 And then five minutes to respond to the other and then we will open it up to questions from all of you, maybe some from me, and we'll see where we go. Knowing these two gentlemen, I'm quite sure this debate will generate at least as much light as you. So let me turn the floor over now to William Thomas. Okay, I've got ten minutes here to say something about why I think we need a government and why anarchy is an empty rationalization and kind of a religion of the libertarians. And I'm going to have to move fast, so I'm going to talk about first, objectivist objections to anarchism, and then I want to talk about practice. Like in reality, what is anarchy really? People say anarchy is. I'd like to talk about what I think we can say from reality about what anarchy is, some examples. And just to conclude with a thought. So what are we all looking for from a political system? What are we all looking for? We're looking for a system that protects our individual rights, or if you want to just boil it right down, that bans the initiation of physical force between people. Or you can live in society and expect that generally the expectation of your interactions with other people will be that they will be conditioned by the understanding that no one should be initiating the use of force against someone else. And you hope that if someone does initiate force against you, either you're able to deal with it easily yourself, or a lot of friends will help you, and that when people use force, they're always defending against the initiation of force. And so the implications of this in rights theory are rights to life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness, and many other subsidiary rights. And this is all premised on the right to act as a living being free from the initiation of force. And that's why I have that at all. Why? Because force is inimical to reason. You can't live a productive and happy life if you're not able to pursue your values and act on your judgment. You can't even think, well, if you're not able to act on your judgment. Government, this my writ, is to defend government. So let me define my terms right away. What is a government? People often say government is a monopoly on the use of force. I think that's a little sloppy. After all, to say it's a legal monopoly is an oxymoron. But we're talking about force. So when there's an economic monopoly, it means they're going to use force against you if you violate the terms of the monopoly, like if you compete with it. But anyone who's set some standards about the use of force is going to use force against you if you violate those standards with force. I mean, so to say that the government is a coercive monopoly is just to say it's a government. And it's just to say it's in the business of enforcing social rules and enforcing them coercively. And even anarchists believe in such institutions, that is, that institutions that enforce social rules and do that coercively. Now a government is an institution that enforces social rules in a given geographic area and it enforces them coercively. And what distinguishes the government from all the different organizations like the mafia or maybe some of you all here in New Hampshire who don't like what the government does. A lot of us who don't like it may rebel a little bit or violate these rules. One of the most dangerous rules is that it can't be challenged with impunity. There are gangs who violate the rules of the government consistently. They do, but they can't get too big. They can't get too aggressive or the government will stomp on them. So you can't challenge it with impunity. You can challenge it, but you can't challenge it and just ignore it. And so with this definition of government, what I mean by a government, let's be clear, it's not someone who claims mystic authority to rule over you. That's not in the definition. A government is just this kind of institution and a government could have separated powers. We live under one that's like that. It could have different levels. We live under one that's like that. It could have competing institutions. We actually in some respects are under one that does that. But a government is the framework in which these all interact and cooperate non-binally and that it's this framework that can't be challenged with impunity. Why do we need government? Well, government is the means of place and use of retaliatory force under objective control. It does this through the creation of law, through the creation of the rule of law. And I can't dilate on all the characteristics of the rule of law, but let's just say it tries to be applied objectively, consistently. The rule of law is not personal. It's principled in many other characteristics. The rule of law is essential to industry, to trade, and to liberty. The contracts depend on it. The ability to do any kind of trading over long distances depends on the consistency of rule of law. And I just want to emphasize that any institutional framework that adequately enforces a unified, consistent law, I would call a government. Now, market anarchism, just to be clear what I'm talking against, market anarchism, as I understand the argument, holds that there should be no unified legal defense or law enforcement mechanism, that there should be competition in the use of force. And there should be no state. There's the thing called the state. It won't be there. The idea is that law and law enforcement will be provided by a variety of competing agencies, and they will geographically overlap, too. That's the idea. And the analogy in a lot of these discussions is to the market provision of other goods. We like free market exchange of other goods because we engage in trade. We judge when we want to buy a good or not, when we want to contract with someone or not. And so all our interactions can be win-win. They can all be scaled to our benefit by our judgment. And that we would like to have the provision of law to work that way, too, if we could. That would be great. But the thing is that to say, to speak of a market for coercion is kind of a misnomer. Because coercion is not like other goods. The use of force is not like other goods. Because a free market, a real free market is uncoerced. One of the basic rules of the free market is that it's uncoerced, that your rights are respected. And when we speak of trade, what we mean is voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. But what we're doing is negotiating with a variety of people with guns, using our guns, about how those guns are going to be employed. The discussion doesn't presume that no one is going to be coerced. Actually, if we don't come to an agreement, it presumes that someone will be coerced. That's not the way it works at the supermarket. At the supermarket, it's not the case that if you just decide you don't want to shop there, they're going to stuff the food down your throat no matter what. You've got to make a choice of who's going to stuff the food down your throat. Another basic point about anarchism that's worth remembering is that a standard argument, like Roy Charles wrote an open letter to Imran in the late 1960s, saying this, saying all people are rational. You say people can be rational. And if they're rational, they'll just recognize what other people's rights are so we don't need any government because we can just recognize what other people's rights are. Rand actually represented something like this in Galt's Gulch in Atlas Shrug. The truth is that irrational and evil people exist. Rationality is not automatic. Rationality is a virtue. And it's a virtue for a reason. We don't do it automatically. We don't do it well. And lots of people choose not to do it well. And they're not going to respect rights necessarily because they're irrational and evil. ISIS, for instance, not on the respect to your rights premise in any sense. And the other thing is, even with the best will in the world and really decent people with the right principles and all that, there are honest disagreements. Knowledge is contextual and there are disputes over rights. He did disputes. You screwed me and that contract was violated and you're an asshole and that huge corporation are horrible exploiters. And there are a lot of reasons why Libertarian Defense Alliance would have honest disagreements about issues of rights in their application that they would care about, that are very important to a lot of people. Like abortion. Lots of people think abortion is a hugely important matter if they could get their own little mini-government that would enforce abortion their way. But we're talking about mixed up governments together. That's not going to be happy. Let me just wrap up here with just a statement about some examples. So Rand gives some examples of anarchy like gang warfare amongst urban gangs or the airways before property rights were defined in them. There were people sending radio overlapping each other's signals not respecting each other's territories. In the world today we've got anarchic areas like the Middle East, Syria and Libya. There have been anarchic areas. What I want to say to you is the world today is the result of the competition in the use of force. It's the result. We're seeing the competition in the use of force and its effects all around us. Check out the Hundred Years War. Nice example. World War is a good example of competition over government. You're going to have to assess the existence and possibility of anarchy across the whole spectrum of human existence. Don't cherry pick and think about industrial society. What if you wanted to move there? Invest there? Invent there? Speak out there? Today people from Ghana and other places are migrating through anarchy because there's anarchy in Libya. There's anarchy in Libya. There's no government. You're able to contract for somebody to do things that would otherwise be illegal. It's not a problem. They can take you all the way from Ghana to wherever you want to go. Where do they want to go? Italy. Why do they want to go to Italy? Because they have the rule of law there. They don't want to stay in the anarchy and invest there. Why not? It's an anarchy. A fair number of Ganons are dying on this trip. If you're being killed in the anarchy, they like Italy better. They're much less likely to be killed there. So that's my little statement about anarchy. Not. It's a rationalism. When it doesn't exist, it's bad. We need rule of law. And if we ever had it and the market anarchy series worked, they would work by creating a government. Thank you. Test, test. That was a nice presentation. I think of the objectivist position. And as Will's lieutenant of his talk kind of indicated, the question when he talked about whether government is justified or not, the question is not really whether anarchism is something we should be for or against any more than objectivists say they're for atheism. Objectivists are for reason and they therefore don't believe there's a basis for believing in God that makes them atheists, but they're not for atheism. So it's not that we're for anarchism. The question is should we be for or against the state? And also I don't even, I think we have to be leery of the word government. The word government sometimes it uses a synonym for state, sometimes it's not. In parliamentary systems they talk about forming a new government. They obviously don't mean the state. In the U.S. when there's a government shutdown, the state is still there. So government and state are different entities as Will almost admitted, I think in his talks, when he says that any institution that enforces laws in some kind of reliable way is a government. So that doesn't give it the essential characteristics of what the state is. Okay, there are other words we have to be careful with. The word coercion, libertarians sometimes use the word coercion as a synonym for aggression. It's not nor is violence or force, right? Aggression is a very carefully defined concept in libertarian theory, okay? And sometimes the pro-state, menarchist, objectivist, if you admit that you're in favor of law and order, then they say they knew believe in government because they defined it that way. And then later on you say I'm against the state and they say but the government is the state because they believe it's necessary. So it's either a form of question begging or some kind of equivocation. In my mind let's just talk about the state. Is the state justified or not? For my mind the question is not whether we need state. It's not whether the state is necessary or even inevitable or unlikely. The simple question for libertarians is whether the state is just, okay? And not just any state, not like the American state today, not like the Iraqi state, but the state per se by its nature. So we need a couple of definitions. What is the state? Okay, so I think a good way to define the state is it's a territorial monopolist of ultimate decision making It's an institution vested with the power to legislate and tax the inhabitants of the territory. Now that's not part of the definition. That's just what they tend to do. I'm going to just quote Hans-Herman Hoppe here. Let me begin with the definition of a state. What must an agent be able to do to qualify as a state? This agent must be able to insist that all conflicts among the inhabitants of a given territory be brought to him for ultimate decision making or be subject to his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to insist that all conflicts involving himself be adjudicated by himself and his agent and implied in the power to exclude all others from acting as the ultimate judge. The second defining characteristic of a state is the power to tax, to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for these services. So based on this definition, it's easy to see why there might be a desire to be a state or to have control of a state. Whoever is the monopolist of final arbitration in a given territory can make laws, and he who can legislate can also tax, which is an enviable position. Okay, so in my view, the state is basically an exploiting firm, but its definition is a territory monopolist over justice and law in a given geographic region. Okay. Now, the question is what is justice because we said it's a state just. Justinian, Emperor of Rome, said justice is the constant and perpetual wish to render to everyone his due. In other words, it's what you're owed. Now, what you're owed depends upon what your rights are. What your rights are, according to libertarianism, which I think we all agree on, is to be free from aggression. So it's very simple. Ainran said, so long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate. Do you hear me? No man may start the use of physical force against others. I agree with this, and I agree with Will's basic justification for this principle. So the question is simply, is the state just according to what its essential nature is? Does the state necessarily, by its nature, violate rights? In other words, does the state necessarily commit aggression? This is the only question that matters to libertarians. Okay. Now, in my view, the state has to do one of two things to be a state. It has to either tax or it has to monopolize justice services in a given area. Either one is actually sufficient and implies the other. So for example, if you only had the power to tax, then you could easily outcompete any competing firm, because you could offer, you know, it's just like the public school would outcompete private schools because you're paying the taxes already for the public schools. On the other hand, if the state didn't tax, but it had the power to exclude any competition, then it could just charge a monopoly price for its services, which is equivalent to a tax. Now, the objectivist, I believe, according to Rand, and I'm sure our friends here, rightfully reject the power of the state to tax. But as far as I understand it, they still believe the state has the power and the right to outlaw competing agencies in a given geographic region, which is a form of aggression. Because if you actually use force to stop someone from engaging in a peaceful activity, when they haven't committed aggression themselves, you're committing aggression yourself. Now, it's possible that my friends here are really anarchists and just don't like the word. Galt's Gulch looks a little anarchistic to me. Okay. Now, in practice, all states engage in both taxation and legislation, and the state is really an exploiting firm. How much time do I have? Four minutes. Okay. Let me just summarize here. As a matter of practice, here's what the state really does in real life. The state we're dealing with now that all states have always done, especially in modern states, especially in the West. So, first of all, the goal of the state is to maximize its wealth by exploiting its victims. Now, the state is always a minority. That's the only way someone at the top of the pyramid can make a lot of money in a classic firm situation. So, the state is a minority, so they can be overpowered by the masses. So, they have a problem. They want to exploit these people, but they're a minority. So, they have to come up with ways to keep the population at bay, to delude them into thinking the state is legitimate, which is what distinguishes it from the mafia. People don't largely regard the mafia as legitimate, although the mafia attacks us less and provides better services. Okay. So, the first thing the state does is it engages in ideological propaganda to persuade us that the world is not really the way it is, that taxes really are voluntary, that we would have chaos in the streets without the state, et cetera. Okay. And then it engages in a variety of targeted redistribution measures to corrupt the people that it wants to redistribute money from. So, first it monopolizes the courts, the law, the police, the feds, the judicial system. Then it starts monopolizing traffic communication, right? Because it can't go around robbing people with our control of the rivers and the internet. It also monopolizes field of education, which ties back into its ideological propaganda role. Then the state redistributes power itself in the form of democracy. It opens it up. It tells us you are the government. Don't complain when your brother-in-law is thrown in jail for marijuana distribution. Okay. And finally, the final step is it monopolizes the field of money and banking because even the state has trouble taking out loans to fund its activities or taxing people because it's going to get resistance. So it's far better to just take over the federal, the banking and monetary system so that it can just print money to pay for its activities. So, by my mind, the state is unjust and legitimate because it necessarily commits aggression. And indeed, it's just the criminal agency of aggression. It can be defined that way as well. I would just add one more thing. The state is the institutionalized agency of aggression. It commits what you could call public aggression. Libertarians are against all aggression, including private aggression, which is crime. So we're against private crime and state crime. It's just that the state is a much more successful criminal than the private underground. Applause from a more than one species. All right. We now move to the rebuttal phase. Will you have five minutes to follow up? Well, I thought we were going to debate anarchism. And all I've heard is a rationalist critique of a vision of what government is. That's it. That hasn't been a positive view for anarchism at all. It hasn't addressed the fact that when anarchists talk of a system of law that somehow not a unified cooperative system that enforces social rules coercively in a geographic area and can't be resisted with impunity, it's not that. They say it's not that because there's free competition amongst the agencies. But that's the existence of such a thing. The possibility of such a thing is exactly the issue here. At least I thought. Now, Stephen said a lot of nasty things about governments. So Stephen says the state, at least in his essential definition, that's the same definition. I mean, it's more or less the same definition I gave for government. So the points about how the language is used, that's fine. We can say we'll talk about the state, if you want the definition of the state. I'll take that. That's the semantic side of it. Okay, let me get on to... So I'm just going to go back and talk a little bit about why I think... The nub of the issue, one of the nub of the issues that Stephen got at was he thinks the state is illegitimate because it won't leave other people free to compete with the state. That they won't do that. And I always been puzzled by this because as far as I understood the market anarchist argument was that you were supposed to maybe form or there were going to be various defense agencies. We're going to have no government to start with and we're going to have a bunch of defense agencies. But defense agencies are all going to have to have their own conception of law. I mean the rights as we understand them are so abstract. I have a slide maybe you don't have to read it but there's lots of definition issues in how the rights come down in practice and those all have to be worked out. And after all even in the best society I can imagine there might be a significant minority who really don't agree with all those principles so they may be trying to form a different kind of defense agency. Now but if that happens and I join a defense agency or I mean Stefan we agree about the fundamental purpose so we're both out shopping for a defense agent or maybe we're going to have to form one because in our neighborhood there's no friendly Walmart delivering good defense agency services to us right now. So we say alright we're going to have our law is going to be based in the protection of individual rights. We're going to ban the initiation of force or aggression if you want to put it that way. That's the whole discussion. And we're going to do that. Now there's one thing we want in our dealings with other people. We want our rights respected. So we're going to go around to all the other people forming defense agencies. We're going to say you do whatever you want. You get whatever customers you want. It's just one thing. We've got to be real sure you're not going to violate our rights because you know we don't want you ending up being taken over by ISIS or you know the Christian right and or the Greens and shoving it all down our throat. Or just being a thug or a liar. They're libertarian thugs and liars. They sound good in abstract but in concrete they are power seekers and frauds. It happens. So we want to be sure that our rights are going to be respected. How are we going to do that? We're going to have to form cooperative agreements with other defense agencies where we can count on them. Where we know we can count on them and they follow the right principles. We're going to have to check every defense agency that could be really dangerous to us that could resist us with impurity to make sure it observes the right principles. And if they do they're okay. What have we done once we've done that? We've created the state. We have created a unified system of enforcing social rules diversively in a geographic area. We're going to have to do it to defend our rights. It's going to have to be that way. And that's because coercion is different. Stefan makes a lot about tax whatever. You know one of my principles is it's early games. Maybe when we get a lot closer to a free society the institutional possibilities are going to be a lot clearer to us. But all we know right now is that if what you're doing is defining the law even if you're a defense agency you're still offering to shoot people that don't follow your principles. That's not really voluntary. So to make a lot of noise about tax I mean yes we'd like to have fever service as much as we can. Rand had some interesting ideas about that other people have too. But the point is even in those circumstances I mean one of Rand's examples was only charge people who need to engage in long term contracts. They get the most economic value out of the state so only charge them and they don't have to do a formal contract so you're not really interfering with a lot of their choices. But the truth is you need the institution of long term contracts you can't flourish as fully as possible without it and they're forcing you to pay for it. And I think all these fever service examples for government services end up working like that. So it's a good idea to make fee for service but it's still not going to be that different from a tax. Those are my remarks. Thanks. Thanks Will. I'll just comment on a few of Will's remarks mostly his initial talk but I thought it was interesting you mentioned I and Rand had brought up the problem of coming up with a proper tarry and a property rights solution to the airwaves problem which David Kelly has written and probably the best single book on that with Roger Donnelly Leslie Parlor. The only book I know of that is consistent and deals with this problem the right way but as you point out the US government actually monopolized by statute with the FCC the airwaves and so in this case the government actually prevented a free market solution from arising a common law type solution so that's not a very good example. The one problem I have with this view of the problem of competing defense agencies that object to the C is that I have never heard a good explanation of why this doesn't imply the need for a one world government. Some I've talked to have kind of admitted that but they say that it's too early or that the other governments are so irrational that if we had a one world government right now we'd be a minority in the sea of irrationality but it looks like their long term ideal goal would be a one world government. Now I don't think I need to explain here the danger of that horrible thing which means that I would think even irrational objectives would say we need to have some distributed power some competing states around the world but if that's possible I don't know where the limit is even Mises thought you could push it down to a very very tiny level I don't know how far the objectives that you could have state so that's one point. I think Will is referring to my position as rationalist although basically my position is very simple I agree with him that aggression is unjust I don't think that's a rationalist thing to say and we roughly agree on the redefinition of the state so I don't know where the rationalism is there I'm just simply asking the question or making the observation that we cannot support the state's legitimacy if it commits aggression it's very simple I don't think that's rationalist either so the other one he made the point that it looks like some libertarians like Roy Childs he mentioned had implied that the state is not justified because everyone's rational and the free market will work out without the state I don't think that libertarians assume everyone is rational in the objective sense in fact our recognition that a lot of people are not rational and are evil is the reason we fear the state because as Hayek talks about the worst rise to the top so if some people are bad don't give them the power of nuclear weapons I'll stop there okay so we're going to open this up to questions but first I want to ask one question of each of our participants so let me start with Will would you care to comment on the point about world government is the logic of the objective position pushes toward the idea thinking that the best government would be a world government I think that's actually an open and ongoing question that if you could have wait a minute we're talking about if we could have one good unified system of government it would be very minimal very rights respecting so it would be it would have a lot of checks and balances no no you see when I talk about my ideal government I think I'm talking about what would really happen really happen if you succeeded in trying to engage in libertarian anarchism if you succeeded so that's one issue but the thing is the problem with the libertarian project the libertarian anarchist project is that it envisions a set of competition over government services that happens on over every transaction and every pairwise combination that might happen whereas when you have geographically centered governments then at least their competition can be brought under sort of manage a little better because the number of transactions that have to cross the government to government barrier is much smaller by probably a factor of a million I'm sorry I don't do the pairwise to pairwise versus group to group map straight off my head but it's much much much smaller and we live in such a world where that happens and when the competition gets strong it's bad you know it's bad World War II what's going on in the Middle East it's bad so I wouldn't we'd like to move to a much truer society I guess that's the one thing I want to say I want to say that this one thing I do want to just remark while I'm using the microphone for a second is that this is an interesting theoretical discussion I think there's a truth here but the bigger truth is we need a society with much much much more freedom that's the actionable item for us that's what we should dedicate ourselves to trying to achieve and when we can perfect it at the far down the road that's going to be a richer conversation once we know what that's like Stefan my question for you as I understand it the market anarchism vision is that there will be competing protection agencies of some kind and the expectation is that they will compete as firms doing a private market without initiating aggression against each other one of the worries that will raise on his side was there are all kinds of people if coercion is the good that's being marketed some people may market a little more use of coercion than others so we have the possibility of agencies who that are not right to respect them now again if I understand the position the expectation is well what we know about economics is what's going to happen so here's my question for you you start a protection agency with will and go into business and then this other protection agency the state of New Hampshire say or the US government says no we're not going to allow you to be in business we're going to take over we're going to coerce you out of business well okay so that's a big that's a big protection agency it's pushing you out of the way why you could in a certain sense we're in a situation where you could anyone can start a protection agency why is the why is the situation different now from what you envision and how would you get there that's not a big question but one quick quip in response to the world government thing if it does go bad now we can vote with our feet by going to another country or another state I guess in this one world government situation we can vote with our spaceships our only choice as an economic point well of course public choice economics has similar criticisms of the mechanism of any state right you're going to have institutional problems with expecting any state to abuse its power, not be corrupt to not be inefficient but I think even the objective of the menarchist vision is that we can only achieve a free society whether it's a limited state or anarchy with some kind of overall enlightenment of humanity right it's just not going to happen otherwise you have to have a certain increase in people's education and values we already have a degree of society now because people are by and large decent crime is regarded as crime criminals regarded as criminals they're ostracized they're usually poor, they're stupider so we can keep an eye on them we can survive even in the face of crime if we ever achieve a menarchist state then the human condition is going to have improved a lot our wealth is going to be greater we're going to be more educated and more intelligent about these competing agencies of work because you would have mostly peaceful people hiring mostly peaceful agencies and on occasion if one cropped up like you're talking about I think they would be regarded as a species of crime it would maybe be organized crime instead of being a random criminal and they would be dealt with like all criminals are dealt with and there's a lot of literature on why the use of actual violence to solve disputes even in legitimate disputes would be too costly so I actually believe like Randy Burnett talks about this in his book the structure of liberty even if there's a right to retaliate proportionally to have punishment I think we can expect that to be far minimized and hardly ever institutionalized in any kind of society I think ostracism and just market forces would do the trick there so that'd be my response ok let's open this up to questions from please come forward to the mics on either side one of the things I felt was missing was the definition of anarchy the anarchy the anarchy that was talked about here ganglion and mafia that's, I'm going to go from the original Greek and met without Archon met without rulers so that met without rulers, not rules but without rulers some of the key points government and state are legal fictions they can't be felt, seen, heard or smelled only the men and women who work for the legal fictions are real so that's what you're dealing with you're dealing with men and women literally generating soldiers force rules coercively, that is by the use of physical force the supermarket would use for an analogy there, it's all voluntary I'll make those points if you want to talk to me at least so that the audience can hear ok who was your, do you want each of us to take let me have a brief answer so Stephen you're defending anarchy there are different types of anarchism people call it anarcho-syndicalism anarcho-capitalism I was careful to try to say at the end of my remarks that what libertarians oppose is aggression that is aggression committed by the state but also private aggression or private crime which implies that we respect property rights that implies what is called anarcho-capitalism usually or what I usually refer to as anarcho-libertarianism so to my mind anarcho-capitalism is simply a world where there is very little crime and property rights are widely respected and there's no institutionalized crime there is no state and there's very little private crime right sorry the definition we were all using I was using, I thought I hoped I was clear I mean it was an idea there would be no such thing as government as I called it but I accept we can call it state and I just happened to say it would be a situation anarchy itself is there is no state you define gang wars excuse me we have quite a few people in mind let me answer about the gang wars I'm sorry if I'm unclear those were examples those are examples of anarchy they are not the definition the definition is any social circumstance in which there is no such institution as a state or government as Stefan and I have both defined it and those were examples of situations like the where there is no government influence or there is government or there isn't involved in the conversation like when the crypts in the bloods go at it no one's calling the po-po you know no one's appealing to the police to resolve it I think most people believe that without a state you would have chaos so they equate anarchy with chaos but anarcho-capitalist don't believe there would be chaos without a state not necessarily I'm not defining this chaos I know you're not okay we'll alternate this side if I could ask we're eager for questions and comments but if you could keep them as brief as possible to tap into the the knowledge and expertise of the speakers is there a practical approach or a time table which starts this kind of anarcho-capitalism or anything else what would be the real next step that could possibly take place I think that's a question what would be a practical step to move towards anarchy or an anarcho-capitalism I mean what would actually you know is it waiting for everything to collapse before it starts over again or is there some kind of in the next 20 years, 30 years, 50 years 100 years, 10 years I got it I mean that's another huge question I'll just give three kind of short answers to think about after communism fell in the Soviet Union it was a big teaching moment more people today far more people are aware that the free market and the centralized planning is bad it was a big educational moment millions of people have been educated by that event than you know Milton Friedman ever could have with a few books unfortunately so my hope is that as progress as technology progresses and we become wealthier despite the state's depredations that over time people and I think crime falls as wealth goes up people will naturally become more aware of the benefits of freedom so that's one hope the phoenix rising from the ashes idea is going to work that would be horrible but I'll just end on this I was with Hans Urban Hoppe one time he made this suggestion that he needed to give a comedian for the property of freedom of society because really laughing at the state is one of the best things we can do treat the state like a joke don't think them seriously don't give them respect so laugh at the state would be my practical solution for now okay yes for Will never mind jumping in and first I find a TV and I close the camera I see someone on my security system stole my TV yesterday and brought it to the house next door do I still have the right to that TV to this house? do I have the right to get that TV back? yes do I have the right to transfer that to my TV back? yes however however you're in another house a guy shows up says I am reclaiming my property I'm taking it the neighbors all wonder what the hell is going on is this person a criminal or are they being just? uh oh we need a process I'm answering you we need a process to determine if this really was a rice violation or not that's why we need law that's why we need to put it under objective control but I do have the right to transfer my right to the TV whether I give it a dollar you have the right I have the need to know that what's being transferred is a right and what you are not are criminals if I'm involved at all you're not involved at all and whoever you're taking it from okay you're not taking it from you're not involved let's bring this down a little bit well if you can clarify the question calmly alright sorry I'm excited about these recent questions passion hopefully combined anyway so the question essentially was that if individuals have rights to their own things and they have the right to respond to the initiation of force against them and they have the right to cooperate voluntarily with anyone in the protection of their rights which they I guess that is an invitation to individual rights then what the hell is the state for I mean I think that was the question and my answer was that in the example one person was deciding was declaring that their rights and in fact it was true that their rights had been violated and their TV was now in the house of another person and they proposed to invade the property of the other person and take the TV the other person is a person with rights the other person may disagree about the situation often these things happen or that other person may be a liar but the thing is that person may disagree if in general we're going to want a system where if anyone aggresses against us we can show objectively what the case is if anyone else became concerned with the issue they would want to know what the objective caseless situation is and that's what we need law for thank you there's something this is for you Roland there's something you said that caught my attention you talked about having defense agencies you know and competing defense agencies but then there was a sort of you said there's this one thing there's this one thing of the different defense agencies you can't you have to respect but actually is that really true and as long as the other defense ISIS defense agencies they don't engage in an exchange actually I mean yes you may be in a state of war with them they may be morally acceptable to go fighting for fun for instance if they are openly in conflict with you but actually it's not necessary to back into a state from that point it's not necessary to say we must all one by one go around all the different defense agencies even once thousands of miles away and make them out of mode that just doesn't seem to be true at all the competing defense agency idea is that they're going to be a lot of overlapping defense agencies they're not far away they're all here and the default position in the anarchist libertarian anarchist argument is that there won't be such a thing as the state and then any people can form any coalitions they want and even in the best society 10-20% are going to be heavily committed to some practical ideas so they're not far away ISIS is not far away they're going to be right here but why would I care I'm going to care because I want the benefits of industrial capitalism I want to have I want to have an extended market order that's predicated that's predicated on the enforcement of property rights the ability to do contracts and the basic respect for liberty that's a slice of pan you can have all those things and still have groups that identify from a rebellious point of view you just don't do business with them but then I can't do business with them with the individuals that deal with those groups maybe you do do business you choose not to do business the thing is if they aren't basically rights respecting they're going to be regressing not only against possibly me but against my customers and all that the whole vision here is of a society where I can deal with people by trade what I want is a society where we all deal with each other by trade that's what I think we would have to try and make happen okay I think we're going around the same circle here it is the core issue let me move on now let me make one sentence David I just would say I wonder if we didn't have the United States state if we would have ISIS or al-Qaeda the essential problem with the state is it prevents people from acting in their own best interest and this is the with which the market can and I want to disuse people of this concept of the rule of law okay this is a dangerous myth which is promulgated by those in power because it serves them it does not serve us okay there's a paper by John Hosnes called the myth of the rule of law I recommend anybody look it up online okay government can't debate the law the insane the cross-over trial shows this that just blew through countless numbers the violations of the law do you have a question I just I'm just pointing out that I thought it was legal to make comments the cross-over trial David Snowden pointed out the government doesn't have to pay the law so when you say the rule of law what do you it's a myth I think we all agree that it's improper and objectionable and bad and everything if the government isn't subject to the rule of law I mean that's and the whole conception really one of the good things in the conception of the United States is that it's subjecting government to the rule of law it hasn't been done perfectly but it's one thing to say it's a myth you can't both say it's a myth and then appeal to its violation as something disturbing and bad I think what you want to say is it's a great principle I'd like to see it applied even handily let me just make the comment by Hazen is one of my favorites it's a truly fantastic paper what he points out is that the state uses this idea of the rule of law this myth that it is bound by it when it's truly not as a way to legitimize itself it does similar things with democracy and with the constitution things like this so I think that's a fantastic paper and it's just a tool the government uses to legitimize itself as the result in the Obama case yesterday showed statutory law including the constitution is almost never objective law corresponding with property rights so the judges have free discretion to decide however they want and then paper their reasoning if you read the Supreme Court decision from yesterday both sides make sense because they're both interpreting non-objective law it's totally arbitrary so you can't even blame the judges they can't make a good decision when they're interpreting legislation or statutes just one small comment I'm familiar with Hazen's paper and we will shortly be publishing a paper by Jason Walker a philosopher of law that presents a critique of that point so anyone will be on our website probably by the end of the year okay next question I believe it's Mr. one thing I didn't hear is the power of the mind this is really just a big mind game government really doesn't exist it only exists in the minds of the people who let it rule the energy the state does not exist in my mind it doesn't have to exist in any other mind either what's important to me is how I relate to people what they do for me that is the important thing in life I hear all these people say the energy happens and this happens the energy exists in my mind the energy can start tomorrow every single one of our minds there's a state we want it to no one here can change my thinking and tell me there is a state unless I want to so I make that one I make it something for you so that's something for you to take at this moment I'm not sure that I was addressed to I would just say that I would think the claim that you have recognized that the government is just an idea, and that you refuse to accept the idea, if you had fully reached such a realization, then you would ignore all the unjust laws of the United States. You would act to confront and fight any violators of what you consider to be justice. You would compete with the unjust defense agency ruling all of us right now. OK, I think we have time. This will have to be the last question. I'm sorry, everybody, but we are essentially out of time. But please go ahead. My question is the rest of the world. To the what? To the what? To both. To both of you. So I find it very interesting that the argument to justify the state is the same argument people use to justify the centralization of gun ownership. If everyone walks around with a gun, everyone's going to start shooting everyone. Every time there's a dispute. So let us put all the guns into the central body-making power, who, of course, will only put the guns in our enemy spaces and never our own. I think that Murray Rothbard said best, the idea of a strictly limited constitutional state was a noble experiment that failed. It failed under the most favorable and propitious circumstances. So why should it fair and better now? Notice that conservative lazy fairs, the man who wants to put all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government, and then says, limit yourself. It is he who is truly the impact of political opinion. Last comment. I would just say that because competition over the use of force is what it is, it is warfare. And because unjust government, unjust laws and criminals are possible and real and actually exist, the right to bear arms is essential. It's essential in a free society precisely because sometimes you're going to have to fight people who are unjust. It's going to happen sometimes. And if we were one of the things that would be nice is if our citizenry were more empowered in terms of arms than they are, there would be more resistance to the bad things our government does. So it's no surprise that the unjust government we have tries to take away people's guns. And that is absolutely an attack on our liberty and a vital need that we have to sustain. We dodged the private ownership of Nuke's question. So good. All right. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Rich topic, and I really appreciate the interest. And thank all of you for coming. The next session in our tent will be a discussion about open versus closed objectivism with myself and Aaron Day. So we'll come back in five.