 This is the non-aggression podcast. Propaganda propaganda machine. I hope you feel the same way. But to be an anarchist and assume responsibility for yourself, I think this is a great idea. I'm happy to talk with Stefan Kinsella. He's a patent attorney from Houston, Texas. He's director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom. Find that at c4sif.org. He's a libertarian author and he has been featured on mesis.org, lourockwell.com, and other sites. He also can be found at stefankinsella.com. So welcome, Stefan. Thank you for coming on. Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here. Yeah. All right. And I did mention that Stefan's a patent attorney and that he deals in intellectual property or IP. And I just want to briefly go into that. There's two main types of intellectual property that are destructive in my view. And I think in yours too, patents and copyrights are the two main destructive ones. There's also trademarks such as Coca-Cola's logo and packaging, which people are familiar with and their brand. Patents protect designs. So this would be like an improvement to a mousetrap would be covered by a patent. People are outlawed from using the same design in their own work. Copyrights protect written or other creative works such as songs or artwork from being copied without permission. So if you can briefly explain for listeners why patents and copyrights are immoral and unnecessary and just try to keep in mind that the average person and the person that might be listening does think that patents encourage innovation, which you show in your work is either false or unproven at best. And also keeping in mind, as you've pointed out, there are massive costs that we know about. And you've estimated them, I think, to be half a trillion dollars per year. So if you can just elaborate on that. Absolutely. Yes. So IP or intellectual property refers to, is a term used nowadays to refer to several types of legal protection for things having to do with creativity of the mind. They're not traditional classical property rights in tangible fixed material resources like land or horses or cows or cars or cans of goods on your shelves in your store or light bulbs. And there are traditionally four main types, which is copyright and patent and trade secret and trademark. I would also include, and then there's newer ones like a semiconductor mask work protection for the way integrated circuits are laid out, which is sort of a special right, kind of like a copyright. And there's also different types of patents and copyright, different types of patents within the patent field. There are design patents, utility patents, patents on asexually reproduced plants. And in some countries there are what's called petty patents. That's patents that don't get examined. So they have less weight behind them or a shorter term. And there's also defamation law, which is the right to protect your reputation using defamation law, which is libel and slander, which is not typically considered an IP right. But I think it should be because it's very similar in motivation to the others. I think every one of these rights is completely unjust and destructive and counterproductive to their claimed benefits, totally contrary to the free market and private property and free enterprise and competition, contrary to what people have been led to believe by the people that push for these systems, which basically are all invasions of property and they are all either, they lead to censorship and thought control in the case of copyright or they're used to protect established industries, like in the case of a patent and even trademark to some degree. They all permit legal bullying because larger companies can just use the threat of these things to get people to stop criticizing them or to stop competing with them or to stop saying things that you don't like. There are innumerable examples that we could give. And the examples are never ending and they pop up on almost daily basis now with the advent of the internet. In the case of patents in particular, patents and copyrights are the two biggest ones and the two that do the most damage. I would say that copyright does the most damage to society because they last so much longer, they last over 100 years usually. And they censor free speech, they prevent people from saying what they want to say and it's used by the state as an excuse to increasingly regulate the internet, which I think is a tool that's crucial for freedom. So it's hard to, it's hard to measure how much copyright costs in dollar terms. It doesn't really cause as much financial cost on the economy as the patent system does. It does distort the culture. It does distort the way movies are made and the way sequels are made and the way media is distributed and the way music is made. It does distort that. It does have a cultural distorting effect. I got you. You mentioned you've estimated what half a trillion. That's just like your rough estimate, which is obviously a huge amount of costs. I mean, what can you elaborate on like how you arrived at that estimate or? Yeah, so that's for patents cover inventions or just technical innovations and patents impose a variety of costs on the economy. You can just think about how it would do that. Number one, it encourages lack of standards. So for example, HP, Epson, Canon all have their own patents on their own laser cartridge designs. And they do that on purpose so that only they can sell the ink cartridges for their printers. And so instead of having like a common interface or think about Apple's Apple's nice lightning plug for its new things, that's covered by IP. And so only they can make those things. So that lets them have higher prices, but it also causes lack of standardization in the market, which has a cost. Patent attorneys have to be hired like me to obtain and acquire patents by companies either for aggressive purposes or just for defensive purposes. So that's millions of dollars per year. Patent lawsuits themselves when they're waged millions and millions, tens of millions of dollars quite often every year. People don't engage in research and innovation in a given area if they know that they can't sell a product because it's going to be blocked by a big player who has patents. So innovation is actually not engaged in quite often because of patents. So there's just a host of kind of qualitative factors like that. And the estimates that people have done are all over the board. It's hard to get a good estimate of this. Like one estimate says that patent trolls, which is just one subset or one type of IP behavior, have cost the economy half a trillion dollars over the last like 10 years. So that's just patent trolling alone. So 20, 30, 40, 50 billion dollars a year just from patent trolls. But I don't think patent trolls are even the biggest problem. They're just like one slice of the problem. So you have to multiply that by maybe a factor of 10. So my rough guess is anywhere between 200 billion dollars and maybe three, 400 billion dollars a year. It's a large cost. I mean, no matter what. And that's just in the US alone, let's say. So we're talking close to half a trillion a year in cost. Wow. Okay. So you did mention that you're a patent attorney, as I know. And as usual, the status argument will want it both ways. Either you're an outsider, you're clueless like me. Like I'm not an attorney. I'm not an expert. So they either want me to, if I say something, they'll say I'm an outsider. I don't know how the system works. But if you're an expert, you've been a lawyer for over 20 years. You're just, to them, you're just a hypocrite who profits off the system that you denounce. And it's just funny. I mean, I don't know what you think about that argument, but it's just, you know. I've heard similar arguments for a long time. It's frustrating because it's a damned if you do damned if you don't think. So basically, the people that would have kind of intellectual ammunition to expose the system would tend to be people that have some deep knowledge of it, like a practitioner. So those people are supposed to be barred from speaking out against it. So they only want ignorant people to be able to talk about the system. And furthermore, the whole critique is, it's a fallacious critique. It's the two-quok argument, right? The idea that if you're a hypocrite, your arguments have to be wrong. Right. And it's also just a personal ad hominem. It's the issue is not whether Stefan Kinsella is a hypocrite. It's whether the patent system is legitimate. And furthermore, it's based upon ignorance of the way the law works, because I don't really actually think I am a hypocrite, because if I were prosecuting patents, or if I were suing companies for violating patents, if I were using patents aggressively, you could argue that's hypocritical, but I actually don't do that. The patent field is a very wide field, and there are transactioners. There are people that focus on licensing and contracts. And there are people that focus on defense. And I focus on defense in a couple of ways by helping companies obtain patents, which they need to defend themselves from attacks from other companies with patents. And also on the defense side of litigation, defending someone who has been sued for patent infringement. So my job would not exist in a pre-market, but that doesn't mean I'm hypocritical. Anymore than a tax attorney who defends you from the IRS, who thinks the IRS should be abolished, is a hypocrite. Yeah, but hey, Stefan, why let the facts get in the way of a good status argument? You're a defensive patent attorney, but to them, you're just a hypocrite, right? I mean, whatever. Hey, Mark Cuban, I know you mentioned him on the Freedom Fiends show the other day. I was thinking about asking about him anyway. For two things about him, really, and people like him, like Uber wealthy people. He doesn't really understand private property rights, as you've said. But I'm curious why there aren't any other high-profile, wealthy anarchists. It seems like Cuban would be a perfect fit for anarchy. He could really do us a lot of good. He could help us maybe fund private defense companies or something. But why do you think that hasn't happened yet? Well, I think that people that tend to get wealthy if they're not just completely lucky, which I don't think he was completely lucky. He had some skill and some savviness. They focused determinately on one goal in their life, just like a brain surgeon. He has to spend countless hours to become a brain surgeon. They just don't have the interest or the time in the stuff that makes others a libertarian. I think that's part of the reason. Although, I mean, you have people like Peter Thiel, who's pretty much an anarchist libertarian, I understand, who's a billionaire, I think. He funded Ron Paul, I think. And he's from PayPal, I believe. I don't know much about him, but yeah, that's what I know. But actually, Mark Cuban did give $250,000, along with this guy, Notch, the guy that is the guy behind Minecraft. Is his name Notch? Not for me, yeah. A really wealthy game designer. Notch and Mark Cuban each gave $250,000, so half a million dollars total to the Electronic Frontier Foundation about a year or two ago to establish an endowed chair. They named it the Mark Cuban chair to eliminate stupid patents. But I mean, like you say, though, just eliminating stupid patents doesn't strike at the root of the problem, though. So it kind of might benefit his investments or his strategy, but it wouldn't really necessarily benefit freedom. I mean, I have a feeling someone who has enough intelligence and involves, frankly, and in putting the money where their mouth is, to put half a million dollars or $250,000 into something to stop patents of some form, I would think there was a good chance if you could sit down with the guy, like if I could sit down with him and he was interested in having an intelligent conversation, I probably could persuade him. I think there's a good chance he could be persuaded to oppose, put the patents in their entirety. He's seeing the excess as he thinks they're ridiculous. He's not striking at the root. I guess that's just not his specialty. Yeah, I mean, I wish you could sit down with him or if you haven't tried, maybe you should try because I think it's important that we get as many people as we can from different backgrounds, rich, poor, but especially wealthy people have a lot of influence, obviously, and Cuban's a high-profile guy. But anyway, I think what's his name? The Amazon Jeff Bezos said a few years ago that he thinks software patents should maybe have a two or three or four-year term. So he wants to reduce the term of software patents. He doesn't want to reduce all patents terms, and he doesn't even want to get rid of software patents. And this was on the heels of Amazon having the one-click patent, which was ridiculous, which they used against Barnes & Noble that Christmas about six or seven years ago. So there's very few people that are really good on this, and that's because very few people have a principled approach to things anymore. Almost everyone is a sort of a pragmatic utilitarian. They don't want to be too radical, too extreme, too principled. They always want to tweak things and fix something, you know? So the patent system is broken. It needs to be fixed. The copyright system is not doing what it originally intended. It needs to be fixed. That's their approach, and that's hard to overcome. I agree. Now, Stefan Malanou has been in the news recently, especially in libertarian circles. He dealt with copyright there. He took down a YouTube channel using the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Do you think he was justified in doing that, and what are your thoughts on Malanou specifically? So I'm actually friends with Stefan Malanou. I think he's a very sharp, radical libertarian, generally. He's popular. He's spread the message of liberty to lots more people than I probably ever have. This kind of question kind of gets back to this hypocrite thing. In a way, it's not the question. It's not really relevant. So what I think is the DMCA should not exist. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act should not exist, and the copyright law itself shouldn't exist. The reason it shouldn't exist is because people will use it. If no one ever used it, it wouldn't be a concern. I actually think someone sent me today a link back in 2009. He had some comments in a video where he seemed to threaten the use of defamation law against anyone who accused him of having a cult. And as I mentioned earlier, I regard defamation law as another type of IP. So here we have two cases where he has used or threatened to use types of IP, both copyright and defamation law. I tend to agree with you. I mean, I don't think what he does personally discredits his arguments in favor of anarchy or the people that he's converted. I know personally he's converted lots of people. I don't really pay much attention to him just because I don't have the time. His videos tend to be longer. But I am going to start paying closer attention to him to see. And I've heard some things, and he's definitely a radical libertarian like us. So that's a good thing. So my primary view is one of theory and one of principles. And it's more about what the law should be, not about what personal behavior should be. We all live in an unfree world and how we take advantage of it is an interesting question. But I don't know if I'm going to put myself out there as the expert on it. I would say that, so for example, any modern libertarian who publishes a book with a regular press and has the regular copyright notice on it is in effect doing what Mollie knew is alleged to have done, which was to threaten someone with copyright to get them to not do something. But if you have a copyright notice on a book and you don't take the extra effort of putting a career commons license worth saying everyone's free to use this, you're using the copyright to state it's granted you to in effect intimidate people into not photocopying your book. So this happens all the time. I don't know why he would be singled out. He singled out because he's anti IP, but I don't think people that are anti IP should be treated any worse than people that are actually pro IP. So it looks to me like about half of the criticism against him is by people who are not even against IP. They're just having fun calling him a hypocrite. I mean, I guess I'd rather a hypocrite who is against IP but on occasion uses it to someone who's in favor of IP and uses it anyway. And the other half of people seem to be upset that he used it. And look, I would hope I would have the courage not to use copyright law in that way ever against someone. I think it's wrong. I think it's immoral. I think it's bad to try to silence your critics. It's better to just ignore them or to respond to what they say. I do think it's a use of the state to violate their rights. So and I also think it's it's the stricent effects going to kick in here and probably this true shibes and I forgot the name of the other and free domain something. They were probably fairly low level and now they're going to get a lot of attention. And it's also futile. The videos are back up already from what I understand. So this kind of thing I think is impractical and it was probably a mistake. Shouldn't have been done. And I'd say it's immoral. But it's all the result of having the state have a copyright system. So I don't know what else there is to say if he had called me up and said, should I do this? I would say I don't think you should. I don't think it makes him the worst person in the world. Probably a probably a one time thing is probably not going to be repeated. I don't either. And hopefully he can kind of learn a quote unquote learn from this. But one more quick question about IP here. The main argument that most unsophisticated or uneducated people in private property law and IP make is that IP is necessary and we need it for innovation. But you've argued that that is actually an unproven claim. There's no size to back it up. And it's really just scaremongering. It's easy to manipulate public opinion and everything really except for clear, consistent property rights. So big companies feed us this propaganda that we need IP to protect innovation. Without it, innovation would come to a halt. It reminds me of Paul Krugman who speaks out against deflation, saying that there would be a vicious cycle that people stop purchasing. Who would build roads without the government? The drug war keeps us safe and all that. Yeah, I mean, it's scaremongering. Well, one mistake in that is the correlation and causation fallacy, which is the idea that just because something goes along together doesn't mean one's a cause of the other. It is true that America has been the most, say, innovative and prosperous nation for about the last 200 years. Since our founding and we had copyright and patent law since the beginning, too. But of course, we've also had a war about every 10 years. We've had taxation and export import controls and lots of other obviously bad things. We had slavery for half a century. We had lots of other things that also went along with our prosperity and they shouldn't be confused as the cause of it either. Well, but some people argue that women earned the right to vote. So that proves that government can change. That's actually an argument I've heard many times and it's like, why? Well, so it's one reason that I try to emphasize to people, I'm a libertarian. I'm pro-property rights. I'm pro-technology. I'm pro-the-mind. It's not like I'm against copyright and patent because I'm a kind of a commie who doesn't like commerce and doesn't like profit and doesn't like technology and doesn't like innovation, which is, by the way, I think sort of the motivation for some of the leftist hostility towards patents, because they view it as a property right and they hate property rights. So that's why they don't like it. Good. I like property rights. Yeah, you do. And you actually know what they are. They don't. I realize that IP is contrary to property rights and that's why I don't like it. So I just want to make it clear to people. I actually think that without, so basically the claim given for patents is that they're necessary for innovation. This is the standard line given to kind of sell this idea. On its face, well, first of all, you would think that we've had the law enforced in 1790 or 1991, over 200 years. You think that by now someone would have been able to do a study or two to demonstrate this. No one ever has. All the studies seem to show it's a big distortion on innovation and it's a cost on innovation and it's a cost on society. So there's no empirical evidence to back up their empirical argument. And you can see why. It's basically the origins of patents were in this practice of the king giving monopoly protection to his favored court cronies. That's what patent means open. So it's like a letter patent is an open letter from the king that this guy can carry with him to the new world or to wherever. Say the king has said, I'm the only one who can export, you know, sheepskin. I'm the only one who can import tea. I have the monopoly on playing cards in this town. It was pure protectionism and mercantilism. That's the origins. And so that's how it's used now. It's explicit purpose is to protect people from competition because the idea is that once you start selling a product, if it's too easy for people to compete with you by just copying what you have done, then you're not going to be able to make a profit easily enough. So they want to slow down competition. To make it easier for people to make profits. So it's an intentional it's intentionally designed to slow down the free market to put like a monkey wrench in the works because they don't want unbridled competition. And so the reason it dissuades innovation is, as I said, you have no incentive or reason to innovate. Like I have no reason to try to start a new smartphone company right now that has features somewhat similar to the iPhone by Apple and the Samsung devices and others. Because these are large companies that have millions of dollars and hundreds and thousands of patents. And they will go after me and they will just bury me if I even dare to enter their reign, their realm. So we have reduced competition. We have the effect is cartels or oligopolies like Apple, Samsung, a few smartphone makers. Little companies have almost no chance of entering into this area. All they can do is try to get some venture capital funding start up and hope they get bought out by one of the big companies. Largely for their patent portfolio. So they can use it to build their walls even higher and to fight the guys within the walls when they need to. Okay. Something on beyond IP here a little bit. Here in Pittsburgh, I actually went to a meet up with some members of the Libertarian party just to kind of see what they're all about. And a lot of them actually support geoliveritarianism, which is based on Henry George's idea to abolish all taxation, save for a single tax on the value of land. So that's kind of the layman's definition. I think these people misunderstand property rights and ownership as you've argued. And as I tried to argue with them, they ignore a lot of these arguments too. They ignore the fact that using something or possessing something is a necessary prerequisite to ownership. It's actually in the dictionary. And when I make that argument, people kind of, they don't know what to do. Like they say it's just my opinion that I own something because I use it. But no, it's actually one of the prerequisites to ownership is you have to be possessing slash using it. And they cannot refute that argument because it's in the dictionary. What do you think? Well, so this is Georgism, right? And I think Murray Rothbard has a devastating reply to the Georgists. I forgot the name of his article, but if you just look at Murray Rothbard and Georgism, I think it's just the definitive argument against it. If the Georgists were to say, we should replace every tax with the following, and it would be better, even though you don't like the tax in the first place, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with them. In fact, one of them, Fred Foldberry, who I've known for years, who's a big Georgist. I had a little interaction with him on Facebook or something the other day, and I was saying how it's a tax and it's immoral. And he says, oh, so you'd prefer the current system. And I said, well, that's a different issue. If you want to argue that a better tax would be this way than that way, that's one thing. Although I never want to get into those discussions because I don't believe the state is not interested in making the tax system better. The state is not interested in lowering our tax burden. If you start telling the state, lobbying the state to change the tax system from one form to another, like the flat tax or the national sales tax or whatever, the state's going to oblige you. They're going to take the new tax, but they're going to leave the old one in place. Yeah, I mean, Pittsburgh or Pennsylvania actually has state-controlled liquor stores, which we actually are still paying a Johnstown flood tax. The Johnstown flood was over 100 years ago. It's been cleaned up for 50 years. We actually pay that tax every time we buy liquor. It hasn't gone away. The turnpikes here, we still pay for them, even though they were supposed to be free by now. But the whole George's argument is essentially rests on this fact. They say that owning land excludes everyone else from using it, even unborn people, and supposedly that's aggression. Now, if I take this to its logical, natural conclusion, anything you do with a scarce resource is aggressive. Yes. If I own a car, I exclude somebody from using that same car because there's scarce resources as far as rubber, steel, whatever makes a car. So their argument kind of is inconsistent. Like, why does it not apply to other things? Now, what their argument against that is, well, everyone needs land and it's in a fixed supply. But what I'm trying to argue and what I've been arguing with some people online, especially, is that water falls under the same definition. Water has a fixed supply and we need it to live. So why aren't George's logically advocating for a water value tax? They can't answer that question. Maybe what do you think? Have you heard that argument or what do you think their response would be? Yeah, I've heard some of those arguments. I think I'm with you. What I think the problem they make is they assume land is special. Whereas what you're arguing is that land is just another type of resource. So therefore, their arguments to land should apply to others. And I agree with that. I think that land is not a special resource. It's just one type of resource. I think part of the problem is they have this idea. I mean, to my mind, I'm starting to come to the view that one of the biggest mistakes in history and philosophy and political theory was John Locke's labor theory of property, which sort of complements the Marxian, Adam Smithian labor theory of value. All this fixation on labor as something special, and it's not, it's just an action. Just like land is not a special type of resource. It's just one type of resource. And the fixation on value is this almost mystical substance. Of course, the Marxians think that you're actually stealing from workers if you employ them because you're not giving them the surplus value of their labor, which is completely nonsensical. I think an Austrian economics background helps explode a lot of these ideas. In the case of land, they have sort of a hybrid of these ideas where they say that the value of the land is not completely because of the improvements upon the land by the person who homesteads it. It has sort of an underlying value that was there already because just of the land's existence. So you don't have a moral right to own the whole piece of land, just the part that you improved, and therefore the single tax can be distributed across the community for the part of the land that was naturally valuable already that you don't have a claim to. So I totally disagree with that as well because under Austrian theory, which is very subjective in the sense of subjective theory of value, combined with political theory and libertarianism, sorry, Rothbardian type homesteading, you don't own a piece of land because you created the value in the land. You own the land because you have a better claim to it than anyone else. And that is you were using it first. In a sense, it's just like something's class or characterization as a good depends upon how it's regarded by the user. So like whether something is a consumer good or whether it's a capital good or whether it's a good at all, depends upon how the user regards it. Well, you've made this argument before that let's say somebody has a hunk of marble, they make a statue. They only own the statue because they own the marble before and they own it after. They would not own the statue if they stole the marble or if their employer owns the marble, then the employer owns the statue and you get paid for your work, but you do not own the statue. So you've already made that argument years ago and people just ignore it or don't know it, I guess. Well, it's hard to tie these things together and people don't always read, but yeah, I think there's a similar fallacy there that's made by the Randians in favor of IP and a similar fallacy is being made by the Georgians, I believe. They all assume the validity of this model that ownership comes from owning the fruits of your labor. So basically it's all based upon this metaphorical notion that the fruits of your labor produce something of value or as Randians produce values and those things are owned. Now, the Georgians take that and they say, well, but the fruits of your labor only created the improvements on the land so you don't have a right to the underlying land itself. Okay, so they're going with it that way. The objective is say, well, the fruits of your labor might create a valuable song or invention and you own that. They're all using this imprecise vague metaphor to come up with their conclusions, which are all wrong for those reasons. The problem is revealed in the following way. When people like objectivists or other libertarians who haven't thought too deeply about this, when they sort of recite the locky and libertarian basis of ownership, they'll say something like, there are three ways that you can acquire property. Number one, you can find it in its unused state in nature like a homesteading. You can acquire it by contract like someone sells it to you or gives it to you, or you can create it. So they put this third category in there and then when you put the third category in there, that opens the door for intellectual property and for the confusions that even the Georgians have that creation is a source of property rights ownership but if you don't create the land, you don't own it. In that same article that I referenced about the marble statue, you take on that argument as well and you say that creation is not sufficient or necessary for ownership. So everyone should just read that article. I'll link it on the podcast. You know, it's all there if people would just pay attention and maybe they just don't know about it so I'll link them to it. The idea is people don't distinguish between the source of wealth and the source of property. So it's definitely a source of wealth when you produce or transform things that you own into a more valuable configuration. And you're not against that and neither am I. Let's just be clear. We're not against producing or changing things at all. We need that to prosper, right? No, that fact that's one reason that I'm a favor of property rights. I need to have property rights in the natural resources, the factors, the inputs that go into a production process in order to own the output and to be able to sell it. You know, if Apple is going to transform silicon and kind of useless iron ore, basically, into iPhones, they have to own the iron ore and the silica first and the factories that produce it. That's what property rights are for and then they transform these raw materials into a much more useful shape, little computers that you can put in your pocket. Then they can sell them for a profit. This is all good. This is because of property rights. Right. It's not against them. Now, one other thing I'm kind of working on a post for my site that's going to detail Geoliberitarian or yeah, Geoliberitarianism more is that the whole thing is just full of fallacies. And the main thing is that it's a dishonest argument as well. Like they technically say that, well, land is in a fixed supply. But effectively it's not. And I guess I've maybe defined this term like effective land. You can you can build land above ground, below ground in the outer space. So there is, of course, there's effectively a limitless supply of where somebody can live. I live on the second floor of an apartment. There's people that live next door to me. There's people live below me next, you know, and there could be a third floor. So yeah, the land we rest on is fixed, but the improvements we make if there are correct private property laws would allow effectively unlimited land, effective land. Like the real argument is we need equal access to land. We can have that without without limiting private property rights. We can just build above ground, build below ground, going out of space. There's lots of ways to increase livable, effective land in my opinion. Yeah, I agree with that. And I mean, I agree totally with that. Yeah, land is in plus there are other things that are in someone fixed supply. But that doesn't mean you have to have some kind of yield. Yeah, I mean, it's just a technicality. It's semantics. They're saying, well, there's never going to be more than maybe 100 million square miles of land. But the other thing is if they're going to talk about equal access, there's no such thing as equal access. Somebody today has better access to land than somebody 50 years ago because there's more advanced transportation. There's more advanced tools to look up land values or find land. So there's never such thing as equal access. And also if there's more people on the land, that means there's less land per person, which is not equal access. I mean, if there was one person living on Earth or two people, let's say, and then two more people are born, there's less land for everyone. So it's not equal access. They're saying it's equal access to the value of land, which again, it's just a semantic argument. There's no way to even properly value. Like, who values the value of land? Oh, some beer cat crap. Like, yeah. Of course, we're largely benefited as well by the fact that other people are homesteading land and claiming ownership of it. Yes, if someone goes in homesteads a square mile in the middle of Oregon, I am no longer able to homestead that land. However, the ability for them to do it means land can be first used by someone and used for long-term purposes with long range. Plus they also... My point is if you go out into the world of a world of 7 billion people with everyone owning land, you're better off because there are services available now. There's roads, there's shopping markets and doctor's offices and... They also ignore the fact that you did have the chance to homestead land. You just didn't capitalize on it. Like, everyone has a chance to homestead land. It's just you didn't capitalize on it. Like, you actually do have equal access. You just didn't do it first whether you're... It's not worth your time. Like, you can't research a square mile in Utah. It's just not worth your time. But you did have the chance to get it before anyone else. You just didn't do it. I would say that there's one criticism of land ownership, which is made more by left libertarians than by Georgians, which I think has some merit if you kind of give it a Rothbardian hoppy and spin. And that is this sort of opposition to the enclosure movement like in England. So the idea is one that even Hoppe kind of inadvertently refers to in his... I think he has a 2011 article in the Journal of Libertarian Papers, which I'm the editor of. He owned private property and these kinds of issues. And he says that imagine a town where there's a common path. And so he says that they've been using this street basically for travel between their houses and get to the river. They've established by homesteading, by use, they've established sort of an easement right over it. So it's like a partial property right or a right defined by use in a certain way. So if someone else worked later to homestead the street and try to make it into a private paved street and charge a ferris or people to use it, they would have to take it subject to the pre-existing easement. In other words, people would still have the right to cross over it, at least people in the town. Well, I think that would actually be... I would push back on that. I think that would be a question for the courts because you can't really have two owners of something. Like if a group collectively uses something, then that doesn't necessarily mean they own it. I mean, say I shop at the same grocery store for five years and then all of a sudden somebody buys them out and tears it down. I don't own the right to go to that grocery store just because I've used it. I mean, I don't own it. I mean, it's kind of... True, but you were using someone else's property under their terms. In the other case, you could see... I mean, it is possible to divide ownership up. So let's suppose I own attractive land and I'm your neighbor and you want to have the right to cross over a corner of my land on a daily basis to make your travel easier. I could sell you that right. It's called an easement or a servitude in the civil law. In that case, I would own the full or most of the ownership of the land, but you would have a partial right to drive over it for that narrow purpose. And it could be an inheritable right. Well, okay. And I guess I would ask then in this case... Again, I think this would be something for the courts to decide and it's interesting. But in that case where a lot of people use a common path, do you think it's been established? Like do you think ownership has been established or it's still just kind of an unknown resource and people haven't demonstrated enough use to meet the threshold for ownership? Like what do you think? No, I agree that you could imagine courts getting involved to make the decision and there would be have to be standards and you'd have to have thresholds. I think Hoppe's idea is he's assuming that there's enough open and notorious and longstanding use in this way that a court say would say yes, they've homesteaded at least an easement on this land. That's their use. Because remember, property rights very depend upon the resource at issue. Like you could imagine property rights in airways the way airplanes cross or shipping lanes or shipping rights or roaming cattle or ruminants over the land. Ownership is expressed in different ways and demonstrated in different ways. I mean, farmers, ranchers will brand their cattle with their sign and that's a kind of evolved developed technique for identifying and that other people are expected to respect. And it's also probably IP law if you copy their brand mark, right? That may be copyrighted. I don't know. I don't know. That's an interesting question. I don't know about that one. Okay. Now let me, I'm not going to try to call you out or anything but I want to hear your opinion on this. In 2004, which is 10 years ago, of course, you said that you didn't believe Anarchy was likely to be achieved and I'll quote directly from an article. It says, you said, in my view, we're about as likely to achieve Minarchy as we are to achieve Anarchy, i.e., both are remote possibilities. And you say that both are exceedingly unlikely. But then recently I did hear something that you said and you said you were debating with Jan Helfeld or Jan Helfeld. And you actually said to him, it's a great debate, you said to him that within two to three generations, it's likely that the Anarchists will succeed and that status are kind of a dying breed nowadays. So I mean, do you still feel this way that you did in 2004? Have we made progress towards Anarchy and what are your thoughts on that going back 10 years? Oh, I have to revisit all that to see the whole context to see. I could have, I don't know, maybe I was in a good mood one day and a bad mood the other day. Let me rephrase the question then. Do you think that we are likely to see Anarchy? Like, what would you estimate a rough probability of seeing Anarchy within the next, let's say, 50 years in the US? Something approaching anarcho-capitalism. Like, what would you estimate? It's likely, unlikely, 1% chance, 50%? Like, what do you think? Well, I go back and forth on this, right? First of all, the future is unpredictable. We have to admit that. And look, when I talk about these likelihoods, there's sometimes the reason I say that is for a couple of reasons. Number one, the Minarchists call us Utopians. So I like to just point out that the idea of a limited government is what's really Utopian. Okay, so this Minarchy that they're in favor of has never existed and I don't think ever really will exist. As you said on the Freedom Fiends as well, and this is the first time I've ever heard, it's an excellent insight. You said that there's no such thing as an unlimited government and your exact words were even Hitler favored a limited government. So the only question is, what are your limits? And that I think is a brilliant insight that needs to be spread around and I think everyone needs to hear that because it's a really good insight. There's no such thing as an unlimited government by nature. It cannot be unlimited. Right, they can't be unlimited. They can't be omnipotent. They can't be omniscient. So and another reason I make that point is because I want to point out that I'm a principled libertarian, that I'm an anarchist and I'm a libertarian even though or even if I don't think I'm going to achieve it in my lifetime because I'm worried about these activist types that are so impatient to get their results and they're promised everything by these radicals. We're going to achieve liberty in six months or two years. And when they don't, then they despair and they give up and they just move on to or they sell out or they start voting in electoral politics. So I want to make it clear. I'm for liberty because it's the right thing to do and it's the right way to be. I'm for liberty even if I don't think, I mean, there's a great quote in C.S. Lewis's Narnia books. I think it's in the silver chair. I have it on my website somewhere. Where, you know, the green winds or something has the kids kidnapped underground in her evil kingdom and she's got this kind of drug in the air kind of slowly hypnotizing them, seducing them. She's trying to persuade them that the world above, Narnia, doesn't exist. That Aslan, who is the representative of Jesus, doesn't exist. And all of a sudden, one of the characters, I think his puddlegum sticks his foot in the fire to kind of shock himself back into awakeness and he says, you know what, maybe you're right. Maybe it's just a fairytale. Maybe the world above doesn't exist. But even if it doesn't exist, I'm going to act like it exists. I'm going to act as if there's an Aslan. And to my mind, that little speech is kind of how I feel about libertarianism. I won't say I don't care because I do care, but even if the dream is remote and hard to achieve and may never be achieved, I'm going to be a libertarian anyway. I'm going to be the right kind of person. Well, me too, me too. Yeah. And I think that gets to kind of my next question I had in mind is that the main argument in the common, the vastly the most common one I've heard when I argue with any status, or even other minarchists or geolibritarians, whatever, is that. Yeah. Microstatus. Right. Yes. Microstatus. Yeah, right. Okay. But that's what they call himself, right? But the main argument against anarchy or anarcho-capitalism is that anarchy wouldn't work. Those are the main arguments. And I say, I agree with you, I think on this, it's an irrelevant argument and it moves the goalpost because we're talking from a rights-based perspective and they're talking from a utilitarian-based playing field. It's a common good argument. And it also makes some implications. It's a loaded argument because it implies that the current status system quote unquote works, which even status themselves admit is wrong. Look at any political debate. Even Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have criticisms against why the state doesn't work as constructed. So the state is what doesn't work. Anarchy is what would work if we allowed it to work and if we had the freedom to try it, I think. I think Harry Brown, when he ran for president, he tried that kind of message. He kept repeating over and over again in interviews. The government just doesn't work, right? It's kind of a pragmatic argument. I think that the fundamental error being made here by everyone on the other side, even the microstatists or the Georgians or the menarchists even, the fundamental mistake is they all favor a state of some type. So they're all thinking, what policy should we favor the state to implement? What system do we favor the state propping up or providing the necessary foundations for? Yeah, and it assumes a conclusion, right, that we need a state. It doesn't actually address the fact that we may not need a state at all and it may be economically and morally obviously it is, but economically better as well, not to have a state. Well, but it assumes when they talk to someone like us, who's an anarchist, they want to know what our system is. So to them, there's a hundred thousand system being proposed out there. You have the liberal system being proposed and the conservative system being proposed and the menarchist system being proposed, totalitarian, theocratic, whatever. And then the anarchist comes along, the anarcho-libertarian, and they say, well, then what's your system? And they want to ask you questions like, well, how would it work? And what they don't understand is we're different than all the others because we don't favor a system. What we oppose is systematic violence. Right. And it's like a quote that a friend of mine showed me and I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but basically said the state is almost like a destructive fire and asking how would it work, anarchy is like saying, what would you replace the destructive fire with? You don't replace it with anything. You just consistently oppose aggression and just keep doing that until it goes away, hopefully. Yeah, I get this in IP. I get it in anarchist questions all the time. People, they want certainty. They want to say, well, what's it going to look like in your ideal society? And the real, the honest answer is, it's going to be society where there's very little violence. You know what, I was just going to ask you that, but before I do ask you to elaborate on that a bit. Yeah, I mean, I think that in their mind, a lot of times it does discredit our argument because they're not, I don't think they're sophisticated enough to realize the subtleties in our argument. Like it's not us avoiding the discussion of, well, deep down we know anarchy won't work, so we just make an excuse. It's actually that the argument is not, it's irrelevant. It's an argument that's a strawman argument. That's why we don't address it. And anarchists have addressed parts of that argument. Walter Block has written books about how private roads would work. I've written articles along this line. So there are economic arguments for how it could work. And I deep down, and I think you too believe that totally free markets would work and would increase wealth. But even if they didn't, I would still favor them because it would eliminate rights violations, which is all I'm worried about. And it's all you're worried about. And it's all you should be worried about, honestly. That's true. But I also do believe that it would be better in a consequentialist sense as well. Absolutely, yes. There's no conflict between the two. But they wanted to demand you to spell out the particulars of exactly what's going to happen. And sometimes we libertarians when pushed on the fence, we feel compelled to give an answer, otherwise they're just not going to listen to us. So we say, okay, if you want me to speculate, here's what I think the price of Bitcoin will be in 17 years. And here's how I think people would innovate. And it's like the argument I've made is that trying to predict how private roads would handle drunk driving, let's say. I've made this argument on my site, is it's like predicting how would Amazon.com operate before the internet even existed. So it would be like saying, what's their shipping rate is going to be? When are they going to ship out? What if they don't carry the item I want? How's their return policy going to work? What if they steal my credit card number? And this is before the system even exists, they're asking these questions. And that gets at the problem is these questions will never end. So they will always have another question. And the problem is we can't answer all the questions because of the laws they put in force that foreclose the other system from arising in the first place so we can see what would happen. Exactly. They use the existence of the system to justify the existence of the system. They're essentially conservative. Exactly. It's a circular argument. Now, two quick questions. But that was my next one is, why is anarchy a cut and dried pass or fail system? As soon as a free market fails supposedly, status say, well, this is why the free market will never work. Now, the state gets essentially unlimited chances and reduced to fix their own mistakes. I mean, thousands of years of failures as you've alluded to, slavery, the Holocaust, even the recent killings in Ferguson, the police brutality, all these are state created problems. And yet the state gets unlimited chances to fix them and the state gets more money to fix them. Like if the roads are bad, guess what? The state's getting more money to fix them. Why is it that the state gets rewarded for failure? But anarchy, the slightest hint of failure in a free market, if everyone can't afford an iPhone, it's a free market failure. And we need to have an Obama phone or a Reagan phone or whoever created it. I mean, why are they so dishonest and deceitful with people? I mean, it's ridiculous. That's actually a good question. I've never heard the question put that way. And I don't know if I know the answer why there's such a double standard. I suppose. I mean, I think anarchy should be a constant goal. And it's the argument that we normally hear and that we normally make is that, yeah, we may not ever completely eliminate murder and rape and violence, but we're always trying to eliminate it. That's what makes us better people, more civilized people. So yeah, the free market may not double your net wealth overnight. It may actually lower it at first, but we need to give it time to, first of all, eradicate the state's malinvestments and distortions. But we also need to give people a chance to adjust to anarchy, which they don't want to do that. They just want to keep fixing the state. The state will save us. The state will fix it. But it's problems caused by the state itself. I think that to give the average person a little bit of credit, I think most of them are fairly decent-minded. They assume mistakenly that the state is ultimately necessary. You have to have a state. And so they think you have to have a state no matter what, and the alternative is worse. And so they know that it's not great. So they think the only thing they can do is try to fix it. They're also understandably leery of messiahs and radicals who claim they can fix everything. People that are a little too passionate about their ideas. So they're a little bit reluctant to give up what they see as an overall decent system for no reason. So I can understand the reluctance to engage in wholesale radicalism. What I don't get is why they won't give us the chance to try it on our own. If anarchists want to start their own community, why can't we take the risk? We're the ones that are going to suffer. If we start our own society without the state, let's say we take a state like New Hampshire, for an example, say anarchists all move there, we live without government. Who's going to suffer because of that? We're not going to invade anyone else. No one else in California or Iraq or Canada or even neighboring states like Delaware or whatever. Nobody else would suffer but us. We're the ones that would be risking our capital, risking our time, et cetera. So the whole thing boils down to their afraid of competition because if it works, it's going to be a beacon for everyone else to say, hey, wait a second, maybe the state doesn't work. From a utilitarian standpoint, maybe I need to rethink everything and that's kind of what we're trying to get people to do and it's working with some people but maybe not everyone. But I want to know what you think about this. This is a personal question, I guess, but how do you think justice would work in a free society? I mean, would there really even be much crime at all if we end the drug war, the overseas wars and the war on terror, get rid of IP laws and victimless crimes and I guess end the Fed or allow competition so it implodes on its own. How much crime would there be? I'm thinking not much, but what do you think? So we have to distinguish two types of crime. You have institutionalized crime, which is what the state does. So as long as we have a state, there's going to be crime just by the government's existence. But if we, even if we had a minimal state somehow against, even though it's unlikely, in today's day and age with technology and technology is going to keep improving, prosperity is going to keep improving. Yeah, I think crime would be almost negligible because there'd be no reason to commit it. I think we would have such wealth, such an unimaginable wealth that it'd be easy to make lots of money. And for the people that couldn't, it would be easy for them to find charitable donors who would just give them some money. I mean, I don't think there'd be a problem with crime. You would have still a few sociopaths who just want to take advantage of the people who aren't living in their doors locked in. Yeah, you know what, we have those now and they're called politicians. So I mean, we kind of eliminate those too, right? Correct. But if we imagine a private society, so the state is gone, so there's no institutionalized crime, I think you would have sporadic crime by sociopaths and people losing their temper on occasion. I mean, I think we'd have a world of peace and prosperity and high tech and people would start leaving their doors unlocked and things like that. So we become maybe more defenseless sheep type because it's rational, because almost no one is a threat. And in such a society, those people are easy pickings for the people right on the edges of sociopathy. So I guess you would have an occasional crime, but I think it would be reduced by a factor of a million or something, it'd be almost nothing. I agree 100%. Now I don't know if you endorse this argument or not, but there's been an argument made that we don't ever actually escape anarchy and you've alluded to the argument that there's anarchy between the states. Like there's no super state that tells the USA what to do, at least not yet, I guess. But my question about this is, assuming that we never escape anarchy, which I guess I can grant that for the sake of argument, it's a different argument, I guess. Has there been what some people say a market failure? Has there been a market failure in the sense of providing defense against the state? Like I want defense against the government and the free market has been able to overcome government restrictions. Would you consider that a market failure as far as there aren't any private defense agencies able to clash with the state and defend us? I mean, it's obviously extremely difficult based on their monopoly on currency and military and everything, but I think it's slightly a market failure that we haven't seen more effective defenses against state violence. So I think there's a big demand for it and it should be addressed. What do you think? Well, it's an interesting way of looking at it. A market failure typically is used by critics of the market to point to certain obvious things they think the market should do, primarily the provision of public goods or the provision of goods that are not possible because of a pre-writing effect. And so they will use that as a criticism of the market. The market has a failure here, so the state has to step in and provide this public good. I don't think you're using it in that sense. You're using it as in some kind of just a market is not enough to defeat the state. Yeah, I think the market has failed to overcome the state and I guess market failure is commonly used that way, but why hasn't the market been able to even scratch the surface of defending us against the state? Well, first of all, so I think you're alluding to an article by a guy named Alfred Cousin like in an early issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies and it's called, Do We Ever Really Get Out of the State? It's a classic article. He's actually not even a libertarian, I believe, and he published a follow-up to it a few years ago called Revisiting this Argument and one of the last episodes of the Journal of Libertarian Studies before it went under. But and his argument is not just that there's anarchy between the states, but that there's anarchy within the state. That is, imagine the U.S. federal government. There's like President Obama is nominally at the head of this pyramid of power, but the people he talks to, he's not pointing a gun at them, right? They're listening to him voluntarily in a sense and everyone else in the state, they're all following a certain set of rules. So it's like a private order that works without an external coercive threat to get it together. That's another question that I have, I guess, jumping off from that is, I don't actually consider Barack Obama a violator of the non-aggression principle in most cases because he doesn't actually arrest people, he doesn't actually fight the wars, he just kind of tells people, hey, go commit a crime and they listen to him on their own, you know, on their own free will and on their own accord. So I think, you know. Yeah, that's another area of dispute among libertarians. I would take the other side of that one. I wrote a paper with Patrick Tinsley in the quarterly Journal of Australian Economics a few years back, about 10 years ago, called causation and aggression. And I try to analyze the nature of responsibility for certain indirect actions like what you're talking about, like giving orders. And I think that the reason people say, and maybe you can correct me for your reasons, but the reason people say Barack Obama is not responsible is because they imagine this fixed pie of responsibility. Like if you make Barack Obama liable for the actions of some goon that he orders to do something, then you have to say the goon is not responsible. And you're reluctant to do that, so you have to choose. I just don't think that you can hold somebody responsible for essentially words. I mean, I think you've made the counterargument to yourself because you've said that words aren't aggressive actions. And that's all. Not per se, not per se, but I think they can be means as part of a causal chain of aggression in some cases. But ultimately, he's not responsible. Like even if Obama says, you have to go to war or else we'll arrest you. Well, who's going to arrest you? A soldier or an IRS agent will arrest you or somebody, a cop will arrest you. If they don't, if they choose not to, then someone else will arrest them. Think of it like this. Here's an example of giving people because you could use that argument and I've heard people make the argument that Adolf Hitler himself was perfectly libertarian and he never hurt anyone. Well, I would disagree with that though because he actually served in the military. So like somebody like John McCain would not be, he would violate the non-aggression principle because he specifically fought in a war and committed aggression. Well, Barack Obama is the head of state. He is the head of the military in a sense. So he's in the military now in a sense. But okay, so forget about Hitler's particular actions as a soldier or whatever. As the furor of Germany, when he's in his bunker, giving orders to people in that capacity. Now, so I have just imagined the following scenario. Suppose there's a Jewish woman who's a house cleaner there and she knows Hitler, her family's about to be sent off to the Holocaust and if she has the chance to just take a letter opener and stab Hitler in the neck, she can end the war and kill Hitler. Would that be an act of aggression? And I think the answer is clearly no. And but the only way to conclude that is to say that Hitler's position on top of a pyramid of power within an organization is a sufficient causal nexus to implicate him in liability for what the underlings are doing. I would actually say that technically it is an act of aggression because I can't assign any specific blame to Hitler. Let's assume that he didn't actually kill people or fight in the war in the trenches. Right, right. He's only giving orders. So I mean, it's like, it's like if I tell somebody, Hey, go rob that bank. Is somebody justified to come after me for saying that? No, I mean, you're well, but that's I don't think that's the same. That's not the same thing. I mean, we have to look at things contextually and socially and saying go rob the bank. You know, it's like, it's like if I'm standing a mile from you and I say, Hey, I'm going to kick your ass. Or that's a direct, but that's a direct threat that you're going to do it. You're not sending that direct a mile away, but you're not sending an agent to do it. That's what I'm saying. The clear, the to me, the way it breaks down is that there's an agent on Hitler's behalf that's killing you. It's not him himself. So you have to blame the actual agent in my opinion now. I think you blame them both. That's my view. I mean, imagine a woman who's got a boyfriend and she seduces him and she persuades him to kill her husband so that they can go run off and to look together. I view them as basically co-conspirators in a crime. Even though she just persuaded him to do it, she didn't coerce him. She didn't even pay him anything monetarily. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't disagree more, but I think that's kind of getting into a whole other debate. Maybe we'll have it another time. I think that could get into a lengthy debate, but I respect your views and I definitely want to read that article that you alluded to earlier to get some other views on it. Maybe I'll change my mind. Yeah, it's causation and aggression in the quarterly journal of Austrian economics. I will definitely look it up. We haven't really seen anarchy in the common use as far as like no state. We haven't really seen it tried anywhere. You know, I know you've said it's been tried hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago, but we haven't seen it tried in modern-day society. You know, post Rothbard. Things have changed. You know, we have the internet now. We have better infrastructure. Knowledge has increased. I don't think we have seen anarchy in the way that it's commonly defined tried. So I think it's kind of a strawman to say that anarchy's been tried and hasn't worked. I don't think it has been tried for the common person. I think that's right. Although if you go along with the idea that the state is limited necessarily, then all states are always limited. There's areas of life which are largely free of government control. You know, you walk down the street, you interact with your neighbors, you go buy something from an Apple store. These things, their state is in the background, but they're not always there. And so they're kind of, I mean, the internet itself is fairly anarchistic in the way it's run and the way it's ruled. It is, but I mean, the state still heavily spies on them. I mean, the NSA is obviously listening to us right now, probably not that I care, but you know, what's up NSA? I guess, but yeah, I guess. I think to me, the big dilemma, one of the big like anarchist dilemmas is, let's suppose somehow the U.S. became an anarchist libertarian region somehow, but we're still in a world faced with other states. So the other 199 states are still there. We still have Russia and China with their nukes and their quasi-Kami, quasi-fascist regimes. So to me, the interesting question is, in such a world, how could a free society defend itself from other states? I mean, I think Rothbard touches on that in For New Liberty. He kind of says, why make that assumption? Like if we're going to assume anarchy is achieved in the U.S., why not assume it's been achieved everywhere? Correct. Yeah, I mean. I think it's an unrealistic assumption. I do agree. I think if we ever achieve anarchy, it's going to happen fairly gradually and it's going to happen for reasons that are probably going to be spreading to other places other than one isolated region. I do agree. I'm just envisioning the case where you succeeded somehow in getting one island. I don't know what your defenses would be. I think the answer to that, I've kind of defended that against people, is that it's hard to take over, like say the USA has no government. How are you going to actually quote unquote take over the USA? Like I live in Pittsburgh. To take over Pittsburgh, you would have to take over every individual street, every house. Like just because you quote unquote conquer my neighboring street five miles down the road, it doesn't really affect me. I mean, I'm against them doing that, but I'm not bound to their laws. Like the reason you can take over and why war is so bad is because you take over the government apparatus that taxes and sets laws. So I mean. That's a good point. It's like guerrilla warfare. You know, and I think Rothbard gets into that too. It's like guerrilla warfare. Like it's so much more costly and tough to take over a decentralized society than one that has a strict hierarchy of government. So I think that's, I think that's the answer. It's too cost prohibitive to take over each individual household basically. It's just, it just wouldn't work. And there's no, you don't gain anything from taking over my house. Like what are you, what are you going to take my computer? Maybe 50 bucks, but you're going to, it's going to cost you 10,000 just to find me. You know what I mean? So yeah, I think that's probably the practical answer. I think it's probably right. I mean, I think more reading is definitely, maybe more writing on my part is, is warranted on that more research. Do you, what do you know about the Free State Project? I'm thinking about going to pork fest, porky pine fest in New Hampshire. Have you been there yet? Are you thinking about going? I'm thinking about going next year, but what are your thoughts? I've never been, I've been invited a couple of times to, I think there's another one in New Hampshire and there's the pork fest and there's another one in New Hampshire, the Liberty Fest or something like that. And I'm a, I know a lot of people, I know Ian Freeman and, you know, the talk, Free Talk Live guys. I've heard nothing but good things about it. I think I've heard that it's great and I want to go something out, but I haven't made it there yet. And the Free State Project is one of the only sort of libertarian, kind of quasi-utopian projects in the last 30, 40 years that I've heard about that is actually not a scam and hasn't followed the part, the general part. Well, I'd encourage you to try and go to pork fest next year. I think I'm going to go and I want to get other people to go because I'd love to meet you in person and talk with other people like you, Michael Dean, you know, Dovey Barker. So maybe if you can make it, it's in June, I think, and I'm thinking about, you know, setting it up. I don't know. It's possibility. Yeah. It's possibility. It's just, it's hard to, it doesn't look like it's easy to get there from Houston for me. That's one reason I didn't go before, but maybe I'll just suck it up and go one year. Maybe you and Mark Cuban can share his private jet, you know, and kind of we can convert him. That would be awesome. That would get me there. Yeah. I wanted to get your thoughts on something that's a little bit dated, but not really the Donald Sterling situation in the NBA. I haven't really heard it discuss much in libertarian circles. The whole issue, I guess, is do you have a right to privacy when you're on the phone with someone? I think I know your answer. My answer is that I don't think you have an expectation of privacy. If you say something on the phone, you kind of have to trust the person on the other end to keep it private. And you should not expect or especially appeal to the state to keep that private. Even if, now this is where the question comes up, even if the person says, you know, I'm not recording you, but then they do record you, that's kind of, you know, fraud or something. But what are your thoughts on the whole unknowingly recording calls? Like, how do you come down on that? I didn't think it was a phone call issue in the Sterling case. I thought his girlfriend recorded it like with her iPhone or something in the background while he was making his racist rants in his private. It may have been that. I mean, let's, you know what, it may have been that, but let's assume, I guess, both situations. Like, is it justified either way? Like, do you have a right to privacy, basically, when you're on the phone or talking in person with somebody? Well, as a look, so first of all, the idea of expectation of privacy is just the lawyer's language they use to justify a decision by a judge about whether or not, you know, the Fourth Amendment was invaded. So I think the expectation of privacy idea is not really a coherent libertarian one. And even the right of privacy is not a coherent libertarian one. All you really have is property rights. Right of privacy is used as sort of a shorthand for some kind of cluster of civil liberties or property rights. And also is a prophylactic shield against what the state can do. So in that regard, I'm in favor of it. As long as we have a state, I'm in favor of as many incoherent artificial rights that you want to think of that can limit what the state can do. Like the right, the right to be presumed innocent. I don't think that's a natural right either. But I'm happy that the state has the burden of proof in a murder trial, which is what the right to be presumed innocent means. In this particular case, I think it's just, it's pretty much going to be a social customary kind of thing. And of course, it's kind of sleazy and slimy to betray someone. It gets increasingly worse if there's a contractual relationship, like let's say you're talking to your lawyer and he has a contractual obligation with you to maintain confidences. In that case, if he leaked a confidence, I think maybe there's a contractual action against him. Of course, the bigger damage is going to be he's going to lose his reputation and not going to get any more clients. So really these things take care of themselves. I guess technically you could argue that this woman was in his house and she was using his property without his permission, like standing in his living room with a phone behind her back, recording what he was doing and she should have known he wouldn't have consented to that. So in a way, it's a type of trespass. But on the other hand, he set the situation up. He let her in his house, he trusted her. Right. I think it's an interesting debate and I think the courts would probably decide. Just want to point out, status, they all think they are smarter than us when it's actually the total opposite. They think they have us cornered with these so-called like gotcha arguments. We've heard them all before. You know, we're happy to debate you to speak with you. But they run away. They call us childish. They cite loopholes and IP. Like, oh, it's just a loophole that when you say, oh, you have your original MP3, even though you copied it, like that's just a loophole. They call people racist like Ron Paul, Rothbard, and even Lou Rockwell. They call them racist. They attack us personally. In your case, with the debate with Helfeld, they screech on about the format, the format, even though they're running into you're a lot of time when they do it. Status will do anything to avoid an actual debate on, you know, private property rights. They'll unfriend us on Facebook, call us names, childish, say it won't work, but they won't actually debate us. And I just want to kind of point that out in closing and get your kind of thoughts and your experiences. Like, have you seen these tactics used against you? I know you have. I've seen it on video, but is it common for you? It is, but I guess a general observation about that is that this is just the consequence of their whole world view, right? Which is basically if you're not an anarchist libertarian, you're in favor of using the systematic institutional power of the state and force against people when they don't agree with you. So basically in the end, they support laws which will bash you over the head for not doing what they want you to do. So they're always not willing to have a conversation at a certain point. You can complain for a little while, but at a certain point, they're just going to reach up and grab a hammer and hit you over the head with it. I mean, that's what laws do. So it's no surprise to me that that's how they act in a more conventional argumentative setting. They're not interested. If they were interested in having a real debate, they would not support laws that used force against you just because they disagree with you. Right. And I think I think you I think you put it well against Hellfield. You said, you know, just because Stefan Kinsella thinks a certain way or because you go over his, you know, a lot of time, then it's OK to steal your money. And it's just you put it well there. Hey, it's been great talking to you, Stefan. I'm going to let you get going. It was beyond my best expectations, man. You've been wonderful and I appreciate it. And I'm a big fan, man. Thank you very much. You've been an inspiration. Glad to do it. Thanks a lot. All right, Stefan. Hey, thanks, man. Appreciate it.