 K.O. debate series this summer. My name is Sarah Morrison. I'm the high school programs manager at FEE and whether you're here in the room with us for the debate or watching our live stream I would like to welcome you. Our debate topic today is on the necessity of government and our moderator is Dr. Anne Bradley who is the vice president of economic initiatives at the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics and I'm going to turn the debate over to her now. Good afternoon and thank you everyone for being here today. The title of our debate is government. What is it good for? But before we get to the resolution, I'd like to introduce the two debaters on the affirmative. We have Dr. Patrick McLaughlin. He is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University where he co founded Reg Data. His research focuses on regulations and the regulatory process and he holds his Ph.D. in economics from Clemson University. On the negative we have Dr. Anthony Davies. Dr. Davies is associate professor of economics at Duquesne University and a Mercatus affiliated scholar. He is a regular publisher in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and Forbes and he received his Ph.D. in economics from the State University of New York at Albany. The resolution today, government is necessary for the protection of property rights and the provision of some public goods. Dr. Patrick McLaughlin will be in the affirmative and Dr. Anthony Davies will be in the negative. We will begin with opening statements of eight minutes each and the affirmative has the floor. Thank you. I think we can all accept as a basic premise that self-interest is the basic engine of a market-driven economy. People act in their own self-interest and that's good. But a market-driven economy also depends on the existence of property rights and the protection of property. Oliver Wintow home said it best when he said the right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins. That relies on the premise that the other man has the property rights to his nose, doesn't it? The enforcement of property rights, the existence of property rights is in and of itself a public good. Now the provision of enforcement of property rights could be allocated to individuals, people of their own property could protect their own property but it's more efficiently allocated to a third party, the government. Why? Well if I protect only my own property there's a lesson there you'll learn don't mess with Patrick's property that's an important lesson to learn but Anthony's property, Dr. Davies property is still fair game. Of course Dr. Davies could protect his own property and so can everyone else in this room and everyone online but what if we just collectively hire a sheriff? That'd be a lot cheaper perhaps and the sheriff that gains from specialization in property rights enforcement. Now other public goods could similarly be provisioned better by the government. Reasonable people can disagree about these there's arguments of fire protection, national military defense, roads, there's others that are better listed on a list of public goods that the government might provide. I think reasonable people can make a case either way about those but the existence and enforcement of property rights in the first place is a proper role for the government. Furthermore I think self-interest alone does not ensure that externality problems are solved. One obvious externality problem that self-interest alone may not be able to solve is air pollution. Air pollution is a complex externality primarily because it's difficult at least at present to assign property rights to air and so that makes the solution of the externality problem one that government may need to intervene in. Now societies have long recognized the need for a government to enforce at the very least property rights. Think about the wild west or even earlier earlier days earlier era where there was a town sheriff hired by the people of a city or a village. That is a way of creating a government. Government is just giving a monopoly to the rights of enforcement to an individual or an organization. The rights to use force to enforce property right laws. That's what a sheriff did. The trick is make sure that the institution that's created called the government or called the sheriff is adequately constrained. As long as the government's adequately constrained the institution is necessary for a market-based society to function efficiently, protect individual rights from violation for other parties can be maintained by government. The trick is the constraint parts. So probably most of you have read the Odyssey by Homer, the story of Odysseus traveling back from war going back to his home in Greece. Part of that story is Odysseus traveling by the sirens. So Odysseus in the sirens is a great example of what needs to be done in the formation of government, formation of an entity who's going to enforce property rights. The sirens as you probably know would entice any person who heard their song, their beautiful song to jump overboard off the ship and try to swim to where they are and drown in the process. Odysseus was aware of this. He was warned that that temptation would be there, that no one can resist that temptation. And so what did he do? He had his men, his crew waxing their ears, and they had him tied up to the mast. He wanted to hear that song, but he didn't want to be able to give in to the temptation. That temptation that the sirens gave is similar to the temptation that anyone in the government would have. Once you have a little bit of power, the temptation to expand that power is always going to be there. You have to have a system of restraints built around that power in order to have a well-functioning government and a government that does not get out of control beyond the simple role of protecting property rights, establishing property rights and protecting them and enforcing the rights of individuals through externalities and not be impeded upon. So three basic points in reiteration. I think the government is good for the creation and enforcement of property rights. It is good for solving some externalities, and all of that must be done with constraints built in that the government cannot get out of. I rest my case. And now in the negative Dr. Davies has before. I'm open to arguments for government, but I have yet to hear one that I find compelling. In the state of nature, people exist. We exist prior to government. Therefore, in my opinion, the onus is on those who believe we need government to justify the claim, not on the people who believe we don't to justify theirs. All interactions among people are either cooperative or coerced. Government is the tool we've evolved to use for coerced interactions. Markets are the tool that we've evolved largely to use for cooperative interactions. So any justification for government must rest on the premise that there are things necessary to society which can only be achieved by coercion rather than cooperation. Traditional examples rely on this thing that we need exhibiting a free rider problem, as in the case of roads or a coordination problem, as in the case of the military or externalities, as in the case of police and fire protection. In most cases, in fact, in every case I've ever heard, it can be shown that cooperative action can provide these things. Enforcement of property rights is argued as a rule for government. But we have in front of us some beautiful examples of property rights being monitored and enforced by cooperation, by markets. The example I give you is eBay. On eBay, I can sell a product, I can advertise to sell a product, I can receive money from a buyer, and I'm perfectly free not to send a product in exchange. I can effectively steal the person's money. And yet you don't get rampant instances of theft on eBay, and it has nothing to do with the government. It has everything to do with the market having addressed the need for protections of property rights. Use the example of Odysseus asking the crew to tie him up, which I think is a beautiful example. He asked his crew to tie him up. Nobody forced Odysseus to be tied. The only compelling argument I have heard for government, for coercive government, is to pay for the military. But the interesting thing about the military is that this becomes a circular argument. The only reason I need a military is because the other guy's got a military. That is the only need for my government is the fact that somebody else has a government. In closing, let me argue that my admittedly anarchic view of the world is not antithetical to government. It's antithetical to coerced government. I believe there's plenty of room for what I would describe as voluntary government, and we have plenty of examples of this. Homeowners associations, rules for clubs and organizations, arbitration, private security, that the security that protects you here while you're on this campus, is market provided. It is not government provided. The difference between a coerced government and a voluntary government is that in the case of a voluntary government, I choose to be subject to the laws of the government. And at any point, I can choose to remove myself from that society and no longer be subject to those rules. With the coerced government, there is no escape clause. You are born into the rules. And the only way to escape them is death. Okay, now we'll proceed into the response time. So I actually agree with very much of what Dr. Davies said. I do think government like entities evolve in voluntary cooperation examples. And those can do the jobs of what you think of as the federal government or state governments or more coercive governments. So it's certainly the case that a voluntarily agreed upon government like entity can fulfill the role of creation and enforcement of property rights. And even and even some externalities solve some externality problems. But there I still think is an argument for a broader role of coercion and other externality problems. One specific one that comes to mind is about the only one that comes to mind actually is a mandatory vaccinations. So before the 1930s, diphtheria infected about 21,000 people per year killing 1800 of them by 2006 those numbers were zero and zero because of vaccinations until the 1950s when polio vaccines were invented polio infected 16,000 people per year crippling many for life and killed nearly 2000 people on an annual basis. Now polio is largely eradicated from the world. Similar results for chicken pox rubella measles and whooping cough. Except we're currently seeing it whooping cough arise again, especially here in California. And why is that is because the government, although previously had a mandatory vaccination policy has been granting exemptions from this mandatory vaccination policy. Vaccinations work because of a herd immunity. If everyone in the group has immunity or at least enough people have immunity, even if one person's vaccination doesn't kick in and protect that person, there's a little risk of that being spread to others. That only works if everyone gets it. If enough people in the group choose not to get it, try to get their exemptions, then you're going to see that herd immunity go away. So whooping cough cases had dropped from about 200,000 pre vaccination days per year to 1010 is low point in 1976. By last year, actually 2012, it had risen again to 48,277. That's the highest since 1955. And it's gotten higher since then 18 infants died of it in 2012 for 1976. So I do think you can make a case, at least in this specific externality that a broader coercion could help the world could make people better off in the sense of making people not be harmed by others choices to not get a vaccination. I just want to reiterate, though, although I'm making a case for limited government in this specific example, you have to have that self restraint built in like Odysseus. And I also want to introduce a new term that I tested out earlier today, adaptive self disintegration. That is something that also I would like to see built into whatever storm of form of coercive government does come about if one is agreed to by people in society. And that means as you see the need for coercive policies go away, they actually go away. They actually disintegrate polio is a good example. If polio has indeed been eradicated, then maybe we don't need the vaccinations anymore. Maybe we do. I think that needs to be empirically tested. But that's something that should be actively adopted prior to even considering a coercive form of government. Thank you. Thank you. Negative four minutes for response. It's difficult when when faced with specific examples to to argue how a market would handle something. And the reason it's difficult is because the is because of the reason markets work, which is entrepreneurs have an incentive to find solutions to problems. If if it's possible for us to sit here and describe solutions to every problem we can imagine, then it's also possible for us to design the economy and there's no point in markets in the first place. And in at least partially vaccinations in my mind fall into that category, I can I can describe as what I can imagine is a market solution to this. Whether or not it would be the market solution. I don't know because we haven't tried it. But for example, why not handle this through a standard case of tort, which is, you know, you have polio and I've contracted it from you because you weren't vaccinated. I treat this as any other kind of injury that you might inflict on me. And I'll take you to court. Now one might argue that while you were taking someone to court that requires a government know because court systems can be privatized as well. We have them in this country. In fact, they work better in most cases than the public court system, which is arbitration. So my knee jerk reaction is rather than to see a problem and to say this is something government should handle is to try and imagine is there a way markets might be able to handle that. If from sitting here I can come up with something that sounds somewhat plausible, then I guarantee you that entrepreneurs with a profit incentive who have more energy and time and incentive than I have can come up with better solutions before for questions. Yes, I just have a reply to Mr. Mr. McLaughlin. That's in regards to the construction of government because when when you give the government a monopoly on it's on monopoly on coercion, you as you said you need some way to restrict it so it doesn't go overboard and use that power for other means other than property rights. However, giving the example of the United States when it was founded, it was designed as a very minarchist, very restrained government with the Constitution Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, et cetera, et cetera. Yet few centuries later we have now a giant bloated nanny state government. So how would we effectively restrict the government without resorting to more force? It's a great point. I don't know that we have adequately, we actually definitely have not adequately constrained the government in the United States and that's true in a lot of countries. I do think the best best way to stop a government from abusing its monopoly power to use force and coercion is to have other government-like entities competing with that one. So as long as you don't like what's going on here, you can go somewhere else, then the people who are ruling here are going to take that into account and maybe change the way that they rule. I think this is similar to what Dr. Davies is saying. I think if you have different voluntary organizations having different policies, people can choose among those and that is going to be a market-like system of restraint built into the provision of property rights and enforcement of property rights. Right, so I have a question for the negative, Mr. Davies. In your second speech you mentioned, one of the lines that stuck out to me was that in your admittedly anarchic view, you are against all forms of coercive government, but you're not against forms of voluntary government. So my question to you is, do you believe that the United States or any other country, for that matter, needs a central government and if not, what do you believe should be the forms of government that should protect our rights? Yes, so there's two dimensions to this question. One is kind of an ideal dimension. Where ideally should we be? The other is a practical dimension of where do you go from here, right, and don't confuse the two because the path from where we are to the ideal can be very rocky. So in an ideal sense, I would argue that all governments are voluntary, as Dr. McLaughlin has pointed out. I have the ability to come and move into this area and subject myself to the rules of this government, or I have the ability to not do so and go somewhere else. This interestingly is the way the United States was designed. We were supposed to be a very limited federal government with all of the governing occurring at the state level. That is, we were designed to be political competition, not political monopoly. Now I would push that even further and say it should go down to the local level. There's a good principle Catholic social thought called subsidiarity, which basically means pushing decision making to the lowest possible level. That's precisely this. If a neighborhood can handle a question, then the local government shouldn't. If the local government can handle it, the state shouldn't. If the state can handle it, the federal government shouldn't. And I believe if you follow practically speaking that rule, you'll end up with virtually all decisions being made at this very low level. In fact, a level that's low enough that everyone has the ability, if they don't like the rules, to remove themselves at relatively low cost and go somewhere where they do like the rules. For the negative, does the privatizing of these court systems and jails not lead to the possibility of greater corporate corruption? Or does the dollars and the importance of the dollar to the entrepreneur keep these companies or privatized institutes of anything in check? And will they maintain honesty and integrity? Yeah, that's an interesting question, because when people think about private arbitration, which is the private version of a court system, they imagine, well, it's very easy for the large corporation to simply buy off the judge, right? And the judge is just going to arbitrate in the corporation's favor. But notice my incentive, if I am the judge, the arbiter, my incentive is to give a just result, because the only way I can be the arbiter, because this is all voluntary, is for both parties in the disagreement to agree to me. So if I have developed a reputation as an unjust arbiter, you're not going to agree to have me, so no amount of money the corporation is going to throw at me is going to have any effect. Is the system perfect? No, by no means is it perfect. We're dealing with human beings. But that's not the right question. The right question is, is it better than a coerced system? A system in which a judge is appointed and his rulings are enforced by the force of the state. Now here, the state can pay off the politicians or pay off the judge. I have no recourse against this corporation, because the state has said I must deal with this judge. So I actually find a greater probability of justice in the arbitration system. Many people base their view of government on the size of government on personal values and morals. What do you both base your view of the size of government on? Sometimes you can't look at outcomes if they haven't happened yet. So you have to have some sort of view of the size of government, suppose you're creating one, or you're establishing some sort of system in a village or something like that prior to seeing outcomes, but fortunately I have hindsight. I can look at history and look at the formations of government throughout history. And I think by and large that sort of examination is the sort of approach that you would see in the empirical science. So I look at outcomes and based on outcomes I think that there's a lot of evidence that size of government, let me rephrase this, that a government that's not adequately constrained in its original design can grow to a size where outcomes become negative. Outcomes like happiness, like income, like life expectancy. Those are the sorts of criteria I would examine. When addressing the question of how large should a government be? Do you want me to answer also? Yeah, it's interesting because Dr. McLaughlin is taking an empirical approach. I would take a philosophic approach that the size of government should be driven by principles of human dignity. That is there's a dignity to being human. Humans should not be enslaved, they should not enslave each other. It's that principle that should drive the size of government and in my opinion, absent any other argument I've heard, it drives it to zero. For the affirmative, you repeatedly mentioned that the government should find a way to constrain itself to its original documentation, but as you mentioned in a lecture from previously, every administration since Carter has told its agencies to look in on itself and on its regulations to get rid of what it does not need in this adaptive self-dissolution. But as you all, but as you said then, when they, when the agency is turning on themselves, not only do they not remove this regulation, they actually find that they are incentivized to create more regulation. So how would you go about finding a way to actually solve this and incentivize them to remove this regulation? I actually have a relatively simple solution to this. Pay the people who are assigned the job of solving externalities for actually solving externalities. This question is for the affirmative. So you mentioned that one of them, something about the government being kept in check by other entities that function similar to the government, but how would those, how would those entities be allowed to operate or what gives them any power at all if the definition of government is a monopoly on force? How, what would give them any power? What would stop the established government from questioning our competition? It's for you. Yeah, it's a great question because implied in that question, I think, is a local monopoly on the right to use force, a local monopolist with the right to use force could use that force to prevent people from leaving his or her little fiefdom. What I was saying is if you can have people moving from one area where there's a government to another area where there's a government to another one, that will that will lead to competition amongst all of those different entities. But if you can't let people leave, if people can't leave voluntarily, you're, it's going into a different scenario. That was not the scenario I was trying to arrive, that may be a scenario that actually does arise. But I think if you look back at history, I think a large portion of the rise in GDP per capita, the rise in income, men's progress that we saw at the timing, around the time of the industrial revolution, 16th, 15th, 17th centuries coincided with abilities of people in these same countries to move from one to the other. I think there was a large amount of competition amongst the governments that finally arose that forced governments to give people more rights in order to attract people, in order to not lose people. This is directed to both sides. The seeming type of government that you both have resolved at is a competitive set of governments. And to me that sounds really like a feudal system. So my question is, if it is basically why will this work when the feudal systems such as in the UK and in Japan, and if this isn't like a feudal system, what makes this different? There's some other properties to feudal systems, besides the fact that they're multiple governments. And those other properties are the reasons that feudal systems did not lead to as rapid a growth as we're seeing, say, post feudal systems once the democratic systems that we see today arose. Feudal systems, I think, coincided with government predation. What you saw in a lot of feudal society was those who had the power used the power to take from the others who lived in that same, in their fiefdom, I guess, is the word without those people agreeing to have that taken from us. It's slavery. Slavery does not work. That's why you had failure or curative. On the other hand, competition between governments doesn't imply slavery. And that's what I think is a great way of constraining governments if you do agree to create governments or government-like entities. This is for both the negative and the affirmative. Should we restrict the government? Should we be restricting the government, I should say? Should we restrict the government? Talking about the government we have right now. Yeah, well, clearly I would say yes. Restricted all the way down to it doing nothing, right? If you want, if you want a more detailed response, I would say a big step in the right direction is returning to the model that we were intended, which is a federal government that basically only looks outward. It handles foreign affairs, it handles military action, and that's all. Everything else is handled at the state level. The most part I agree there should be, there definitely should be restrictions on government at all levels, really. And if you add to those restrictions, add to some sort of mechanisms to limit the power, the ability of those in power to take. I think you'll see those in power responding to their incentives or responding to their ability to take and often do. I think this is part of the genius of the original constitution. The constitution did attempt to restrict what the government could do. It still does. There have been large changes since the original creation of the country, but that's why that document was so important because of the restrictions they contained. And I think we've said this before, but it's worth underlining the difference between power in the hands of the state and power in the hands of the federal government is that the states must compete amongst each other, and the power of that competition is astounding. You know, ask yourself how many people do you know who complain about iPhones? Typically, we don't because iPhone has to constantly be responding to consumers because it has competitors in the form of Samsung and other things. Now, how often do we complain about Comcast? Frequently, there is no competitor, at least locally. The power of competition is incredible, no matter how much power the state has. If the state must compete with other states, that alone will force the state to be very circumspect in exercising that power. My question is for Mr. Davies, Professor Davies, you mentioned before in the question relating to government size, what's the optimal one, and philosophically human dignity drives that, and that humans don't or should not slave others. Well, in the past we have enslaved others, and in your opinion, less government, almost no government, how can you ensure that others would not enslave? And how can you ensure that in the, you're talking about a competitive governments that in that competition, how can you ensure the rights of others and that they will not be enslaved? Yeah, that's a good question, and it goes back to my original point, which is the onus, the responsibility is on, in my opinion, on those who believe in government to justify government. So I would turn the question around and say, can you guarantee me that governments won't enslave? And in fact, if we look historically, while clearly, you know, private individuals, you'll find instances of private individuals enslaving, I think you will find historically that the vast majority of cases of enslavement have been cases of enslavement that are either the direct result of or encouraged by government. This question is also for the negative. You brought up that you're only, the only compelling argument for a coercive action by government is a military, or managing the military, but you brought up that it's sort of a circular argument. So is there any way a free market system or a cooperative system of voluntary government, that is, would be able to regulate these kind of military actions? Yeah, I don't know, I don't know, I haven't gone down that path of asking how a private sector might regulate military action, largely because I got stuck on this answer of, well, the only reason for a military is if the other guy's got a military. So, kind of off the cuff, one suggestion, and I'm not sure that I'm going to, I may regret having said this, one possibility is that if you're going to have a military, military, that it be manned entirely by conscription, which sounds the the antithesis of what I've been saying, right, except the thing about conscription is if the population is against a war, it's much, the population will be much more incensed if the people who are being sent to war are being sent to war, to a war that the population does not want against those people's wills. It's a very different matter if the population doesn't want the war and the people who are fighting the war are people who we hired. They're voluntarily, let's say voluntarily, they volunteered to go and be in the military and be paid a salary in exchange for doing this. So, in a sense, I would argue that the natural throttle on a military, on a government's ability to wage war, is that the people have a tremendous amount of skin in the game. My question is directed towards Dr. Davies. Earlier you said that governments can be competitive to a very local level and this competition would cause them to do better or people could move, but if people were to move, they would have to change their jobs, their whole work schedule and everything. So, what would be the solution? Yeah, so this is an interesting question. So, there's a couple of answers here. One is not all moves require you changing your job, particularly if you're moving from one local, underneath one local government to another. And in fact, you see this all the time, but you see it amongst the more affluent families. They're the ones that can pick and choose what school district they want to be in. They're doing exactly what we're talking about. They're choosing one governmental entity versus another. The other issue is this. You don't need everyone to have competition. You don't need everyone moving from one government to another. You only need enough to make it painful. Apple competes with, who makes the other thing? Google. No, Google. Samsung business. The Android. Apple competes with Android. It does not require, it does not require everyone who owns an iPhone to suddenly say, I don't like what's going on here and shift to Android. It only takes some. It's enough to get Apple's attention and now Apple alters what it's doing. So, you don't need everybody to move. You just need some. Even though you didn't ask me, I'm going to interject here. The threats of people moving alone may be sufficient. Yes, yes. All right, I have a question directed for the affirmative. If government is truly necessary for the protection and the creation of property rights, is an individual ever able to protect or create their own property rights devoid of the government? I'd say that's a possibility. I did make the case that the government can play a good role in the creation and protection of property rights. But yeah, I think there are scenarios where individuals can protect their own property rights. The existence of property rights requires that multiple individuals recognize their existence. If you just recognize the existence of property rights, your own property to yourself, that doesn't really do a whole lot of good. So, there does have to be some sort of cooperative agreement that there are property rights, otherwise where does the property rights? So, groups could agree about property, agree that there are property rights and create property rights. Those groups, I think, would tend to, and this is something we observe historically, to allocate to a third party the role of enforcement of the property rights. Those are the government-like entities that we have seen involved over time. I have a question for the negative. How is your view on a local voluntary government, any different from what we have now, where national governments compete in similar ways? If I wanted to, I could move from the United States to Great Britain, if I wanted to. How is that any different from what we have now, except at a much smaller scale? Yeah, there's two differences here. And while you brought that up, it's worth noting, one of the things that people say as well, if anarchy is such a good idea, how come nobody's tried it? To which I respond, it's around us all the time. There is no world government. At a national level, we exist in an anarchic environment. It's just that the countries are allowed, that people who are running the countries are allowed to exist in the anarchic environment, it's just not us down the ground, right? So, with respect to your question, look, why doesn't this work at the national level? There's a couple of things. One, it's very expensive to move from one country to another, much more so than to move from one locality to another, or even across state lines. Not just because of the physical cost of moving, but largely you're dealing also not just with moving geographically, but moving into a different culture, with different mores, possibly a different language. There's all kinds of barriers here. Then throw on top of that, the artificial barriers. You can't just pick up and go to England. You have to get a visa, and then you have to get residence status, and all of this is granted by the government, and if they don't grant it to you, you have to turn around and come back, right? So, it's not moving between countries, it's not nearly as easy as, for example, moving between localities or states. My questions are both sides. Recently around the world, we've seen a lot of populations rise against their government, and I'm specifically thinking about Venezuela, in which the government or the people have been protesting for over five months now, and the current government, which pushes a socialist agenda, has not only kind of oppressed the people by shutting down the social media sites and stuff like Twitter and Facebook and stuff, and also controlling all of the news channels and stuff to only show the government side of things. A lot of countries around the world purchase oil from Venezuela, and I was wondering what you guys think the U.S. should do, not only in this country, but also in other countries in which a lot of the world around us relies on, and we also do too. Do you want to go first? I can copy you then. I think that just of your question is, is there a role for the government to intervene in other countries, in other governments, where you see a agendas of repression or abuse through price if I can try to summarize the gist of the question. That's a very tricky question. I'm not going to give you a straightforward answer, unfortunately. I can imagine some scenario where intervention does make sense. I made the case earlier for a role of governments based on the fact that mandatory vaccinations can prevent people from dying or getting crippled from disease. I think you can make a similar argument that in some cases, intervention by government could stop people from being killed or enslaved or genocidal, cases of genocidal perhaps. On the other hand, the risk of such interventions is so great in the sense that if someone in power is making the decision that in this case I need to intervene and in another case I don't need to intervene, then that's taking away those bindings that Odysseus has at the max that's letting that person be tempted to intervene in cases where maybe there's not a good justification for the intervention. I gave you a very wishy-washy answer because I don't have a straightforward black or white response. I think it's a wishy-washy world and in some cases there are justifications for governments. In other cases, there are not. One of the problems that we have with government is that we attribute to it magic powers. We see a problem. We say, well, the government should fix this as if there's this magic wand and whatever the government does, the problem goes away. I think a better way to deal with this is to ask, all right, here's a problem. Are we better off allowing the government to take a shot at fixing it or are we better off allowing markets, free cooperation to have a shot at fixing it? And the case in point I'll give you is Cuba. Cubans have been living under a communist government, oppressive government for half a century. And I believe United States government intervention is largely responsible. We embargo Cuba. Cuba's been under embargo for almost the full of that half century. If instead the United States government had stepped back and let markets do what they do, which is we'll go there. It's a nice place to visit. Their cigars are great. We'll buy those. We'll sell them things. All of a sudden, markets would do two things here. One, make the Cuban people themselves richer as they engage in trade. Two, remind them constantly of the difference between the society they live in, in societies outside. They don't see largely that dichotomy. And so they're less apt to turn to their own government and say enough is enough. The best way to overthrow communism is to trade with it, not to embargo it. This is more for the negative. You said that you'd like government reduce the size of zero philosophically, but we're kind of already in like a voluntary government like the metaphorical social contract where we give up some of our like, I guess, natural rights so for safety. But you're talking about private courts, but if there's no government to set laws, then what's the point of courts where you can't? You technically haven't committed a crime except. Right. Yeah, I don't believe in the social contract. It's equivalent to my coming along, mowing your lawn and saying, give me 50 bucks. And you saying, but I never agreed for you to mow my lawn to which I respond. You moved in next door to me. This is the social contract. You live next to me. I mow your lawn. You never agreed to this. I never agreed to a social contract. Right. Nor did you. Meanwhile, there is a contract, an explicit written contract that although we individually didn't agree to it, our forebears did. That's the United States Constitution. I'd like to see that followed first before we start talking about some mythical social contract. For the negative and moving toward no government involvement, is it possible for us to regress or in your case, progress to this point by decreasing policies and regulations over time or would it take a large-scale cap such as a global war, economic disaster, more so than we already are, or like a natural disaster, like a hurricane, like something that would maim our country? Yeah. My hypothesis is the past to an anarchic world is not something that's going to require some natural disaster, revolution or something. It's a place that humans seem to be moving. If you look backward through history, democracy is a relatively new phenomenon. Before that we had kings, before that we had tribal chieftains. It's a story while interrupted. Human history is largely a story of more and more freedom. Where that ends is in an anarchic world, right? Now, anarchy is not a game for children. It's something that only adults can play and by that what I mean is it requires that largely, not in all cases because humans are imperfect, but it requires largely humans coming to the realization that there is this thing of fundamental human dignity, that we have a responsibility to honor in each other and in ourselves. When we get to that point, not all of us, but enough of us, then you have enough adults that anarchy starts to work. I think it's a natural evolution. When, how long will it take us to get there? I don't know, but certainly more than my lifetime. For the affirmative, you mentioned that we, that if Odysseus is tied to the mass, then he should not be able to choose whether or not he intervenes because in which case, why tie him? So, my question is, if he should not be, if the government should not choose whether or not they should intervene and be taken down from the mass, why have the government to be tied to the mass in the first place, if that makes any sense? I'm not sure I understand. Can you try again? Never mind, it sounded better in my head. Well, all right, let me try. So I think you're saying that if I want to take the choice of intervention, the ability of a government to use force in some situation to make citizens, people in the world, not do something, then where is the restriction of the government in the first place? If I'm giving the government the ability to make that intervention, then is there actually, is Odysseus actually bound to the mass? Is that a good rephrasing of what you're saying? All right. Well, I think that the choice on what powers to give the government has to be made a priori, has to be made prior to the agreement by those who are going to live in the jurisdiction of that government. They're going to sail with Captain Odysseus as to what ability he has to actually remove the restraints. Odysseus did ask his crew to untie him, but he had also told them beforehand whatever I say, don't untie me. They also go waxing their ears so they couldn't even hear him. But the point is, a government is going to be tempted to step beyond its restraints, step beyond the people in government are going to be tempted to be stepping beyond whatever original document limits them in the first place. The trick is to build into that document no ability for it, despite the temptation, to have the crew untie him. Okay, great. Thank you all so much. Now we are going to enter closing statements and negative will begin this time and has two minutes. So the fundamental question here is what is the best form of human interaction? Is it better that we cooperate or is it better that we coerce each other? And the problem with coercion is two-fold. One, it's very easy to imagine all the wondrous things that could happen if only we could force people to do certain things. The other problem is that the people aren't going to like to be coerced and they're going to respond. We call this unintended consequences. Remembering that humans are imperfect and we are imperfect in both markets and government. The best solution for organizing ourselves is a solution that automatically corrects itself. Solutions that automatically correct themselves are solutions in which you have competition and the consumer's ability or the voter's ability to move between one product offering and another or in this case one government and another. The right way to answer this question is to embrace on both fronts government and markets, human fallibility and limitations. And now the affirmative has the floor for two minutes. I think for the most part we've come to agreement that if there is a role for government such as what I described in my opening statement that there's perhaps a role for creation and enforcement of property rights, a role for correcting negative externalities, then that role needs to be agreed upon prior to the creation of the entity, government-like entity and that those who are under the power of that entity need to be able to opt out. It is important to have a well-functioning government, government-like entity, whatever you want to call it, to have that government be under the pressure of the competition. Competition just wonders in the market for making companies produce new products, new ideas and not cheat. Similarly governments could be under the pressure of competition and as a result produce better governance, better policy and not be tempted to cheat on whatever original document was put together in this creation. Okay, thank you both so much and thank you all for joining us today for government-like entity.