 Welcome. I'm glad for the big turnout. It helps when there's no competition. I'm glad you're all here Let me just as a matter so you're not on the edge of your seats and I disappoint you I know some of you have seen my online talks about private military defense and like police and judicial Activities, I'm not gonna cover that in this talk. That's what's called the market for security So I do that one on Friday. So this one is other, you know, it's a sort of hodgepodge of various issues of You know, how could things be handled in a free society? I also want to make just a quick announcement. Some of you may be interested to know So I think a lot of you have noticed my son's been down playing chess and he played a faculty member here I'm not gonna say who it is But let me give you a hint by the transitive property. I Can now beat Friedrich Hayek in chess so you can figure out so we've narrowed it down all right, so Economics of a stateless society. So one thing is why did we why do I use that term stateless? There's a thing going back where Some people make a distinction between the state and government and like state with a capital S and government with a small G and I used to think oh who cares about that but More recently, I've had a change of heart So I try to you know, sometimes you slip up in casual conversation But I do try to stress the state because some people the way they use government They mean it just as a more general like there's authority so they might say oh There's government within the church or the family and any sort of hierarchy at all even if it's Consented to in some manner. So that's why I'm trying in this talk to stick to else be saying stateless Also, just so you're not getting confused Really what the what the goal is from a Rothbardian perspective and what motivates the people who are you know the faculty at this Event is a free society. I think that's the more positive goal So statelessness is necessary but insufficient for a free society, right? so that obviously Martians come and blow up the world or something it would be stateless, but you know, it's it's I'm not sure what you They'd get rid of the NSA. So it's it's not sure it's a toss-up. All right, so that's that's where we're coming from with this one Let me motivate this by giving a very interesting quote here So this is from an intellectual. I'll tell you who it is in a second But let's just consider the statement for if the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the state If it were convinced that the state is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large Then the state would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another mafia gang hence the necessity of the state's employment of Idiologists and hence the necessity of the state's age-old alliance with the court intellectuals who we've the apology of for state rule and So I like this quote because it underscores I think even libertarian sometimes fall prey to this misconception that the reason The the state has so much power and influence in society is that they have more guns than people or geez They you know, they just have tanks and we don't so therefore that's why they're in charge and that's not really correct that Mises Relying on the insights of David Hume would often stress that in the long run. There's no such thing as an unpopular government Okay, even and you might say oh come on maybe like in Western democracies, but but you know, we're about authoritarian regimes No, you can see this principle there the most clearly It's precisely in the most totalitarian regimes where they have the strongest tightest control on the media the schools You know people don't have internet access, right? So if it really were, you know, the North Korean government were in charge of the government The North Korean state were in charge Because of the fact that they could just kill people and that you know any dissent wouldn't be tolerated Then they would say yeah, go ahead teach whatever you want in the schools because if anyone steps out of line, you know We'll kill them. That's not what they do though They very tightly control what ideas that people have because they know how fragile their rule really is I said the people running the show They know just how fragile is that's why they have to worry about public opinion That's why they have to have this whole system of intellectuals court intellectuals who propagate falsehoods and you know myths about We like when you think about us history the normal way that's taught is just a succession of us presidents Right as opposed to I then this was the age when this entrepreneur, you know did his thing or this inventor did such and such Whereas you know it's supposed to be this is period of different rules by the person in the White House That's the way it's typically taught and it's not a coincidence. Okay, so So that's the importance of a week like Mises University that yes There's other particular strategies like C setting in the Free State Project or political action whether to educate the public or just to You know try to elect more libertarian officials But all these going underground off the grid so forth, but all those things require More of the public to agree with the spirit at least of the stuff we're teaching this week, right like even if for example drugs were still Illegal if nobody in your neighborhood was ever going to call the cops on you then it wouldn't really matter Right, you see so it takes the public has to cooperate with the authorities and ultimately as Mises says It's not enough for the the ruler to have an army because why do the soldiers point their guns at the population instead of turning around and pointing them at The ruler and you know coups happen. There are violent Overthrows of the government and so Mises point was ultimately its ideas that matter So who was the this might surprise you who actually wrote this this? Really provocative passage. It was a young Janet Yellen in grad school No, it wasn't It was Murray Rothbard Now now why did I do that? I just told you not to trust the court intellectuals because I'm here with a tie Doesn't mean what I'm saying is right. Okay, trust no one. All right There apparently there it's probably apocryphal, but I was reading on like the Sicilian You know mafia and well a stuff came from and apparently there's a story about how The the mafia don takes his young you know his oldest son And but when he's still a young kid takes him out like it has him stand up on some building That's you know like maybe this tall and says jump off. I'll catch you and because like no daddy I don't want to come on. I'll catch I'll catch you the kid jumps and he just lets him smack into the ground It was trust no one. All right, so Here's I'm gonna jump into a bunch of specifics, but there's a general presumption for volunteerism So no matter what the issue is It's odd that normally the way the argument goes for oh and yeah, yeah Sure freedom works for things like TVs and ice cream cones But in this particular issue and the interventionist will give some particular social Situation we need state intervention because of the da da da da right and they'll go through and list why standard Profit maximizing business wouldn't be applicable in that situation But what's odd is it's like everybody in the world can understand There's this glaring gap here where people want something to be done And yet the only people who seem to not be able to recognize that are the profit-seeking business people, right? And so the idea is that silly yet It might take some ingenuity there might have to be some cleverness in how can we charge and make money? Solving this genuine problem that we all agree people have here But it's odd that the one set of people who apparently can't recognize there are the people who would make a bunch of money from fixing the problem So this is a probably a bit dated. The principal is the vanilla ice. I know like two of you now know who this is Because his iconic song he has a line if there's a problem you'll all solve it And so okay, I will have to get a different reference for next year. All right So let's talk about money. So here's an area where a lot of people just assume Oh, of course, you need the state to provide money, right? They can't even conceive I mean just to look around look at there's money. That's just provided by states all over the world So of course that has to happen. What is manger taught that no actually? Historically money emerged first voluntarily in the private sector and it was only later that Political states coerced and you took over that area So how did that how did that form? So just talk about something like gold so manger and I'm here I think you guys may have gotten a version of this already But let me just reiterate the story really quickly not just for its own sake But also to show the type of explanation and something that you could call a spontaneous order So first of all manger and by the way, let me just mention this isn't just that Austria and fanboys are saying oh, we like the way manger handled this no back in the day I think it was like in the encyclopedia of economics Manger had the article entry on the origin of money Okay, so it was he was acknowledged at the time in the late 1800s as he was one of the people who really had written the best exposition of how could money have emerged Spontaneously if that's the word you want to use or or without you know some central planning organization or some wise king So for what one thing is manger pointed out the problem with the so-called state theory of money right the idea that Look at there's this thing money. It's clearly not natural, right? We say where where did trees come from? Well, that's obviously something that was was natural You can talk about evolution or you can talk about God But it's not that humans had anything to do with why trees are there But money is clearly something that came from human beings and so then that it's a natural And it's also very useful and so it's a natural inclination for people to say so therefore there must have been some wise Person or group of rulers way back when who invented this thing because they can't conceive of how else could it have arisen And so manger pointed out there's a lot of problems with that So number one we don't have any evidence of that right you would think if somebody invented money We might remember that person that might have been recorded somehow and that that's that's not the case This is also even if it were true that some you know, so people are engaging in barter. Let's say and then Some wise person has this great idea like you know what what if instead of trading things that you directly value and accept And trade what if we and he like picks up a stone and says what if every one half of every transaction involves people accepting these stones That are by themselves not something that you would value that would sound really stupid, right? I mean we now having grown up in this world We understand that actually that does make sense But you can see how back then that would that would seem crazy and then furthermore even if he like maybe the king says All right, everybody has to when you're selling something you got to accept these stones first And don't worry when you want to buy something you trade in these stones for it So that's why it'll all be a wash in the long run It will all be more effective and efficient even if he could convince his subjects to go along with that perhaps You know because he's threatening them somehow What would be the purchasing power right so if originally you were going to sell horses for so many eggs Now here so oh gee I have to first sell the horses for stones Well to know how many stones do except you need to know well How many stones trade for eggs to know if this is still a good deal or not or for maybe I just don't want to sell Well, how would you know that because the egg seller is in the same boat? How does he know how many eggs to sell for stones right so you see it's it's hard and this is another area where I think even We talk about fiat money even a lot of Austrians and libertarians sometimes say oh the reason this is valid is because the government has guns and makes it valuable and It has to be more complicated than that right because you wouldn't know just from scratch What's the purchasing power of even this fiat money supposed to be so just just keep that in mind that? There's a lot more involved when to get people to accept and use something as money Okay, so that's great. It seems like mega makes some good points, but then how how did we get there? It's almost like he seems to have proven. Yeah money can't exist how would it ever get off the ground and So the story he tells is I'm obviously simplifying it here boiling it down for the just the basic story is that even in a state of I'll say barter the more technical term would be direct exchange But even in that state some goods would have a bigger market than others some things would be more salable or we could say more marketable so things like eggs and and beef and so forth would have a wide market where something like a very Sophisticated telescope it could be valuable But only a very few people would want to buy that thing right and so if you're going into town to trade and You're carrying a bunch of eggs You're gonna quickly find somebody on the other side of that you know who wants eggs and has whatever you want But if you're going to town with a really sophisticated Telescope and you want horses what are the chances you're gonna find someone on that day who's selling horses and wants a really sophisticated Telescope so you see you see the problem there So manger said what people would do who are in the position of wanting to unload goods that are relatively unmarketable Even though they might be very valuable is they would do indirect trades right they would take something as a stepping stone So they found someone selling eggs who wanted a really fancy telescope They might trade because they know if I have a bunch of eggs I'm much more likely to find someone selling horses who wants eggs than wants this sophisticated telescope So that's the the first link there in the argument and once you accept that which you know seems pretty straightforward It's snowballs right so then what happens is things that initially just because of their Attributes and people their desire for direct consumption or production Desired a certain good and it was relatively marketable now its marketability gets enhanced because there's a second layer of people who accept it Because they're gonna trade it away All right, and so things that initially were a little bit more marketable now are a lot more marketable because more and more people Accept them in a trade just intending to hold them temporarily to unload them later All right, and that process snowballs and if one or two goods Gets to the point at which just about everybody realizes. Oh, yeah, I'm not gonna have trouble unloading that So I'll see whatever I have to sell I'll sell take that thing and then go trade it away for whatever I ultimately desire We'll go up that's money. That's what money is. It's a medium of exchange. That's universally accepted So and then the things like why gold and silver There it's because if you think about what sorts of goods would be very useful in that role Things that are, you know, very durable like like cattle could could work in some respects But it's you know, you have to feed them they go to the bathroom There's all sorts of problems with them if you want to buy something that costs half of a cow It's hard to make change right so there's things like that whereas gold and silver there's really nothing wrong with them They're pretty good on all the dimensions of what would make a good medium of exchange And that's why over time the market embraced gold and silver as the monies Whereas something you might felt like what about diamonds the strike against diamonds is they're not homogeneous, right? It's not that a pound of diamonds is a pound of diamonds if you have one huge diamond That's more valuable than a bunch of smaller diamonds that have the same weight Where's with gold that doesn't work like that because you can just melt gold down and it's a pound of gold or an ounce of gold Is an ounce of gold? Okay, so that's Manger's story about how money could have emerged Just using and notice there nobody planned that outcome so and this is a subtlety So it's not that we're saying rationality wasn't involved and this was just oh just money emerged and it was kind of this weird thing Everybody was making very specific means ends appraisements But what they were doing was just saying okay. I want you know, I have this telescope. I want to get I'm gonna say horses and there's a guy here offering eggs for a telescope I will make this trade because I know I'm more likely right so that's a very rational Thing to do there. It's not we're not just appealing to some Tendency or propensity to trade you can see why that person's improving his own position the way he evaluates it But he wasn't thinking ah and then when others start doing this 10 years from now We're all going to be using money and that makes more sense than bar Nobody was thinking like that it just sort of naturally happened each person looking, you know fairly short term where this Result was something that was the result of human action, but not of human design Okay, what about Coins, okay, so you can say all right that explains maybe why gold could be the money in a community But what about actually having coinage that's something that states around the world right now do But again, this was originally you had private mints That would take the gold and silver and stamp them into coins And it was only later that you know states political institutions crowded that out and took over that that function So that this isn't to science fiction George selgin actually has a book on this going through and showing pictures too So it's not only that the money the coins that were privately produced were possible that they existed They were actually much better looking coins than the stuff that the states produced because they had to be there was in competition So to be clear The private mints they didn't make gold money gold was money by itself All they were doing was they they it would be A matter of convenience to for example if a merchant was selling something for 10 ounces of gold And you walked in there with just a block of yellow metal They could you know, they would have to weigh it They would have to try to assess its purity whereas if there was a company that would take The actual blocks of metal and stamp them into very recognizable coins with a certain insignia That would be hard for counterfeiters to match and on the you know the circumference they had ridges So it'd be hard to shave off You know bits of gold so that you are assured of the the fineness and weight of it That's what the mint did that's the service that provided it was just Certification that this really is an ounce of gold or you can tell this is an ounce with very little inspection compared to Just the raw metal as it were okay, and so that really happened. So since mints were competing with each other That's why the coins would have to look nice. That was one of the attributes Why would you carry coins from this mint versus another? Well, the things were really ornamental and pretty to look at that would give them a slight edge And of course they also had to be hard to counterfeit and so forth All right, what about banking that's another area where it seems like oh clearly you need to have heavy regulation at least of Banking because otherwise the public's going to be taking advantage of no again here. This is standard. You can see how this would emerge It's very inconvenient to just rely on gold coins And so there would be a role for banks To issue notes for example saying the bearer of this Is entitled to one ounce of gold at the murphy banker at the you know Rothbard bank or whatever and they could be 100% reserve I won't get into that because I you know did the lecture yesterday And i'm saying even this service that that is providing genuine service to the public Right if you get to be pretty wealthy and you have thousands of gold coins in your possession You're vulnerable to robbery All right, and so you could go give a storm at this place that has big vaults and armed guards and cameras and insurance And then they give you Debit card and modern times are back then they could give you paper notes Which are very easy to transport if you're going to make a large purchase It's a lot easier to hand over some high denomination notes than to have bags of gold coins Or you could write checks, you know that the bank could certify that yes This person has whatever 10,000 ounces of gold to his name And so he can write these authorized checks and there can be a very you know They can check your signature and blah blah blah to make sure it's a legitimate transaction. All right, so there's plenty of Reasons that banks would emerge and did emerge historically for volunteer through the voluntary market Let me just mention here That what we're told that regulation and central banks are supposed to do Is the opposite of actually what they do in practice, right? So the the claim is Oh without heavy regulation if you just had laissez-faire in banking Banks would be issuing these notes the public would have no idea what they were there'd be fly-by-night companies And you know merchants would be accepting notes And then they'd go and the bank wouldn't exist anymore things like that And so we need regulation to protect the public from wild inflationary booms caused by these wildcat banks And actually that is 100 backwards that in the voluntary private sector where there's just standard contract Enforcement where banks don't have special privileges There would be very sharp limits on note issue because if anyone bank issued more notes than its competitors did Its reserves of gold would quickly get drained right that Because you would you are a merchant you're accepting let's say you accept notes from anybody What are you going to do with them? You're not going to hold notes from some bank You don't recognize you're going to go to your bank and deposit them And so at the end of every week or month the banks all settle up with each other with clearing Transactions and on net if your customers turned in more notes than this bank's customers did vis-a-vis each other The one bank settles up by sending net gold to the other bank to get settled up And so if one bank is issuing paper notes like crazy and doesn't have the gold to back it up Then its clients spend more in the community the other banks accumulate notes Drawing on that bank and it runs out of reserves. So there were strict limits on credit expansion from any one bank in that kind of a system Central banks their function what's one of the things if you go look at the historical controversy or discussion One of the functions of the central bank was to be a lender of last resort So that is not at all telling private banks. Hey, don't lend too much. Don't be too aggressive in your loan policies If we're here to bail you out if you get caught with your pants down That's what you need a lender of last resort for is if you get caught And people you owe people more money than you can pay them at the moment That's when the central bank comes in to rescue you so that institution far from promoting Capitalism among commercial banks actually gives them the incentive to inflate more And then also obviously tight regulation restricting free entry of new firms into the banking sector Allows a cartel to form right because even if all the banks, you know, remember that mechanism I said two minutes ago. What if all the commercial banks agree with each other? Hey, let's just all of inflate in unison So our notes, you know cancel out each other and we can all make more loans and earn more interest income And then we won't have a net drain of reserves because we're all doing it together They might do that But then some new bank can set up shop that has a higher reserve ratio And it will drain the reserves from all the expanding banks But you can't do that if it's really hard to open up a new bank And right now it's very difficult to oh, you can't just open up a new bank It's not like opening up a pizza shop. Okay, and so notice again All the things that are in place allegedly to protect the public actually Protect the the banking sector and allow them to inflate more Okay the famous question who would build the roads? I I always forget to look up and tom woods has my favorite quick one-liner response to this He says something like that. Yeah, it's kind of amazing that this is the go-to objection to libertarianism It's like there's consumers over here and there's wal-mart over here and they can't figure out how to you know They're all just scratching their heads saying how can we get together and right and notice it's It's not like it takes some secret knowledge to know how to build a road You see what I mean like it's whereas you could see with things like Uh, you know, we'll get into this on the friday talk if you go to that when we're talking about military defense You can kind of understand someone thinking well g the nsa and the fbi and the ci They know Things the private sector doesn't know and so that's why they need to be in charge of keeping us safe from the russians or whoever But when it comes to building roads, it's not like yeah, the government or the political authorities know certain things about asphalt That nobody in the private sector know you see what i'm saying. All right Okay, also besides just the theoretical appeals. I'm making historically again. We see the same pattern the early turnpikes They were raised Constructed privately there was and there were there were mechanisms too to overcome what you could call the free rider problem So if there are a bunch of merchants in a certain area They knew if they built a turnpike that went through there that they could attract, you know traffic from you know So like people are going from here like this major city this major city and let's say there's a town in the middle They would know if we make it convenient for these people to go right through our town this way Then we'll benefit from them stopping and buying stuff along the way from us rather than stopping somewhere else And so the the merchants in an area Might all chip in to help contribute and build a road where they're not stopping people every two feet and charging a toll They could have free access roads Like that where the local merchants are the ones putting up the money because they know it will more than pay for itself In the extra traffic they're going to get all right, and there were like public Shaming campaigns and things in certain areas where you know somebody who was the advocate of building this privately financed turnpike Would get contributions from the major merchants and then if somebody was holding out You know he might publicly let people know that hey this one guy is going to benefit from this and he's not So they couldn't stick a gun to his head But the point was there were plenty of mechanisms to try to get financing for so-called public goods Short of sticking guns in people's faces all right and this did work historically and it was only later the governments took it over Okay on this issue some people say oh my gosh if this were the case I mean in some cities red lights would mean go and green lights would mean stop and it would just be complete anarchy and chaos Okay, so number one obviously that's silly Okay, like it's not that we have different definitions of what a centimeter is around the world And yet it's not that if you try you know some scientists try to publish a paper And they have a footnote saying by the way when we say centimeter we mean and they said some huge unit of length You know they would just wouldn't get published that'd be crazy. All right, so it's not that you need Force to make sure that there are standards that people voluntarily embrace on the other hand It's good that in certain settings there would be some variety and some experimentation And so if you've never heard of this guy later go google hans monderman So he I think he's dutch. He's a road engineer And he has what at the time were very unorthodox views So he doesn't believe in signage or lights and in in his mind If if you have to put up a light or a sign to regulate the traffic flow you built the road wrong That it shouldn't you shouldn't have to give that extra information Just the natural design and layout of the road should give the drivers what they need And he was a big proponent of traffic circles And you know the drivers would go up to there and they would be confused and not know what to do And he said exactly that's what you want You don't want people zoning out and just not paying attention because oh, it's all right If there's a red light i'll stop otherwise i'm not even paying attention to what i'm doing He said that's how you hit pedestrians as if you're not really paying and instead if you're a little bit confused as a driver You're looking around you're alert. You're not going to hit somebody and he did this thing I can't find it on youtube now, but I did see it. He's talking to a reporter explaining his views He goes up to an intersection that he designed. It's like a traffic circle and it's crazy. There's cars all over the place he turns around Yeah backwards and he and he starts walking backwards across the street into the traffic right So he was hit and killed but still the point No, no, he didn't get hit and killed So his point was he was showing How much he trusted his design that he knew the oncoming motorists were very alert and they're not going to run into a guy Okay, so again, i'm just i'm not saying that's necessarily the solution But my point is we just assume that the way the state builds maintains roads now is the way it ought to be done When no it's a cliche about how in many areas there's potholes in the roads and it's terrible So the you know who knows what it would look like But don't just assume the way that the state maintains the road network right now is the correct way And it's up to the market to prove it could maybe match the performance of the state. Why would you think that? Okay, walter block makes the point if you look at the the fatalities It's not as if there's two people every year who die on the roads right There's lots of fatalities and his point is if a private company were causing all these there'd be congressional hearings And yet the way it is now If people die, it's just oh well Yeah, a driver error that guy must have been drinking or he was going too fast or get his brakes checked people Don't stop and say gee maybe we shouldn't have the political system being in charge of designing and building and maintaining the roads Maybe that's why there's so many deaths at this intersection Okay, beyond all that stuff this simple phenomenon of traffic jams, right? So if you're not from a big area, this might not be a huge deal to you But if you like or you know, new york la chicago houston it is Crazy just how much time people waste every day Russia we're going to and from work in the city and these are very productive people that time is very valuable So I don't I don't have the estimates of my fingertips But I'm thinking it's like in the billions of dollars in terms of just lost productivity these high productive people Sitting in traffic beyond that I do think the murder rate in new york would go down if you privatize the roads because people how aggravated they get And i'm losing it and they just you know go I'm I'm not even kidding. I'm being serious. All right, so Also something like bridgegate. I don't know if you guys know what that is but chris christy got in trouble he's governor of new jersey and There were serious elegant I don't know if they like literally proved it happened But there were very serious allegations of some of his key staffers to punish some mayor Some democratic mayor who hadn't supported christy's reelection campaign as governor Deliberately shut down some roads. I think it was the george washington bridge on the top Deliberately shut them down during rush hour one time to punish that mayor to cause massive traffic snarls And then there were some he likes some I think somebody died because he was in the in the ambulance or something And and so that was a huge scandal and people said that's partly why maybe christy didn't get picked as trumps vp because of that reason But the point being If if we were from scratch debating whether the political system or the profit and loss system should build and maintain roads And I said well, you don't want to trust the political system because maybe just out of personal vendetta They might deliberately cause huge traffic jams that inconvenience thousands of people I'm sure the critically. Oh, yeah, I'm sure somebody would do that. Geez, you know, whereas no that literally happened apparently Okay, so you see and why not the only reason it was bad for them is they got caught. It's not that You know, they they lost out on the other deal that the officials who made that call Were thousands of dollars poorer because they had fewer people passing the toll that day Right, you could say the the the political authorities missed out on the revenue But so the people who made that decision do not directly get to pocket that revenue That's not their money. It would be corruption if they pocket whereas a private company Is not going out of a vendetta just implement some policy because they hate some guy across the street And lose thousands of dollars or at least they will personally feel that they would have to really hate the guy to do that They're like if you're willing to pay it. Okay asset forfeitures, there's a huge thing now where governments Like the police this was a big thing I can't remember which interstate it was but there's an interstate that went through nashville Where the the the deal is people would bring in money in the cars buy drugs and then go the other way Um with with the drugs and the police set up roadblocks to allegedly to stop this trafficking But coincidentally they set it up on the side where the money was coming in They weren't trying to catch the people with the drugs They were stopping people who had cash in their in their trunks Seizing it and there are horror stories where like people who don't trust banks or some guy was in the middle of something And he was moving and he had you know thousands of dollars like 80 thousand dollars in cash in his trunk Because he was going to go buy a house and just he was you know person for some reason he didn't trust the commercial banks with a nut job and You know, there was it wasn't like You know, he had a bunch of white powder in the back seat or something. You're like say hello to my little friend no he He's just a regular guy and he had a bunch of cash and the cops started with that suspicious And they took it and he has to prove he's not a drug dealer to get his cash back Right, so there's all sorts of things like that That wouldn't be able to occur I mean the reason the state can get away with that kind of stuff is because they own and control the roads That's partly why they have such dumps. So again, it's not merely an issue of Traffic jams. Oh, by the way, I didn't explain the reason traffic jams occur is because the price is too low That's just a standard shortage. Just think about a supply and demand graph What happens if the price is too low too many people want to use the resource Compared to the quantity supplied. That's a shortage. That's what traffic jams are their shortages Okay, so the price is too low if it were privatized The price the tolls would initially shoot through the roof But at least rush hour would be you know fast and then with those huge profits People would build more roads and tunnels and bridges and so forth Okay, the last thing involuntary blood draws. There's another thing now too where At dui checkpoints or whatever they will against your will like hold you down and pull blood out and test it again And people were you know that went to the supreme court and things but that's The reason that happens is because the government's the one in charge of the roads Right, if there were a mark a private company in charge of these roads here and another company on these roads here If you didn't elect their policy, you would just drive on the competitors roads Whereas, you know, if it's the local government doing it, you it's it's harder just to say I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go to albuquerque anymore. Whereas you could easily say I'm not taking route a I'm taking route b that this company maintains Okay, what about public so-called public transportation Again, if you if you live or in a big city or have lived there, you're gonna know exactly I mean if you haven't this might not make sense to you But this is basically what the subway looks like a new york city at certain times of day And so what they will do I mean literally the subway comes in it opens if it's like Four through six p.m. In certain areas where a lot of office workers are going home for the the subway opens People literally go in I'm talking about like in terms of there's not much of volume left Inside the subway car. That's not human flesh I'm being serious And so But notice that doesn't happen on airplanes, right? It's not like you get into the plane and And some guys sitting on your lap and somebody's on your shoulders And they're you're saying, okay, we're going to tokyo now we strap in And you say why is this oh because it's a popular you should have known you should have flown at 3 a.m That's that's the solution They don't do that or a movie theater opening, right? You go to like the opening of the new avengers movie or something It might sell out But the theater owner doesn't let everyone pile in and sit on you to go watch captain america, right? Because they I mean this is silly I said because they know we want our customers to have an enjoyable experience What you do is you raise the price or you build more capacity You don't just let anybody pile in so that the thing So that the the rationing mechanism is to make the good or service less enjoyable to the user That's not what a private business is but the state does that because they don't care The people run the subway whether they make more or less profit Those bureaucrats don't earn bonuses for earning a profit again If they got caught doing that that would be embezzlement if they said no we we raise tolls and we we limit You know we put in turnstiles and strictly enforce them and we had police to make sure People weren't going in beyond just the seating capacity in the standard standing room And then you know and we raised the prices to be able to accommodate that and we made an extra billion dollars last quarter And now we're going to give ourselves bonuses of 100 million each for this new plan You know people would flip out they'd say what are you doing? You're charging us more money and pocketing it that'd be corruption And so that's why the political system doesn't do that and you end up with craziness like this All right. What about free and compulsory schooling? Okay, so government schools are often a euphemism for prison in some communities And here I mean so I don't just mean like oh miserable. I don't want to have to learn algebra I mean in some areas like literally you are in physical danger if the kids they have to go to certain schools And again, it's it's not it's precisely the groups of people that interventionists say would be left behind and not taken care of in a free market And that's why we need to have free so-called public schooling Is because of these underserved communities that you know the rich capitalists would ignore It's precisely those people who are getting terrible educations and are often in literal physical Violence situations because of this they can't even not go to school because it's against the law Also, it's not a coincidence. I would say right. It's not just oh, yeah The people running the state apparatus mean well and they just haven't paid attention What they weren't aware that there's shootings and knifeings and schools and so forth and the test scores are pretty poor No, they know full well. So I think the real reason in terms of long term Why is it the state insists on having such a strong presence in education? It's for the reason I said in the beginning that the people running this know full well How much ideas matter and ideology is important and this is how you maintain for example that US history is nothing but a succession of which president will happen to be in office for that four years Okay, and so homeschooling other nontraditional approaches vastly outperform these establishment ones And also let me just mention The I think there's like about half the let's say half the people who are currently in college Shouldn't be and I don't mean because they're stupid. That's not what I'm saying I'm just saying there's a certain type of person like when I when I first was teaching I could just tell that in the class Half of the students I would say they really it's it's they just they were there because they had to because they knew Oh, yeah, I have to get a college degree to get a job You got to do this and it was really just four years of checking the box Whereas let's say the other half were actually interested in the ideas and again I'm not saying the one group was smarter than the other and in many cases There were plenty of really intelligent people who I thought this is such a waste for them to be sitting here watching me draw Marginal cost curves, they're not going to ever use this stuff They should go out and you know get more business experience right away. They're wasting four years here Not only spending money, but they're missing on a potential job experience. All right, so The way I try to get regular people to see this point as I go the other way and I say what if We changed the expectation so that everybody to get a job to be considered a normal citizen And to have good loving parents had to go get a phd in something Right, we could see how that would be crazy. You say no that would that would just water down what a phd meant If everybody if the standard rule was any educated person had to have a phd in something You would realize that have to lower the standards and those programs And it would just be an arms race if everybody has to get a phd Then that doesn't signify anything and so it's just now instead of having to have a bachelor's degree You have to have a phd It would cancel out largely and it would just we would all lose four or five more years of our life rather than being productive Okay, and so you can see how that would be kind of crazy. So I'm saying what are the chances right now? We're at the optimal position And whereas we admit insisting on more schooling would be a problem No, maybe dialing it back actually would make more sense And it's clearly with all the government support given to education in terms of subsidies and mandates and so forth You can see how it's pushing people well beyond whatever that optimal level would be Okay, what about safety regulations? I'm going to speed up here because I got a couple more topics. I want to hit Whenever there's a food board illness or a plane crash Even though the state apparatus is officially in charge of keeping that stuff safe safe for us to make sure those wildcat Free enterprise nut jobs don't run the show and have shoddy products and adulterated food and so forth and crazy planes Where there's no oil changes. That's what we have the faa for the fda So whenever people die whenever there's disaster under the state's regulation Why people don't say, huh? Maybe the state's doing a bad job. No, it's always Thank goodness. We had the you know faa there. We need to beef up their funding when there's a plane crash, right? That's that's weird. It's like what could possibly happen to make people doubt the current system They always look at the failures under interventionism and say that's what would happen under the free market except more so Which is just weird if you think about it Okay, so just look at the comparative institutional analysis When there's a plane crash the faa typically will get more funding if there's some particularly agree like if some inspector Got caught being drunk and he didn't go look at the planes that he might get fired or something But it's not that the program is going to get its budget slash because you're doing a bad job They're going to get more funding if you're in congress and there's a bad plane crash and you vote to cut the funding of the faa You know, that'd be crazy people go nuts. What are you doing? They need more money So that's weird where if they fail they get more money. So why would we expect them to to do well in that scenario? Also, I don't have time to get into it here, but the standard libertarian critique of the fda is that they have all these unnecessary regulations and insistence on uh test procedures and so forth to bring a new drug to market Such that right now it costs over a billion billion with a b dollars to bring a major new drug to market. So that's true And so that's partly why Those drugs are so expensive because they have to be otherwise it wouldn't make sense And that's why you have drugs developed for mass markets not for real niche Illnesses because it just they they don't can't make money off of it. That's all true But the flip side is also true that the fda approved stuff that is actually So dangerous that it shouldn't be used under an standard metric of you know risk reward And yet the fda is very reluctant and sluggish in admitting it made a mistake and yanking the thing from the shelves And because the fda approved it that sort of gives its blessing and makes people more likely to use the thing Then if you just had a total free market So here it's not that consumers on their own would have to go and do tests on pills There would be private certification agencies right now. There are magazines like there's best pills worst pills I think it's a subscription service they um This was true as of like five years ago or so when I was doing research for a book That magazine Correctly anticipated all of the recalls the fda would do Months or in some cases years before the fda reversed itself. So let me just restate that This magazine that was giving consumers feedback and insight into which pharmaceuticals were safe or not was saying these particular Items the fda has approved. We think they're not safe. We think the fda will reverse itself eventually And it was corrected in all of those cases and in many cases it took years for the fda to admit It had been wrong in particular go look up the vioxx scandal just to see, you know, the most egregious case Okay, what about vaccinations? so again here Private schools and so forth they can have whatever rules they want a private school can say to attend here You need to show us you have these vaccinations. That's you know under a free society They're fine to do that they're free to do that other schools can say the opposite They can say, you know what? We don't insist on this So it's the point is you don't need a political system to enforce it. It's not that regulation or Standards necessarily has to flow from the course of political process Also, this is an ironic area Because by its very nature if you're saying no my kids vaccinated then in general that your kids should be free You know should be safe from these illnesses Right, so it's it's odd that this is one where a lot of it's a hill a lot of people die on and say Yeah, I like the libertarian view, but no, I mean come on. We have to have mandatory vaccinations And the counter response to this Is interesting so I was in an argument with somebody, you know I was saying I don't think the state should enforce vaccination policies let the schools and You know workplaces come up with their own policies And uh and I and I made that that second point and I said by the way If you like the vaccines and think they're good then just okay give them to yourself and your kids And then you'll be safe from this stuff, right? And you say well, no, that's not enough. We need to have what's called herd immunity We have to have it so that most people get it because There are people who because of their you know frail system or whatever If they got the vaccination it could be deadly to them And so since they can't get vaccinated we need to enforce just about everybody else gets the vaccination so that we can't have an Outbreak and so notice though they're admitting It went from these vaccinations are totally safe and only jenny mccarthy and other nut jobs could possibly Not want to give their kid this stuff to well some people might die if we gave them the vaccine So that's why everyone else has to be forced to do it And so now we're just quibbling over Who is it safe to give it to or not it's gone from this blanket science versus tinfoil hat wearing nut jobs to We're disagreeing the political authorities say this group it's safe to administer to and some parents disagree with that judgment So now you can see that this is really a very nuanced thing and clearly I would you know give the prerogative to the parents Okay, the last thing I got 30 seconds here. I'm going to solve the immigration problem. You ready? Okay, so First of all As with things like prayer in schools. Hey, do you think that in the government schools? There should be prayer You know can and or the 10 commandments There's no good answer to that the people on both sides have legitimate points So the same thing with immigration With the authorities in washington enforcing national borders Yes, both sides make valid points and there's no ultimate solution. So it's it's you're not going to have that's part of the problem That's why you don't want to have the political authorities mandating a one-size-fits-all solution Okay, let me just mention though. There's no such thing as a right to travel freely Okay, when it comes to things like malls fancy restaurants country clubs or your own house Of course, you can enforce borders. You're not, you know restricting someone's freedom But there's no freedom to travel through this region Unmolested by any sort of intervention that that's not true. There's no such thing as the right to move around the right to migrate So ultimately in a free society private landowners would set whatever policies they want So let me just demonstrate. I'm going to solve this with powerpoint. It would look something like this Okay, so we're worried Imagine like the current continental us goes roth bardy in next thursday This is the way it would look conveniently only people with very short first names bought these parcels of land Now now the and so they set whatever policies they want. Okay. Now the problem is you say, what about pan pan is kind of crazy She's a big fan of ms-13 in isis. And so she Is not going to do much about this border right there So that's why we need to have you know, washington dc come and put troops and build a fence. Watch this you guys ready Okay The people around pan can enforce it. Okay. And so The point being that yeah, it's it's a hard problem. I'm actually I'm not I mean I'm being glib here Obviously, it's a hard problem. But the point being that As with everywhere else just private private. That's really the only solution. So yes, we can quibble and say, okay Given that this isn't going to happen next thursday What should the u.s federal government? I get that but my point is there's going to be no good satisfactory answer there Whatever we say is going to be inferior compared to legitimate private property where people enforcing the borders on their own land Okay, I am done here. So thanks everybody