 Yeah, I'm very honored and pleased to welcome on Freyjaid Radio the legal expert and libertarian Stefan Kenzela. Stefan, you're very welcome to our show. Thank you. I'm very glad to be here. Okay. One of the first things I would like to ask you is that could you please introduce yourself? For those people, it may sound strange that still don't know you. Sure. Yes. I'm an attorney in Houston, Texas, United States. I'm a longtime libertarian writer and advocate and I've written a lot on the fields of intellectual property and libertarian rights theory, HAPPA, Rothbard and free markets, private property rights, but I'm also a practicing attorney here in Texas. And you've written a book, I believe? Yeah, I've written several books, some on legal theory and some on legal topics, which is my specialty, International Law and Intellectual Property Law, but also in the sort of political theory world, I've written some other books and edited books. And one of them is Against Intellectual Property and you can actually find the book online and more information about that at my website, which is stefankenzela.com, S-T-E-P-H-A-N which is an Irish originated name, which means dirty head actually, which I don't have it present. Well, we will add your website address on the Facebook page and in the broadcast information. Okay. Yeah. Sure. And I would like to recommend this website to any libertarian who is seriously in trying to ground why property rights are valid and things like that. I would like to start first with you asked to ask you, could you explain the so-called Lockean Provisio? What is it and what are the historical roots of that term? Yeah. So the Lockean idea, I mean, of course, John Locke was a theorist in the 1600s and he is one of the primary founders of thought that a lot of pro-property rights, pro-freedom, pro-liberal, pro-western people nowadays draw back on even if they don't realize it. And John Locke basically had a simple idea, which a lot of people now think is obvious, but primarily that's because of his influence. And his idea was that if you were the first person to use something in the world, some scarce resource, then you have a better claim to it than other people. You make sure labor with it. Now, he was arguing against sort of an earlier tradition, which was more monarchistic, more feudalistic in some ways. So one thing he said was that you have the right to your body and your person, and therefore you have the right to what you do with it, what you call labor, and therefore you own your labor, and therefore you own what you mix your labor with. So what he said was, there's one exception to this, and that is that if you take something from the unowned state of nature, like a piece of land or whatever, that you have the right to it unless you don't leave enough for other people to homestead as well. So that was the Locke and Proviso, so he said that you can take something that's unowned unless there's not much of it left. If there's not much of it left, then you do harm people by taking a piece of it. If there's tons of it around, or lots of it around, then you don't harm other people by taking it. Now, I actually disagree with Locke on his Proviso, but that was the Proviso. He had one exception in his theory, so he said basically there's unowned things lying around. No one can complain if you are the first person to take it and now you're the owner of that thing. But if there's only a little bit of it left, you could see why people would start complaining that you're the guy taking it. So that was his Proviso. As far as I can see, this clashes, for one instance, with the idea that as libertarians we would like to see a state where everything is privatized, like Walter Blocks says, if it moves, privatize it, and if it doesn't move, privatize it also. Well, I do agree with that, but I think a different way to look at it is this. Is that everything in the world that is potentially something that you could have a clash over or a conflict over, every legal system is going to have some rule that says who owns it, because otherwise you're just going to have struggle over it and there's no law. So the question is, who should own it? So the question is, what should the legal system say, who should be the owner of a given resource? So the question is really not who should be the private owner or not. The question is, who should be the owner? Now when you say privatize, you're sort of implying that there should be no government. But I think the answer is simply who should be the owner of a given resource and the answer is found in Locke. That is, the first person who finds it has a better claim than other people who come later, or if you contractually transfer it to someone, you sell it, or you donate it, or you give it, or you leave it by will, by a testament to someone else, then they are the owner now of this thing. So by these very simple rules, contract and first ownership, you could always identify the proper owner of a given resource. So the question is not private versus public, it's who is the proper owner of a given resource. Exactly. Yeah, of course. So when we look a little bit deeper into his appropriation theory of the Lockeian Provisio, we see that he uses mixing your labor and as far as I have understood your writings, you seem to have a problem with his labor theory. Am I correct? Yes. I mean, I think he was actually correct in his conclusion, but I think his argument contained an unnecessary step. What Locke said was that we all agree that we own ourselves. Now the word self is sort of vague and ambiguous. Yes. To my mind, if you want to make it clear, you mean your body, because your body is the only thing someone can really take from you by force. I mean, they can't take my spirit. They can't take my memories. They can't take my soul. They can't take my feelings without really doing something to my body. So the thing we're really concerned about is the body. In fact, all the crimes that everyday humans would all agree are legitimate crimes and should be prohibited, like rape and theft and robbery and murder and kidnapping and slavery. They're all basically crimes, physical crimes against the borders of people's actual physical bodies. So that's the primary thing we need to be concerned about. So Locke basically said you own yourself or your body and therefore you own what you do with it, which is called labor. And if you own the labor, then you own what you mix it with. I don't disagree with his conclusion, which was that if you mix your labor with an unowned resource, like a piece of land or a tree, then you have a better claim than other people. I think he's correct about that. But his reasoning is that the reason you have a better claim is because you have an ownership claim to the labor. I just think this is a category mistake because labor is an action. It's what you do with your body. So we own our bodies. That means we have the right to do with them what we want to do, but it doesn't mean that we metaphorically have the right to own the things, so to speak, emanating from our bodies, which is labor. It's okay to think of it in this way, but we have to be careful because metaphors can lead us astray. Yeah, that would be my next question. What is exactly the danger of this view that you can own your labor? So the danger is, well, number one, it led to the view which was adopted by others like Adam Smith and then Karl Marx, you know, the labor theory of value exactly property, which led to communism and the devastation of hundreds, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of human lives. So it actually literally led to death and devastation for uncountable human beings in history in the 20th century because of the mistaken view of the labor theory of value, which, by the way, is not the same thing, but it's related. So the labor theory of value says that the value of an object is some kind of intrinsic inherent quality of the thing and where does it come from? It comes from the amount of labor you put into it. Now, if you have this view of value, which is incorrect according to the Austrian school, Mises and Hayek and Karl Minger, if you have this view of labor, then you have to believe that when you have an employee, I'm sorry, employer who employs people like a capitalist, then if they make a profit, the profit almost necessarily comes from the surplus value of labor that the worker put into the project that he's not being compensated for. So you have to view basically voluntary free market interactions as a type of theft, and then you have to condemn them. And then you have to, the only way to fight that would be to have a type of statism that comes in and commands and controls the economy and prevents voluntary human relations. Or as Robert Nozick, a famous American libertarian theorist, said consensual acts among, or capitalist acts among consenting adults. Exactly. And once you prohibit that, then you open the door for fascism and totalitarianism. So that's one danger of the libertarian value. Yeah, it led to the exploitation theory of Marx, which justifies all kinds of interventions into the economy and personal lives of people. Exactly. And in political philosophy, I believe the main problem of Locke's misstep, which by the way David Hume saw through, David Hume saw that this was an unnecessary and fallacious step in Locke's theory. Locke's theory is correct, but without that step. And that step potentially leads to the idea that if you own your labor, then you own whatever proceeds from it. Well, then there's no restriction on this. This could be applied to things that are intangible as well as tangible. Exactly. If your labor leads to something that's valuable, like a song or an opera or a painting or a movie, something that's intangible, while it has value, your labor created it. And if you own the result of your labor, you should own this too. So the problem is that this mistaken step in the Lockeian argument, which was a heroic effort to improve the situation that had gone before him, but it leads to the idea of intellectual property primarily patent and copyright. The idea that we have the property right in our reputations, in songs and artistic works, and in inventions because you created it with your labor and you own the proceeds of that. So it sort of leads to a way that people can argue to validate the modern concept of patent and copyright and other forms of intellectual property. Yep, exactly. I find it very ironic that objectivists who are very anti-Marxists used that mistake, the labor theory of value, to justify their defense of IP. It is ironic. Yeah, you're right, especially because Rand was such a huge opponent of Marx, of course. Yes. But Rand bought into the same mistaken idea that Locke did, which Marx and Adam Smith and others bought into as well, which is this labor conception. And remember, I don't want to criticize these guys for where they were at the time. I mean, John Locke was an amazing... Well, he was a racist from what recent scholarship shows. But if you look at his ideas, his ideas were a huge advance in the liberal tradition. In their historical context, their deeds... Absolutely. I'm not criticizing him, but that doesn't mean his ideas were 100% correct. Exactly. And I think what happened was... So John Locke inspired the sort of liberal, rationalist revolution, which inspired the American Revolution, which gave rise to basically the libertarian tradition in the world today. Yep. And this is one reason why we can trace a lot of these ideas back to the founders. America, even though they were also hypocritical, white, racist, properitarian politicians, to a large extent. But the ideas that intertwined in between all of their writings and what was going on then can be traced back to Locke and other English and Continental writers. Exactly. You can see that in the Martin Luther King's speech. I have a dream where he cites the Declaration of Independence. Absolutely. And he then univeralizes it. Yeah, yeah, it's not perfectly consistent. So you have Ayn Rand escaping from Marxist-dominated Russia coming to the U.S. and she sees how great the U.S. is compared to what she escaped from. And she sees our Constitution and our founding documents and she thinks this is great compared to what she's used to. And she's right. She is. So she assumed, I think initially, that the Constitution and the United States founding period was this kind of amazing breakthrough in human civilization and history, sort of the culmination of the Greek and the Western ideals, and that we had finally gotten it almost right. And she could fix it, but it was almost right, which, by the way, so in the United States Constitution, it's very non-libertarian or very not perfect libertarian. It authorizes slavery. It permits taxation. It permits conscription. It permits war. It permits lots of things that we would not agree with. And in the Fifth Amendment, it seems to authorize eminent domain, which is the government taking private property if you pay a price. And I mean, I've heard, I don't know if this is published yet, but there are letters from Rothbard and others showing that when Ein Rand came to the country early on, she initially was actually in favor of eminent domain. She was. She was. And after talks with Isabel Patterson and others, she rejected the view. But in the beginning, she was. She changed to her credit. She changed her mind. But the point is that you can see that she was heavily influenced by this idea that we have an experiment that almost worked. The the early American experiment. Yeah. And she probably brushed aside, like a lot of us do, you know, the fact that we had slavery and that we were women weren't treated properly and that we were more primitive, etc. But she had an ideal in mind and she tried to build on that and improve on it, which is admirable, I think. But in the field of intellectual property, I think this is her fatal mistake and also the field of government. I think Ein Rand's two key mistakes were her foundation of rights, which was too intertwined with the idea of intellectual property under the influence of Locke. I agree. And also the idea that anarchists or or unlibertarian are not consistent with her philosophy because. And she thinks they're for chaos or that it can't work. Or it's really not clear exactly what her criticism is. You know, I studied a lot of libertarians. I've read several biographies of Rand, of Mises, of Hayek, of Rothbard. And people are always disappointed in their heroes, but there is no perfect libertarian. People are partly the product of their time and they they are subject to the limits of the time in which they have grown up, that this goes for Mises as well as Rand. Mises used to be for conscription and other things. When he came to New York in the early forties, he was the most moderate libertarian within the libertarian circles to his surprise, to his other surprise. So and people are constricted by the view in which they grow up and therefore breakthroughs like like you've made them in IP and patents are very, very valuable. Well, right. And I don't mean to be critical of Ryan Rand. She was a she's a towering figure and so was Mises, of course. Yes. What what happens on occasion? I mean, in in my case, I was really a dedicated adherent of Austrianism and freedom and liberty. But I was also a lawyer and I was starting to become a patent attorney and IP attorney, an intellectual property attorney. So my attention turned more and more to this topic because I was thinking is this stuff that I'm practicing in my practice really justified and I'm Rand's justification in her. I think it's in capitalism, the unknown ideal. I can't remember. She has an essay about the very short essay. True. But it had always bugged me. I think it bugs a lot of people because it's not complete. She didn't pretend it was complete. But she, you know, I'm Rand is a very principal thinker, for example, in the antitrust case, you know, for what you call in Europe, competition law, yeah, laws that prohibit monopolies or private companies from becoming too big or conspiring together to set prices, et cetera. You had the Sherman. Yeah, the Sherman Antitrust Act and Clayton Act over here. And I don't know what the names are in Europe, but there are similar laws around the world. I ran heroically in her her her main followers that she allowed to be printed in her books. She opposed antitrust law not on empirical grounds like Milton Friedman would, but on principled grounds like you have the right, you know, two businessmen have the right to meet together and set prices if they want to. Yep. And honestly, what's the difference between two independent companies or two companies that get bought by a bigger company and they're banded together under the same corporate structure, which is permissible legally. I mean, it makes no difference. You know, it makes no sense to distinguish between them. But the point is her defense of antitrust was primarily moral that you have the right to try to set prices. And then she would say, well, you know, empirically we don't think this is going to work. Cartels won't work and there's economic forces that will limit the bad effects of this, et cetera. In patent law, uncharacteristically, and copyright in patents, in trying to defend the existing law, she adopted utilitarian ad hoc arguments. Exactly. She was stuck trying to defend a 17 year patent term and a 50 year after the life of the author copyright term. Now, these are totally arbitrary, as is obvious to anyone. And there's no way you can defend that on natural rights type grounds. So, Ayn Rand was stuck trying to come up with a way to defend this American type system of IP law because it was part of the founding. And it sort of, it complimented her ideas of the importance of the intellect in the mind. And I think that's one thing we have to fight. We have to make clear that just because we're opposed to state-granted intellectual property law does not mean that we're not capitalist. Doesn't mean we're not pro-property rights. It doesn't mean we're against creativity in the intellect. I think it's actually the opposite way around. We have to at least make it clear, even if you disagree with us, that the reason we oppose these state grants of monopoly privilege is because we are in favor of creativity. We're in favor of freedom. We're in favor of a vigorous free market. We're in favor of individual property rights. You might disagree with us that that's the implication, but that's our basis. It's not because of communism or collectivism or hatred of profit or this kind of stuff. There's nothing to do with it. Let me ask you, for our listeners who are not up to date about IPs and patents, could you very basically explain the difference between intellectual property and patents? Yeah, well, intellectual property is a term that's used and in Europe it's called industrial property. It's not exactly the same, but it's similar. So it's sort of a term that refers to several types of legal laws or legal regimes that are related to each other. Patent is one, copyright's another, trademark is another. And there are a few others, but I won't bore you with details. What they have in common according to the people that try to group them together is that they all relate to products of the intellect or products of the mind that are intangible and that have some value in commerce, okay? So a trademark is the name of your company or your product like Coca-Cola or Mercedes or Boeing, whatever. And a copyright is a legal right to the way you express something that's creative and original, like a painting or a novel or a movie or even software in some cases or a book. And patent has to do with an innovative and practically useful idea like the way you design a machine or the way you have a chemical or some kind of technical process that produces something useful. So you basically have these three fundamental types of intellectual property, which they're called. So a patent would be a subset of the field of intellectual or industrial property. Okay, okay. And could you explain the utilitarian defense of intellectual property and also tell us what's wrong with it? Well, so if you ask someone, why do we have this? So there's two different ways of looking at it. Why in terms of historical origin, why did they arise? Why do we have these laws? And the other question is why do we need them? Which is the defense of these laws. And historically the origin is that the governments, the monarchies in Europe in the 15, 1600s, 1700s were granting these monopolies. The king would grant a monopoly to a court favorite or some guy in a town that was a popular guy or someone who was powerful. He would say, you're the only guy who can sell soap or can sell sheepskin or whatever. They just gave them a monopoly, it's called a patent. So the practice of patents arose in the form of just protectionism or mercantilism. And copyrights arose when the printing press started threatening them, the monopoly on ideas that the church and the state held sort of in combination. So they would have these guilds that would authorize which books could be printed, et cetera. And then finally this resulted in legislation which devolved to the authors but then was transferred right back to the publishers because of the practicalities of the industry. And so in other words, the authors got the copyright but then the publishing houses got the monopoly right back again because to have a book published you had to go back to the publishers. So that's the practical origin of the things. The argument nowadays for it and if we take as a classic case the United States Constitution which was ratified in 1789 about 220 something years ago the clause in the Constitution says that to promote the progress of science and the useful arts which Congress shall have the power to grant to authors and inventors for limited times the restricted or the privileged use to their creative writings or works. So the theory there and then right after that the copyright act and the patent act were enacted and ever since then the Western world has modeled what the US did more or less. So they're pretty much all the same. So the idea is that if you don't have a patent law which gives you a monopoly on your invention then you would keep secret for as long as you could your idea, you would keep it as what's called a trade secret which is a fourth type of intellectual property. And the people that are behind this say that that's a bad thing, that we want information to spread. So what we will say is we'll say listen if you disclose to the public exactly how you made your invention then we're gonna give you a 17 year monopoly on it. So you can make profits for 17 years monopoly profits but in exchange you have to disclose to the world how you did it. So that's the primary idea behind patents although most people would argue that it's something else is to incentivize invention in the first place but that's not what's in patent laws. They actually require you to disclose what you're doing in exchange for getting a monopoly. So that's the literal bargain. And in copyright it's similar but the idea is that to incentivize people to create artistic works like songs or paintings or novels, we have to let them be the only one who could sell their work for some limited time which nowadays is the life of the author plus 70 years. So it's over a hundred years in most cases, literally over a century. And it used to be by the way 14, for both these used to be 14 years, sometimes extendable for another seven or 14 years. And the 14 year term came about totally by happenstance because the idea was that if you're like a guy who gets a monopoly from the king and you have an apprentice, then apprentice terms last for seven years, right? So you need to have time to train two apprentices to do what you're doing and to keep them from competing with you. So two apprentice terms is 14 years. So this is how these terms came about. It was just totally protectionism, totally utilitarian, totally unprincipled. And as of today with our modern empirical and econometric techniques, totally unsubstantiated by any data whatsoever. The data we have nowadays, all the economic studies we have indicate that there is no way whatsoever to substantiate the claim that we need these laws to have innovation, creativity, artistic works, invention. In fact, the evidence indicates that we would have at least as much, if not more without these laws. Yeah, I would say that as well. When you look at, for instance, the music industry, you see that bands get paid very, very little per album and that they make 80% of the money they make through touring and merchandise. Yes, and whenever you bring up an example like that, the proponent of IP will just switch to another industry. Yes, they will. So they'll say, well, what about perfume? Or what about, what if I want to publish a book that's a non-fiction book? Am I supposed to go read my book to audience? So everything you mentioned, you overcome one of their ad hoc examples and they will come up with another one just to try to show that you can't solve the utopian dreams of a world where everyone gets paid to do whatever they think should be done or what the government thinks should be done. Yes, and that's always the same because when you as a libertarian try to defend the free market, they will say, how about roads? You explain the roads, how about hospitals? You explain the hospitals, how about this? How about that? And you'll be talking for hours and they're still not convinced. And that is because I think that they don't accept or get the moral defense because the moral defense makes X like a limit and within that limit of that moral defense, then you can go search for practical solutions. But first you have to accept moral limits. This is not allowed. Yeah, no, I agree with that. But I also think that if they were at least sincere, I mean, if you're just an empirical minded person and you want results and you're just, if you really were sincere about the roads question and you got a good answer, a sincere person would stop and think, okay, he actually gave me a good answer. Maybe I'm gonna stop and think about what led me to ask that question in the first place, but instead they just turn to the next question. They have like a list of 115 questions they're gonna ask. I know. And if you answer all 100, 115 questions, they have another, they can go to their friends and get the next set of questions that they will never stop. So I agree with you, but I do think even if you were an empirical minded person, I mean, look, if you were an honest empirical minded person with totally no principles, but just an ad hoc sort of idea that I'll go where the evidence leads me. Well, the evidence in the field of patent and copyright shows that countries that have had no IP have had artistic creation and they've had innovation. Okay, and we know that it's possible and there's no evidence to support it. And we know that it leads to this huge industry that we have now patent trolls, copyright trolls, censorship, $100 million in billion dollar verdicts against companies, the repression of competition, the creation of oligopolies because you have these companies like Apple and Samsung and Microsoft and Google that basically they rise to the four and they can afford to fight each other. And they waste billions of dollars to fight each other. They waste it and they pass the cost on to us. Exactly. And they don't have, less money to use for innovation, but the smaller companies, the innovators, the upstarts, they're on the outside of this wall. They can't compete with these guys because they don't have enough money to withstand a lawsuit. So it really does lead to repressed competition, reduced free markets and reduced consumer welfare. So all the things that the patent advocates pretend to be in favor of, any sober realistic analysis of the situation would lead you to say maybe in a free, maybe in a perfect world that God designs, I would be in favor of an idealistic utopianized sort of patent system, but we don't have anything near that. There's no chance of having that. We would clearly be better off by having no patent system than any patent system we can expect to have in the real world. That is what a practical pragmatic person would conclude if they were honest and serious. So even if you don't have morals and principles, if you're just really honest and sincere, then you would have to oppose the IP system. That's a very good explanation. And could you explain a little the difference between intangible property and real property and how when intangible property is protected by loss is a danger for real property rights? Yeah, and so the word intangible, I mean, I know I'm speaking across languages here, but tangible means touchable, something you can touch with your hands, right? And some people like Hardy Bouillon, who's a French writer who's written some of my publications, he's argued that a better word would be material versus immaterial, and I don't strongly disagree with him on that. You're correct. Which goes back to the idea of scarcity and non-scarcity, which really, honestly, if you wanna talk about the most coherent way to describe this and to explain it, is rivalry versus non-rivalry. It's an economic concept. What it means is if there's a resource out there in the world, something that we need to use to accomplish our ends in life, like bread or fruit or a chair or a bat or a car or a house or an apple or whatever, or land, if there's some resource, then the reason it's a resource, the reason it's used to achieve an end, and the reason we need property rights in it is because only one person can use this thing, right? So if I have an egg, you can't take my egg and make your fried egg with it and let me make mine too. Only one of us can. So this egg only has a limited use. And so if it's going to be used productively and peacefully by people that cooperate with each other and have a society among each other, we have to have some kind of socially recognized rule that says whenever you have a resource that people can conflict over or clash over, we just have to have a rule that says who gets to use it so that we can know who uses it, where the borders are, and we can live in peace with each other. And then if I don't have the right to use that thing, then I can trade with the guy that has the right to use that thing. That's the peaceful, cooperative way to do things. This is why property rights have emerged. This is why property rights are necessary and are an essential aspect of human civilization. So all property rights have to do with things that are rivalrous or scarce resources, right? So then the only question is who should get to use it? This is why we get back to what we talked about in the beginning about Locke. Locke's idea that, well, the person who first started using it has a better claim to this thing than someone who comes later, unless he gives it voluntarily to someone else and then they have a better claim, even against the first guy. So with these very simple rules, with the idea that we recognize that when there's a scarce resource, we need a rule that says who owns the thing, okay? And then the rule is whoever first owns it or who has an earlier claim to it or who has a better contractual claim to it. That's basically it. One exception would be in the case of crimes or torts. So if you do something wrong to someone, so let's say you trespass against me or my property, then you might be said to incur some kind of obligation to repay me to make restitution towards me. And in that case, some of your property now is transferred to the person that you harmed. But other than that case, so in other words, we could say there's a third rule. We can always identify the owner of a resource by asking a combination of questions. Who first owned it or who had the earlier claim to it? Who first used it, that is? Who made a contractual voluntary transfer of it or who committed some kind of act of trespass or crime which also effectively transferred it to the victim of that crime? But other than that, you don't really need anything else to determine who owns a given resource. Now, you asked about the danger of trying to assign rights in intangible things. So the point is if you assign rights in the way I described, that basically exhausts the possibility it answers all the questions of who can own a given resource. If you come up with another rule, it has to undercut one of the earlier rules. So if you say that, yeah, the guy that owns this car is the guy that created it or bought it from a previous owner, right? Unless some other guy came up with a way to tune his engine that this other guy is using too closely. So what you're doing is you're coming up with a third homesteading rule or you're coming up with another property transfer rule that basically takes the property from the owner to some third party. This is the fundamental problem. You cannot give rights in intangible things without taking things that already owned other people. So if you grant someone a copyright or a patent, you're giving them the right to go to a court to use force to tell them you cannot use your property in this way unless you pay me rent or unless you get my permission. And the problem with that is that that assumes that the guy demanding payment is the owner of the thing, but he's not. He's demanding payment from the owners. So the fundamental problem with granting rights in intangibles is the same thing is the problem with granting positive welfare rights. Exactly, I was thinking about that. Yes. Yeah, it's the same thing. It's the same thing because it corrupts the real existing rights, the negative rights in this case. Yeah, well, nothing comes for free, right? So if the government prints more money, they're not creating wealth. They're just diluting the purchasing power of the existing money held by the people. And when the government creates positive rights, every right comes with an obligation. So if you have the right to attend the university for free, what that means is that your neighbors have the obligation to pay for it. So every right comes with a price. And whenever you have them of the positive right or whatever you come up with an IP right, it always has to necessarily take away from existing established rights and scarce resources. That's very clear. IP and patents is not the only thing you have been writing about. One thing you have been writing about are Hans-Hermann Hoppe and argumentations ethics. Could you explain those a little bit? Yes, so Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German legal, political theorist and Austrian economist. When I say Austrian, I mean he is influenced heavily by the Austrian school of economics, which is primarily Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, an American who was Mises student. So Hoppe is a philosopher and Austrian political and economic theorist. And among Hoppe's many contributions to all these fields is his idea which he introduced in the late 80s after he moved to the United States and started studying under Rothbard, became Rothbard's chief sort of student and protege. That was in Las Vegas, wasn't it? I think initially it was not. I think Rothbard was in New York at first and then they both moved soon after to Las Vegas for about a decade. But I think initially Rothbard was in New York. I could be wrong about that. But then in the case, Hoppe was a more Kantian type of philosopher. And from what I've learned, Hoppe basically came up with praxeology, which is Mises' sort of unique twist and the most rigorous interpretation of Austrian economics out there. He came up with a version of praxeology on his own. He was raised as a leftist in Germany. He was a brilliant philosopher, grad student type and he started coming up with these theories on his own. And then he stumbled across Rothbard and Mises and he realized that Mises had basically done this already. If I may interrupt you first. Praxeology is the Austrian term for the study of human action, right? Praxeology is Mises' term for, I think he came up with it. That's his version of Austrian economics. Austrian economics is a field of economics that I think was originated by Karl Manger in the late 1800s and it started in his idea of marginalism and subjectivism, but then others developed it and Mises in a lot of people's view is the most rigorous and most individualist and the most scientific in a sense. And he systematized it and he called his method of analysis praxeology. He came up with the word, I believe on his own based upon Greek roots or Latin roots. Yep, he did. And it means the logic of action or the science or the study or the logic of human action. So it was kind of a Kantian style analysis where he said we can take as a given as an undeniable given certain things about human nature and the facts of the world, which is that humans act and that has certain implications. Human beings are actors. We're not physical particles that are bouncing around like bowling balls or billiards balls. We actually have purposes. We have teleology, right? In the Aristotelian sense. But because we have an action, what that means is as an actor, you view the world at a present moment and you see, you envision what you think is going to come in the future and you are unsatisfied with the direction of what you think is coming. And so you use your understanding of the world now to say what do I have it available at my disposal that I can use to change the course of action, to change the course of the future, to change the course of history basically or the future history. And so you basically utilize some scarce means or some scarce resource to try to interrupt the flow of affairs to achieve some future state of affairs that you predict will happen if you are successful that will make you happier. So that's what human action is in general and there's lots of economic implications you get from that. Now, Hoppe started deriving these ideas on his own but then when he discovered Mises and Rothbard he became quickly an inherent of Mises and Rothbard and an anarcho-capitalist in the radical American sense and quickly dropped his early flirtation with European leftism, et cetera. Although he retained some of his attraction to the Kantian framework, okay? And he came up with an idea because one of his professors when he was getting his habilitation or his PhD was a Jurgen Habermas who was a famous European lefty intellectual German. And Habermas has this idea called communication ethics or discourse ethics. Now Habermas and his associate Carl Otto Appell another German who Hoppe actually prefers in terms of the rigor of his thought they both thought that the there's something about the nature of justification when we have a discussion between two people like you and I are doing now there's something about that that has implications for what you could justify. So you couldn't, to take a crazy example you and I it would be hard to imagine is a sincere discussion between you and me about which one of us gets to own the other because we might as well just try to shoot each other or kill each other. I mean, if we're actually having a real discussion we're sort of taking some things for granted which is I have the right to my body you have the right to your body let's go from there and let's see what we can figure out something like that in a non-rigorous sense. Now Habermas and Appell thought that this had implications for social democracy and democracy in general and they thought that it meant that you had to have the right to basic housing and a living and a job and all these social democratic things. Now Hoppe when he got influenced by Rothbard and Mises thought not so fast. I think your basic insight is sound and potentially profitable but I think if you have the insights of Rothbardian political radicalism and Mazizian social theory then you have to realize that the implications of your communications ideas your discourse ethics is that the only political theory you could ever justify would be a totally other respecting type of ethic that is the peace ethic that is the Lockean libertarian ethic. So that's Hoppe's argument and that's not really the argument that's how it came about. The nutshell is that he believes that the essence of discourse is peace and cooperation and so that basically means that you could never make a coherent peaceful cooperative argument in an actual discourse to argue for something seriously contrary to that like slavery or some kind of a class system or a domination system where one class rules the other. So would you say that it works like an axiom? Well, depends on what you mean by axiom. I mean, in math axiom just means an assumed postulate and the Randian sort of Aristotelian sense an axiom. I was talking about the new Aristotelian framework that in an axiom you can't deny axiom without contradicting yourself. I think it does with one difference. So the axiom in the Randian neo-Randian Aristotelian sense is basically some kind of statement that is self-contradictory to deny, right? Like the law of non-contradiction or the law of identity or the law of causality or even some factual statements like the fact that there is consciousness like you couldn't deny that you're conscious or that you exist as an actual existing observer without contradicting yourself. So some of those get very close to what Hoppe and the realistic form of Continism that he is an inherent of. And according to Hoppe and I've come to agree with him, there are two main strands of Continism. One is the American interpretation which is more idealistic and idealistic not in the sense of having ideals but in the sense of believing that the world of ideas is paramount and that we don't have a direct connection to reality. It's more of a subjectivist or relativist interpretation. And the European interpretation of Conte which is apparently more realistic. And according to Hans Hoppe, he doesn't care which one is correct. I mean if Conte really meant A or B, it doesn't matter but the one that makes sense is the realistic interpretation which is the Misesian and the Hoppean and even the Randian version which Rand would deny. But the point is according to the realistic interpretation or use of the Conte and type of mental framework that Hoppe and Mises use, some of the arguments are very similar to the way Rand herself would demonstrate her axiomatic concepts. So she would demonstrate identity, the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction and the law of causation and other fundamental laws by showing that denying them is self-contradictory. And some of the laws Hoppe talks about are similar except they basically rely upon what's called performative contradiction. So the contradiction is not like necessarily an inherent logical contradiction. Like you could imagine a universe with no humans. In a universe with no humans there would be no human action. But Mises is correct to say that it's undeniable that there is human action because for anyone to deny it, they're acting as a human and they'd be counter-contradict. So that's a performative contradiction. So yes, I would say the Hoppean proof of rights is a cousin to at least of the Randian Aristotelian axiomatic logical proofs. Thank you. One last question I have because we're over an hour now and I don't wanna take up too much of your time but you have contributed to this kind of thought as well and you came up during class I believe with what you call the unstoppable principle and you connected it to the non-aggression principle. Could you explain that a little bit? Well, right. So this is the late 80s when I was in law school and I was infatuated with Hoppe's insights about argumentation ethics. And at the time I was learning in contract theory about the ancient principle called a stop-all which is not only a common law view, there's something similar in the civil law, the continental law, which you guys have. The basic idea is that there's something unjust about permitting someone to take two inconsistent stances in a say a certain legal proceeding. So you can't argue one thing to make gains in a certain part of the proceeding and then later on say the exact opposite. If you did that, you'd be a stopped or prevented from the judge would just say, listen, you already admitted that you're married to this woman. Now you can't say you're not married to her. It's gotta be one way or the other. So in a logical sense, you can see the origins of that or the roots of that idea is that we have to have a coherent argument, to have a serious argument, to try to get to the truth of things. You have to at least be consistent, right? And something struck me about that idea in contract law which was that there's something ultra consistent about the libertarian insistence of the non-aggression principle which is the idea that we libertarians believe that you have the right to do anything you want in the world except commit aggression. Now what does that mean? That means that you can use force only in response to force. So you can see the sort of symmetry there that force is justified only when it's in response to an initiation of force but force in response to aggression is justified because there's a symmetry there. So you can't use force, you may not use force unless it's in response to force. So if someone insults me, maybe I can insult them back but I can't punch them in the nose because they didn't use force. But if they punch me in the nose, I can punch them back. So you see a symmetry there. So it made me think that if you're the first one to commit the act of aggression, you've initiated force, the reason that it's okay for the other guy to punch you back is because you were stopped from complaining because you're basically taking two inconsistent positions. You're saying when you punch someone in the nose, you're effectively saying it's legitimate for me to do this. And when you object to being punched in the nose in response, you're saying punching people is wrong. Well, you can't have it both ways. You have to choose, right? So that's the idea. And I think it's totally based upon and complementary to Hoppe's approach as well. It's just another way to look at the same idea. It's another way to flesh out why the libertarian idea is natural and intuitive and fundamental and really should be intuitive to everyone, not just libertarians, but everyone. Yeah, but what you and Hans-Hermann Hoppe do is it's just nice to say, well, this is intuitive, but when you can make it explicit, then you can really defend it, then it becomes clear. I think so. When you try to add some rigorous interpretation to it, I think, yeah, I think it has, I've tried to do that. Hoppe has tried, others have tried. And we do as good as we can to try to explain to people what they really already know. Most people already know is wrong to hurt people. They know this. This is why we have political dialogue because people are searching for justification for these kind of uncomfortable political things that they're wanting to favor. So we just have to get people to be consistent and be honest and look at the logic and the economics of what they're talking about. Well, that sounds like a real great closing note. Thank you very much for your time and your wisdom during this interview. And I'll hope we meet one day and talk again. Love to do it. Thank you very much. Okay.