. Well, when it when it push came to shove, I think, and I, you know, if Tom and Ron Paul really believe abortion is murder, then the Supreme Court dominated by their thinking would rule that it's a violation of rights and would ban it from the state as they as they should. Look, my view is unequivocal. If abortion is murder, it should be banned from anybody. You don't, you don't make exclusions for murder. You don't say it's a state issue, whether you don't approve of murder or not. Murder is a universal violation of individual rights and the federal government should uphold it. But look, I think what would happen if Ron Paul got elected is he would be a disaster. It would ultimately, his whole libertarian world would collapse. And as a consequence of that collapse, capitalism would get a bad name for 100 years. I hope that when we got a good name. Well, granted, I give you that. I hope that when we ultimately win, and when we actually have politicians implementing some of these policies, they do so in a credible they do so in a in a in a sound kind of way. And they have policies that not just the policy is a sound, but the reasoning is sound. They can explain it and therefore they can pull it off and generate the kind of outcome that we all believe is possible. But, you know, I haven't recently gone through the one Paul thing I used to, but Ron Paul's views on a bunch of different things. Not my views. Sorry. And I believe that, you know, it's a bad example because I believe there are quite a few libertarians who would do a better job than Ron Paul does. But I think part of the problem would be that there would be a lot of infighting among libertarians about what to implement because it's not obvious, right? As we listed, there are kind libertarianism is not one cohesive, coherent political idea, even in politics, cohesive ideology, never mind more broader. So instead of fantasizing about a Ron Paul victory, which I don't think will happen, particularly now Ron Paul, he's a little old, or any libertarian victory in our lifetime right now, it's just not going to happen. You're not going to see it. Let's focus on building a society. Let's focus on building the foundational ideas that will make liberty and freedom sustainable in the future. And I think those foundational ideas are philosophical, I think they have to be, I don't know any other philosopher other than I ran on which you could ground them. We've tried to ground them on John Locke and Adam Smith, not good enough. Sorry, not good enough. They went a long way towards it, so we couldn't have got where we are today without it. But we have a great leap forward, and that great leap forward is Ayn Rand, who I think completes the project of the Enlightenment. What we need is to take our ideas seriously. And I think libertarians do themselves harm, do themselves and do the cause harm by not taking Ayn Rand more seriously, and that's it. Gentlemen, we're out of time, so thank you very much. So, Tom, do you want to tell us something where people can find more about libertarian part of Scotland and what you're doing these days, and so what do you want people to know? Okay, you can check out the Scottish Libertarian Party at www.ScottishLibertarians.com, or you can follow us on Twitter at atskollibertarian. So, gentlemen, thank you so much. Many thanks to our superchatters. A big thank you to the Ayn Rand Institute for supporting this series, and Tom, Jaron, thank you very much. We'll see you all next week. Bye-bye. Thank you.