 How libertarians commonly say that one thing that distinguishes us from other political philosophies is that we don't recognize any positive rights or positive obligations, and that sort of comes from our symmetrical view of the non-aggression principle, which implies that rights are negative. In other words, you have the right to do anything you want in the world, and the only thing you have an obligation to do politically is to refrain from invading other people's property. So that's a negative obligation. And so their right not to be invaded would be a negative right, because rights and obligations are correlatives. Each one implies the other. They're like two sides of a coin. Rights and duties for obligations are correlatives. And what we say is that one problem with all competing political theories is that they all give positive obligations to people that they did not sign up for. But of course, this implies that not all obligations, even if libertarianism has to be negative, they just – you can have positive obligations. It's just that they have to be voluntarily acquired somehow. Okay? So let's go on to slide three. So let's take some examples. Of course, a clear-cut example, if you commit a crime, then as soon as you have committed that crime, even if you're in the process of it, you will acquire immediately a positive obligation to the victim. You have an obligation to stop. Well, that's actually a negative obligation, I guess, but you have an obligation to cooperate and participate in your apprehension. You have an obligation to immediately start trying to make restitution to the victim, et cetera. And if you have by a crime or by a tort, like an negligent action or maybe a type of assault and battery, let's say you push someone into a lake. Well, normally, if you're walking by a lake and you see someone drowning, then you don't have an obligation to – that is a legally enforceable obligation to rescue them. You have arguably a moral obligation, in some cases, to make an effort. But if you don't rescue the person, then you're not going to be liable for the harm that happened to the person if they drowned, let's say. But if you were the one who pushed them into the lake, let's say intentionally or even negligently, then you're the one who has caused the peril that you've put them in. So that would be another way of acquiring a positive obligation. So crime or torts or negligence are actions that you commit that can give you positive obligations and in turn gives the victim or the recipient some kind of correlative positive right, you could say. This is not what socialism or other political theories would say. They say that you have positive obligations to support your fellow man just because we're all humans or we're part of society, something like that. Now, we don't agree with that. It takes a particular action to obligate yourself. And just to make it clear why this is not compatible with libertarianism, what socialists believe. If someone has a positive right, that is a right to, let's say, education or food or housing, then someone has to – there's a correlative duty to provide it. So that means the rest of society, everyone has taxpayers or whatever, has an obligation to give up some of their money to the government to be redistributed to those who need these things. So that's a positive claim on their property, which there's no basis for that. This is the reason we're opposed to unvoluntarily incurred obligations. So that's a couple of actions that can happen. What about other actions? Well, now some libertarians of the more conservative mindset – I actually lean this way, although I don't think I'm conservative, but I believe that the analogy I gave earlier about pushing the person in the lake, what have you done there? You've basically taken an action that puts someone that has rights into a position of peril or dependency on your positive actions to do something that prevents them from suffering severe harm because of the situation you've put them into, because of the nature of the situation you've put this victim into. Now they are dependent on your positive actions to prevent some serious harm happening to their life or their body or their property. Likewise, it seems to me at least you could argue that if you conceive a child, then you have brought – because of the nature of man, infants are not born ready to go. They're born naturally dependent upon their parents for almost total care initially and gradually less over the years. So as long as you agree that humans have rights – so this infant has rights, so it's a rights-bearing entity – and it will be harmed if you don't take care of it and you are the one who by your actions of causing the baby to exist have put a dependent rights-bearing being into the world in a situation similar to the victim of pushing someone in the lake. So arguably the people that are causally responsible for the baby's existence and being in this state of dependency are the ones that by their actions have acquired a positive obligation to care for the infant as parents, which has a host of obligations – you know, obligation to educate, to shelter, to protect, to teach, et cetera. Now you could also even argue that that obligation starts earlier on even during pregnancy and you could argue that this is one argument against at least late-term abortion. I've never argued strongly this myself, but I think that you could make an argument somewhat along those lines. So – but the general point, I think, is hard to argue against that there are some positive obligations. Tony, while we may get to it in the more controversies – or in the more conundrums of controversies, I don't know if we will get to it. And I really don't have much more to say about it than what I've said, except I think that this is a hard issue. Even Ayn Rand, by the way, who seemed to be very flippant about abortion and calling fetuses just balls or protoplasm, she said that we could argue about the later stage of the pregnancy, but she never explained why. So even Ayn Rand was thinking that later in the pregnancy, a late-term abortion could be tantamount to an infanticide, even though her argument basically is that whatever happens in the woman's body is her right. Her right to control, which would include infanticide, I suppose. I think if you're religious and have a religious view of this, then you have – most religious people believe in the soul and they believe that when the fetus is conceived, it has rights from that point on. Beyond – I can get to that question about Rothbard in a second. If you have a more secular view, then you tend to associate rights with some faculty of rationality, because that's the human faculty that sets us apart from animals. And so then the question is, when does that arise? And if you agree that an infant has rights, it's hard to argue that an eight-month-old fetus doesn't have rights, because they're very similar. Physically, they're just inside the mother's body still. See more comments here. So my view is that infanticide is a type of murder or at least a prohibitable crime, and that late-term abortion is very similar to it. But I tend to agree for a variety of reasons that it still probably should not be legally outlawed, because to outlaw that just – it's too intrusive, even by private society. Although you could see lots of social consequences arising from late-term abortions that are done for no reason. Earlier on in the pregnancy, I tend to think it's immoral, but maybe not to the level of rights violation. So that's how I tend to do it. I also tend to think that with technology improving, if someday a woman who wants to get rid of a pregnancy at almost any stage probably could transplant the fetus into some other incubator or other woman, and it could live. And if that was the case, why would she – even Walter Block's argument is like the eviction argument. And I think that's Rothbard's argument too, is that you can evict the trespasser, and you have to use the least harmful means. And if that means killing it, then you're killing it as a byproduct of evicting a trespasser. But if a technology came about that made it possible to evict the baby without killing it, then you would have to do that. Because it would be murder. I think that's Block's view, and I'm sympathetic to it. The problem I have with it is that I don't think it's quite right to call a fetus a trespasser because it was invited. To me, it's like inviting someone to dinner at your house for a few hours, and then in the middle of dinner, a huge hurricane hits, and for anyone to leave the house, they would be instantly killed. So because you invited them, you have to shelter them until the storm passes, which is similar to the mother having to carry the baby to term. So that's one argument there. Kathy says a child is not a trespasser. That's ridiculous. I assume you're saying the idea that a trespasser is ridiculous. I can do agree, Kathy. I think you invited a child. Now in the case of rape, you could argue that it is a trespasser, and I have to say it here because I don't know if it's a boy or a girl. He or she is a boy or a girl. So rape might be one exception, although you could also view it as this is just another harm that the rapist imposed on the woman. He not only raped her, but he put her in a position where she can't evict this kid until birth or until it's safe to get it out. Okay, someone had a question about abandonment. John Matzai Rothbard says parents can abandon the child once it's born. Why do I disagree? Well, I don't know where I said I disagree with that. I just said parents have positive obligations to the child, but a parent who really wants to get rid of the child. So for example, if a parent has a child and just totally lets it starve, I think they're guilty of murder. Even Walter Block, I think, would agree with that. He said if you don't want to be the parent, then you have to let someone else rescue the child and adopt it. Now as a theoretical matter, you might argue that even in that case where the parent lets someone else adopt the child, then the child has some kind of claim against the original parent too. But I would argue that number one, a parent who wants to get rid of the child is never in practice going to ever be a good parent and it can't really be enforced. Now if they're rich, you could theoretically take some money to support the child for some time. But I would say that the parent is the presumed guardian of the child. In other words, the reason the parent gets to act, do things to the child, make decisions for the child is because he's acting as the child's presumptive agent. In other words, it's like if you fell into a coma temporarily and you're married, then presumably your spouse has your permission or we presume she has or he has to make decisions for you until you regain consciousness. A child is like that too until they reach a certain age of maturity. So we have to presume that the child would consent to someone making decisions on the child's behalf, which would be the person with the most natural link to the child, which would initially be the parents. If a parent is abusive, like severe abuse or neglect or wanting to get rid of the child, then at that point in time I think the default presumption that the parent is the one presumed by this child is overcome. And now the presumption would switch to the next most logical person, which might be an adoptive parent or an aunt. And I would say even the final decision of the parent on behalf of the child to consent to this new parent becoming the new parent would be a valid decision and would cut the ties to the first parent. So basically it's the baby to give off his claims on the original parent and switch them to his new parents who are willing to step in and the birth parents are making the decision as the agent. And I think that's a reasonable decision, but it's the last one they can make. Yon says, if I don't consent to the jurisdiction of a PDA, then a duty seems no more than an exhortation to act or refrain from acting. In other words, it's an attempt to control conduct short of a more costly reliance on physical force. Well, when we're talking about rights here, we're talking about rights that are actually legally enforced in some society or enforced in some legal way with some kind of severe consequence, which even could be ostracism or restitution backed by force or even punishment as we discussed earlier. So the positive obligation is an obligation that is legally enforceable by the legal system. And as we also discussed, I don't think you can argue that the person who has an obligation or a duty has to be consented ahead of time to the PDA's obligation to be bound by it. You're bound just because of the right between people and the fact that the victim of your aggression has the right in any legal system to retaliate or to use force to defend themselves. Kathy says, I wonder if these arguments are the result of childless men's minds. Well, Walter Block has children, so I don't think in his case, although I will say that I was sort of a Randian pro, not pro-abortion but pro-choice, strongly pro-choice in my Randian days. And I will say that having a child in late 30s made me think a lot about the child, and it did open my eyes in a way to sort of how callous it is to just speak of killing the fetus just for convenience or something like that. So it could be a little bit. But also I think Rothbard, et cetera, he was doing a lot. He was alone in the wilderness in a way, one of the very first, and so he was jumping from issue to issue and coming up with a – trying to come up with a reasonable approach to things. And it's not surprising some things get refined or maybe seen as not consistent with the rest of their theory later on by others who stand on their shoulders. Brian says, ma'amuni, has there ever been any cohesive argument that defines when a child is sufficiently mature to make their own decisions? I say this also in light of mentally retarded individuals and people who have dementia. Jan says, why didn't Rothbard have kids? I have no idea. I don't know. A lot of objectives as Randian and even libertarian types tend not to. But back to Brian's question, I don't know of any extensive argument, actually. I could point you to a few things. Like I think maybe Rothbard or Walter Block have an implicit idea and even Hunterman Hoppe that there's some connection with the child saying no and not like a four-year-old saying no. But the child basically making a sufficiently mature decision to become independent and leave the home. And you could imagine in social context a 12 or 14-year-old doing that if things were bad enough. I don't think there would be a single, legislated age of majority of 18 or 21 like we have now. Kathy, I know you didn't mean it as an insult. I have similar thoughts. And I'm careful about mentioning it because people take it as condescending that once you see what I've seen, then you'll see. And I don't mean it that way, but it's true that we do learn things in life. In any case, I would also point – and so I think Hoppe also links a little bit of that. I think it's in the second or first chapter of his theory of socialism and capitalism. We have some comments and some footnotes about children and the role of parents as guardians. And I think he would link it to his argumentation ethics when the child is able to basically intelligently respect other people's rights and assert his ownership of his own life. And I think this relates to, in a social context, to human maturity and the ability to somehow be independent. And there's, of course, a spectrum of when you're a totally dependent child or infant and you gradually become close to the age when you could be independent if you wanted to, even though 12 or 13 wouldn't be ideal. Oops, hold on a second. Can everyone still hear me? I think the video is frozen up. Let me close it and see if I can fix this. Oh, I'm just in a second. Give me a second, guys. I might have to log out and log back in. Give me just one second. Let me try a quick fix, although you really don't need to see me for this. Okay, I'm going to log out. I'll be right back on. Everybody hang tight. Take a one-minute break. Okay. Can people hear me? I'm trying to get things fixed. Sorry about that, Snapoo. Okay. We're back going again. Sorry about that. This age we live in. Let me just check the, am I loud enough? Is my mic loud enough? Okay, guys. So where were we? We were talking, oh, I was also going to point people to, you know, I've lost the chat window that we had earlier. So if anyone has anything I missed, you can have to retype it. I have Yon's comment about, according to Rothbard, the kid would have to resolve it by leaving home, which is, I think, a fair practical test. I am not one of these libertarians who thinks that if you use physical force to restrain a young child, like, from running into the street or touching a hot stove, then it's aggression. I think you have the child's implicit consent to make decisions like that on his behalf. So you are deciding at the child's agent to give this adult permission to do this to you, so it's not aggression because it's consented to. Now, spanking, I don't know if this is really a strongly libertarian issue. I had a long conversation on YouTube with Steph and Mollie knew about this a few months ago, about Montessori education and peace. And I used to be post-panking until I had children. And now I don't know if I think it should be prohibited. In fact, I don't think it should be prohibited, at least mild spanking. But I do think it's a mild form of aggression and not a good idea. It's just not the right way to raise a child. But I probably have different views than some conservative parents or some libertarian parents on that, or conservative libertarian parents, I should say. Now, what I was going to point to was someone asked about this mentally retarded people or people with dementia. I would suggest take a look at the book Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community by Lauren Lemasky. And he's got a section in there where he talks about what he calls piggybacking. So he talks about how we give rights in a moral community of a libertarian society to people that don't really have the normal capacity that we normally think is the source of rights, rationality, et cetera. And he basically has this argument that we let these marginal cases, or you could say defective humans. I don't want to be pejorative, but you could say some people have some severe defects in their mental capacity. We let them sort of share in the pool of human rights or individual rights by piggybacking onto our rights. So they're dependent in a sense, and they couldn't have rights if they were all that existed because they wouldn't be able to have a society to respect each other's rights. So take a look at that. I don't know of any more developed criteria than that. I think it's more of a judgment call thing. I think that basically in a libertarian society where people recognize that fully grown adults had rights and respected them, then almost everyone of those people that are part of society would, of course, believe that at least more humans from infant onwards also had rights because there's no essential difference between them and us. And that severely defective people are marginal cases and would have to have guardian and caretakers. And similar to the child, if there's an abusive guardian or caretaker, I would think that they're violating their duty as caretaker and they don't have the default consent of the disabled person to make those decisions and are presumptively committing aggression and ought to be replaced with a different guardian or charitable ward or whatever. Okay, so I hope that's clear. Now, so far I've discussed one way that positive obligations can arise consistent with libertarianism. Basically, socialism would say that you acquire positive obligations by the act of existing, right, so by doing nothing. And I've argued that you can certainly acquire obligations by certain actions like a crime or a tort or even creating a dependent entity like a human baby conceiving. Now, another would say you can also create obligations by making a contract. Okay, let's see. So you bind yourself by promising to do something. Now, I would agree that a promise gives rise to moral obligations, which is my a libertarian view. This is not part of libertarianism. But I think it's problematic to say that it gives rise to actual legally enforceable rights correlative positive obligations. And the reason is, and we can turn to this a little bit now. I'll try to get to it more later. It's not compatible with what I think is the most sensible understanding of contract, which is the Rothbard Evers view of contract, which is called the title transfer theory of contract. In this view, and I do have some slides on this later. In this view, contracts are not binding promises or legally enforceable promises. They are just transfers of title among one or more people to property that they own. And if I transfer my car to you, it's no obligation about it. I'm just changing who owns it. It's mine. Now it becomes yours. And reciprocally to that, your title to $10,000 of cash transfers to me, conditioned upon my giving you the car. But there's really no obligations about it. If you imagine, like let's say I promise to sing at your wedding and if you pay me $1,000, well, if I don't show up, do I have a positive obligation at the 7 o'clock base? 30 minutes. Anyway, if you have a positive obligation to sing or if I have a positive obligation to sing, then you have the right to have me sing. And if I don't sing, theoretically you could have the police grab me and force me to sing or you could punish me for not singing. But it wouldn't be practical in those cases, but in some cases you could enforce performance with a threat of coercion. Just like you can enforce other rights with a threat of coercion, like right of the right for you not to attack me, I can use force to stop that. But the problem with that is that really the right way to look at that contract is that was a one-way transfer of title from you to me. It was a conditional transfer of future property to me, $1,000, conditioned upon my singing. If I don't sing, I don't trigger the condition that makes the transfer of property come to me, the payment. Now, if the guy who's hiring me wants to be sure I'm going to sing, well, he can never be sure, the future's uncertain, but he can impose a penalty on me. He can try to get me to agree to a penalty so that I'll have an extra incentive. My incentive to sing is to not miss out on another $1,000, but I just miss out on it. I'm not penalized in addition to that. So he can make me agree, okay, Cancelo, you have to agree to – I'll agree to give you $1,000 if you show up and sing, but you have to agree to pay me $10,000 in damages if you don't show up and sing. Now, that's an extra penalty he's imposing on me. I can't talk right now. That's a penalty he's imposing on me which cost me more. So I might say, well, I'll give you that insurance policy, but it's going to cost you $100, so really, you have to pay me $1,100 to get me to show up. But in either case, that's just the transfer of obligations – transfer of titles to property. Now, Per Jeldas says, if you are paid a down payment, are you legally obligated? Now, this is Walter Bloch's argument and Rothbard's argument too, which I'll get to later, that if you accept a down payment like that and then you don't perform, then you're implicitly stealing the down payment. I don't think that's correct. I have some slides on this later. I'll get to them when we get to them, but I'll go ahead and talk about it now. Again, I think they're not being careful enough with Rothbard's own title transfer theory. We have to recognize a few things. According to libertarian theory, there always has to be an owner of every scarce resource at every moment in time so that people can know who owns it and the owner can know that he owns it and is able to use it. You cannot determine the ownership of something in the future. You have to be able to determine it in principle now. You can't say, well, we'll know who owns this thing now when we wait for 10 years and see what then happens in 10 years or in one year or in one month. But that's implicitly what Rothbard is doing, I think, and Walter Bloch as well. So let's take an example that Walter always uses. Let's say I give you a car now in exchange for you getting me $10,000 in a month. Now, if I'm giving you the car now instead of in a month, there must be a reason you need to use the car now. So for you to use it, you have to have the right to control it, which is ownership or at least the type of ownership. If in one month you are unable to pay me the $1,000, then what have you implicitly stolen from me? It's got to either be the $1,000 or it's got to be the car. Well, in one month from now, you can't steal the car from me a month ago. It doesn't make any sense. You can't say that your use of the car was not consented to because I did consent to it. I gave it to you. And if you're penniless and you can't pay me the $1,000 in a month, then how can that $1,000 be stolen? There's no $1,000 in existence to steal. It would be like if I said, I hereby give you the moon, but I don't own the moon. Or if I said, I hereby give you the purple dragon over my shoulder. I mean, there is no purple dragon that exists, so I can't be stealing it from you. So I think that there's a confusion there. I think that there is no theft. Now, if you're given a down payment, then either it's yours to keep and you own it or you're just holding it. If you're holding it until you perform, then you don't own it yet. And if you spend it before you perform, then you could argue, someone could argue you've stolen it because you converted someone's property or used it without their consent, because you were supposed to just hold it. But in that case, why would the promiseee give you the $1,000 down payment ahead of time? I mean, you either need to put it with a third party or put conditions on it or take the risk that it might be stolen. Brian says, would I say that this is subsumed under the concept of risk and betting on the future? I'm not sure what this means, but I think a lot of this is actually yes. Every contract, except for ones that are very simple and simultaneous, you know, mutual, like I hand you a dollar for a chocolate bar, and they happen at the same time. And even those can never really happen at the same time. There's always a future element. I mean, the guy that goes first is assuming that the subsequent action that's his reward for performing is what it's expected to be. But the future's uncertain. The universe might end right one second after I pay the dollar and then the chocolate bar never gets to me. But most contracts have a future element, a future performance or title transfer. If it's a future performance, then that serves as a trigger to a title transfer. If it's a future title transfer, then it's a transfer of some future good. But if the future is necessarily uncertain, the existence and my ownership of this future good is necessarily uncertain. And of course, the person who is giving something now in exchange for something in the future is taking a risk that the future object might not exist. Yeah, he's taking a risk, which is why, and alone, if I give a thousand now in exchange for a future $1100, I know that that $1100 may actually not exist, which is why it has to be bigger than the $10,000 I'm giving now. And that relates to the interest rate. Okay, back up. All right, so let's get back to some of these issues here on this slide. And then maybe we can address some of these other issues in further detail later. But the whole point of this is to point out that if you take the Rothbard view of contract, then really only actions are the way to give rise to positive obligations. Now, that doesn't mean that speech couldn't be a type of action. It just means that it's not binding merely because you make a promise. But we also have to recognize that speech is a type of action. And the fundamental thing in my view to recognize is that the reason we say that certain actions are prohibited is because they have causes. Remember, the museum structure of action is that an action is something we do with the scarce means that is causally efficacious at achieving some end, right? And we take this action and we achieve some end. We cause something to happen. And if we cause the invasion of the physical integrity of someone else's body or property, that is what aggression is. It is an action that has a causal connection between the use of some means and the end result that you wanted, and in this case, an illicit result or an impermissible result. By the way, I talk about this in this article at the bottom of slide three, causation and aggression with Pat Tendly, a friend of mine. But by this understanding, speech actually could be a type of aggression because it's an action that causes harm. Not because it's a binding promise, but because they actually are not binding promises, according to Rothbard's theory. But I mean, look at the examples I get here. If you're the captain of a firing squad and you say ready, aim, fire, or if you are the president, you give an order down the chain of command telling the pilot of the airplane, circle over Hiroshima or Nagasaki and drop the atomic bomb, right? Then you are playing a causal role in damage. So I think that also could be a species of aggression and that could give rise to positive obligations. So it's words, but it's not because the words are promises that are legally binding as contracts, but because they play a causal role in aggression. And also, there's another issue libertarians sometimes wrestle with. You know, they'll say that there's an absolute right to free speech, which as we'll get to later, property rights are really the only independent rights. Everything else is derivative or consequences of that. When we speak of free speech, for example, as an independent right, you sort of lose the connection to property rights. And then you also tend to think of them in absolute terms. You'll say that, well, libertarians have the right to do anything except use physical force against others, and words are not physical force, so nothing you say to someone could obligate you, right? Which I think is wrong because of the examples I just gave. In fact, this leaves Walter Block and others to say that basically the president who orders a bombing is actually not liable unless there are two things, unless there is coercion of this underling by the boss or there's some kind of contract. And I'll discuss in a couple slides. Tony Cape has a question about Rothbard on my inciting and all this. I have a slide, a one or two slides down. Let's hold off till I get there. I'm almost there, actually. So this separation of the right to speech from property rights, number one, leads to an overemphasis in the right to speech, so much so that you would deny liability of people for inciting a riot or for ordering an underling to commit a crime in some cases. And on the other hand, it's too broad because it would lead you to think that, well, I mean, if I have the right to free speech, then nothing I say to someone incurs liability. But number one, I don't have the right to go on your property and sing a song without your permission. If the right is independent, then it would override property rights. But if you lose the connection that it's dependent on property rights, and in fact, this is what's happened. Like in the U.S. law, the courts have said that private shopping malls are effectively public property and people have the right to pass leaflets out there because of free speech rights. It overrides property rights. So you can see the danger of this. And further, I give an example here. People say that Jefferson had this famous thing, sticks and stones may break my bones. Well, is that Jefferson or is that just an old nursery rhyme? But words would never hurt me. I know people say this. However, imagine the case. That would mean that if you're in a bar and you walk up to some guy and you just look him in the face and you say, you know, your mom is ugly in a kind of rough shot bar where people kind of know that saying that to some big tough biker guy is going to get you punched in the face. Now, strict libertarians would say, well, you have the right to free speech. You're not committing the aggression against him. So if this guy punches you, then he had no right to do it. Maybe you were unwise. Maybe you shouldn't have provoked him. But maybe it was immoral of you even. But the guy that punches you, he is the initiator of force and he's theoretically an aggressor. Just like a girl that walks almost naked through Central Park in New York at midnight doesn't deserve the rapes, but she's taking a risk. But the guy that rapes her is still guilty, which I agree is correct. He's still guilty in that case. But in this case, I think you could actually make an argument that it's not aggression if you insult someone in a bar and they punch you, because you're basically used a social convention or a means of communication to invite a fight. Just like if you say you want to step outside and have a fight or enter into the boxing ring, let's have a fight or let's have a duel. It's a type of invitation to being punched. Now, I think it's contextual and highly factual, but I think in some cases you could argue this. Jackson88 says, unless there's a commons, all speech would then be subject to the permission of the owner of the property, from which you might wish to speak. Yeah, I tend to think that, but I think that these rules would be default rules if the owner hasn't specified something. And there could be commons, in a sense, or maybe one neighbor standing on one side of the fence and the other on the other side of the fence, and they insult each other in a fight-break-shot. I mean, okay. By the way, and let me mention here, I do think there's a fallacy made by some people. Some libertarians, let's take a simple case of a mafia boss. Well, let's take a better case. A mafia boss orders an underling to kill some shopkeeper who didn't pay protection money. Now, there seems to be a reluctance on the part of some libertarians to blame the boss if he is not coercing the guy, because it's almost like they believe there's a fixed pie of liability to go around, like there's 100% murder that was done. And obviously, the hitman or the underling who did the direct crime is 100% guilty. But if we're to hold the boss liable, too, for suggesting that he performed this crime, basically, for inciting it, you might say, then we have to take some of the liability away from him. So maybe it's 25%, 1%, 30%, the other, maybe 50%, 50%, and they're reluctant to say that the hitman is not 100% guilty. The problem is they're wrong in assuming that there's a fixed pie of liability. There is the possibility of joint action on the free market that's called cooperation and the division of labor. That's what firms are, right? That's what partnerships are. People cooperate and collaborate collectively to perform things. Same with crimes. People can have joint collaboration as co-conspirators in crimes. And in this case, they're all 100% liable, or at least potentially so. So in this case, I would say that the hitman and the boss are 100% each joint and separately liable to the victim. It's like if two guys beat you up and they do $10,000 of damage, then you're entitled to obtain 10,000 from each one. Well, from either one of them. I mean, maybe you take $5,000 from each if they have it. But if one has no money and one is rich, then you can take the entire 10,000 from him. And then he could pursue his fellow aggressor for the $5,000. But it's not up to you. It shouldn't be on the victim to be out his reparations because of a claim on the part of one of the co-aggressors. So that is my perspective on this. And I think that there's a mistake there in unwillingness to give blame to the insider or to the mob boss. It's like people are afraid that if they do that, they're going to absolve the middleman or the underling from responsibility. Okay, so let's go on to the next slide. There's another thing I'm going to mention here. There's something called logical positivism, which is the idea that the only meaningful statements are those that are empirical and that any statement that is analytical, which is like a definitional type statement or one that doesn't rely upon empirical proof, it's circular and really says nothing about the world. And the Kantian, the realistic Kantian view, which Hoppe and Mises hold, for example, is the view that this is actually false, that there is a type of knowledge of the world which is not empirical or is not, you don't need to test it. It's not falsifiable, but it's also not empty. And it's a synthetic a priori statement. So logical positivism has to do with your view of epistemology. There's another type of positivism called legal positivism. And legal positivism is a group of kind of related ideas. One of them is the view that it's possible to separate law and morality. Now, in one way I think that this is correct. In one way I think it's not. It depends on what it means. And because the people that formulated this idea are not libertarians, it's not really as precise or clear as we would like. But in one sense I think it's correct that you can separate law from morality in that we can identify an existing law as a law, even if it's immoral. So for example, it is currently a law that you must pay income tax. That is true. And I don't think it's bad legal positivism or unlibertarian to recognize that. In fact, I think it's essential to recognize this. And what we would say it's illegitimate because it doesn't comply with libertarian law, with what should be the law. So because libertarians are not relativists and because we're not Democrats who sort of think of the democratic process as being what generates all law. In other words, the typical socialist or Democrat or statist thinks of the state as the source of all law. And it's somewhat arbitrary because the state can decree whatever it wants, whether it's the result of the democratic process or whether it's the result of a decree by the legislature or the state or what. But they have this idea that it's sort of an arbitrary, artificial, made-up thing, right? And therefore, they're a little bit afraid to admit the distinction between what the law is and what it should be because they don't really have a strong standard for what it should be. So if they admit that this is a law, then they're almost blessing it as being what it should be because they have no other standard of where law comes from than the state. That's the bad part of legal positivism. It's the idea that rights and laws have to and can only emanate from some governmental sovereign, you know, like the king or the legislature or the people speaking as a democracy through the legislature. So that's the problem because they have no external standards, although they contradict themselves when they criticize Supreme Court rulings or laws by saying that that's a bad law. I mean, what do they mean by bad law? Either it's a law or it's not a law according to legal positivism of the bad stripe. So I think you have to separate the two parts of legal positivism. Libertarians often criticize, especially natural law or conservative type libertarians, they say they're against natural law, I'm sorry, legal positivism. They're against the idea that law and morality can be separated. This is people like Lawn Fuller, and he argued with people on the other side like H.L.A. Hart, H.A.R.T., that's a famous Fuller-Hart debate on this. You can look it up on Wikipedia. But the point I want to make here is, number one, realize that we libertarians have nothing to fear for admitting that something's a law because we have a normative moral framework that we can refer to to criticize that law to say, yes, it's a law. The government's enforcing this law, but it's evil, right? So we don't really have to worry about that, about admitting that things are laws. Now, in doubtful cases, you can use it as a strategy to say, well, that's not really legal. It's not according to the Constitution, but you're really making a normative argument that the court should, for various legal and moral reasons, overturn this law. You're trying to use it as a tactic or a strategy, but in substance and honesty and truth, it's hard to really say that certain things that are evil laws are not laws. So be careful of that. But the point I wanted to make here is that Jackson says most positive things are simply arguing that rights aren't self-enforcing. I'm not so sure. And I actually have a slide later on where we may not get to it today, but talking about legal positivism and logical positivism, I tend to think that there is a connection between being a logical positivist and a legal positivist. It's a weak link, maybe tenuous, maybe hidden, but I tend to think it's sort of in what you're saying. I think that a logical positivist thinks that a scientific law is not a real law unless you can test it. It doesn't have any teeth. That's why they dismiss praxeology and Austrian economics and a priori reasoning, because they just can't get their head around the idea of a truth that you can prove by pure mental reasoning and deduction without being able to test it. So they kind of become a logical positivist because of this monist view of things, this view that there's only one way something is really real, right? That is if it's testable. It's only real science. It's only a real law if it's a physical law or if it's falsifiable by experiments. And likewise, I think they almost have this view that talk about natural rights or libertarian rights or moral rights is almost like an opera or a synthetic statement is empty because it doesn't have any teeth to it. It's almost like they hold up a model in their heads of a real law is one that is so strong that it's self-enforcing. For it to be a real law, no one will be able to violate that. And you see an analogy there to the logical positivism and their flaw. Logical positivists see all laws as being basically physical laws of the world, and likewise, I think when this kind of mindset looks at legal positivism and the distinction between actual existing law and libertarian law, we could call it, they basically think if it's not a self-enforcing right, then they'll say, you'll hear people say, well, then what good is it? What good are your rights? Almost like the rights don't do any good because they're not self-enforcing. But that's a confusion. They're thinking about the factual and the physical world, which is the world of what laws are enforced, right? And like physical laws and physical force as opposed to normative prescriptions. And when we say it's a libertarian law or libertarian right, we're saying that the other person is not justified in doing it. And then these high-bound sort of concrete-bound people that are so used to scientism and monism and logical positivism become legal positivists in the sense that they just dismiss it unless it's an actual existing law enforced by some reliable forceful authority like the state. And so they become logical positivists. So I actually think there is a somewhat of a connection. I haven't seen this written up yet, but I'd like to do it someday. But this leads me. The one point I wanted to make here is a point that, and I'm not making a secularist or even an atheist point, but I see a similar problem, not as bad, but a similar problem with some of the religious-oriented arguments for natural rights, even the libertarian ones, because now I'm not saying that religion is incompatible with libertarianism, but I think that this particular argument, basically it's the argument that, well, the legislature, there is a natural law, and the positive law that the legislature in Acts either is or is not consistent with that. If it's not, then it deviates from natural law, and therefore it's illegitimate law or bad law, right? So they agree with kind of the libertarian take on this, but then they would say what natural law is that that God has decreed or that that has a source in the way nature's arranged. So they're looking for and they're thinking of law as having a source. So just like the legal positivist or the bad modern legal positivist who thinks of law as only that which the legislature or the sovereign decrees and enforces, the natural law types push it back a level and they still are looking for the source of law and they say it's God, or it's some moral structure of the universe that God laid down, but they're still looking for a source. And I think that's like a type of positivism because it mistakes the nature of rights because, again, it's got this ideal of a right that's having some kind of real anchor in some physical manifestation, almost self-enforcing, because after all, if God decreed it, then it's got to do with morality, and if you don't comply with it, there's at least some implicit consequence or punishment down the road, right, hell or whatever. So the problem is that they're talking about norms and norms are inherently prescriptive, not descriptive. They tell people what they should do, but that implies, because people do have free will, that they have the choice to follow them or not. In other words, there is no, there can be no automatic consequence of violating a norm like that or a right. And they can't have a source. It seems like saying, it's almost like saying, what is the source of 2 plus 2 is 4? And I think the question has no meaning. A source, you could say, what's the source of this spring of water, you know, of this jet of water? That's a physical thing that has a source or a cause. But when you say, what's the source of rights, you really are asking who decreed it to make it so. Almost like you don't think they're real unless they have some reliable source who decreed it. Whereas I don't think that that's the nature of rights at all. The nature of rights is just the outcome of the logic of human interaction by people that have certain common goals, which are certain that common values, which are like peace, prosperity, non-violence, cooperation, productive use of scarce resources. People that have these values by the nature of what it means to have these values, if they choose to live with each other and try to come up with a way that this can be accomplished, then they will come up on these norms. There's no source to that any more than there's a source to the proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus. I mean, you can prove through elementary number theory that one plus one is two. But the proof doesn't have a source, the proof is a proof. It's facts or it's knowledge that we have. So to ask for a source of a norm is like asking for a source of a fact. And facts don't have sources. Facts are just truths about the way things are. Anyway, that's a little bit philosophical and that's my take on that. It's two past 8 p.m. eastern time. Why don't we take a five-minute break, come back at 7 past, and continue from here? Okay, everybody. By the way, before I resume, if anyone has any questions, feel free. I'll keep going unless I hear a lot of questions. But I have a lot of material collected for this course and it's becoming clear that I'm not going to get to all of it, which is fine. I knew I wouldn't get to all of it. But what I'm wondering is I wouldn't mind doing a sixth lecture at the end of this if we can handle it technically and with a schedule. I'd have to ask Danny about that. But I wonder if the – I mean, most people might have planned on only five and don't have room in their schedule for a sixth lecture. So I would solicit feedback from the class and see if you would like a sixth lecture at the end or even a makeup class. But then I wouldn't want to cover new material in it. So all right, I'll talk to – it looks like there's positive response. I'll talk to Danny and I've got to double check my schedule. But it just occurred to me because – and we still won't cover everything. I'm thinking this could be an eight-week or nine-week course, actually, but that would be too long to cover everything. I don't know if I can do a – I'll look at the schedule, we'll see. Brian says he thinks we're getting too sidetracked. Yeah, in most of my other classes, I don't allow this to happen as much. In this one, I don't mind it because most of the questions or slides I would be talking about later anyway, and it's hard to organize them all. But when a question comes up that's related, it seems to me that that's kind of where they slide maybe should have been. So I think it's related together. I think it's okay. But if others feel the same, I could try to slow down on it and hold questions to the question period or something like that. Maybe it's hard to follow when it snakes around, but I try to easily bring it back, and I do think there's usually a connection. Oh, okay. Maybe it sounds better now. Okay, so one more thing I wanted to bring up here that's a little bit related to this. For those of you who are familiar with HAPA's argumentation ethics and my similar approach, which is called ASTAPL, sort of my take on how we can justify that we have rights. And it basically goes back to the symmetry of the libertarian non-aggression principle that we find attracted in the first place. And it's basically the recognition that there's just no way that you could ever justify committing aggression against people. For non-aggression, you don't really need to justify it because you're just minding your own business, basically, and you're not trying to invade other property. But most civilized people, I believe, tend to feel some reluctance to engage in violence to get what they want, because they're social animals. So when you see a chance to use violence that you want to use violence, civilized people are those that pause and wonder whether that's legitimate or justified, which means consistent with other values that they hold. And people that are the type of people to seek for justifications and to be willing to engage in dialogue or discourse with other humans, trying to figure out what the right justifications are, what the right norms are. And those people can't help but reflecting that there are certain things that all these community people doing these justifying acts have in common, and that is they all believe in the endeavor of trying to justify, which is a civilized thing to do. They believe in civilization. They believe in peace if it's possible. They believe in avoiding conflict if it's possible. They believe in harmony and cooperation and productive use of scarce resources. This is what they're searching for. And to make a long story short, I think the argumentation ethics, a stop-all point of view, basically makes you aware of why our natural, intuitive affinity for the libertarian non-aggression principle, why it is actually the only justifiable principle. And that is because everything else that conflicts with libertarianism, which is basically a type of statism or socialism, always assumes a norm that violates the norms that people already take for granted when they're engaging in this justifying argumentation in the first place. So basically, if you have a little bit of economic literacy and you have a search for truth, truth is a goal, honesty is a goal, consistency is a goal, and you recognize the base norms that you have to adopt to engage in the civilized activity of trying to justify things in the first place, which is a predisposition towards cooperation and even compromise, a predisposition towards peace, a predisposition against using violence unless it's justified. All these things combine to result in the libertarian norm because everything else is incompatible with it. So basically, if you argue for socialism, you're undercutting what you have to presume as part of being part of a civilized debate. That's the argumentation ethics approach, and I know not everyone agrees with it, but I do think it is, even if you don't agree with it, I think it's descriptive of really what our approach is. So in deal with that, what I want to point out is it's a bit frustrating to me, and I think there is a fallacy when involved with someone and you've probably experienced this. You'll be arguing with someone. Quite often a fellow libertarian, but if they're a libertarian, usually they're like a utilitarian or they're sort of a skeptic libertarian or they're people that say they don't buy into natural rights, they just are consequentials or something like that. They'll challenge you to prove, they'll say, well, why do we have rights? What's the source of rights? And I've already explained, I think, they're making a fallacy by asking for the source of rights. But when they challenge you to demonstrate why there are rights, well, and I'll talk about this later, but first of all, I don't know if it's even ontologically correct to say there are rights or rights exist. That's sort of shorthand for saying that a certain right that you're describing is justified or any law that's actually enforced that's contrary to that right would be unjustified or illegitimate. Okay, so that's what I think that means. But when they say why are there rights, what I want to do is I want to turn it around on them and I want to say, well, look, either we both believe in rights or we don't. If we don't both believe in rights, then that means I believe in your rights that you don't believe in my rights, which means you're willing to pounce on me and hit me over the head with a club if you disagree with me or if you want to take my stuff. In other words, you're basically my enemy. So I'm sitting here having a pretend civilized discussion with someone who is admitting that he's my enemy and is willing to bash my head in to get what he wants. I mean, one response is say, if you're that person, you know, we have nothing to say. I will identify you as an enemy and I will keep my eyes open for you, but I'll treat you now as an outlaw. And of course, most people won't go that far. They will just say, no, no, no, I respect your rights too. Well, if you respect my rights and I respect yours, why are you challenging me to demonstrate what you believe already? See, this is what gets me. So I'll have an argument with a right skeptic who claims to, for the sake of argument, respect my rights or claims and practices to respect my rights. So he's acting on the presumption that there are rights, which again means he's acting on the belief that the values that he has, even if he thinks they're random and arbitrary, you know, his predisposition to peace, et cetera, that they imply libertarian norms. He believes that. And he's asking you to prove it, why you believe it. But why is it incumbent on me to prove – it's like it's two guys at the Star Trek convention and one guy challenges the other guy to justify why he likes Star Trek. But they're both there at the convention. They already are both fans of Star Trek. They can take that as a common ground. And in fact, that's what I think rights are. I think rights come from shared values of a community of people. And everyone outside that community of people – and that community of people is consistent and economically literate enough to realize that these shared values, basically civilized values imply libertarian norms. That's where they come from. And people outside that community are just outlaws, literally. They're just – but we already know that it's possible for criminals to violate our rights. It's possible for people to choose to violate our rights. So the fact that there's someone on the outside refusing to accept our premises, you know, that peace is good, et cetera, that prosperity is good, it's irrelevant. It doesn't disprove our belief in rights because our belief in rights is just a consequence of values that we have adopted. And as I said before, I think that the values that we adopt, which are called the grunt norms, GRUND and RMS, basic values like, as I said, favoring prosperity, favoring civil society, favoring cooperation, these values are adopted by people. And I actually don't think you can come up with an argument for them. I think that the hues is ought dichotomy or gap is correct. You cannot derive an ought or a value from an is or a fact. The only way to do that is you have to sneak in a norm. Well, I don't think we – I don't say we sneak it in. Let's be honest about it. We adopt – we civilize people or exactly people that do value these basic norms. Why we value them is an interesting question, but it's an explanation. It's not an argument for them. I think the reason – someone asked if it's because of Christianity, cultural inheritance. I think it could be part of that, of course, but I think it's because we are social beings. It's because of the way we evolved. It's because of our social nature and it's because of the economics. It's because there is a benefit psychologically to being part of society, which means following rules and valuing other people, having a bit of empathy. And there is a value to cooperation because of economic laws, because of the productivity of stable property rights, of the division of labor and trade, all of which require cooperation and some kind of empathy and mutual respect and respect for the idea of justice and fairness in norms. So this is why I think it's – so I think in a sense it's natural. It's natural for it to arise. So this is my perspective on this. Darren says shared values may also lead to socialism. Yes, but I think that's only because these people are not fully consistent. In other words, they're shared values by virtue of trying to be civilized people justifying something. Their shared values are the basic values of prosperity and peace and cooperation. And they are just wrong that these things are compatible with socialism. They're actually wrong. Now, what that means is their higher level norms, their political norms, are inconsistent with their undeniably held lower level or ground level norms, right? And they can't deny that they value consistency either. I mean, who can deny in an argument that they value consistency? That just means to value truth and non-contradiction. No one can deny argumentatively that non-contradiction makes things false and that that matters. If they deny that, they're just speaking nonsense and not engaging in legitimate argumentation. This is why I think the argumentation approach is so powerful. Jackson says maybe he's simply engaging you as a tool to achieve his ends. In other words, he's only pretending to share your values. Yeah, but then he's not engaging in genuine argumentation. He's lying. He's really predisposed or he's really prepared to hit you over the head if he needs to, but he's just pretending. Okay. Brian Mooney says, I think that part of the struggle is that so often he hears that the natural rights exist in the same domain as other natural phenomena such as gravity, that gravity is measurable, that natural rights only exist when there's more than one person in existence. Yeah, I agree. This is a mistake. I think there is a connection between logical positivism, which is monist. In other words, believes in only one realm of reality. Whereas, nosesian dualism, and I think a proper normative approach, or dualist, that is, in economics, we see that there's the teleological realm, that's the realm of human action and purpose, and there is the causal realm or the natural physical realm. And likewise, there is the factual and descriptive realm, and there's also the prescriptive and normative realm. That means things that you should do. And those flow from the fact that we have values, and this goes back to economics. We have values, undeniably, by virtue of acting. When you act, you demonstrate that you value something. When you engage in a certain type of action called argumentation, that's a subtype of action, you demonstrate that you value whatever are the argumentative presuppositions, the normative presuppositions, are of argumentation. And argumentation is a conflict-free, peaceful, rational, civilized, truth-binding, mutually-body-respecting activity. So of course, there are certain proto-libertarian norms presupposed by the very rational action of dialogue, discourse, and rational interaction. Okay. Per gel dust, the reason you're asking is less than 5% of people that ever lived were free. Therefore, in the rest of the society, these norms were not observed. Well, I think to the extent we've had human society, we've had a certain degree of civilized norms being respected. I think, let's just say today's society, the mixed economy, we're somewhat socialist, we're somewhat free, even in today's society. Most people as citizens would not feel from their neighbors even if they knew they could get away with it. They voluntarily have absorbed these norms. And I think that's always been the case for thousands of years. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had progress over all these years. We wouldn't have even had society. We'd just be warring tribes of animals. But people are not perfectly consistent and they don't have perfect economic literacy. This is why my great hope is that two things will happen. I don't have a lot of hope in a Marxian transformation of human intelligence or consistency. There's some desire for that. But I do believe that if we become richer because of the operation of free markets and technology, then people have more luxury to not be willing to engage in plunder. And they become more educated because they can afford more education, and that would make them hopefully more consistent. And number two, just like the fall of the Soviet Union in 89, 90 whenever it was, it was a teaching moment. It taught people around the world who were never interested in economics before. I would say that today there is a greater awareness among people of the world, at least a dim awareness that the centrally planned economy, communism, doesn't work very well. And that capitalism, even if there's problems with it, generates a lot of wealth. So there's a dim awareness of that, not because they took a course at Red Rothbard, but because they've seen what happened 20 years ago in the Soviet Union. So I'm hopeful that other things happen in the world, like all the wealth and riches that come from private companies in the West, et cetera, that over time people will gradually improve their economic literacy. So I think if you have greater prosperity and greater education because of that, and if you have greater economic literacy absorbed by teaching moments and by osmosis, that we will gradually adopt and sculpt political norms that are more and more consistent with the fundamental proto-libertarian norms of civilized discourse in the first place. So that's my hope. In fact, I think it's the only hope, and I think it has to be a long run hope, unfortunately. All right. So let's go on to slide five. I've talked about this already, contracts and mining promises. So if you're interested in pursuing this further, take a look at these links on page five. Here's another one that's interesting. Hey, well, let's do this since we had a question or remember that I left off on the stage. Let me find my incitement slide. And let's talk about that right now, because that was a follow-up on what we talked about earlier. We're going to slide 18. So I stopped at six, and I'll pick that up next time or later tonight. So someone's asking about the incitement view and whether I agree with Rothbard on this. Look, of course, he's basically right on all this, and his framework is great. And a lot of my nitpicking disagreements are things he didn't follow to carefully. He didn't develop them. And I think they're basically inconsistent with his other theories, which I agree with. So Pat Tinsley and I wrote an article a few years ago on causation and aggression. And when I have suggested reading here, what I'm saying is I won't test on it, but I do suggest you read it. Actually, maybe I meant that you should be tested on it. I think optional is stuff I'm not going to test on. Sorry, I think I won't test on this. I'll clarify that next time. So I think the problem that Rothbard makes, and frankly, Walter just follows him lockstep here, is that he has this comment that inciting is just simply never a crime. And the reason seems to be that the writers have free will. Now, as I said, there's two problems with this reasoning. Number one, it seems to be based upon the idea that if there's a person between you and an action, then he breaks the chain of causation, which is a legal sort of concept, between you and the thing he does. And therefore, he's liable and you're not. But of course, as I said before, they can both be liable. There's no problem with that. And also, I think it sort of ignores other Austrian insights about human cooperation that Block and Rothbard, for example, would agree to, like the Division of Labor and firms and partnerships and cooperation, joint ventures, joint activities. That is, as Mises points out, in an advanced society, when we act, well, when you act in general, you employ means, which are normally scarce resources, but you employ scarce resources to achieve your in, right? But in an advanced society with an advanced economy and industrialization, other people can serve as means to your in. Now, not in the Confian sense that you're using them as a mean instead of an in, but you're using them in a cooperative way as part of the Division of Labor to achieve your in. So if I want a cake, I could obtain the scarce resources to bake one or I could hire a chef to bake one for me. So this guy serves as my means to my end of achieving a cake. So humans can be means to other's in, even though they have free will. Their free will doesn't prevent them from being a means. And if you view a crime as employing a means to achieve an in, then I see no structural reason why the means has to be a gun. It couldn't be another person. In fact, if you imagine, you know, two or three guys simultaneously beating up someone, then they're all liable. If two or three guys rob a bank together, each one is 100% liable, jointly and separately liable. That's a legal term, by the way, which means each one is liable independently for the whole damage. They're not like each liable for one third of the total damage. Each one is liable for 100% of the damage. That doesn't mean that the victims get to recover three times, but it means they can get the entire mountain, either one of the guys, if they have to. Anyway, but, and I think Rothbard and Walter Block would agree that a group of people co-conspirators performing an action together would all be liable, and I hope they would agree they're all 100% liable. But if that's the case, why do they have to be temporally connected? In other words, why does the action have to be coordinated simultaneously? Why couldn't there be a temporal component? In other words, there's one guy who plans it and orders his, you know, people out to rob the bank, and they rob it, and another guy arrives to pick them up with a getaway car. Another guy, you know, comes in and cleans up the evidence and shoots all the people. I mean, they're all part of this overall scheme of conspiracy, and they are all, and might be, 100% liable for the crime. The fact that free will doesn't change anything. In fact, if it did, then the two cases that Block and Rothbard – well, Block formalized this. Block says there's only two cases where you're indirectly liable for the direct actions of another person. That's number one if you coerce them, or number two if you have a contract. You know, I don't think this is very libertarian Austrian reasoning from the following reasons. Number one, if A coercing B to kill C, okay, let's take a better example. Let's say you have a mob boss who threatens his underling. He says, I want you to go kill this baker, and if you don't kill him, I'm going to kill you. So he's coercing the guy, as opposed to a suggestion, right, saying, you know, I really would take it as a favor if you do it, but I won't do anything if you don't, but I really want you to go rub this guy out. In my view, there's really no difference. Both the direct killer, the assassin, and the boss are guilty because in both cases the boss used another guy to achieve his end. The fact that he didn't coerce him in one case and coerced him in the other doesn't change that in my view. And if he did change it, then I think Walter would have to say that if I coerce you to kill someone else, then I'm liable and you're not. In other words, the coercing would remove your liability. After all, I've removed your free will or something. But I don't think coercing someone to perform a crime absolves them from liability. I might reduce the punishment, but they're still a murderer. They chose to do it. Sure, they were coerced, but they chose to do it. In fact, they chose to join this guy's organization in this case. So I think trying to say that the mob boss is only guilty if he coerces the underling is just an artificial ad hoc criterion that doesn't really hold up. It's not a part of a general theory. I've had discussions with Walter Block about this. He's a great friend of mine. He's a great libertarian, obviously. I said, well, was Truman liable for the bombing of Hiroshima? He said yes. But he didn't coerce the pilot. Walter said, oh, sure, he coerced him because if he didn't follow orders, he'd be put in jail. But that's not – first of all, the president doesn't put him in jail. There's a whole bunch of apparatus that would do that. And it's not necessarily the case. A lot of times, a mission like that, if someone refuses to perform it, then they find another guy because they don't want someone who's unwilling. So I don't think there necessarily is coercion. And if there's not coercion, I think the president will still be liable. I mean, theoretically, you could argue that Hitler is not a murderer, but all of the soldiers were that were conscripted or that were volunteered because Hitler didn't have a gun and physically coerced anyone. Maybe other people coerced him down the chain of probation. And the second category is contract. Now, the problem with this is it actually, I think, contradicts the Austrian view of subjective value, of a subjective theory of value, which is the idea that money is really nothing special nor – excuse me, normatively. It's just something that people value, but we value lots of things. So imagine a case where a wife who's this high-star with her husband and wants to get rid of him and get his insurance money, his life insurance, hires a hitman to assassinate her husband. Now, Walter would say that she's liable of murder because she had a contract with the guy. Well, all the contract is she agreed to give him money on the occurrence of a condition. It's a title transfer. So I don't see what's special about that because the guy could value the money, but he might value something else instead. So let's suppose she has a boyfriend and she seduces him with promises of sex or affection or just a hope of it if he kills her husband. She basically begs into it and he doesn't. Now, I think Walter would say she nearly incited him in that case because there's no contract and there's no coercion. But what's the difference? In both cases, there was the expectation of receiving something subjectively valued by the hitman, either a transfer or a title of property or sexual services. Brian Mooney says, asked another way, are the Germans who elected Hitler murderers? Well, that's, I mean, the question of deciding who is liable and to what degree is, of course, a complicated one. I mean, you could argue that no vote matters, so everyone who voted is not responsible. Walter actually has a good article on this about how do we apportion liability for crimes of statism. And he talks about legislators. I mean, in a way, you don't blame the legislators because they're going to do what they're elected to do. And you could hardly blame the voters because their votes don't really matter and you can't blame them for voting to protect themselves against other special workers. Once you have democracy going, it's a war of all against all. I tend to think there's different levels of responsibility. I think, yes, the Germans who voted for Hitler, no, I don't know if they knew he was, everything was going to do with it. He was pretty split about a lot of terrible things first and anti-Semitic things, et cetera. So, yeah, I think there's some liability for that, sure. I mean, think of it from the victim's point of view. Let's suppose you had a wife who was murdered in the Holocaust and you met a German citizen who voted for Hitler. You know, you might want to wring her their neck because you're attributing responsibility. I don't think that's completely unreasonable. I'm right. Now, like in the modern American system, you know, I've heard some libertarians say you've got to blame the jailers but you can't blame the judges or the – after all, the legislators only know words. They have freedom of speech. They're not actually coercing anyone. The president doesn't do – I mean, it's crazy. I think they turned it upside down. Of course, they henchmen the guys that keep drug criminals in jail or committing some kind of crime. But even worse are the legislators and the executive branch. I tend to think that in a society like ours, the worst fault is on a combination of who has the most direct effect on the outcome and who has the most discretion to not do it. So in today's system, I actually tend to blame almost above all others the American juror because your vote really doesn't matter too much as a citizen. But on the jury, in criminal convictions for income tax evasion and treason and spying and copyright and patent violations and drug crimes and other victimless crimes, as a juror, because we have double jeopardy, which means you cannot try someone for the same crime twice. And because the jurors supposedly have some kind of – you have a practical ability to nullify a bad law. You do not have to vote to convict a person guilty of an evil law. The buck should stop with the jury. So I almost think the most evil people in America are jurors. People in their capacity is jurors. I agree there's coercion that I tell you if I was on a jury, I would never vote to convict. Now, of course, they weed you out with four deer and they ask potential nullifiers now if you could vote to convict if the evidence was there. So they tend to weed out people like that. But still, that's no excuse for being on a jury and for voting to convict someone. You're basically playing the final causal role in putting them behind bars. Of course, the judge is guilty. Of course, the legislature is guilty. Of course, the president or the executive branch and the jailers are guilty. Even the voters to some degree, I believe, are guilty and liable for this. Yes, I do believe that. I don't think we should go much over time, but I would be happy to go another five or so minutes. So let's see who's on page 19. This is something interesting. It's not really a controversy. It's just a way to flesh out a little bit of this discussion. In the law, there's these famous examples they give to law students where in the law you have what's called but for causation, or I think it's sometimes called cause in fact, and proximate causation, which is legal causation, which means you're really responsible if you're a proximate cause. Now, proximate as a word just means close. It's sort of getting at the idea that you're close enough causally to what happened to be responsible, which is basically my idea. I put it in an Austrian framework using the means and ends framework. A lot of people would say, so the but for idea is that but for your action, the evil result wouldn't have happened. By that standard, if you say someone is guilty if they're a but for a cause, if they're not guilty, if they're not a but for a cause, there's actually problems with both of those. So number one example they give in law school is imagine two guys who want to burn down a stand in a weak field, a dry weak field with, you know, kindling everywhere on opposite sides of this house, and each light of fire at the same time, one on the east side, one on the west side, the fire races to the house and burns it down and kills a few people inside the house. Now, neither one is a but for a cause or a cause, in fact, because, you know, if the guy on the west side hadn't lit the fire, the house still would have burned down because he lit a fire. The other guy lit a fire and vice versa. So if you use but for causation, these two arsonists could get off scot-free. So the better you would say, well, we're going to lump them together as joint actors, even though they didn't know each other. And at least we're going to put the blame on these two bad guys instead of on the victims. So you've got to make exceptions to but for causation if that's your standard, which shouldn't be your standard. And it's actually too broad in some ways because, you know, Hitler's mother, you could say she was a factual cause of the holocaust because but for her having Hitler, there would have been no holocaust, at least not in the way it turned out. But does that mean she's responsible? No. And according to my framework, she didn't, you know, perform an action using Hitler as a means to her ends of wiping off the Jews. It just happened to be, he did have free will. He did perform that action, and she didn't use him to do that. So but for causation is both too narrow and too broad. What you need is proximate causation but informed by Nathesian praxeology along the – Kathy says, did he have a mother? Well, I assumed he was born. Tony Cape asked the hypothetical if his mother told him getting rid of the Jews was good and withheld affection until he started violence. I don't know. I think it's a borderline case. I mean, I don't think that's the same as incitement. But of course it's morally comparable but whether it rises to the level of responsibility, I don't know. I think he's an independent actor in that case. So I would agree with Rothbard and Walter in those cases actually. I just think in some cases, like imagine there's a mob angry because some woman was raped and we'll say they're kind of a racist white town in the south 50 years ago and where there's a rumor going around some black guy raped this white woman and some black guy comes walking by and I see him and I know that he's innocent. But he's an enemy of mine because he's competing with me with some business. So I point at him and I say, there he is. I saw him do it. Go get him. And the crowd gets whipped up into a frenzy and they chase the guy down and lynch him and kill him. Now, I believe that Block and Rothbard say that he is not guilty. I said, I'm not guilty in that case. I've been citing the murder. But I think I am. Is the crowd guilty too? Yeah, probably because they acted on unreliable information, right? Or take another example. Let's suppose there's a trial of a guy that's a rival for a girl. In other words, a guy in town that I don't like because we both want the same girl. And he's been accused of committing some active crime by the state court, let's say. And I actually know he's innocent because I know who did it. But I agree to be a witness and I testify at the trial that I saw him commit the crime and then the jury convicts him. And then he's convicted for 10 years or something like that. All I did was speak words. But I believe that I am a very crucial cause of his harm. And I think I'm a kidnapper. You know, I'm maybe a murderer if he gets executed. But it doesn't mean the jury's all scot-free. It doesn't mean the judge is all scot-free. It doesn't mean the executioner or the jail are all scot-free. But I am clearly a cause of what happened to him. I'm curious if anyone disagrees with a lot of the stuff I'm saying here. I would say the actors are guilty of acting on unreliable source there. But not in every case. I mean, you could imagine a case where, you know, let's say some woman is a thief and she stole some guy's wallet. And this guy sees it happening and the guy leaps on the woman in a public street or whatever to take the wallet back. So it looks like he's assaulting this woman, maybe even trying to rape her, but he's not. He's trying to get his property back. And some evil bystander yells at the crowd, hey, look, he's raping that poor woman. Now, there might be a guy in the crowd with a gun who is a good guy. And he sees what appears to him to be a woman being a solstice. And that appearance is confirmed by a guy intentionally lying. And in a case like that, the bystanders have no time to reflect if it's an emergency situation. And if he shoots the guy who's innocent, then maybe he has an excuse because he was acting upon the best information he had. He was deceived by the woman's actions and by the bystanders' words. But he acted in good faith. Maybe he's minimally negligent or I don't know. But you could see some cases where you can't really give them blame like you could a jury who's relying upon bad evidence. Well, we've gone a little bit over. Be happy to take any final questions, but I think we should stop here on the slides. Jackson asked, are we going to talk about immigration? Well, it's all my slides. So whether we'll get to it, I don't know. Like I said earlier, I'm going to try to add a sixth class to have more time to cover more topics. But honestly, I don't know if I'll get to it. But I'll try to move it up if someone wants to bring it up. That's another juicy topic. So we'll see if we have time. I'd like to. All right. Others are interested in it. I'll try to move that up. So we should have time to get to it. Thanks, everybody. Have a good evening. And I'll see you next Monday. I'll post a notice to the class about the possibility of a sixth lecture after I talk to you. Thanks, guys.