 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the main event. This morning we have a debate between two of our summer fellows. The debate topic is, is the non-aggression principle enough to sustain a free society? And we have a disciple and student of Walter Block, Anthony Cesario debating one side, and Conor Mortel, who's from Florida, debating the other side. So join me in welcoming our debate participants. First, we have Anthony Rasputin Cesario. And taking the negative, we have Conor the bass-dist-papest Mortel. As I said, the debate topic is, is the non-aggression principle enough to sustain a free society? This debate has been going on for weeks now over in the hallowed chairs and corners of Rothbard Village. So they've already settled on some of the definitions since we have sort of a constrained time here. But they're each going to have five minutes to make some introductory remarks, and then they will have some informal back and forth for 15 minutes, and then they'll conclude. Before Conor, excuse me, before Anthony gets started with his introductory remarks, please make sure that you take the pre-debate survey. So there are two cards out on your seats. Some say pre-debate and the other ones say post-debate. Be sure to scan the QR code for the pre-debate survey and make your selection. It's either yes, undecided, or no. Okay, we'll leave that open for just a few more moments. Go ahead and help me welcome our first debate participant, Anthony Cesario. All right. Thank you guys very much for coming, listening to this amazing debate. First, I wanted to thank the Mises Institute for all their hard work, making this an absolutely amazing place, making this a great place for scholars and every one of us. I do want to mention when I first accepted this invitation, I was under the impression that it was going to be a facial hair competition, and I was going to sweep him under the rug. Debate is going to be a little bit more challenging, so I'm going to see what I can do. To be honest, I'm very happy to share a stage with Conor. He's been a great friend over these past couple of years. As Jonathan or Dr. Newman has mentioned, we've had amazing conversations at Rothbard Village talking about all kinds of crazy topics under the sun. What I love about Conor the most is there's tons of things that I don't know a lot about, and I find that he consistently knows a lot about them way more than I do. So I absolutely love being able to share, bounce back those ideas, and it's just an honor to share the stage with him, and I look forward to attending Texas Tech with him. It's going to be a lot of fun. Now, with that said, enough nice things about Conor. I'm going to tell you why he's wrong and why non-aggression is enough to sustain a free society. The way that I'm going to kind of approach this is by giving it a little bit of a brief overview of what non-aggression is. Non-aggression is really one side of a coin. The other side of that coin is private property. I have, as a visual aid, a coin that you guys could see. It's a real silver dollar coin at the Mises Institute. Really cool. Makes noise. But these two sides of this coin really have three implications for a free society, and they come into three different realms of society. The first realm is on civil liberties or personal liberties, and it has an emphasis on free association. The second realm that non-aggression really focuses on is on economic liberties, so having to do with an emphasis on free enterprise and non-intervention in a lot of these affairs. And then the third realm of free society, or at least of non-aggression implication, would be that of foreign policy, foreign intervention, and it would be one of non-intervention. So an emphasis on non-intervention. My argument is that these principles are pretty much all that is necessary are really the sufficient grounds for a free society, and it does it in two ways. First, by having the emphasis on non-aggression, what you do is you increase the costs of coercion relative to that of cooperation. So this helps thwart and withstand any type of bad actors who may want to take advantage of other people or who may want to kind of implement their own views on others. The second way that non-aggression in a free society is really beneficial in creating a strong system is through free association. One of the things that it does is if you have any of these, what people would think of are socially harmful views or socially harmful ideas, free association allows these individual communities to kind of be separate and removed from other types of communities that may have different values, different views, different social ideas. And because of this, if there's any socially harmful view, the result isn't going to be that it's going to tear down a free society but instead it's going to be selected out for. That little community itself isn't going to be able to sustain and might get selected out for and as a result, you're still going to have this free society, you're still going to have a system of non-aggression of private property rights even if these types of things fail. So in other words, a group having these bad values in a free society doesn't mean it will collapse, it just means that they'll be selected out for. The communities that remain, however, they don't need to necessarily have any shared values, any shared principles. They could be a pluralistic, eclectic group of different views, different ideas, and it wouldn't necessarily show or demonstrate that there's a particular value or group, ideals that are necessary in order to sustain the society. So as a result, a free society is not only going to be able to sustain itself from bad actors but it's also going to be able to sustain itself from socially harmful behavior through these principles of free association, non-aggression, and non-intervention. Thank you so much. Alright, I'm going to begin differently from Anthony in two ways. The first is that I'm not going to thank us for an absolutely amazing week. I'd like to thank the faculty and staff and fellows for an absolutely fantastic week. Secondly, I won't be wasting my time complimenting my opponent who is ontologically evil. Now, I've been thinking along and hard for weeks. Honestly Anthony, I have been going back on this for years about why the NAP is insufficient to sustain a free society and while I believe there are multiple reasons it may fall short, I don't have enough time to get into all of them so I want to address the one most important one and that is simply that with the NAP alone, there is not a person in this room who could figure out how to build the roads. Oh wow, I was counting on a laugh. I'm out. No, but I put in my stupid silly joke because I want to make it clear that I'm not arguing the statist argument of we need a government. It's a weak argument that is often presented to us when we argue for the NAP and it's not what I seek to prove today. I'm not trying to argue that we need an exogenous force in forcing the ideals beyond the NAP but rather that if a free society is to survive, which Anthony and I have agreed in our Rothbard Village discussions which as Dr. Newman has claimed are canon, that our definition and our benchmark for failure is within three generations it does not revert to a state or collapse altogether and if it is to do so, however it is that we arrived at the NAP, we must also arrive at further key values also implemented in the minds of the people. And I am far from alone in this belief. In fact, I'm standing on the shoulders of not just giants, but libertarian, Massessian giants. The great Lou Rockwell said himself that in order to maintain a free society, it is essential that the traditional family be preserved. Furthermore, Murray Rothbard has stated that libertarianism is logically consistent with almost any attitude toward culture, society, religion, or moral principle. In strict logic, libertarian political doctrine can be severed from all other considerations. Logically one can be, and indeed most libertarians in fact are, hedonist, libertines, immoralist, militant enemies of religion and indeed Christianity in particular, and these people can still be consistent adherents of libertarian politics. As all too many libertarians turn out to be, strictly logically, one can do all of these things. But psychologically, sociologically, and in practice, it simply does not work that way. Why does it not work that way? There are two reasons that are in line with our two conditions for failure and it's that without these two things, society will either collapse or regress to a state. As for regressing to a state, there were very few things that Ludwig von Mises and Karl Marx agreed on. However, this was one of them. Karl Marx stated that the influence of communism will make marriage solely about the partners, not about the children, and that part of the reason for this was that the foundations of capitalism are from the family as the division of labor. He attacked the family because he believed that without it as a fundamental value, capitalism and the free society as such would not last. Mises agreed with this premise stating that these attacks on the family go hand in hand with plans for the socialization and means of production, and that marriage would disappear with the disappearance of private property, and as you attack the proliferation of children, you further attack private property in the non-aggression principle. The family, and most importantly, as I said, the proliferation of children within the family, must be firmly upheld if we are to avoid the ideology that stands against everything we support. As for the collapse of society as a whole, it's a slightly stronger case to have to make. However, great philosopher Peter Craft once wrote that if you want to destroy a society, all you have to do is advocate one simple thing. Tell that society to have less children. We've learned this week about the values of the division of labor and the way that the proliferation of society can grow into further specialization. It's only logical that actively pursuing a shrinking in that population would also hurt the division of labor. And Peter Craft pointed this out saying that it was the greatest tool of civilization, was that division of labor, and for a society to flourish, you have to call for the proliferation of children and the protection of the family supporting these children. To destroy a society, all you have to do is flip the script and call for less children. Now, the one thing that Anthony Murray Rothbard and myself agree on is that the nap and libertarianism in general do not in any way forbid things like abortion that would lead to less children and certainly do not actively encourage the proliferation of children. In fact, Murray Rothbard even argued that we should abandon Roe v. Wade because the decentralization and libertarianization of abortion would lead to more abortions. I think that would immediately lead to the family being weakened, the lessening of children and the worsening of the division of labor, and as such it would lead to a downfall of our free society. And while Rothbard didn't quite get this, the absolutely fantastic Lou Rockwell said himself, unless we can pass our heritage to our children, we are doomed. So to conclude, I'll quote Rothbard once more where he was right about this issue, that this is a battle between the corrupt rotten new culture versus the glorious life-affirming old. This is our culture war. Thank you all very much. Okay, so now we'll move into the section of our debate where there'll just be some back and forth. This will be pretty informal. If I sense that there's too much interruption or somebody's not getting enough time, then I'll try to intervene in that sense. Anthony, why don't you go ahead and start off with some responses to Connor? Yeah, so Connor, if I'm understanding your argument correctly, what it sounds like you're saying is in addition to the non-aggression principle and in addition to having kind of a free society with private property rights, one of the core fundamental necessary features that we would also need would be a focus on family values and the proliferation of children. Would that be accurate? That'd be accurate, and I'd add in the fact that I don't necessarily agree with in your introduction you had said groups will sort themselves out and will work their ways out. I tend more towards Rothbard that the decentralization would lead to less of that as opposed to more of it. So I do agree that's my point, and I think the nap alone wouldn't lead to that. Can you just clarify that real quick? It wouldn't lead to what specifically? Well, it was the quote I had that when he called for Roe v. Wade to be overturned so that we could have more abortion, and Anthony and I's canon arguments. I think we've come to a conclusion on this that we agree the decentralization of abortion would lead to more abortion. And I use that as an example because it's a big strong hot button topic. But I think generally speaking, family values being the decentralization would lead to things such as abortion that don't strengthen the proliferation of children and the strength of families. Okay, I'm following that. The one thing that I don't understand would be when it comes to this decentralization, this having fewer children, having maybe a weaker family structure. If you have it within the context of free association where you have these different communities who are able to kind of branch off and do this own thing and maybe have lower birth rates, how would that fundamentally undermine the system or the structure itself where you would have these other communities that might be having more kids or different rates of kids? So as for how it would undermine the structure, realistically the downfall of civilization argument in three generations is a little too far. I think it's coming more to the we deviate back from the nap and refer back to a state. And I think over enough time I'd be right that society would collapse as we started not proliferating children enough. I think as far as returning back to the nap, it goes back to the Lou Rocco quote I stated, if we cannot pass our ideas to our children, our society is doomed. Obviously we can, but I'm presuming that the nap is taking our anti-egalitarian stances into condition. And in reality, there are going to be people who are more pro-nap and there are going to be people who are less pro-nap. And I think in the society where we are allowed to flourish with less pro-family rights, I think those such people will be more likely to get their ideas through. They will be perhaps more pro-nap. I don't know what you would call it. There will still be disagreements within this society. And I think the people with the less pro-family rights will have more success. I think it will lead to less than birth rates. And in such, there will be like there is today. I mean, I'm calling out the wonderful Felicia who has three amazing children and her children are going to lead society one day. However, her children are in the minority and I imagine that in Auburn, Alabama, we don't have our ideas of the nap being passed on to the children very well. I think it will be very safe to assume that within three generations, there's a tight window and I'll give that. But I think over time, as family rights started to dissipate, that pushing forward of the ideas that matter, the people with bad ideas sell really well. They sell really well. And if we don't have strong families, there's no way to protect our good ideas because like Misa said, you protect the ideas of private property through having strong families. Maybe a question for Anthony is what sort of mechanism do you envision might arise with just the non-aggression principle in place that would allow for that value or that norm to carry on. So Connor is saying that the institution of the family will do that. Do you think that maybe we don't need such an institution or it'll just happen on its own? So when it comes to a type of mechanism that would keep or sustain these notions of non-aggression or these ideas of non-aggression, I look at it a lot in some ways from an economic perspective where if you have this system, you have a basis of non-aggression, you have an environment where pushing against that is going to come with a lot of increased costs. You're going to have to be fighting a lot more people. You're going to have to be grouping up. You're going to have to have increased costs in terms of taking on additional risk and uncertainty when it comes to trying to take advantage or pillage or force your ideas on others. So I think there's a strong economic case that would help curtail a lot of these deviations of aggression if you wanted to try to take advantage of someone. I think there's going to be a lot more costs involved in that. And I think the other part would be through voluntary association and free association, if you wanted to have these other ideas of social values or other types of ideological values, you'd still have that opportunity to do that. And if you have this basis of non-intervention, it seems like you'd have a much stronger bore kind of against that. I've got, I think, two responses to that. My first is that I, obviously I'm an Australian economist, I entirely agree that the free market would lead to the most flourishing of the subjective wants of the people. I don't necessarily think that from that economic standpoint we get to what's good for civilization because I don't think the subjective wants of the people are always what's best for civilization. And then if there's an economic incentive to go back to this and it would protect that civilization, then I just struggle with how we got here in the first place if the economic incentive was to remain free. Well, one of the things that I think about you mentioned a lot about flourishing, a free society flourishing, and I think that's a little bit different than sustaining. And I think even you would agree that in a whole bunch of different aspects people make trade-offs in terms of, okay, maybe I don't want the most economically efficient decision because there's other things that I value maybe a little bit more highly that I'd rather go ahead and pursue that and kind of have that trade-off. So I think in these cases, even if you had a situation where a free society would maybe not be as advanced and flourishing as it could be because the birth rate is around one instead of three, you would still, it would seem have that society be able to sustain itself and have those people make that trade-off of saying, these are my preferences for how I kind of want to live and exist with other people. Okay, so I may have phrased that poorly. You're right that I said flourishing and it should have been unsustainable. However, I'll take it, I agree there are trade-offs and I agree people are going to pick the things. I'm not saying economically like they'll pick what's best for their finances. I'm even saying that they will pick X, Y, and Z because it's good for their values and they think that over this and as a result they push for the values. And I'm saying their values can very well be things that are bad for civilization and that giving, I mean I come from it from obviously a Christian perspective where I believe we're a fallen race. But even from a non-Christian perspective, I think it's easy to look around the room and say we are a deeply flawed group of people. Except for me, I'm very charming and handsome. But I think if you gave this deeply flawed group of people simply don't aggress against each other and pursue your highest-ordered mean, I don't think that their highest-ordered means would be things that protect the non-aggression. I think many people would take on things that would lead to... I mean like this is an example and it's not really what I would say would be downfall, but I am a big oil guy for those who have read my summer research. And as much as I'd love to believe that in a world if we just suddenly didn't have a government tomorrow, people would throw the windmills out the window. I think that the education's already been done as such where... Or even not already been done as such. There are people smarter than me who would make arguments against that. And I don't think just because that... Let's say for the sake of argument that my opinion is right. I know it's... I'm some dumb moron. But for the sake of argument, my take on energy is right. And that's going to be the best for society. There will still be these people in the non-aggression principle pushing for other energy sources for whatever their highest order... They think it's good for the environment. They think it's good for financial reasons. And at the end of the day, they will pick things that will be the downfall of civilization. I for the sake of this debate say that it's opposing strong family values. But I don't think the fact that they have the opportunity to pick things they value more means they will pick things that will not lead against civilization. Just to kind of build on that a little bit. You mentioned that the society is kind of with these harmful social values or ideas in particular when it comes to child rearing. And it seems like you're talking about these societies having fewer children and still being able to promote and pursue and push these ideas on others. But one of the things I'm curious about is if you have these other communities where they have a higher children proliferation rate and they have these more socially beneficial values that you would think of a family traditions and everything like that. What mechanism or how do you see the communities with higher birth rates and higher children being subsumed by these communities with fewer children and fewer family values? How do you see them as coming in some type of a position or some type of a way of threatening a free society? I'd look a lot at today. I think the people who have good values are passing them on to their children better than most. Better than all. I'll say better than all. However, at the same time, I'd say that they're losing. They're losing that across the board. And it's that things like schools will still exist and no matter what the free society is, your kindergarten teacher will have more influence or at least as much influence on your kid as you do. Luckily, there are very wise kindergarten teachers of the world like Mr. Mortell. However, at the end of the day, there will still be people without the strength of a family being the integral to society who are the kids are with their kindergarten teacher eight hours a day being influenced towards things that are not inherently anti-NAP but like Mises said, things like the destruction of the family that go hand in hand with the later destruction of the NAP. So when it comes to the kindergarten teacher who's teaching the kids and the family, one of the things that I think about in a free society would once again be free association. And it would seem like one of the problems that we have today is a lack of free association. There's a lot of government involvement, a lot of intervention in these public schools that I think lead to these types of outcomes where you have this kindergarten teacher telling your kids all kinds of stuff that you don't want them to know. But I think in a free society, if you're able to have those levels of free association, the kindergarteners who you seek out are going to be much more in line with those values. And if you're seeking out kindergarten teachers who are more pro-family, pro-value, and you're having more kids, it seems like you could, in a lot of ways, have a strong kind of barrier against maybe those other schools who aren't teaching their kids that and who are having fewer kids. I actually don't totally disagree with you there. But where I'd go a little different is I don't think the NAP alone will lead to the schools teaching those values. And I think at the end of the day, I loved with all my heart being a kindergarten teacher. It was the best experience of my life. But if I had a family of my own, I simply wouldn't be doing it. That's an unfortunate reality. I think any scenario where there's schools, by its nature, are going to be someone like me who's some 26-year-old moron. So I don't know why we would expect the teachers to be good just because we had free association. We could expect some things that would be good for homeschool options. We could expect better than we have today. In fact, I firmly believe that if either Anthony or I were correct, we'd be in a significantly better world than we are today. So I do think we would see better things. But I don't see why we would expect the schools to teach values like that. And part of our debate is that we agree that these teachers are teaching the non-aggression principle. I don't want to pretend I'm picking someone of today arguing. It's a teacher who has accepted the non-aggression principle. But I don't know why we would expect them not to teach certain things like, again, referring back to my Mises argument, that would inevitably lead to questioning and taking away from the non-aggression principle. I don't know why we should expect them to teach these things just because of the freedom of association. Yeah, I'm not necessarily sure I'm just kind of de facto expecting them to pursue the right kinds of teaching. I guess one of the ways that I kind of approach it or look at it is one of pluralism, where you have a lot of different people with a lot of different ideas on family, on religion, on how to bring up children. And the way that I kind of see it is within this framework, if you have non-aggression, these people who have all of these different ideas are able to branch off and kind of raise and live in their kind of ways the way that they would want. And I think there's a little bit of a self-selection process where the people who want the correct or the types of values that they think are correct for a kindergarten or a teacher are going to be seeking out and moving to those communities and remaining in those communities. So it seems like it's not so much that they will just happen to be teaching these things, but that it's going to be a little bit more of a selection process. I know you're not a hoppa guy, but with this pluralism you're talking about, look somewhat like covenant communities, I'm trying to understand what you're going at here, totally. It probably would be a little bit similar, I guess one of the things that I think about is that voluntary association aspect where you can have a variety of different views, even if you wanted to have a type of communal ownership within a framework of property rights. I think you can have a lot of these views and a lot of these ideas kind of isolated and you can maintain them and even have them flourish within these communities while still allowing other people to kind of go and associate elsewhere. What we can agree on just before I get this question is there are ideas that would cripple society like communism. So I'm going to say there's free association. What would you think the standard of failure in these communities for where, what do you think? I'm trying to think how to phrase this. As communities outright failed, what would that actually look like? Would it just be people moving away or would we see these communities in this pluralist society straight up just collapse? What do you expect in that? I'm open to either. I could see them as people moving away voluntarily and kind of selecting for other values but I could also see it as these little communities in and of themselves completely disintegrating or collapsing or everyone dies in these particular areas but the failure of these little communities would be in a context of a variety of other communities where you have not necessarily all communities with family values but you can have other types of values, other types of views within this kind of framework. So I see it as... I could kind of see it a little bit as both. With that we'll go to the concluding remarks. Oh, sorry. Whatever you're going to say, you can save it for the conclusion. So we'll have Anthony go first. Since he spoke first, we'll allow the second person to also have the final word. All right, so thank you again, Connor, for this amazing exchange, this amazing conversation. I love it. It's great to be able to kind of present some of our late night after our Rothbard Village discussions to everyone else. It's going to get a little bit of taste for some of the things that we talk about. Also, once again, I want to thank the Mises Institute. They're an absolutely amazing organization for students like us. They've done a great thing keeping this institute an amazing museum, a collection of books and there's really a great opportunity for young scholars and other scholars who are well within their work. So I really, really appreciate them. To conclude, I really just want to reiterate that non-aggression principle or non-aggression in general is sufficient to sustain a free society. The two main reasons why are because it offers protection from bad actors through this mechanism of increased cost of coercion relative to cooperation. And it also protects society from social harmful behaviors through this process of free association of being able to kind of let people self-select, do their own thing. And if that in particular little community or even a big community falls or fails or undermines, you still have this framework of non-aggression and property where other communities and other people are living with a potentially wide variety of views not necessarily limited to something like family values or religious outlook or a progressive social outlook or something like that. To wrap up, I really just kind of want to go through a couple of quotes. I love Connors' use of quotes. I think they're really, really great. There's a couple of quotes from Lou Rockwell that I also really like. He obviously is a little bit more, I think, on Connors' side, so I don't want to be taking him out of context. But he does make some really good criticisms of a lot of the left libertarians who want to kind of argue a lot of these ideas as well and kind of say non-aggression is not enough. We need more socially progressive ideas, socially progressive values. And I think a lot of Lou's criticisms or I think his response is relevant and applicable to this debate in this context where we're talking about whether or not more is needed to sustain this free society. So one of the first things he says is that he just mentions there's various schools of thought that culminate in the principle of non-aggression. So there's a wide variety of different ways that different people can arrive and reach at this principle of non-aggression. One of the things that he mentions is he says libertarians are unsuited to the thought-control business. I'm not accusing Conor of that but relative to just in the context of the quote, I think it's nice. He says it's difficult enough to try to persuade people to adopt views dramatically opposed to what they've been taught throughout their lives. If we can persuade people of non-aggression, we should be delighted. There is no need to complicate things by arbitrarily imposing a slate of regime-approved opinions to the core teaching of our philosophy. And once again, I'm not saying Conor is giving regime-approved. If anything, he's giving the opposite of regime-approved. But still, I think that applies where, really, the focus, the emphasis is just on non-aggression. If we can get people to accept that, that really should be the main emphasis that we should be focused and working on. And lastly, the libertarian position is not merely the state, that the state is a moral evil, but that human liberty is a tremendous moral good. Human beings ought to interact with each other as a basis of reason, their distinguishing characteristic, rather than with hangman and with guns, which Conor and I both agree. And when they do so, the results by a welcome happenstance are rising living standards, an explosion in creativity and technological advance and peace, even in the world's partially capitalist societies, hundreds of millions if not billions of people have been liberated from miserable, soul-crushing conditions of hand-to-mouth existence in exchange for a far more meaningful, fulfilling life. So I really believe that these foundations of non-aggression, private property rights will really be enough to sustain this free society. And one last thing I do kind of want to mention is, of course, I love Walter Block. He's one of my favorite libertarian scholars, economists out there. And one of the things that he just kind of briefly mentions in touching on topics related to this is he says, suppose, for the sake of argument, that Conor is right, what are these specific values, like family values, that are very important? What does that mean? Are there any logical implications that follow from this? Does this mean that we should associate specifically with some people and push out and remove ourselves from other people? Does this mean we should open ourselves up to particular types of ideas or we should reject other ideas for the sake of this? And I would argue, and I think he argues as well, that none of this logically follows, that we had these particular values or ideas that were necessary and important to sustain the society. It doesn't really tell us what we should do, how we should treat other people today, or how we should kind of carry on our lives in the moment. Thank you very much. All right, well, I have nothing left to say. I was told that I can't just get up and beat Anthony with a copy of For a New Liberty and ask, where's the nap to save you now? That's all I had written down for my conclusion. But I'll get inside and thank Anthony. Anthony and I have been having this debate since Mises U 2021. All you guys have been sitting around at the hotel arguing until four in the morning about various things. I mean, that's how Anthony and I met. We've become best friends through this very argument. So thank you very much for a fantastic, an absolutely fantastic debate. With that, I also like the approach that Anthony took of taking someone who generally agrees with him and taking him out of context. So I would like to turn to a man that Anthony has spoken quite fondly of named Walter Block. For those of you who don't know Walter Block, Walter Block is quite a proponent of thin libertarianism, of nap-only libertarianism. Now, Walter Block has claimed positive mention of free enterprise, capitalism, profits, et cetera, will be severely punished by law in the free society in some places. He doesn't claim it will happen. However, he says it's most likely that there will be places where such beliefs are actively punished by the local law. My last question I wanted to get in was of Anthony's, if these societies literally die, is that not really an incentive for other people to turn from it, but I didn't get my questions fine. But with Block claiming that it's likely that such places would have people outright proliferating the ideas opposed to everything we believe in in the free society, Hans Hermann Habba has retorted with a all-too-well-known quote that such people should be physically removed, so to speak. Block's response to this is that he fully agrees with Habba that the views of the Democrats, the Communists, the queer study theorists, et cetera, are, quote, very harmful for civilization. But he goes on to say that physically removing some people from society, if one is to maintain a libertarian order, is erroneous from the perspective of correct libertarian theory. He's right, because herein lies the problem. He leaves us with two options. Either we accept this is true, and we are going to have to take an erroneous libertarian, or let's take an action that is erroneous in libertarian theory, or we have to accept the ideas that destroy libertarian theory. Like you said, ideas of vanishing by law, free enterprise, capitalism, and profits, and even talk of such things. However, luckily I have a solution. And that is that we don't turn necessarily to the government, but that in the same way we push for the non-aggression principle, we push for ideas that protect the non-aggression principle in this society, and that we have these strong virtues that support them. So I'm going to turn the block one more time, because Walter Block also likes to say that every libertarian gets one exception. So I want you to take one moment and really think about what your one exception to libertarian law is. And I don't mean the joke, I have too slow in the left lane should be shot. I mean, really what your one exception would be. Perhaps you agree with me, and it'd be something that I'd have said. Perhaps you think I'm genuinely evil for everything I've set up here, and people like me will lead to the downfall of the free society. But whatever your one exception is, take a minute and think about it, it's presumably the proliferation of some virtue, or the banishment of some vice. Ask yourself whatever this virtue or vice you're thinking of, what would be the result of this in a society only led by the nap? Would this virtue really proliferate, and would this vice really be abandoned? Now many of you are probably thinking of things that we have great answers to, that these things would be abandoned by. But at the end of the day, the reason you're thinking to yourself, whatever it is you've thought of, is your libertarian exception is because you don't wholly believe that whatever this one exception is would be found in the nap. So I ask yourself to really take these virtues and vice that you think, and additionally, I'd like you to believe my own arguments, take these into mind, and I'm not calling for you to give up libertarianism or even to make a libertarian exception. I'm not saying we need to have a state come and force whatever virtue you believe in or that I believe in. I'm saying that there are virtues that the nap cannot sustain without. I'm not calling for the nap minus and saying we shouldn't celebrate people turning to liberty. I'm calling for the nap plus, saying we need the nonaggression principle to call for this libertarian society, but we can't stop there because we need to call for further virtue beyond that. Thank you all very much and have an absolutely fantastic day. Okay, so please scan the QR code for the post-debate poll. We'll use the difference in responses from the pre-debate to the post-debate poll to decide on a winner. And also, we will pass around a microphone for some questions from the audience. So while you're taking the post-debate poll, we'll have a microphone ready for people to ask questions for our debate participants. While you're taking the post-debate poll, remember I have free chocolate chips in my apartment. Howdy. So I have a question mostly for Anthony. We really use like Robinson Caruso style situations to kind of describe how a free society or like how an economy would naturally grow, right? Well, if that was accurate, then why did we create the state in the first place? If the incentives of nonaggression are that great, then why did we create a state in the first place and why would this free society not fall victim to those same incentives and just create a state all over again? Yeah, I think that's a really good question. Oh, okay. I'd probably have to think about that a little bit more, but... Can I give Anthony a lifeline? Oh, sure, please. I'm hoping you've already voted. I do agree with David's point. The one caveat I'd say just to be fair in this debate is we did assume these people have been taught the nonaggression principle, whereas previously these people had not been taught the nonaggression principle. I think the incentives that led to the state the first time would lead all over again, but I also, to be fair to Anthony, because I don't actually hate him, I wanted to throw in that. Yeah, I do think that starting from a basis of nonaggression I think is an important difference, and I think there's a lot of other... I'm not an expert on a lot of the history or anything like that, so I can't give perfect answers of how particular situations these states arose, but I do think that the fundamental framework and the ideas and the understanding of whether or not certain individuals have rights or whether or not certain forms of aggression are justified, I think we're absent in a lot of those beginning stages. This question is primarily for O'Connor, so when thinking about this question, it seemed like you could almost make an analytical or a definitional case that Anthony's position is right. If you define, for example, a free society as one in which you have resistance against the aggression, then if everyone obeys nonaggression, then you're necessarily free, right? So how would you respond to that case? If you want to vote against me for semantics, go for it, but at the end of the day, I think Anthony, we're pretty fair to each other on this that we're generally assuming people begin with the nap and I'm claiming that from accepting the nap people would deviate away from it with time. So my question is for Anthony. Anthony, let's say you have a society, right, and your society is allowing evictions in the first trimester, and O'Connor and I see this and we take our papal army and we come conquer you because you're actually committing aggression, right? We believe you to be committing aggression. One of your points was that your free society would be avoiding conflict in this regard, but it seems like there's these kind of moral gray areas on serious issues that would lead to more conflict and maybe even like a state, right, where O'Connor and I's papal army is enforcing these kinds of ideas, right? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think there's a couple of different ways that I look at it. One of the first ways is by accepting nonaggression from the offset, from the start, one of the implications of that is non-intervention and foreign policy. And so I think there's a lot of situations where people look around the world, look at other communities, and say what they're doing is wrong, what they're doing is evil, what they're doing shouldn't be allowed, but from that libertarian perspective, or at least a perspective of nonaggression, we recognize limitations in intervening and getting involved in a lot of those conflicts and a lot of those issues. I also think in those ways, the costs of coercion I think would come into play as well. I definitely think there could be different groups, different bandit groups, or moral crusader type groups who want to take it upon themselves to try and go and liberate people or do these different types of things. But if you are going at it through a coercive, violent type of a manner, you're going to be taking on a whole bunch of increased costs. This could be a trade-off that you might want to make, but I think that in the long run, these costs are going to be greater than the costs of everyone else who's trying to cooperate who are saying, look, I disagree with you on evictionism. I think that's an immoral evil thing, but I'm not going to intervene. Maybe I'll trade with you from afar or I'm not going to trade with you at all, but I think those interactions, those exchanges, are going to win over those exchanges of the ones who want to impose violence by that. I also just, since I shut down a question against me for being semantic, I do want to say, Anthony and I in our canon RV discussions did accept, I'm not calling for a papal army to attack Anthony, except in Minecraft. Join me in applauding our debate participants one last time. And the winner of the debate based on survey results is the affirmative, Anthony Cesario. It's rigged, votes came in overnight. He has won one of the Rothbard Silver Rounds. Thanks everyone.