 Our next speaker is David Friedman, who you've met already. But I'm going to, in this case, sort of break my rule about short introductions, because I have some interesting stories I can tell about David. And also because David's talk is the last one today, and that leaves a lot of leeway in terms of running over. I met David over 10 years ago, although he doesn't remember. And in fact, I bumped into him at Libertarian Functions off and on over these 10 years, and he hasn't remembered any of them. And so what I've done is I've secretly designed this conference so that in the future he will never forget me. And for instance, just one part of my plot, it wasn't George, it wasn't Mike Grossberg, it was me. I was the one that switched the debate topic on David from the, what I thought, less interesting strategic question to the more interesting fundamental question. The first time I met David was at an SIL conference. They were holding them in Philadelphia. This was either around the time of the split in Young Americans for Freedom. This was the time when Roy Childs, before Roy Childs had sported a beard and before Roy Childs had gotten quite so rotund and was giving his speeches about statism and the rise, a big business in the rise of the American statism. This was the period when Dirk Pearson was going under the name of Sky Darius and recommending that the best way to spread libertarianism was to give acid to third graders. The conference that David spoke at, he was quite a sight. At this time, he had much longer hair than he has now. Out quite a bit further, he had this huge medallion, it must have weighed a ton, that he wore around his neck and I'm not exactly sure what the medallion said. He looked outrageous, he got up to begin his speech, said something to the effect that it was going to be a short speech because he preferred question and answers, they were more fun, and then got up on top of the counter and sat cross-legged and gave his talk. The interesting thing about that talk was that von Mises was in the audience at the same time. I don't know whether it was David's appearance or whether what David ended up saying during the talk, but von Mises walked out much to the disconcert of Don Ernsberger and Dave Walters who had given that talk. I'm not sure whether it's that. One of the two talks I heard at this conference, David was making an economic point and he started to draw on the board a demand and supply diagram and then he turned to the audience and he said which axis is demand and which axis is supply and at the time he says I've never read any economics books or I've never taken any economics courses. But it was a good talk anyway on monopoly and the other talk he gave during that conference was entitled Problems with Libertarianism. Ten years ago. I still have it on tape. So that's the title of David's talk tonight and I'm hoping that in the intervening ten years David has come up with some solutions and some new problems and we'll find out. I think Jeff somebody should tell you that the two axes on that diagram are called price and quantity and that supply and demand are both relations between price and quantity. I started arguing Libertarianism something well over 20 years ago when I was in high school and at the time everything seemed very clear and neat and I made all sorts of great desert island arguments about who had the right to this and that and a few years later my best friend in high school who I spent all of my study halls arguing these things with told me he'd become a Libertarian very satisfactory and at the time it seemed to me that the economics was reasonably clear and if you're only a little bit cleverer you could prove that government was of no use for anything at all and over the years the arguments have seemed to me to grow more and more complicated and the results less and less clear and the result is that I find it irritating to discover that a large fraction of the population of Libertarians is that everything is very easy and that we really know all the answers and it starts out with a equals a or some similar axiom and then with a few simple steps that any intelligent person could see if he only wasn't blinded by his statist preconceptions we end up with the answer to all problems in the world. I guess another thing that makes me irritated with this is that I have for the last few years been a professional economist and the fact that I have never taken for credit an economics course in my life and I've discovered that there are quite a lot of bright people out there who have thought more about economics than let us say 99.8% of Libertarians and don't agree with us about everything and have good legitimate reasons for disagreeing with some of our conclusions so I think the world is a complicated place and I think it is a good experience for Libertarians simply to be told about some problems. So this is essentially the same speech that I gave 10 years ago and I'm glad somebody still remembers it. The speech will not contain any answers at all. If you come to hear my talk at Denver you'll get a little fragmentary beginning of an answer to some of the questions but not very much of one because they're hard questions and I think that George should get some credit for having spent the last hour with one counted one hard question one which most of us like to ignore because it's too hard so all I'll be doing is giving you problems and some of them are going to be problems where as far as I can see Libertarian ideas as current Libertarians understand them give us no answer at all to an important problem others are cases where Libertarian ideas as Libertarians understand them and to give us a perfectly clear answer that none of us is willing to accept or believe in others are cases where there seems to be a serious conflict between what the Libertarian answer seems to be and other things we believe in are value and it's not at all clear what the right way of resolving that conflict is and others are problems with the foundations of our Libertarian arguments on which everything else is built and then after I talk about that about how to avoid thinking about hard problems so that really the full title is hard problems and how to avoid them I'll start with one of the ones to which I think we don't have any answer or at least most of us don't come to Denver and that's the question of what rights you have against a criminal criminal comes into your house and he steals your television set now all Libertarians agree your entitled to take the television set back Bob LeFave would presumably say only very gently but essentially all of us agree you can take the television set back however it requires a very elementary consideration of the incentives in that situation to realize that if all you ever do is take the television set back theft is going to be a rather attractive profession because sometimes you catch the thief and take the television set back and sometimes you don't catch the thief and don't take the television set back so heads he wins and tails he breaks even and that's a pretty good gamble so that suggests that it might be nice to do something to the thief in addition to taking the television set back and then the problem is what how much are you entitled to do I think very many of us very few of us feel that if you steal a nickel from me I'm entitled to enslave you for the rest of your life and yet short of that how in principle do we decide what the appropriate punishment is now some people would say well that's very easy the appropriate punishment is whatever is necessary to deter thieves but of course an economist will tell you that that sort of all or nothing category isn't very useful the higher the punishment is the more thieves will be deterred the less time and trouble you have to take guarding your property and so forth now other people think that you can get your answer by waving your hands ten years ago as Jeff may remember a member of the audience who is a disciple of one of the more prominent libertarian thinkers came up and said oh that's an easy problem Murray solved that years ago you get to punish him with exactly the amount of what he's taken if he takes a hundred dollars from you you take a hundred dollars and then another hundred dollars back which my answer is well two is a nice number I mean so is three so is one and a half I mean saying that you can invent an answer doesn't give me any reason to believe it besides what if you only catch a tenth of the thieves if you only catch a tenth of the thieves then stealing a hundred dollars with one chance in ten of having to give two hundred back is still a pretty good deal so that's one example of what seems to me as a hard and interesting problem if you like you can think of it as either a moral problem or an economic problem but it's a problem in rights simply when somebody violates somebody else's rights what claim does the victim have and please remember it or maybe I'll it'll become clearer as I go on that violation of rights is not merely something done by terrible evil wicked people it's something that any of us might do by mistake that any of us might do when we believe the circumstances are one thing and they're another and the same question then arises you might say of course that if I've only violated your rights by mistake then all you have to do is take the television set back it was just I made a mistake I thought it was my television set but of course an economist will tell you that how much trouble I go to to avoid making mistakes may have something to do with whether or not I receive some punishment when I make them well let me give you another problem in the same general ballpark and this problem is best illustrated by a simple story was a story apparently on television about a man who was sitting at home waiting to hear who had been stealing his firewood now the rest of the story goes as follows that's the punchline the rest of the story was that he had a pile of firewood and it had been disappearing and he tried keeping an eye out for whoever was stealing it and didn't manage to catch the guy and maybe he put a fence around it or something and that didn't work so eventually he decided on a rather simple and elegant solution to the problem he took a stick of firewood and he drilled a hole in it and he put a stick of dynamite in the hole and he put the stick of firewood back on his wood pile and the next day it disappeared and then he sat at home waiting to hear who had been stealing his firewood now it's a very clever solution but some of us may feel that capital punishment is a little bit extreme for petty theft and that raises again the same sort of questions given that you're entitled to defend your rights just what are you entitled to do to defend your rights are you entitled to machine gun people for trespassing on your lawn for example well most of us would say no are you not entitled to hurt people at all well that would seem to leave you pretty nearly defenseless but I'm entitled to do how do you find out? do you just sort of wave your hand and say well I can invent an answer I'm entitled to do as much damage to him as he was going to do to me well in that case the dynamite is out but so are practically any serious defense is eliminated by that method so that's a second problem for you to think about in my list of problems let me give you a third one one which is related to this it's an old sort of puzzle for people who like to argue moral arguments but it's also one of some current relevance it's what's usually called the human shield problem the bad guy grabs up an innocent victim pulls out a gun points it at you and starts shooting or asking for your money or whatever you have a gun but if you shoot back you might kill the innocent shield are you entitled to do it now instead of elaborating on that problem I would like to suggest that there is a form of that problem which is closely involved with arguments about foreign policy and particular about nuclear deterrence that is to say suppose it is the case suppose it is the case that there is no practical way of preventing somebody from blowing you up with nuclear weapons except by threatening to blow him up now maybe it's not the case but I don't see anything in the nature of reality that makes it impossible that it should be the case so let's think about that hypothesis and just to make things simple suppose that the somebody who wants to blow you up is the government of the Soviet Union and you are an American citizen who's a libertarian and wants to do the right thing and let's suppose to avoid a bunch of irrelevant issues that we don't have an American government we've got a private protection agency in America it's financed by voluntary contributions and the question is should it use these contributions to buy nuclear missiles and aim them at Moscow and I will suppose for the sake of argument that there is not a viable alternative that is to say if the Russians come and fight you in the streets they will win because they will blow up with their nuclear weapons anything that they want to and they will use that as a threat to make all the Americans turn against you because they don't want to be blown up and so forth and so on I don't want to get into a long thing on foreign policy I just want to set up my hypothetical case and now somebody points out to you that if you have nuclear missiles aimed at Moscow and if you ever use them you are going to be killing a couple of million Russian civilians who are totally innocent who are far more victims of the Soviet government than you are at the moment and who merely have the misfortune to live next to where the Soviet rulers live and if you use your nuclear missiles to blow up Russian missile silos that radiation will kill another 100,000 innocent Russian civilians who are in no way responsible for the aggression of their government even if we suppose their government is going to commit aggression and you are then left with the interesting problem do you say I'm sorry about it but I've got to defend my freedom the only way to do it is by using these missiles and therefore if necessary I hope it won't come to it but if necessary I will kill the human shields I will blow up Moscow just if that's the only way of defending myself or do you say no, that's an immoral act the ends never justify the means those individuals have a right not to be aggressed against unfortunately that means we have to surrender to the Soviet Union a little unpleasant choice I can't say I like either alternative for anybody who does like the alternative maybe I should expand a bit on why they shouldn't like whichever alternative they think they like maybe I suppose the alternative of surrendering to the Soviets maybe is obviously unattractive but let's suppose you say well it's alright I don't like the idea of killing these people but it is a human shield problem and it's the only way I can defend myself and I'm not after all trying to aggress against them they just happen to be getting in the line of fire so to speak so it's alright well then the next question I ask is if you're entitled to violate other people's rights in defending yourself if that's the only way of doing it suppose you're fighting a tank war and there's somebody with a farm in the way and that person for his own reason says sorry I know that you would like to move your army across my land in fact you have to do that in order to stop the bad guys over there but I don't give you permission now it happens the bad guys aren't libertarians so they don't have to worry about this problem so they can maneuver their army wherever they like but you keep on being stopped every time you run into a no trespassing sign so you lose the war alright so that convinces you even more clearly that these human shields have to be pushed out of the way but let's keep going because suppose somebody tells you look in order to defend the US we need taxes now it's true that collecting taxes may seem to violate the rights of the other American citizens who are sharing North America with you but if it's the only way of defending your rights well we've already established that it's alright to blow people up with nuclear bombs if they're in your way when you're trying to defend your rights and taking a thousand or two a year from your fellow citizens is much less serious than blowing people up with nuclear bombs so that's alright now let us suppose just to be hypothetical that somebody argued persuasively as in some circumstances you can argue persuasively that a draft is a very important and necessary thing for national defense now of course you wouldn't want to violate the rights of those people you were drafting but if it's the only way of defending your rights now my point in raising these things is not to say therefore we should have a draft it is to make you a little less sure that the arguments you use against people who want a draft or who want taxation or want whatever it is are all that absolutely clear and cut and dry I have a feeling that a lot of your confidence comes from the fact that you believe as I believe that we don't face this problem that you believe as I believe that in fact the US can be defended without a draft but think about the problem suppose you believe the contrary suppose you really had to face the choice do I aggress against other people or do I surrender to a retaliatory dictatorship then you have a hard problem anyway I'll leave you with that and go on to the next so far I've been talking about areas where it seems to me that libertarian theory doesn't give us a very clear answer now let me talk about a subject I raised briefly last night namely areas where it seems to me that libertarian theory as most of us understand it does give us a clear answer unfortunately and I'll take a particular part of libertarian theory and that's the idea of absolute property rights that almost all of us believe in absolute property rights we feel that I own something, it's mine you're not entitled to say to me well you don't really need it so I'll take it you're not entitled to say to me well I'll take it and pay you fair compensation most of us feel that trespassing should be forbidden not merely punished punished only if you happen to be unsuccessful in forbidding it and one of the arguments we often use for that is the argument which says that there is no way of finding out how valuable something is to somebody other than his willingness to sell it so that if I have a piece of land and the government wants to use it to build a highway on, the argument goes if the government can get me to sell it to them or whoever else is building the road can get me to sell it to them that's fine, that demonstrates that it's worth more to them than to me but on the other hand if I'm not willing to sell the argument goes there's no way they can find out how much it's worth to me no way of judging values externally from somebody and therefore you just have to accept my judgment that it's more valuable to me, it's my property very popular argument, we probably all of us who do much arguing have made it from time to time we now come to my trespassing photons raised last night I have a piece of property and you have a piece of property five miles away and I inform you that you do not have my permission to turn on your lights and you say well why do I need your permission to turn on my lights and I say well you know I've got that piece of property, I don't live there I don't use any lights there, I just own it and every time you turn on your lights some of that light gets onto my property I could demonstrate with a telescope and a camera that some photons from your light bulb are straying onto my property and you say yeah but they're not doing any damage are they and I say damage, that's for me to decide there's no way of determining how much I value not having photons on my property except by what I say after all the argument that all you libertarians are all used to using for absolute property rights is that it's not a matter of whether it does damage or not it belongs to me and I get to decide what does damage I get to decide how my land is used just as most of us would say most of the time you can't trespass across my land and then explain that you didn't harm anything I get to say, no you don't get on, it's my land so I should be able to say the same thing to photons and of course it's not just photons when you breathe you exhale carbon dioxide now it just so happens that I don't like having carbon dioxide straying on my land now I don't mind your breathing, in now you I should say that there might be a very practical reason for my taking this position because of course as a reasonable man I would be willing to sell you the right to breathe out so we seem to be in a position where the arguments that we're fond of using in other contexts lead to the conclusion that you cannot breathe out without permission from every landowner on the planet maybe the continent that's not a conclusion that any of us believe in or like and yet it would seem to follow from the kind of arguments that we think are nice clear watertight arguments that lead to places that we want to go give you another one of the same sort the same situation except instead of a small effect making a small probability of an effect most of us would say that I am not entitled to smash your window even if I'm willing to pay for it am I entitled to fly an airplane when I take off in my airplane I know there is some very small probability that I'll crash there's a very small probability that I will first depart from my flight plan unintentionally and go 200 miles in the wrong direction and then crash I am inflicting without permission a risk of injury on everybody within 200 miles of the airport I take off from I'm assuming an airplane with a cruising range of only 200 miles which is modest does that mean I can't take off? does it mean I can take no action at all which inflicts any risk on anybody else now you may say oh but that's not the same thing as deliberately throwing a ball through someone's window and I say well I don't see the difference it's true in one case I'm certain of the consequence in the other I'm not but in each case I am getting a benefit being able to fly from here to New Orleans or whatever at a cost to you I am forcibly imposing on you a rather small chance of having an airplane fall through your roof I'm doing that without your permission I am aggressing against you and why is there a fundamental moral difference between aggressing against you with 90% chance of it turning out and aggressing against you with .0001% chance of it turning out isn't the principle the same and as we are representatives of the party of principle shouldn't we immediately enjoin all airport flights I should say I was reminded a bit of this when I heard John Goffman arguing with regard to nuclear power that it didn't really matter how much radiation reactors put out any radiation at all was trespass any radiation at all was the initiation of coercion and therefore as libertarians we had to be opposed by it to reactors and I was a little disturbed when later on in the same speech in the question period somebody asked him if it wasn't true that burning coal created more radiation than nuclear plants when you allow for this and that and he said no that wasn't true that coal created substantially less radiation than nuclear plants and it didn't seem to occur to him that the question of whether it was more or less was irrelevant if he really believed what he had just been saying 20 minutes before and that indeed if he really believed that there was a strong case for saying that he had to stop breathing alright so that gives you a second category of problems to worry about George got disturbed some time ago by my using the term catastrophic for these problems he apparently believed I meant that these problems posed a catastrophic threat to moral philosophy which was of course a very threatening thing to say to George I didn't mean that at all I just meant that I thought not being allowed to breathe out was sort of a serious problem let me now go on to some problems with the foundations of the libertarian argument and the foundations of the libertarian argument at least as it stated have a good deal to do with property in particular when I forbid you to let those photons trespass that's because I claim that I own this piece of land and the business about flying the airplane has something to do with crashing onto your property though also crashing into you could be a problem where do we get all this property well the libertarians say that's easy we get property by creating things we take the primal stuff of the universe and mold it with our hands yeah but there's only a certain amount of that primal stuff and the kind called lamb we didn't create it was just there so it turns out that one of the most important kinds of property property and land cannot be justified on what we all sort of intuitively feel is the ultimate justification for property rights namely I own myself and my labor and that which proceeds from my labor is mine the land doesn't proceed from your labor so we cook up all sorts of stories about you mixed your labor with the land or you were the first guy to draw a boundary around it or you were the first guy to look down and say mine or somehow or other you got it I don't mind sort of telling pretty stories they're better than not doing anything at all however I'd like to point out that if you're going to claim strong moral conclusions you would better have something more than a story that could be told in any of 73 different ways because those different ways might lead to different conclusions you might discover that according to some of the theories of initial acquisition of property rights your house wasn't yours it belonged to somebody else and that you were the trespasser let me expand a little more on that aside from the first problem of how we get to own land there is a second problem and that is that a very large part of the land in the world is stolen property probably most of it let's take England perhaps as a clearer case than the US in the case of England presumably most of the more attractive pieces of real estate were settled by 1066 in 1066 there was a rather abrupt readjustment of property titles similar readjustments occurred from time to time during the next 900 years now you are sitting in your house in England which you have let us suppose the good American tourist rented from some Englishman and the guy breaks in the door and you pull out your gun because you're an American and you know how to defend yourself and you're a libertarian and you say you're violating my property rights and he says really why is this property yours? and you say oh I rented it and he said well who did you rent it for? and I said oh Mr. Smith the guy who owns it and he said well why does he own it? he said oh he bought it from somebody who owned it well how did he get it? well you traced it back about 15 times oh he got it from somebody who stole it well I think you ought to worry about it a little bit now if we get to America we get into the question of whether you should give the land back to the Indians and that's an interesting question but I've got enough other problems to deal with so I'll skip that one for the moment but I do want to make the point of why it matters we are again we're claiming rights so most of us would claim that when the thief breaks into your house if there's no other way of dealing with him you're entitled to shoot him you're certainly entitled to hit him over the head well I could think of some very plausible versions of a libertarian definition of property rights derivation of property rights in which you're not after all I say to the thief look the reason this land is mine is that I put value into it I or the guy I bought it from he built the house and so forth and the thief says he's actually not a thief I don't know if he's a thief he says look you're perfectly right I am not entitled to use your roof to keep the rain off of and I'm not entitled to use your land to grow grain on because those are all things which are the result of your labor and your labor belongs to you but at the moment all I'm using this land to do is to walk across now it's true I'm walking on your floor but I'd much rather the floor were there because then I wouldn't have had to climb up the steps so that insofar as your labor is not anything to me it has simply made things a little more inconvenient for me all I'm doing is taking a shortcut across your land I could have done that before you cleared the forest before you built the house therefore the use I'm making of that property does not owe a single thing to your labor and what are you doing pointing that gun at me well I would suggest that if you believe you're entitled to point a gun at a thief even if the thief won't be a libertarian moral philosopher and therefore won't make all these arguments you ought to think about whether you really have a firm foundation for your belief that you own that house or the land or anything else other than yourself which most of us feel comfortable with though we could make arguments about that too but let's not let me go on to another fairly broad category and it's one which economists are very concerned about and other libertarians don't seem to worry about very much it's what's called the public good problem the importance of the public good problem is that as a rule economists in general and libertarian economists in particular believe that there are strong arguments for saying that if something is desirable then under a free market it'll happen if I value automobiles somebody will build me an automobile if I value food someone will grow food and we therefore feel comfortable saying we just have an unhindered free market no government intervention will have a good no functioning society we won't starve to death we won't go naked for no clothes being made and so forth and the public good problem involves a particular special sort of good for which the normal arguments that lead to this conclusion don't hold what's a public good a public good does not mean a good that is produced by government there are lots of public goods that are produced privately and there are lots of private goods that are produced by government now I should say economists use slightly different definitions among themselves so I'll give you the version I use it won't be quite identical to what Samuelson would use a public good is a good such that if it is produced it will become available to the members of a pre-existing group of people or in other words it is a good such that the producer cannot control who gets it I don't mean shouldn't control I mean can't control and I can give you a very simple example starting with a public good that happens to be provided privately and that's a radio broadcast normally when we produce goods we can say to individuals if you want it pay for it if you don't pay for it you don't get it if I make a radio broadcast it is impractical or at least has been impractical up to very recently for me to control who hears it and therefore I have to find some other way of selling it now that's a particularly interesting case because there turns out to be a very very clever market solution to providing that public good which would never have occurred to me I think if I had had to dream it up and that is you combine a public good which has a positive value to the customers and a positive cost of production with another public good which has a negative value to the customers and a negative cost of production namely advertisements you tie them together in a package and that's how you pay for it however that is so to speak an ad hoc solution it works in that particular case another public good and one which I think libertarian should be more seriously worried about is national defense I should say for those people who say we don't need a national defense because once we abolish the government we won't have a nation anymore my definition of national defense is defense against nations and that problem is going to exist after we get rid of ours now it so happens that there are serious technical difficulties when a nuclear warhead is going through space en route from Moscow to here finding out whose name is on it there is not any very good way of saying A, B and C have paid for protection so therefore all warheads aimed at them will get shot down and D, E and F where their neighbors haven't and therefore warheads aimed at them will let go by due to the difficulties in this national defense of the public good now I do not want to assert that public goods can't be produced on the market on the contrary there are quite a number of ways they can be what I do assert however is that the strong arguments which make us confident that something which is worth producing will be produced do not hold for public goods that is to say with regard to an ordinary private good one can say with some confidence if it's worth producing it will be produced with a public good you can only say maybe alright let us suppose then that there exists some particular public good where you are convinced that the answer to the maybe is no let us suppose to take what I think is the most serious problem for libertarians that national defense is such a public good that is suppose that it can't be provided except by using the government to steal money for fellow citizens and use that to pay for defense now the assertion I would make as an economist is we have no grounds for being confident that that hypothetical can't occur we have no grounds for being confident that we can defend ourselves without government we may have grounds for thinking we can do so it may be worth doing a lot of thinking about that I devoted chapter of my book to that subject but we don't have grounds for being sure confident that we can do it so then I ask you as libertarians suppose you can't suppose you can't is the proper solution to say well it's too bad we can't defend ourselves by moral means we're moral people we'll send the surrender notice to the Soviets tomorrow or is the appropriate answer to say we regret doing this friends but we've just become the IRS fork over your money so we can pay for national defense now as I say I'm not offering answers today I'm only offering problems so I'll let you stew in that one for a while while I go on to what's the part of this talk you've really been wanting to hear you should be wanting to hear by now which is how to avoid thinking about hard problems now there are a number of ways of avoiding thinking about hard problems which I have observed to be useful as I've passed through libertarian society over the last 20 years one of the most common ones is to assume or argue that the facts that create the problem don't exist thus if I offer the problem I just offered some people will say oh no no we don't have to worry about that problem the Soviets have no interest at all in attacking the US they are purely defensive people the only reason that they have all those thousands and thousands of tanks is they're afraid we're going to invade them and therefore no problem now one answer could be to for me to get sucked into an argument about the Soviet intentions I'm not terribly interested in that at the moment the right answer for me to make is maybe you're right maybe the Soviets have no such intention but suppose they did if the reason that you're opposed to taxing people is that you happen to believe the Soviets are pussycats then when you object to taxes you ought to say I'm against taxes because the Soviets are pussycats we don't need them if the reason you're against taxing people is because you're a party of principle and taxation is bad taxation is theft then you ought to be willing to say even if the Soviets aren't pussycats even if I accept all of these unpleasant hypotheses I'm still not willing to tax you well maybe you're willing to say that if you are think about it for an hour and then say it I'm not saying that I have an answer to this question I'm only saying that I think the quick and easy answers are easy ones to make in a debating context are easy ones to live in live with alright so one solution is to deny the facts now there is a solution which looks like this but isn't quite the same and that is to say not merely that the facts don't happen to be that way but there's some logical reason why they can't be that way that is a lot of libertarians are under the delusion that there exists somewhere buried in human action or capitalism the unknown ideal or somewhere a proof that the free market always solves all problems and you know I'm sorry maybe it's there I haven't found it lots of economists who are basically pro free market have looked real hard for it and I don't think any of them have found it Von Mises didn't find it Von Mises was in favor of the draft I can show you wearing human action he comes out in favor of the draft Adam Smith didn't find it Adam Smith was in favor of the navigation acts which were acts which essentially limited English commerce to English ships and the reason he was in favor of them was not for economic reasons he thought they were bad as far as England's welfare was concerned but because in case of a war with the Dutch he wanted there to be lots of trained English sailors willing to fight and it didn't do any good if they were all Dutch sailors so that you know this hidden answer isn't there I'm afraid alright so one way of avoiding these problems is to say well the facts aren't the way you say and therefore I don't have to think about the hard problem another way popular with certain segments of the Libertarian society is to call these lifeboat problems and to say this since we don't live in lifeboats we don't have to think about lifeboat problems now I guess my answer to that problem is first that whether we live in a lifeboat is an empirical question and a lot of people think we live in a spaceship after all that if suppose it turns out we do live in a lifeboat then what do you do or more generally if you claim you have a system of ethics which tells you how to act one of the things that ought to tell you how to do is what to do in a lifeboat for those of you who are not sort of in members of the running argument on this that's been going on for the last 20 years a lifeboat situation means you and eight other people are in a lifeboat adrift on the Pacific Ocean there's only a certain amount of food you have a gun are you entitled to shoot some of the other people so there'll be enough food for the rest of you does it depend who the lifeboat belongs to does it depend who the gun belongs to what if someone's trying to crawl in and he'll upset and there are a whole bunch of these problems but they're all problems that you have very very few alternatives it's life or death and it looks like violating what you would normally describe as people's rights is the only way to live now I've sometimes suspected that what's really going on in the sort of objectivist inner circle is that they all believe that when you're in a lifeboat situation you do whatever is necessary to stay alive but they'd much rather not tell the rest of us that because we might be in a lifeboat with them someday one can expand that argument a little bit further one of the problems with the objectivist derivation of ethics as I understand it is the person who says yes I agree most of the time I should respect rights but once in a while I get a really good chance to steal and it serves my life qua life to steal under those circumstances and once in a while I get this sneaking suspicion that there is something that Ein Rand isn't telling us because it's perfectly clear that it's in your rational self-interest to tell other people to respect rights all the time all right so calling it a lifeboat situation and saying that ethics don't it doesn't have to deal with lifeboat situations is a second way of avoiding such things a third way of avoiding such things is to say oh that's the old is ought dichotomy and we know that there aren't any is ought dichotomies well again why why aren't there I can think of two reasons one of them is that is always gives you an ought in other words if in order to serve your life which consists of being willing to blow up Moscow in order to keep the Russians from conquering you if in order to do that you've got to murder a bunch of innocent Russians then you ought to well all right you know if that's your view of ethics fine but in that case I wish you'd stop using all this ethical talk to hide the proposition that you ought to do whatever serves your rational self-interest another possibility is that you really believe there are no is ought problems because ultimately as George said last night and as I agreed you can't get oughts from ices therefore no proposition about what is can ever give you a should or in other words the statement that it is impossible to defend your liberty without violating the liberties of innocent Russian civilians doesn't tell you that you should violate those liberties which is perfectly true in other words you come up with the conclusion that you do what you ought to do though the skies fall fiat justicia ruet qualum as they used to say in latin let justice be done though the skies fall and I've noticed that there are very few people saying that who really believe the sky is going to fall when they do justice and maybe there are a few and if so then they are honorable people that's a legitimate position I think to hold but it's one which most of us aren't reluctant to hold and I think there is a certain element of hypocrisy when you say to somebody who disagrees with you I believe in fiat justiceium ruet qualum and therefore you're immoral for being in favor of doing this by the way the skies aren't going to fall when you do the moral thing that's pretending a kind of a moral superiority you don't really have alright well I think I've talked enough about problems and as Jeff remembered from the last time I have this general doctrine that when you're answering a question you're reasonably sure at least one person in the audience is interested in what you're talking about so I will close by telling you what is actually probably the best way of avoiding dealing with these problems and the one you will find most useful if you don't want to feel upset with the purity of your ideas and that is any of these subjects comes up change the subject I have an important announcement about a schedule change so first right now we're having an hour break if you want to panel discussion or debate you can decide yep I think abortion is a very hard problem I am not sure that I regard it as a hard libertarian problem that is to say I think that the essential issues of what is or is not a human being although they are important and interesting issues for libertarians are just as much issues for everybody else and therefore I guess my answer is it's a hard problem and I deliberately left it out on the ground that I was trying to talk specifically about what I thought were problems for libertarians within the contextual libertarian ideas I think my view of the debate is that among libertarians if society has succeeded in convincing itself that it's clear that libertarianism implies we either should or should not allow abortion and no one has done at all a good job of convincing anybody else yep what about space migration what about space migration why is that a problem it's not on our platform is it I am in favor of people yes it is there is a the Libra film we say not on our platform what would you have in our platform about space migration I mean we don't have anything in our platform about exploring the seas or inventing new computers or any of the lots of things that are hopefully going to happen in the next century but anyway yeah there's one small solution to your first problem is to have a sliding scale payback on theft if you have 10 let's say statistics are 10 thefts only one gets reported the guy that gets reported and convicted pays 10 times the rest the price goes up that is certainly an interesting idea there are a couple of difficulties with it I think the idea for those people who couldn't hear it clearly was that the appropriate way the punishment for a crime was to say that if you catch 10% of the people who steal television sets that the penalty then consists of 10 times the value of a television set is that a fair summary no not on the value of the television set but on the number of arrests and convictions I said 10 times the value I said if you catch one tenth of the people who steal that penalty is 10 times the value of what the person stole correct, yeah, I got you that's what you said, that's what I thought now I would point out two things one of them is that some people might argue that you are then punishing the guy you caught for the offense of the guy you didn't caught and that's rather unfair second I would point out that how many people you catch is not a thing given from above it's a function of how much money they catch them and are you willing to say for example that if you deliberately decide on the following policy you say that in order to save money on police we will go to very little trouble to catch criminals the result is we will only catch one criminal in 10,000 and when we catch him we will boil him in oil that being a penalty equivalent to 10,000 times the value of a television set that seems rather unsatisfactory and yet if you don't say that how do you decide how much you do or don't have to spend in catching criminals which is itself going to determine the probabilities which will itself determine the level of the punishment now I don't want to say that your suggestion is not in the right direction but only that I think it is an immensely more complicated problem than that answer suggests it is one of the things that I may be talking about in Denver next regarding your defense national defense is a public good and wouldn't people voluntarily pool their money for a cause they support such as national defense the problem with that and the general public good problem is if something is worth a thousand dollars to me and if spending a thousand dollars I get it and not spending a thousand I don't then I will surely spend a thousand dollars however suppose we have something which is worth a thousand dollars to me but whether or not I spend a thousand dollars has only a very tiny effect on whether I get it which is the case with national defense if we are trying to raise by charity a budget of 10 billion I say my thousand is a drop in the bucket if they get enough to pay for the missiles I am going to be defended whether or not I spend money on it if they don't I am throwing my money away so why bother let me repeat the argument in a slightly different form there are surely at least a hundred thousand people in the US who are basically libertarian probably more than that say a hundred thousand and I would guess that on the average those people believe that having a free society for themselves and their children is worth quite a lot more than a thousand dollars each your argument seems to imply that Ed Clark could raise a hundred million dollars that is to say that if there are a hundred thousand people each of whom values it at a thousand dollars that you ought to be able to get a hundred million for some program which has a reasonable probability of bringing freedom now I am oversimplifying you can see the logic of the argument which is that it's one thing to go to somebody with a car and say look you value this car if you give me the money you get the car it's a very different thing to go to him and say here is something whether you get it has almost nothing to do with what you do why don't you give me some money for it and that's the problem with public goods in general that's why they are a hard problem well David I found your talk stimulating I was going to ask a question that was or pose a question that was pretty much the same as the lady just asked I think you create a false problem with your talking about provision of defense as a public good suppose we have an anarchist society and you're saying suppose Russia poses a real threat to the people in the United States not to the government because there's no government okay you're saying well we look around this is a real problem and I don't want Russia ruling me so I'm going to create a government here and we're going to tax everybody and that way we're going to pay for adequate defense well I think that portrays a little understanding of state dynamics first of all if you had enough consensus in your society to create an IRS you wouldn't need to create an IRS to get the money anyway I mean I really don't think you would and well I don't understand why you prefer being ruled by okay it's obvious you have a preference to be ruled by one set of rulers as opposed to another set of rulers but I don't know what gives you that confidence that one set of rulers will ever turn out to be better than another on the second question we have a bit of evidence I run into from time to time the people who say well after all one government is just like another government so I want to ask you a very simple question yes suppose I was somehow able to believably offer you the following gamble we flip a coin if it turns up heads you spend the rest of your life in Russia as it now is as an average Russian if it turns up tails you spend the rest of your life in the kind of libertarian America you'd like to live in or alternatively you don't have to flip the coin you can go ahead with the way things are now would you take the coin flip would I take the coin flip on those odds no I bet that I could do my best to change it but you would not accept that flip would I not if you're saying you wouldn't accept the coin flip then you have just told then you have just told me that the difference between America as it now is in the Soviet Union is greater than the difference between America as it now is in a free society right but you're putting me in the position of being a hypothetical Russian so I'm already different no I'm saying right now you're standing here and I say I offer you the following gamble I'm a magician somehow and I can make you believe it's real alright either you lived your life and you're now going to live it or we flip a coin and if it comes up heads you are instantly transported to the Soviet Union we'll let you speak Russian and things like that so if it comes up tails we have a libertarian revolution and you'll live the rest of your life in the kind of libertarian society you want would you accept that gamble well what I told you before is I wouldn't and you said that betray something but what I'm trying to tell you is that it's not so much what Soviet leaders want to do in other words I have no faith in Reagan's intentions and what he wants to do because I believe he wants to get away with as much as he can get away with what I put my faith in is the American people and how much they're willing to put up with now they're willing to put up with far too much according to my taste but however it seems that the Soviet people are willing to put up with a little more and that's the crucial difference not the leadership so the assertion you're making is that if the Soviet government conquered the US the US would stay about as free as it was before the Soviet government conquered it we've got a little bit of experimental evidence on this proposition would you say for example that East Germany and West Germany I presume that East Germans and West Germans have more or less identical willingness to put up with things they were one country 40 years ago would you say that East Germany and West Germany are about equally free at the moment David no I wouldn't but I think I should be fair and let other people speak and we can talk about this later I mean we can pursue that length I would suggest that East Germany and West Germany are very strong evidence that the thesis you want to offer which is how much people get oppressed only depends on what they'll put up with next we'll talk about it later there's a rather interesting talk and you presented all these problems and you came to the end with this what do we do what happens now what we got all these problems to worry about and you say ignore them now how is ignoring them a solution how is ignoring a problem a solution and do you find do you think these problems will ever be solved and how with all these problems do you expect a libertarian party you remind me of the story about the preacher who preached on the on the text the fool sayeth in his heart there is no god and at the end of the sermon one of his parishioners came up to him and said you know it was a pretty good sermon preacher but I still think there might be a god I didn't in suggesting ways of avoiding thinking about problems I didn't mean to recommend that that was what you should do I meant to suggest that that was what you shouldn't do and that's what people very frequently do so that I'm certainly not suggesting that you should fail to think about such problems the answer to how I can still be a libertarian is that I know of no set of ideas or conclusions that I like more that I believe the world is a complicated place that there aren't always simple straightforward easy answers to things and that it seems to me that in general most questions appeal to me more than those of any alternative ideology I've come across so I think you have to live with the fact that you may not have a simple straightforward axiomatic system that you may make some mistakes and so forth and that's not a reason for not being a libertarian but it is a reason for not being a libertarian who thinks that all non-libertarians are naves or fools and that's a the attitude I was attempting to attack I'm curious as to why you didn't address the question of adopting property rights for new resources that previously had no value I'm thinking in terms of mining the ocean floor and exploration of space that's an interesting question and I guess the only reason was that I had enough other things to talk about but I would agree that is an interesting question in particular I'll give you one form of it that people have thought about a little bit and that is that I think most libertarians would agree that it is desirable to adopt a private property now there's a perfectly simple way of doing that practically and that is to have the government auction them off and whoever buys them owns them however from a moral standpoint the obvious reply is that if the government didn't own them in the first place how can they sell them and therefore after I have bought them in the government auction when you then start broadcasting on my frequency what right do I have to stop you so that is a case of a new property of a new kind of property of a new existence in the last century where it is by no means clear how you establish who is the legitimate owner and yet it's clear that somebody ought to own it from an economic standpoint it would be very desirable to have them property next first of all I think there are few enough of us that this business if you're standing over there and my standing over here and yelling at each other is getting silly so everybody wants to come over to this corner of the thing and we'll forget about the microphones