 I will go out and I'll buy you new flowers and I'll personally plant them myself. But within 10, that becomes a destruction of someone's property. All right. I want to bring on Stefan Kinsella. How are you doing, Stefan? I'm good. How are you doing? Can you hear me? Yeah. We can hear you clear. Fantastic. How are you doing? Really well, actually. It's one of the best audios on here. Anyway, no. Good to have you on the show. We had a scenario earlier with Facebook pages and the rest of this stuff. I'm going to kind of lay out, some people have already heard this. We had kind of a short discussion on it earlier on before you came on, but I want to clarify. Some people had basically messaged Facebook and reported another Facebook page lying that this Facebook page had supposedly broken Facebook rules and guidelines when they had not. But they claimed this. They got this voluntary Facebook page shut down. And we raised the question, what is line? What is fraud? When does it infringe on NAP? And I figured Mr. Argumentation Ethics himself, have you on the show? We could discuss this tonight. So anyway, I want to start off right off the gate with the fact that line, what's the difference between line and fraud? Let's start with that. Yeah. So just really quickly. I actually didn't follow all the details of the issue, and I'm aware of other cases where people have gotten websites taken off, usually by copyright grounds or other things. And my suspicion is that most of these cases, there are policies in place that probably would not be in place in a pre-society. They're heavily influenced and distorted by the government policies on a variety of laws, copyright, and child pornography, and terrorism, and money laundering, and drugs, and all these things. And most of the time, when a site gets taken down, or a YouTube video, I think it's not good. And I think it's because of state policies, largely. So you asked, what about lying and fraud? And I think this is because there's allegations that someone was being fraudulent. Now it could be that someone was abusing Facebook policies, but on the other hand, Facebook has the right to set their own policies, right? Now of course, I'm against lying as a general matter. I think it's immoral and bad, just like insulting your grandma is a bad thing, but that doesn't mean insulting your grandma is the same thing as lying or vice versa, and it doesn't mean that the same thing is fraud. So I think we can be against lying as people, and we should be, but it's not the same as fraud. People sometimes conflate these things. And then in terms of fraud, as libertarians, we're against fraud because we say it's a type of or a species of aggression or trespass, and people are usually a little bit vague about this. My view is that fraud is basically what you can call in the common law theft by trick. It's using deception to obtain the possession and or title to some scarce resource without the legitimate or true consent of the owner, just like if you're a surgeon and you perform an operation on someone, it's not assault and battery to cut them open because they consented to it, but if they don't give informed consent, that is if you lie to them as the surgeon about what you're going to do, you put them out and you say you're going to remove their kidney and instead you remove their left foot, that is assault and battery because there was no informed consent given to that. So to me, fraud is simply a means by which you perform a type of theft of someone's resources. So what is theft? So theft is simply the unconsented to use of someone's property or scarce resources. So when we say unconsented to, that means they didn't consent to it. So that's what theft or robbery is. So fraud is a way of doing that. It's a way of say engaging in a trade with someone where you condition your transfer of title to your resource on there and the other parties transfer of title to their resource in the exchange. But there's a certain communication between the parties about what that transfer is. So communication and language are an inherent part of any kind of complicated exchange like that. So fraud comes in when there's deception or a misrepresentation by one party which basically renders the transfer of title by the other party inoperative or uninformed. So to me, fraud is just a means by which you obtain possession of someone else's resources without their true consent. Okay, no, that makes perfect sense. So in this scenario, let's say, well, this raises the question, what if somebody frauds somebody else not to gain their property, but so somebody else can gain their property? You see what I'm getting at here? So I fraud you so that Robert benefits or that so Kyren or Michael Dana on here benefits. So I don't get the property, but it deprived you of it. That still counts, right? I don't. I think you have to be precise about it. I don't know. I mean, I think it would be immoral. It'd be shady. It'd be slimy, but depending upon the circumstances, look, the person who is transferring title to property, if I hand you a dollar bill or my sheep in exchange for whatever you're giving me, I'm doing that based upon your representations. Okay, and if you're lying to me, then I could have a claim that you're basically stealing that thing from me that I gave to you because I gave it to you on the condition that you weren't lying. So if you come up with a third party transaction, it depends on the nature of it. I, I'm not sure. I mean, I think in some cases it's caveat emptor or caveat donor. I guess, you know, let the donor beware. If you're going to, if I'm going to give you something based upon your grandma's representation or your friend's representation, then it's not clear to me who's defrauding me, right? Who is taking my property without my consent because the guy that's lying to me is not really defrauding me. In the case of Facebook, I think that primarily if someone abuses Facebook's terms of service and reports a violation when they shouldn't, then it's up to Facebook how stringently they want to enforce that. And their remedy is obvious. They can just eject you, right? They can just boot the guy off so they have an easy remedy. Theoretically, they could have a damages remedy too. They could sue you if that's in the contract as well. But it wouldn't be a right on behalf of the person whose page is removed unless Facebook was foolish enough to put their terms of service that all of their customers have a third party right to go through them to get monetary damages from other users. They're not going to go through that. It's not worth it to them. I think they're just going to have to have a reputation that they're not going to be arbitrary and that they're going to be fair. I mean, if they start booting people off left and right, no one's going to trust their service and they're going to go to some alternative competing service. So I think reputation is the main thing that keeps Facebook honest here. All right. So basically, you're basically saying that only somebody depriving somebody else of property through a lie is considered fraud. Is that a good summarization? Yes, I think that is. And that's because the libertarians, the libertarian argument is basically we're opposed to aggression, which is trespass, which is the use of someone else's resources, including their bodies without their permission or their consent. That is the essence of the libertarian claim. And contracts are just an application of that. A contract is not a type of property. A contract is what a property owner does with his property. In other words, a contract is the means by which an owner exercises his property rights. If I own a resource, that means that I can permit you to use it. Like I can invite you to my home for dinner or I can exclude you. I can deny you the right to use it or I can grant you the rights to use it on a contractual basis for a limited period of time or for limited uses like a car. They let me use the car for a limited time and for limited purposes, but not for any purpose. I can't melt the car down or sell it. Or I can alienate the title to the car completely, which is a complete and final contract. So a contract is simply the way by which an owner of a resource decides and communicates to others who gets to use the resource and for how long and fraud is just another application of that. Fraud is just the recognition that if there's dishonesty or deception involved in one of these kind of communications, then it could result in the unconsented to use of a resource. So it really all comes down to property rights and scarce resources and who has the right to control the use of that resource. One last question that does touch on this with the Facebook contract and stuff, because it really is, I know it's one of those regular user in agreements where you just kind of scroll down and click continue, right? But that's what it really is with Facebook. When you sign up, you do the thing and you basically sign a small mini contract with them on a few basic small things, right? I mean, I guess you don't have to really sign off on anything, but it's kind of like an implicit contract instead of explicitly. I think it's in the Facebook case, I don't think it's implicit. I think it's not signed. It's more of a click wrap or a click type agreement. You actually click on something. So I think there's some affirmative indication of agreement. OK, and by agreeing, but by promising to use their services by using their services, you're promising not to lie to them about things, right? I think that's that would probably if we went through their stuff, they probably would have something in there about that being a bad thing. And they said that rules. We didn't have to have a government do that. I'm basic. I would have said that rule with somebody else, right? Yes. And so, right, right. And so because of that, they if they do lie, would you consider that technically an infringement on the non-aggression principle because of breaking contract? No, I don't think so because so here's the way I look at it. Facebook is granting limited and temporary permission for you and me and other people to use their resources, which is their computer servers, let's say, right? So you are actually controlling their computer hard drives and RAM through the Internet. So they're allowing you to do that. Just like if I call you on the phone, I'm controlling. When I when I cause your telephone to ring, I'm actually causing it to do something. So I'm controlling your phone. But you're permitting me to do that by your by your cooperation in the telephone network, for example, right? Facebook is saying we're going to let you use our servers under these terms. Now, I think there's there's two ways you could look at it. You could say that if Facebook's so if I let's say I invite you to my home for dinner and I say you can use my home for a certain purpose, but you're you're not allowed to wear shoes in my home and scuff my floors up. And let's say you leave your shoes on and scuff my floors up. Now, have you committed trespass by scuffing up my my floors? Well, it's arguable, but the easy remedy is just to eject someone who's not being a polite guest, right? In Facebook's case, I think their terms of service are more like setting out the rules on which they're going to keep let you keep using their property because they really don't need to let you keep using it. They can just boot you. But if they did want to set up a contract by which they they have the right to get damages from you, let's say, sue you for monetary damages, let's say they put that in the contract and they say they say if anyone violates the following terms of service, then you have to pay me a thousand dollars damages or some kind of damages. I think that should be enforceable, but I wouldn't view it as trespass. It would just be an action that is defined in the contract that triggers a consequence and the trigger the consequence that we triggered would be the transfer of title of some resources like some money, some money, some monetary damages. So I think someone who lies to Facebook to get someone's page ejected is basically violating Facebook's terms of service. And whether Facebook wants to enforce it by booting that person or to vigorously police that is really up to Facebook. They're not going to obviously police everything with a big inquiry. It'd be too expensive. So they have to have rough and ready rules of thumb that they apply. So I wouldn't call it trespass. I would say that the person is risking getting booted from the venue. All right. Do any of the panelists want to follow up on this? Ask a question. Well, I think that part of this at least came up due to, you know, an interaction that we had earlier. And I think that, you know, if somebody goes and basically interferes with with with my interactions with with Facebook or with anybody else, you know, if they're if they're going out of their way to not deprive me of property in the sense of taking it for themselves, but essentially vandalizing my my time and access to a resource in a fraudulent manner that they that they are, you know, through deception, vandalizing. I mean, do you think do you think it's not possible for someone to dishonestly vandalize and therefore, you know, be be an NAP violator? Well, see, when you say essentially and when you say, so I'm trying to establish what fraud is. So you can't just call it fraud, right? And you can't just say essentially vandalizing or whatever. I think that it's well, I mean, it deprived me of time and access to a resource. Have they not one? You said go out of your way. I mean, like that's a relevant consideration. And yeah, they're not depriving of anything that you have a property right in. I mean, do you have a property right in your time and resources that you've that you're investing in a private contractual network like Facebook? I don't really see that that's the libertarian project. Well, my my understanding of my agreement with Facebook is that like I follow the rules and I use the service. So if somebody goes and, you know, through deception, deprives me of my interaction with that entity. I think that they've, you know, done something dishonest and deprived me of a resource. OK, I think that is a fair description of what they've done. So what dishonestly depriving a person of resources you don't see as fraud? No. OK. No, I just explained. Fraud is the deceptive acquisition of the control of a resource that someone else owns, especially theft by trick. Well, this is the problem with not being precise in our terms. Fraud is used to describe dishonesty and things that are immoral that I think everyone would agree is immoral, OK? But it's not if you use fraud so broadly, then it's not always a violation of nonaggression principle. Well, I don't try to use it broadly. I mean, I made, you know, earlier I was on the show earlier and I, you know, specifically said, I mean, there's people who lie about me all the time. I have enemies, right? But I don't necessarily say that they're fraudulent. They're not depriving me of anything. If the line between fraud and just a lie is whether you actually obtain a thing from your lie, then I think that there needs to be, like, another word. I'm not sure that there's a word for vandalism by deception because, you know, I'm clearly having. There is. There is. It's called defamation, which is a type of reputation, right, which libertarians oppose. Well, we don't believe in property rights and value. We don't believe in property rights and reputation. We don't believe in property rights and ideas or patterns of information. So, yes, there is a word for it. And it's just not a libertarian concept. I don't think you need to express. Because the thing is that I've really tried to draw a very clear line here that a person is not just depriving me of my reputation, right? Because people do that all the time. I'm not unused to that. That happens every day, right? People go out and say, you know, all types of things about me, you know, like I said, I have enemies. I'm not trying to go and seek restitution or call these people aggressors. But when you're actually seeking out to deprive me of resources, my interaction with this organization that I'm trying to find. Hold on, hold on. So let's stop right here. So you're saying interaction is a resource? It's an advertising platform. An advertising platform is a resource? Yes. It's a resource that's an ownable thing in the world. I mean, see, libertarians believe that in property rights to scale for resources, these are the things that there can be conflict over. Your usefulness of a platform like Facebook, just because you find use in it, doesn't mean it's a thing that can be owned. Not every end of action is an ownable thing, right? I mean, action is aimed at a certain pursuit of an end in general. But not all these ends are ownable things. Is it then OK to transfer, you know, someone? Hold on, hold on, hold on. The question is not whether something's OK or not. That's not the libertarian question whether something's OK or not. Well, is it fraud to take someone's Bitcoin private key and transfer their Bitcoins to your wallet? It depends. No. Well, who would be defrauded by that action? The owner of the Bitcoin. How did you obtain the property? Look, I'm not an advocate of intellectual property here, generally, Stephen. But I would say that there are things that there is such a thing as value in this world that it's not like a chunk of matter in your hand. I don't deny that there is value, but that's not a subject of property rights. So can I redirect this? May I redirect this real quick, please? OK. The question, I believe, is this, that there's a Facebook platform that is using CPU cycles and RAM and computer hardware. That is property. It is scarce resources. They have sub-licensed the use of those in some agreement with Christopher. There is a group that has, through the use of lies, attempted to gain control over Christopher's use of those resources such that they are blocked and not being used by him. Now, they are gaining ownership of those by creating what they want the use to be, which is nothing. So they are. I understand the argument. Right. The problem with the argument is this is why I brought up the libel case. It's exactly the case with libel and reputation rights. This is basically and implicitly an intellectual property argument. In the case of reputation rights, what you're saying is if I tell a lie about someone else and I make other people not deal with that person, then I've hurt them. I've harmed them economically. But all I'm doing is persuading the other people to change their minds. Even if I'm telling a lie, they have the right not to deal with someone else. In this case, and this is why reputation rights cannot be sustained in libertarian theory. In this case, Facebook, you don't really have a contractual right to use Facebook's property. It is a license in the technical sense that license is simply permission, just like if I invite someone to my house for a party and I can eject them at will. Or if I hire someone to work at my physical factory, I give them license to use my equipment in my factory as long as I don't fire them. But I can fire them at will. So the license is totally temporary. In Facebook's case, I'm pretty sure Facebook is not giving you a contractual right to use their services for any longer than they decide not to let you use it. In other words, they can boot any of us off at any time, so could Gmail or whatever. Now if they use that power arbitrarily, they're going to lose customers because people aren't going to trust them and they're going to go to someone else who has a better reputation or charges for the service and gives you a lease, some kind of long-term property right in their resources. So I think that all that's going on here is someone is violating their terms of service with Facebook, arguably, by committing deception or abusing the rules. And they are persuading Facebook to use their rights to kick someone else's Facebook page off. Now the question to me is, whose rights are violated by the deception? Are Facebook's rights violated? Maybe, but their remedy is very easy. They can simply kick off the person who they don't like, right, who's lying to them. Or are the rights of the person whose page was taken down violated? I don't think so, because Facebook has the right to take their page down whenever they want. And I guarantee in terms of service, specifies that if you set up a Facebook page, Facebook maintains the right, reserves the right to remove your page at any time for any reason whatsoever. So if they do that, even if the reason they take it down is because they're relying upon the fabrications of a malicious third party, they have the right to do that, which means that the person whose page is taken down did not have any property rights violated. So again, I'm not sure who the plaintiff would be in a lawsuit. And the only one I can think of would be Facebook, but their remedy is very simple. They can simply remove the person whose actions they don't like. So no, I don't think it's fraudulent in the technical sense of fraud. No, this is a great discussion, guys. Great answer. No, this is a great discussion here. Who else wants to go next? Anybody else want to add to this? I thought it was interesting that it sounded to me like you said that there was no property right in Bitcoin. Could you elaborate on that, Stephen? And my deal in this is tentative, because I'm still trying to understand Bitcoin, to be honest. But I don't think there's a property right in Bitcoin because it's not a scarce resource at all. And in fact, even the terms of service don't prohibit. See, the example you gave earlier about stealing someone's Bitcoin or something like that, to my mind, the way the system is set up, the only way you're going to get someone's private key is you can't guess it. So really, as a practical matter, the only way you would ever obtain their key is if they are stupid and they gave it to you at a bar or they were drunk or they allowed you access to their private system, or you trespassed against their property, like broke into their home, got into their computer and got their password. Now, that's an act of trespass, which should be prohibited, and the effects of that can be taken into account in computing the damages owed for the act of trespass. But the Bitcoin system, as I understand it, which is pseudonymous, right, doesn't require any user to even sign on to any kind of terms of service whatsoever. So my understanding from people that know more about Bitcoin than I do is that Bitcoin's rules do not prohibit you from taking someone's Bitcoins from them if you happen to find the key somehow. They don't prohibit that at all. So it's not even technically a violation of any kind of terms of service you could point to. So it's not a contract, right? It's not a property right. It's simply a reliable scheme that people can use for practical purposes. In a sense, it functions as an analog of property rights, and in some ways it's better than property rights. But I don't think technically the Bitcoin system can be said to create items or objects that can be considered ownable things. In fact, the word Bitcoin is just a metaphor. There's no such thing as a Bitcoin. It's just ledger entries in a private scheme that some people decide to participate in. And would you call a pointer an ownable thing? Would you call a ledger entry a property right? It makes no sense. Okay, one quick pointer to correct you on. Bitcoins are essentially, they are a scarce resource. Even though they are digital entries, there are only a maximum number of Bitcoins that can exist. And so, within the system. Right, and in essence they function the same way that. Yeah, but tell me if I'm wrong. You could copy the entire, I could make a copy of the entire blockchain right now. Yeah. Right, and you and I and everyone in this hangout could start having our separate Bitcoin little trading system using an exact duplicate of the existing blockchain. They call those alternate cryptocurrencies, right? Exactly. So there's nothing that's a scarce resource. So every time someone says it's a scarce resource, they always qualify it with this. They always say, well a Bitcoin is a scarce resource within the Bitcoin network. Well, that's not how real scarce resources work. They're not scarce resources within a system. They are scarce resources in the universe, in reality, right? Right, well there's only a certain amount of, there's only a certain amount of pointers that can be accessed within the Bitcoin system, right? So yes, there's only a certain amount. Right, there's only a certain amount of three-dimensional markers in the earth system. However, if you went to the Europa system and create an identical copy of everything that's in a three-dimensional space on earth, sure, you could have those duplications. It still does not mean that they are scarce. It's just because you have a copy over there that doesn't mean that you're... Let's say that 10 people are playing Monopoly at my home, okay, then we have this Monopoly game. There's only a defined number of Monopoly fake currency units within that system, right? But they're not really money. It's just a scheme or a game that we're all playing. I just don't see, I mean, first of all, Bitcoin is not a thing that there's not a Bitcoin, right? There are entries in a ledger, right? There's a defined number of units. In fact, they're not even coins. It's just because the word coin is attached to it doesn't mean they're really currency units, right? It could be used for anything. Why don't we call them bit ledgers? You know what I mean? We gotta be careful not to be attached to the physicalist meanings of overly metaphorical problems. You can call it whatever you want. The point is though that they are scarce in that there's only one valid entry that can be used per quote, Bitcoin or bit ledger value. And those values are in existence in that particular world. And if you wanted to go to a different world and have a different unique value there, you could, but it's still not a Bitcoin. It's something else. Well, I don't know what a Bitcoin is really. I mean, in a metaphysical sense, I'm so not sure. I mean, I don't disagree with anything you're saying technically. I just think the interpretation, this is a construct on top of a reality that already exists. This is just the way humans interact with each other. And we already have property rules that define who owns the physical scarce resources in the world. That's already done. And how we wanna manipulate these things and arrange our affairs with each other is fine. That's one thing. And if we wanna have a contract with each other, we can do that. But there is no contract with Bitcoin as far as I'm aware. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but no one clicks on a, I accept these terms of service when they use Bitcoin. Well, no, it's a decentralized system. It's basically a standard of conduct, if you will, more than a contract. But I mean, we generally tend to acknowledge. I mean, if the bank decided to transfer all your money into another bank account tomorrow, okay, these are just digits in a computer, but no, but there's a contract with the bank. There's a contract with the bank. And plus that system is heavily distorted by the way the state has manipulated it. In any private real banking system, if you deposit your gold with a bank, you're gonna have a contract specifying who owns the gold. I mean, it's one way or the other, right? The gold is an ownable thing. There's no dispute about that. So I just don't see, like I said, my views on this are tentative. I could be wrong. One problem may be the word scarcity, okay? The word scarcity is used by Austrians, basically is a synonym for the economic concept of rivallessness, right? Right. And I don't think you could argue that the so-called bitcoins, which is, to my mind, the word bitcoin is a word that correlates with a concept. And the concept is just a convenient way that we categorize and understand the way the system works, right? It's easily called in pointers. If you call them pointers, I don't think people are gonna talk about owning pointers because it just doesn't fit into that metaphorical framework that we're used to. And I don't think you need property rights for bitcoins. I mean, the question is, whose property rights were violated by what action? So there's only two ways I can think of it. You can say, quote unquote, steal someone's bitcoins. Number one, you give me your password by negligence or by stupidity or by trust, okay? In which case, there's some kind of implicit contract between us that I've reached, or it's your negligence. Or I broke into your home or your computer and I stole the password, okay? So if I do that, then I've committed trespass then against the physical resource that you own. So regular property rights are totally sufficient to prevent widespread theft, so-called of bitcoins, I think. I mean, this is my take on it. I could be wrong about this, but I haven't heard a good argument so far that bitcoins are ownable things. Well, only one person can own a bitcoin at a time. Let's call it a Satoshi. We'll just use a Satoshi. Yeah, but they don't own it. That's question-begging. I would deny it. They have ownership in that. They have control and use of. Now, let's just say another example of a theft that you would agree is theft. That would be comparable. Let's say that we have a worldwide titling service that's done through the computer system. Somebody hacks into the computer system and changes the owner listing for a section of land so that it says their name instead of the other person's name. Well, that's what's happening in the case of a bitcoin being misappropriated to someone else through fraud. Yeah, but if there's actual fraud, then that's already prohibited. We have to define fraud, but the problem is, for example, I think it's a little question-begging because we both agree that land, let's say, is ownable. But all they did was change a data value in a ledger and now they have ownership of the land. Well, but they don't have ownership of the land. According to all understandings, they do. Well, what does that mean? The title is what gives you the claim of ownership of that land. Well, it depends on what people have agreed to. If I agree to put my land into some kind of trust or some kind of system, which I agree that whatever the rules of the system are, however it shakes out, I agree to abide by that. So I'm taking the risk that someone could manipulate the system or whatever and get ownership of my property. Then I've contractually agreed to that, but most people would not agree to that. But the point is, most people agree that land, so let me give a more real-world example. If I guess your password, okay, let's say you're careless with your passwords, okay, let's say you have a Bank of America account and I just guess your password. And I walk into a Bank of America store tomorrow, I pretend like I'm you, no, and I give them your password and I'm able to access your safety deposit box and take out your mother's favorite necklace or whatever that's in there, okay? Now, you actually own that scarce resource. The fact that I'm able to deceive the custodian into giving me access to it doesn't mean that I now own it. It just means I've basically stolen it, okay? And I've done it, basically, it's just an act of theft because I don't have your consent to use the necklace. You still own the necklace. And I probably have trespassed against the property Bank of America because I've lied to them in contravention of their implicit, if not explicit policies when I enter the door. I have to agree to certain representations of warranties when I walk into their property. That's implicit. That's a condition of my using their property. They're saying you can only use our property if you're not lying to us, if you're telling the truth, blah, blah, blah. That's how I got access to it. So that kind of case, we already agree there's a scarce resource that is owned. In the case of Bitcoin, I don't see what it is that I am taking that is already agreed upon as owned. It's like the argument is trying to be reverse engineered. It's like you're trying to make it look like the other case and say that because it looks like it in structure, the thing that's being taken must be ownable too. And I just am not persuaded by that. So you made the example as if you had deceived Bank of America to go into Bank of America and take the necklace out of the safety deposit box. So that constitutes fraud, you're taking property. If you go into Bank of America, you deceive Bank of America, you go in there and you destroy the necklace and you walk out of there, what is that? I think that would be conversion or a type of theft. Yeah, you're using someone's property without their consent. And if you use it for five minutes and you put it back, that's one type of damage. If you use it for five minutes and destroy it, that's a different type of damage. So they're both types of trespass or aggression, but the damages are different. Just like if you kidnap someone and rape them, it's different than if you kidnap them and let them go five minutes later. I mean, once you commit an act of trespass, then the question becomes one of the extent of the damage you commit doing the action that you don't have the right to perform. This is just- So fraud then is not necessarily like theft. I mean, fraud can be vandalism then. Fraud is a type of theft. I don't know what you mean, it's not like theft. Well, I'm saying you're basically saying that to, if I take something and I obtain value from it, if I take- No, I never said anything about value. Can we define value then because I'm confused. We don't need to. I did say that the amount of damages that you do to the victim can play a role in how you measure the amount of restitution that's owed. But it's not because you have property rights and value. And I notice you keep going back to this, which is what everyone keeps doing, because there's this conceptual confusion about the basis of property rights. And this is why I brought up the defamation and the IP thing earlier, because it always comes back to this. And you gotta stay away from that, because there are no property rights and value. And just because there are more damages owed for a serious act of aggression than a lesser act of aggression, does not mean that there are property rights and value. It simply doesn't. It means that you did a worse harm to someone through an illegitimate act that you had no right to commit. But it doesn't mean that you have a property right and value. What so ever? We're just gonna disagree on that one. Okay, well, this is why your view leads to IP, which is exactly what I said earlier, which I knew it would come to. Yeah, it doesn't lead to IP. Again, I've said before, I mean, people have said terrible things about me and I don't go around demanding restitution for it, but at the same time- What you personally have been in your life has nothing to do with the application of the policy. To fraudulently deprive me of access to a thing of value is a problem. That's, you know- Well, I think you're using thing of value to refer to an economic good, which is okay. It's slightly imprecise, but that's fine. But that doesn't mean there are property rights and value. The essential problem with an act of trespass is the unconsented to use of the owned scarce resource of another person, period. That is basically all that libertarianism is opposed to. That's it. I mean, we are 100% for the property rights of an owner legitimately acquired in a scarce resource, which means the physical integrity in the borders of some kind of material thing in the world. And yes, those things have value to their owners. So what? That is not, that doesn't mean that there's a property right in the value. All acts of trespass, all rights violations are always necessarily unconsented to invasions of the borders of, manipulations of the integrity of things without the consent of the owner. That's all they ever can be. So I wanna ask you a real quick question. Just kind of, I don't know, an odd thing. Let's say that we've got a modern virtual reality, matrix-like or some sort of advanced, what is it, third world or, there was a video game that where you could live an alternate life or life two or something, I don't remember what it was. Second, second life. Second life, yeah, second life. Let's say you've got a second life thing. And it's set up as a open source kind of thing. So there's really no, there's no contract. I mean, you basically, you go on to it and you set up your stuff. And the way it's set up is that there's exclusive, only one time use of this virtual matter that exists in this virtual world. So somebody goes in there and they're a cracker and they're able to break into the system and what they do is they crack into it and they assign exclusive ownership of a mansion to someone else or to themselves. And it was a mansion that you worked your ass off in this virtual world to obtain. And it's now, they can walk into it but you can't go into it. Is this now, even though it's virtual, is it now actually ownable property? I mean, my answer is probably clearer by now. I would say no, except you could imagine a case where there's a contract with the service provider. Let's say all these people are customers of second life or whatever. So you're using their property when you're part of this system. And I guess you could have a totally decentralized system that no one owns. You're just kind of floating out there. But if that doesn't work as well as one where there's an owner of like a Facebook or a Google or a second life, then people are gonna gravitate towards the ones where there's an owner who has the ownership rights over the servers, et cetera. And everyone is using that with the permission of the owner and the owner should have certain rules. And unless they have good rules in place, either practical or legal, right? To prevent this from happening, they're gonna lose customers. No one's gonna wanna use it. They're not gonna want to invest their time in their activities unless they're confident that they can maintain what they've created, et cetera. I mean, I think my son is into Minecraft and they have this problem called Reefers. They have something similar. But I think this just operates according to the rules of the owner of the network. It's like if you go to Disney World. So let me give you an analogy. Let's say you go to Disney World and there's a practice of getting in lines or cues to stand in line for things. There's sort of these informal rules for when you can have someone, or at a mall waiting in line for the Apple Store to open for a new iPhone announcement. There's sort of these informal rules for places in line, right? Like someone's third in line and they might sleep there overnight and everyone assumes they have a pseudo or quasi-property right in that place in line. But they don't really have an actual property right in the place in line. What people are doing is they're using rules that are similar to the rules we use for allocating property rights and scarce resources for these semi-scarce aspects of a private situation. And this is all done under the approval of the owner of the mall or Disney or whatever, right? They're allowing you to do that. Now if they had a big sign that posted and they said no queuing is allowed or queuing is allowed but only by race or lineage or whatever, instead of by first come, first serve, then that would be the rule instead. But they're implicitly or tacitly permitting this behavior to happen, right? And if someone got out of line, metaphorically speaking, someone didn't respect the rules of the queuing process and was too rowdy, maybe security guards would get called and they would be booted from the whole facility. So you have these processes by which people use property rights like features because they work in reality but there's not really a property right in a line on someone else's private property. It's just the using of the contractual system that the owner has implicitly allowed to take place. And I think something similar to that is how you would classify what goes on within a private scheme that people join. It's either decentralized or on someone else's ownership like Second Life or whatever. If you enter a Dungeons and Dragons tournament at the local comic book shop, then you're really on their property, right? And all the guys are playing D&D but they can be kicked out at any moment. But if you start to have an owner act capriciously or not kick out the guys that are being the jerks, then they're gonna lose business and people aren't gonna go there. So I don't really think these are property rights. I think they are the result of property rights. They're relations that result from the enforcement of property rights in scarce resources. No good stuff, guys. We got it in the show now. I gotta do some closing statements but everyone, I think you guys, Kinsella and Chris Cantwell, both of you guys for joining us tonight. It was obviously a very good discussion. I think we all learned something and the viewers can take something away from this video. So I do appreciate it, guys. Thank you for having me and thank you, Stefan. I will think about it and write on it. And I would look forward to hearing your critique of what I wrote on it later on. Sounds good. Awesome, guys. All right, well, good to have you guys on the show. I also wanna thank the panelists for being on the show as well. Kyron, Dana, Kruger, thank you, guys. Pleasure. All right. All right, good stuff. So as you guys know, we have the Free Bumper Sticker giveaway. The winners this week were Pessoa de Gama, Pippi Glockencake, and username FTWBK. Man, those are some random usernames there but you guys are the winners so contact us over on Statism of Slavery where we now have 182,000 subscribers and growing every day. And those are sponsored by nonaggression-apparel.com so make sure you guys check out that online store. Hook them up so they help us with our operations. And you can always find these shows over at voluntaryvirtues.com. Next, on the 18th, not next week, but the week after that I have Robert Murphy on the show and I was just invited to the Foundation for Economic Education. They're gonna pay for me to go for a full seminar, pay for a hotel and everything so I'm really excited about that. And I will be keeping you guys updated on what's going on there. I'm obviously going to give them a lot of highlight and attention. Who would have thought, right? For a pat on the back, I return the favor. But anyway, I'm really excited about that so I will keep you updated as we move forward. And as always, you can find our show over on libertymovementradio.com. It's always syndicated over there every Tuesday night, 8 to 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. This is Mike from Voluntary Virtues saying thank you. Thank you guys so much for your spread and freedom. I'll talk to you guys soon. Have a great night. Bye bye.