 The End of the Bad Quaker podcast where Liberty is our mission today is, what is this? Tuesday, November 4th, 2014. This is podcast number 384 and with me today is Stefan Kinsella and you should know who Stefan is. He's been on the show enough times, but just in case if you want to know a little bit about Stefan Kinsella, Stefan, what's your website? StefanKinsella.com and you can also pick up his great little book. I always like to have at least one or two copies with me wherever I go. I've got some in the motorhome right behind my head up on a shelf right now and his book is Against Intellectual Property. Were you going to, is my thinking straight, were you going to come out with an updated version of that or something? I'm actually going to do a brand new one from the ground up and my book and so I'm going to, yeah, so my plan is in the next year or so to come out with a brand new, complete from the ground up book about intellectual property and rights and property rights and liberty and those kinds of issues. Well, I failed to say that and thanks for coming on and welcome back to the podcast Stefan. Sure, glad to be here. I also wanted to mention something that David Gordon had said some time back. I'm not sure exactly when he said this, but it was a criticism of that book Against Intellectual Property and he said that you didn't really make the case that there would be an economic boom if we got rid of IP laws or if we at least tone them down somewhat. I think I have some evidence that David might want to take a look at. There's a guy named Kevin McKernan and he's a really great guy. He's really smart. He is a, what is it, microbiological, microbiology, something anyway. He does DNA research and he's very successful at what he does and he recently was talking about IP law and how IP laws cripple the medical research industry and how things like he's done a lot of work on epilepsy and he has colleagues that have done a lot of work on the Ebola virus and he was recently on Stephanie Murphy's show Let's Talk Bitcoin and on that and I really want to urge the listeners to get over to, I'll put a link in today's show notes, but get over to Let'sTalkBitcoin.com and find that interview that Stephanie Murphy did with Kevin McKernan because Kevin really shows in that interview that it is absolutely IP law that prevents researchers from being able to share information that it is literally costing lives by them not being able to share that information and it's because of IP law and this would, if you could just eliminate IP law specifically out of the medical industry, Kevin makes a really good argument that it would launch the research in so many new directions because right now so much government money goes plowing into the medical research industry and it doesn't help, it distorts the market, it doesn't fix the problem and if you throw enough money at something eventually you will get results and they may be close to the results you want, but Kevin's argument is really compelling that the private industries and private investors and private researchers can do this work much better than government can and much better than government polluted money can if there weren't IP laws there that hold the industry down. It's a really good argument that he makes and I think David Gordon would probably be amazed at the fact that Stefan Kinsella is correct in his assumption that the lack of IP laws would make things better and Kevin McKernan has the absolute evidence to support that. Anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there. I think two other good sources of sort of empirical research on this issue would be the book Against Intellectual Monopoly by McKellie Boldrin and David Levine which is at their site against monopoly.org free online and also the book by Terence Kealy about the economic laws of scientific research that also provides another insight into how the state disrupts and hinders scientific progress by its involvement in funding of research. Of course, the main argument in my view against intellectual property is as a proprietary one as a justice based one as a principled argument. The main reason I advert to consequences like I do sometimes is because that is the main argument used in favor of IP law and so the constant refrain is that we need IP law, it does promote innovation, so the only response to that is to point out that their case is flawed and the data is actually not there and the data actually points the other way. I think another way to look at it is if there is a government policy then it has an effect. If it didn't have an effect we wouldn't have any reason to oppose it. For example, if there is a drug war but it basically had zero efficacy whatsoever we wouldn't care. It would just be opinions, it would be hortations like don't do drugs but if no one was arrested, no drugs were ever intercepted, no one ever went to jail then it would be a dead letter. The reason we oppose state policies and laws is because they do have an effect. Intellectual property is no exception, antitrust law, tax law, etc. They all have effects so if you were to get rid of an unjust law there is no doubt that it would have some effects, that is the structure of research and development, the way the economy is organized would change and that is because the current law is having an effect. So when people say would there be as much innovation or research and development funds in a given industry after you get rid of patent and copyright you can never say for sure because things certainly would change if we were to get rid of these laws. I don't see how that is a coherent or libertarian objection against this and everything we know teaches us that the state does not produce wealth and cannot produce wealth and to the extent these state laws are having an effect they are basically hampering wealth and reducing consumer welfare and reducing innovation so if you get rid of them it is just natural to assume that we would be better off in some kind of sense. Exactly how it is hard to determine but that is the fault of having the system in place right now that dominates the entire western capitalist system and the way we do things. You know I have a tendency to think in I have so much background in engineering and if I recall you have background in engineering as well don't you Stephen? Yes. I tend to think in engineering waves of thinking and my mind just is very comfortable in that type of thinking and I look at all the innovation I have made this argument quite a few times but I think of all the innovation that has taken place and you know computers are amazing and we can fly in the air and we can you know fly in space and all these things are really really amazing but I have always made the argument that the biggest innovations that humanity has ever done was the control of fire, the hammer, the lever and the blade and if you think about it the leap from having no control of fire, no hammer, no lever and no blade, the leap from not having those things to having them is a greater leap than the one from the Stone Age man standing there with control of fire, a hammer, a lever and a blade to standing on the moon, the technological leap of not having any tools to having the basic set of tools and control of fire is a much greater technological leap and requires much more dramatic changes in brain structure to go from not having any tools to having those basic tools and that happened without a government. So to me that alone is a good chunk of evidence that the government doesn't add anything to the mix because we went now for a very very long time with government and existence where where innovations to that degree didn't take place does that make any sense? I think it makes perfect sense I don't know how you quantify exactly you know historians and scientists and humans can analyze the effects of these different innovations but I think you can make a good case for what you just did and of course they came about not only without government but without any concept of IP at all and not only that we don't even know who the innovators who thought of these things were and there's no reason to think it was just one person it was a gradual evolution of technological knowledge I think of man as a tool wielding creature right this is inherent in the Austrian economics concept of man as an actor who employs means which are scarce resources but guided by knowledge so the knowledge or as Rothbard and others call it technical recipes this body of knowledge that we have accumulated throughout human society and culture and history grows and grows and grows and we can always add to our stock of knowledge and that helps us to exploit scarce resources in the world more efficiently and in more creative more creative ways it's it's actually only a good thing and it's almost impossible to imagine the state contributing to this at most they can distort it they can divert funds from one type of research to another and they will come up with tang for astronauts things like that but of course as Bostia and Hazlett might point out that there's a scene and the unseen right the money that is used to fund government sponsored research is not being used in private ways and on kind of a tangent one thing that surprises me is that the one of the so-called strongest arguments trotted out over and over and over again for patents and copyright is the pharmaceutical industry and everyone says well this is the best case for patents but of course that industry is riddled with state interventionism state costs because of tariffs taxes minimum wage laws regulations not to mention the FDA process itself so here we have an industry that is strangled regulated directed quasi-corporatized because of the FDA and other process and other regulations and the solution of the so-called free market advocates is instead of getting rid of the state interventions the state taxes the drug war you know prescriptions the medical cartel all this stuff instead of advocating that the way to free up the pharmaceutical industry might be to lower taxes and to have a more thriving economy their solution is for the federal government to come in and impose another monopoly scheme which is called the patent system or even for the state to tax you and I you and me and to have a government appointed panel of experts hand out medical or other type of innovative awards every year and some kind of bastard off is funded by the American taxpayer to reward deserving faders of course any one burst at all in any kind of common-sense economics knows that this is a recipe will be captured by special interests will be corrupt will be inefficient will have and and and not only that it will distort the entire structure of research and development world and there there's no limit to this this is the big point there is no limit to this if if we take eighty billion dollars a year let's say in taxpayer funded awards which has been proposed by Sanders the socialist from Vermont and also by Alexander Tabarak a so-called libertarian economist and we use that to replace or augment the patent system well where's the stopping point because medical innovation is not the only thing worth supporting right there's software there's you know there's genetic research there's there's semiconductor research there's aerospace research there's materials research there's really no stopping point to this so if you're gonna say 80 billion for medical innovations if you understand that's a very narrow slice of the entire innovative pie that the patent system right now seeks to so-called encourage we're talking 10 20 30 trillion dollars a year of subsidies from the taxpayer and of course our GDP is 16 trillion a year so right off the bat there's just no way to accomplish this so there's no stopping point people that say that the patent system without the patent system you wouldn't have enough innovation with a 17-year term well why don't they propose a 100-year term why don't they propose capital punishment as the as the penalty for violating patents I mean there's no stopping point to the draconian ways you could enforce and ratchet up IP protection to get more and more and more of so-called innovation out of the economy let's shift and go in a slightly different direction before we run out of time I recently did a brief article on immigration and I kind of you know I have to admit I go back and I reread that and I think you know I kind of wrote this I wrote it a lot quicker than I normally write things like that normally I'll take you know six to do a two or three thousand word article I'll take about six to eight hours and work on it and then I'll put it down for like a day and then I'll come back and completely reread it and then I'll decide what am I gonna keep out of this and what am I gonna throw away and I'll adjust it however and I didn't do that with the article on on immigration I just kind of went through it and did it all in one setting and and and then I just recorded it and put it up and I made some mistakes in it and some of my listeners pointed out those mistakes right away so I want to give Stefan an opportunity to to also point out some possible mistakes in it Stefan knock me out okay so well it's kind of interesting because you and I are pretty much on the same program on most issues and usually I agree with you and if I don't that's fine I just thought this was not this is more the bad and the quicker I mean this was not I just think it was not it wasn't your best analysis for the following reasons and I didn't want to so let's set the stage hoppa let's say 15 17 years ago started writing some kind of contrarian pieces on immigration theory okay which influenced and cause a lot of debate among libertarians like Rothbard and other libertarians it's been kind of controversial since then by others and he incorporated part of that in a recent article which was critical of the left libertarians which I thought was a really good article I don't know if you read the original article that the excerpt was from that you were talking about you were criticizing an excerpt on lu rockwell.com which was taken from a recent article by hoppa on left libertarians or what he calls realistic libertarianism his basic point in that article was that the essential characteristic of the left is their egalitarian that's what they're really for and the essential characteristic of the right is a type of realism about normal social human hierarchies and capitalism and relationships and by and large I agree with his analysis of the left I do think that there is a there's an unrealistic egalitarian sentiment driving a lot of the left libertarians he pointed out that the left has the luxury of being egalitarian because they're basically totalitarians the left libertarians are supposed to know a little bit more about economics and human freedom and so they have a dilemma because you can't really enforce egalitarianism without basically becoming a statist so he was pointing out that they have this sort of dilemma and he was pointing out that the right is essentially more realistic now he's not a rightist of course that was his article and he had he had a pricey in there or a summary of his immigration view which has been around for a good 15 17 20 years and that's what you took to task in your in your article and yours and your in your podcast right correct and so what I noticed in there was first it was your comments started out by saying hop is an important thinker and his argument against immigration was totally logical and made sense okay so you seem to buy into it and then you seem to say that your opposition to it was that if we come up with sensible policies for the state to adopt that make the the pain the state's inflicting on us less then we delay the inevitable conflagration that's coming so your opposition to hop is different than what I've heard from other libertarians most of them you know use nativism or racism or you know the standard knee jerk rebuttals yours seem to be that he's making sense and that's the problem that his his proposal would make the state better but because the only solution now correct me if I'm wrong then because I'd never heard this from you before you seem to believe that education alone is not going to do the job we're not going to achieve liberty by just going out and proselytizing and educating people that the only the only real solution will come when the state gets bigger and bigger the state start consolidating there's three or four or five final states left they're fighting for taxpayers and territory and they start murdering millions hundreds of millions maybe billions of people and finally at that point enough people will realize that the state is totally illegitimate because they become so obviously heinous that people can finally drop the the veneer you know they can drop the the the the fictional attitude that the state is necessary and then some kind of libertarian society can emerge at the end that was roughly what I took from the beginning part of your article and let's break here and throw in a real quick commercial we'll be right back folks Ross Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI in 2013 and charged with victimless crimes in relation to allegedly operating the bitcoin based silk road black market he has been in a prison cell awaiting trial ever since if he did it he's a hero for making the black market a safer place if he did not he's a man wrongfully accused either way if you love freedom and want to end the war on drugs Ross and his family need your support you can learn more and help fund his defense at freeross.org that's freeross.org okay thanks for sticking with us through the commercial and I'm back with Stefan Kinsella yeah um that would be uh that's kind of how I see things like so so let me give it an example of uh of of of how that's taken place during my lifetime during the uh 1970s government in the U.S. was becoming um more and more the failures of government work becoming more and more obvious in the late 70s the uh the early 70s had seen some some anti-government movements that had sort of fallen apart or lost momentum uh due to several little tricks like a lot of the peace movement fell apart because because they ratcheted back the the draft and once there was no draft I mean people still had to register but once there was no actual draft taking place a lot of the people in the peace movement just went back to work and stopped worrying about it because it wasn't affecting them personally the the state was no longer being painful to them so they just went back to work but this but the American government was failing in other ways during the 70s with you know the the price and labor price and wage freezes that Nixon put on and the shift from the gold standard and all those things that took place the economy was was bleeding pretty bad in the 70s and then um you know Reagan came in in 1980 and brought a slightly different view of economics uh moved I believe more towards the Chicago realm and away from standard Keynesianism and it kind of worked in a way it made government feel like it was working better but really government grew tremendously during the 80s but it seemed like all those really radical leftists that wanted to burn down the government uh it seems like they were all pacified and they all just went to work and and then again the same kind of a thing happened in the 90s you know there was all kinds of um uh there were all kinds of uh what are they called militia movement was getting big and there were all kinds of these people in the extreme right that were sharpening their bannets and they were you know by the mid to late 90s they were ready to go they were ready to to just march on Washington and burn the place to the ground and then along comes uh you know W comes in and they all settle down and this guy ratchets government up like it had never been before he went far beyond what Clinton ever had the guts to do in making government bigger and more invasive and it sort of created a in in my mind it created a market for liberty because more important more and more people saw what the NSA was doing and they saw what you know homeland security was doing and they saw what was happening at airports and there was a a reaction to that was the desire for liberty and I and I don't accredit it I don't accredit Ron Paul with being a great man that just magically sprang out of nowhere in 2006 2007 you know I I was listening to him back in 1988 but and in his message never changed so something else had to have changed if Ron Paul's message was consistent the whole time which it was then something else had to change it wasn't that Ron Paul just suddenly you know was birthed uh right out of venus's I mean right out of uh uh pluta wow I'm getting my my ancient gods mixed up right right out of Saturn's forehead or not Saturn boy I did it again Jupiter so so Ron Paul wasn't birthed out of Saturn out of Jupiter's forehead uh you know as Greek gods are um he was here the whole time giving the same message it's just that nobody cared about that message until you know 2007 2008 when when it was really clear that the economy was about to take a dump and then it did take a dump and by the beginning of 2009 all the I told you so's were there and everybody realized this crazy old Ron Paul this crazy old man was right the whole time and all these people started flooding into the Liberty movement half of them not really even knowing what they were after they just knew that where they had been was wrong and that people and you know uh the Peter Schiff's popularity exploded uh Gerald Salente uh I can't even name all of them that that many of us knew those names for years but then all of a sudden everybody knew those names and I think the catalyst to that was that government grew the oppression grew and it got to the point of where more and more people recognized what it was that was taking place around them so using that as evidence I I thoroughly believe that anytime governments gets more comfortable and more um not necessarily shrinking but just to where it's not affecting me personally then uh then I have a tendency to back off and not worry about government even if it's you know even if it's very oppressive to black neighborhoods I'm not noticing it because I'm not in a black neighborhood even if it's oppressive to you know the Jews in the ghetto hey I'm not a Jew and I don't live in a ghetto I don't feel it it's only when government comes up into my face that I actually notice oh man this thing's nasty and I kind of view it like that that the world at some point is going to have to come to uh a a position where they really see what it is that they're asking when they ask city government to make that guy down the street mow his lawn well when they really get an an understanding of what it's like to be on the other end of government to be on the receiving end of government then people reject government so that's that's my thought on that yeah and I strongly disagree with any of that I don't know if I agree with all that I mean logically logically it's possible that we are doomed or logically it's possible that the only way we will achieve victory is some kind of apocalyptic meltdown like you're talking about I think it's also possible that things will get gradually better with a heavy state in the background and what the end result will be is unpredictable I just don't think it's a criticism it's a legitimate criticism of a political theory uh that someone is pointing out one of the ways the state causes harm and to oppose it um you know if I'm being taxed at 43 percent on my gross income and I would prefer to be taxed at 42 percent or 40 percent um it is true that if they do that it might reduce the temptation to revolt right or to have some kind of huge problem but that doesn't mean that it is wrong to object to the 43 percent and to prefer a lower taxation rate just as a simple example um and so I detected a little bit of that in your criticism but um why don't why don't we just kind of get if you don't mind let's let me summarize if you don't mind what I take as the hoppy and view on immigration and see where you disagree at least with the way that I kind of presented sure so hoppa his point he's an anarchist like you and I are and his point is that in a what he calls a private law society you wouldn't the the concept of immigration would make about as much sense as the concept of citizenship it wouldn't exist it would just be private property rights right and and immigration wouldn't exist it would just be people that are invited or not to be on or to use other people's property or scarce resources it would just be a matter of private law only and what he is simply trying to say is that given the existence of the state okay the state is going to have certain control over certain public resources the national forest the roads the public facilities the ports of entry and whatever choice the state makes is going to violate someone's rights given the welfare state given voting given uh anti-discrimination laws and what hoppa points out is that not only does it violate the rights of say a mexican or a you know a british immigrant who might want to come work at microsoft who is not permitted to do so because of immigration law and he admits this is a rights violation of the property owner which is one reason by the way he he he specifically supports the idea that as long as you have someone willing to invite you and to take responsibility for your entering you should be able to come which would open up the immigration system uh you know orders of magnitude more than it is right now okay so he admits that right now the current system violates the rights of property owners who are not able to invite people to work for them for example that they want to but he also points out that there's another rights violation that occurs which is what he calls forced integration that is when the state allows people into the country primarily for political reasons and i think you and i i i'm not i'm not hesitant to say i think that the democrats for example want to allow certain ethnic you know ethnographic minorities and maybe basically people they're going to vote democrat eventually that they are trying to do that i mean there there seems to be no doubt to that right okay and because the existence of anti-discrimination law that is you cannot discriminate in who you live with in neighborhoods you can't discriminate against people you want to associate with in employment because of the existence of a vast network of so-called free public roads allowing these people into the country basically forces them into proximity with people that otherwise might have private arrangements in a free society that were not as closely integrated so it leads to what he calls forced integration and i think that is also undeniably true you might you might dispute the extent of it but if the state allows in you know the unwashed masses it's going to violate the rights of employers and people who live in restricted neighborhoods if you don't allow people in who have an offer to have a job you violate the property rights of the employers so we have an insoluble situation so hapa's point is simply to recognize this and of course that's why he's an anarchist because that would solve both problems but his point is to say we have to stop thinking of the move in the west from the pre-monarchical monarchical society to our modern democratic welfare state system as unalloyed progress and what he points out is that he's not in favor of monarchy he's not a monarchist but if you analyze the policies that a monarch would engage in the monarch simplified as the owner of a country basically would have an incentive a long-term incentive to maximize the wealth and the prosperity of the country by having sensible immigration policies like not letting in criminals not letting in people that are going to stir up trouble letting in people that are productive and that will do a good job let you know so what he does is he comes up with a model of monarchy and he compares it and contrasts it to what we have now in democracy which is the short-run policies aimed at getting democratic voters basically and he shows that the monarchical incentive structure would be superior just from a everyday living person's point of view it would be closer it would be a closer approximation to what would happen in a private law society just like decentralization is getting closer to anarchy than a centralized state would be so he basically just holds this up as a model it's part of his criticism of democracy which i think most libertarians can agree with and when he says that therefore it would be better for the welfare of the everyday citizens in the u.s if the democratic government would adopt policies more similar to what a monarch would adopt then everyone would be better off but he thinks it's unrealistic he doesn't have a naive view that that's really possible so that's his argument his argument is basically a criticism of the current state because he's pointing out that people's rights are going to be violated no matter what and that's why he's ultimately an anarchist not a monarchist and not a an anti-immigrationist what i took from his democracy the god that failed is kind of the same thing as what you just said he kind of he kind of lays that argument out in that book that that for whatever flaws that a monarchy has that it is basically a superior system to what we have now which is representative governments of different kinds whether it's you know i realize we don't actually have a true democracy but um but representative governments create a situation where you're pretty much giving an incentive to loot as much as you can as fast as you can uh in that small term that you're in office uh and then pass whatever is left over to the next generation of politicians and they then loot as much as they can as fast as they can and the the you know the the pipe dream of well all we got to do is just put in um you know term limits and that way these guys don't have a chance to repeat you to make a career out of being a politician out of being a career politician um i think hop rejects that in the sense that uh all you're doing there is you're creating more of an incentive to loot as much as possible as quickly as possible that you would be better off to take away all uh term limits of well of every kind and have them constantly running for office you would actually be better off than having them with term limits i think he makes that argument uh if not in it all fuzzes together now because it's been so many years but if he doesn't make that argument in democracy that god to fails he made it in in some other place if i recall do you are you familiar with that i think that sounds uh that sounds about right so um so keeping that in mind i look at this i look at the whole thing like you know at one point in time uh governments were individual little things that couldn't really control beyond maybe one valley they were a very weak thing that was headed up by one man or one family and they were essentially you know uh kind of like a little mafia situation where you have one godfather or one king or whatever that you want to call him and it's in one little family and they have control of essentially a gang of thugs that you can call you know the military or whatever and they would control this little area where they were but then eventually that got that got bigger and and these little city states uh combined and so you would have a league of city states and it was somewhat disorganized but they could at least defend themselves when another league of city states would would you know try to take some of their property or whatever and with each stage of this thing that is the state as it developed it did two things it got worse for the people that are the victims of government which are you know the people that are paying for all that nonsense but the the government itself worked better in a in a sense that i'm going by um Robert Higgs one time told me i was complaining about government to you know talk you know how we do complain to the government and and and i said how everything government does fails everything it touches fails and he said that's not true he says there's one thing government has consistently always done perfectly and that is replicate itself and keep spreading that's the only the only thing that it does that it does with any you know any true uh efficiency and that got me thinking about it that the purpose of government is not to build the roads and do all these things the purpose of government is to stay alive and it'll do anything it'll have any policy it if that means cut off immigrants and not let anybody in have 100 control of the borders if that'll make government more powerful it would do that tomorrow if that meant open up the floodgates and let them all pile in it would do that tomorrow and the balance i think that government has come to today in the united states is that one side has learned you know the the liberal or the left side has learned that they can bring in um poor people from poor countries they can bring them into the united states hand them uh you know welfare low paying jobs all the things that are you know free medical care in the emergency room at the cost of all the rest of us they can bring those people in give them all those things and get democratic voters out of them and i think the republicans are in the in the people in the right wing have learned that they can use the fear of that to to get a lot more donations from hard right wing people and a lot more control just like right now we've seen essentially a porous border that's just pouring immigrants in and the republicans are now about uh in the process today as we speak of regaining control of of government by using the threat of those if you watch uh you know like the dredge report or whatever you'll see that they every day they pound on uh anything that's right wing really i don't want to just pick on dredge but anything that's right wing they pick on uh they pound on the fact that the the borders are porous and they're coming in and if you believed if you read that stuff and just believed at fox news and everything you would think that there's a wall of of muslim terrorists just marching across that border just waiting to kill us all and the right wing uses that as a tool the same way the left wing uses the uh the waves of immigrants registering as democrats and voting so i don't really see it as uh as one being preferable to the other i see them both as a way that the government uses this thing to uh to just keep growing and getting more powerful i would agree with that and uh you remind me of something i've talked to friends about i've thought about over the years i used to say that the government is good at nothing you know taking kind of the harry brown line um but it is good at destruction because destruction is easier than creation but it's also good at one other thing which is a type of propaganda so it's in the sense the state is good at two things it's good at destruction and it's good at somehow persuading people that it's necessary and legitimate and maybe that's not the government's responsibility maybe that's because of mass delusions on the part of people or the press or the intellectuals i don't know uh human society but there are two things that we have to fight when we fight the state and that's its power to destroy and that's its power to make people believe that it's necessary um how we do that is a different issue and i i tend to agree with your your view that it won't happen by some kind of top down or activist education the one thing that gives me a little hope is when i think of i think of the fall of the of communism in 1990 1991 and i think of that as a big teaching moment for humanity most people don't have economics degrees or haven't read haslet economics in one lesson but there is a widespread acknowledgement nowadays is my impression that communism and central planning just can't work and that's because they saw the fall of communism in 1990 and so my only hope is that as if we survive as a race as a species as technology increases as prosperity increases if we don't have this meltdown that you're somewhat leery about then perhaps over time there will be by osmosis almost a gradual enlightenment of the human race about the benefits of cooperation free markets as a general matter etc that's my only hope and i don't know how we can spur that along by hoping for the worst or something like that um there there was one kind of theoretical thing we did talk about in our exchange about the concept of unowned versus owned property and homesteading i don't know if you wanted to get into that or not sure if you want to so you took the position that that um resources claimed by the state or open to homesteading because they're effectively unowned i think that's the best way to characterize um your argument and i'm sympathetic to that argument my view is a little bit different um i do think that for literally unowned resources like the millions and millions of acres of bla managed land which are totally undeveloped and virgin resources the state has just put a fence up around it and said no one can use this i do think those things effectively have no owner and they should be subject to homesteading by anyone who wants to come and take it although as a personal matter i don't think i would oppose an auction process where the state acted like the owner and sold it to the highest bidder and privatized it i'm basically in favor of privatization however it happens even if it's messy and corrupt as i think rothbard argued too um so i but as a theoretical matter i would agree that those resources technically are unowned now resources that are actually being used by the state like the roads and the government buildings i think as a matter of libertarian property theory it's incorrect to say they're unowned and subject to homesteading you could argue the subject to homesteading as the best way to just return them to private hands but if you if you just take some examples where let's say the state yesterday condemned your home right they they seized it by imminent domain and they paid you nothing for it or they paid you an undermarket value for your home now i would think that at least for a few years after if the state is using it for a municipal municipal office or they gave it to walmart or whatever i would think that the true owner of that home is you and if we were somehow to overcome the state then the person who gets that home is is you not just the first squatter who arrives so i do think that there are true owners even in our mixed economy and i think that when the state has acquired resources by conquest or by purchase using taxes which were taken stolen from people basically then we can identify classes of people that have a better claim to restitution that is by getting ownership of those resources if we were able to ever liquidate the state so i don't think they're subject to homesteading i think that they there is a certain class of people that has a better claim to those resources than others maybe the same is not the true for the national forest but for for actually used resources they were either purchased with taxpayer dollars or they were stolen from someone one way or the other so either the victim of the theft or the victim of the taxes has a better claim just in general than your average citizen of the world so that's why i would not call them unowned i would i would say by and large we would have a process that would try to return those resources to the people that have the best claim to them even acknowledging that they're going to get one cent on the dollar because the government destroys it doesn't create so there's not going to be enough resources to compensate everyone if there was that would be in the state is efficient but it's not i should point out something also that i failed to go into in that article i failed to go into it because honestly i mean this is just this is me just telling the truth for me to go into it it would have been another couple thousand words and a few more hours of me writing it and it's just so much easier for me to say it than to do that and that is on the the question of native native ownership of the mostly of the southwest but of north american general i don't and this and this might take us in a whole different direction and i know i'm going to get some emails over this but i don't believe that you naturally inherit either your fathers or grandfathers or great-grandfathers property or their debt i don't think that there's anything in a natural setting that absolutely demands that you get what your father used to have now i think if your father wishes that you have something when he dies and he indicates that either by telling people or by writing it down then you have a right to it because he has given it to you as a gift but if you don't know your grandfather you've never met your grandfather and he never knew anything about you i don't think he owes you anything i don't think you have a right to anything that was his i don't think there's anything in nature that gives his property or his debt to two or three generations down the road does that am i making any sense to this point um yes so first of all i would say you can never give a debt to someone without their consent okay right uh you can never impose a debt on someone although i could see an argument for some kind of french kind of paternalistic civil law tradition where there's a mutual obligation between the generations where for example if you rear children they have some obligation uh to you and you have some obligation to your children to raise them to adulthood etc if you give me the choice of who's responsible for this uh for this deadbeat kid or this retarded child or whatever would it be the parents or would it be society in general i would choose the parents in general and if you ask me the same question about taking care of an elderly parent i would say the children by and large would have the primary responsibility as opposed to society at large um whether that's a legally enforceable thing it's is dubious but you could see the argument for that um i do think as a matter of fact of course parents have the the the right to transfer their resources to whoever they want by by testament by will right um but we have to have rules default rules in the case where there's no written will and testament and then we go with the natural assumption which in most cases is the parent wants the their resources to go to their spouse or their children and that would be the default assumption um but i do think that as a as a practical matter over time it gets more and more difficult to prove title way back in antiquity um and so theoretically maybe some of the indians could argue they should get parts of manhattan back or whatever but you would have to actually have an actual concrete plaintiff with an actual concrete chain of title with a clear came with a clear case and i think in certain cases if someone can show that their property was literally divested from their ancestor and you can show clear chain of title they should get it back they have a better claim all property contests are always a dispute between two people the person currently claiming or using the resource and someone else claiming they have a better claim to it and i could see some cases where this would happen i think over time it becomes more and more remote which is the reasoning behind the idea of a statute of limitations right that over time the evidence is just too shaky you waited too long to assert your claim it's just we have to just wipe the slate clean and now we have to ask between the the real people living in the world today who has the better claim to the resource and as a general matter i would say the person possessing the resource has a better claim to it which is the reason for the dictum possession is nine tenths of the law you can overcome that presumption if the person possessing it is a government agent who stole it for example um and in that case we have to come up with a secondary rule about who is the better person entitled to it but it's just an average person who bought the land for a square deal from a previous owner even at that previous owner was some kind of fee for involved with the state i would think that the current productive user of the resource has a better claim than some stranger wandering up and saying all these property titles back to adam back to the founding of the us are all corrupt and therefore no property is valid so it's it's just a free for all we can all homestead everything let's have looting and smashing and breaking macy's windows etc i don't agree with that i think that there are better claimants in most property disputes and by large it is the is the peaceful mostly private person who's currently using the land under color color of title as we call it that is he has some reasonable claim back to a previous owner and it gives him a better claim than someone else contesting it i would agree and especially in the case that you mentioned manhattan and especially in a case like that where you have a very limited quantity of land and a lot of people who could argue over who owns it you know who could the descendants of let's just say if there was a 50 inhabitants on the isle of manhattan uh when the dutch settlers came in and took it over and kicked them off those 50 inhabitants might have 300 000 descendants and so it would be really difficult to have an argument over such a small piece of land over the 300 000 descendants of those 50 original inhabitants as opposed to the you know what what is in new york city now i don't even know what the population is but the millions who would have claim over it now so i i agree completely with that i also think that this is not a real problem people bring this up libertarians like you and i that might agree in some cases where an original claimant may be entitled to get his property back and they use that as like this nuclear scenario where no one's really going to agree to that that would destroy western civilization etc the the truth is this is not really a real problem and if it was you would have what we do what we have now which is called property title insurance if you if you even today if you buy a home and you want to get a mortgage or a loan to pay help you pay for it then the the bank giving you the loan wants to make sure that you're buying something that the seller had the right to sell you so they hire a title company to do a title deed search and they issue an opinion which they back with insurance and they basically say we think that the previous owner really owned it because we can trace his claims back as far as we can see and therefore your title is good as long as you sign on the dotted line and fill all the formalities and therefore if it turns out you don't have good title we will we will pay you some money to allow you to go buy another home um that's property title insurance it's very rarely used now because the property title system is so well regulated and established but you could see something like that emerging in a free market if there was any real concern about you know buying a ten thousand dollar Rolex watch which was an antique or something like that you wanted to make sure that someone's not going to claim it later or buying a million dollar estate and so there would be a natural incentive in the free market for people to keep good records and for there to be companies that would be in the business of figuring out who owns what and everyone that owns a house would have an interest in participating in that right if I buy a home I'm going to want to sell it someday so I'm going to register my title as well so that someone doesn't come along in the meantime as a squatter or as some kind of um someone who interferes with my title so I'm going to have an incentive to deposit my title registry with the established record keeping agencies even if they're private even if there's a small fee so this is really a non problem and to the extent it would be a real problem could be handled easily by property title insurance so it's just a non problem I think you're right I think it's a it's a red herring that's obvious that's that's often thrown out in order to take the you know to throw out the in order to get the conversation going in a different direction or to distract the conversation um and it's completely different if you're talking about something like you know the island Manhattan or uh or a watch or or one particular mansion on one particular estate a lot of people then equate that to the entire southwest which even at the highest point of native inhabitants in the southwest they only took up a very small amount of land they didn't uh you know the vast sums of of of the west were never really settled by anyone it was never if you assume let's just say if you assume the Comanche tribe owned it well then you're doing the same thing as if the Comanche tribe was a state and you're assigning to this you know this figment of your imagination writes like if it's a human like if it's actually occupying all that land which it is not yeah and in reality um we all we all acknowledge for example the the vast harm done to say the blacks and during shadow slavery and so the claim for compensation for the damage done has some plausibility but as a practical matter what they really want they don't want any particular piece of property back that was taken if they did that might be a more justifiable claim like you know these black ancestors of descendants of this slave are entitled to this plantation in Louisiana okay maybe you can make an argument for that if it's not too old the claim is not too old and stale but what they really want is they want the federal government which is already a criminal organization to tax innocent modern people to just give them money it's just a transfer of wealth right so this is what really these claims turn turn into I think and which is why we really ultimately have to we have to oppose them one thing we libertarians need I believe to emphasize is we need to explain that just because we have this ideal model of Lockean homesteading which is this idea that if there's a virgin world or virgin land and the first person who homesteads it does have a better claim than others that is the ideal but that doesn't mean that if we can't trace title back from a current user of a resource all the way back to to add them let's say or to the first guy it doesn't mean that his property right is tarnished doesn't mean that at all because all property rights are always a dispute between two people two or more people in the real world today so the question is always which of the which of the current contestants has the better claim to the resource and let's say that we can't figure out who really owned this resource all the way back to the days of Rome or whatever because history is too cloudy and messy well but that doesn't mean that the newcomer has a better claim to it it doesn't mean that it's unowned or up for grabs it means that we have to let possession lay where it is unless there's a good reason to overturn it that has always been the rule in the civilized legal systems of the world possession always means something which is why ownership is really an extension of what's called the right to possess the right to be undisturbed in your use of a resource now i've got one other criticism that i touched on in that article of hop's position that maybe if you feel to comment on it i would appreciate that in in my reading of hoppa's article i think there's an assumption built into it that when immigrants come into a new country whether we're talking about people coming into the united states from mexico or guatemala or china or england or whether we're talking about immigrants coming into europe uh from africa or southeast asia or wherever it's kind of i i get the flavor of reading hoppa's article article that it's almost an assumption that they're taking something by by moving into that area and what they're actually doing is they're they're moving in and they're renting houses they're uh you know they're taking jobs or they're not taking jobs and they're living off of some type of welfare support in in any case and even if they're coming in and getting government supplied you know housing that's uh that's tax paid for and so forth in any case they're not actually taking anything from the existing residents uh other than things like welfare payments or something like that that the government is doing which is robbery already so so that the fault is not on the immigrant and the fault is not that they're coming in and taking something that is not theirs the fault is in the sense that the government has provided incentives free healthcare you know free housing free free money uh the government provided incentives are the problem not the immigrants um because they're not in my point really being that they're not taking away from the property of the people coming in they're simply coming in utilizing what's available and attempting to make a better life for themselves i mean personally i agree totally with that i am i i don't recall exactly um hoppa's argument on this i i i don't think he would make the argument that um that economically immigrants are taking anything because he's a free market advocate um and i i don't think his main argument is that the problem with immigrants is that as long as we have a welfare state we have to stop immigration which is the standard kind of conservative libertarian argument i think his argument is more is based upon the idea that in a private world you would have an emergence of lots of private hierarchies and uh social structures so you might have areas that uh maybe chinatown you know maybe more it's more ethnically centered maybe you might have a more capitalist area like Hong Kong maybe some areas are more bucolic like Lancaster Pennsylvania and these areas would tend to have their own customs more raised maybe even uh restrictive covenants and agreements and in other words the idea is a vision of a a variegated world with lots of diversity but different areas do things their own ways and in those in those areas uh there would tend to be some segregation by religion by culture by race whatever now i'm not really advocating this theory myself but i do think that there's a common vision of how a private world would work out and it would be peaceful people would trade but you would have different rules it may it may be permissible to walk around topless in one area uh and another area it may be extremely frowned upon for people to undercut the you know the the prevailing moral ethic of that area okay so sorry i got my poodles going on here um and so um and so i think he's simply pointing out that if you have open immigration with anti-discrimination laws and with public roads and with affirmative action then it causes a forced integration of people that otherwise would have a peaceful sort of segregation that's the type of harm it's hard to quantify but it's real so i don't think it's about these guys participating in welfare i think it's more about the government forcing people to live together in a sense that wouldn't want to live together my personal vision is i think it's the world gets more cosmopolitan and bigger and richer that we would have more and more interpersonal diversity um and you know enclaves like new york city things like that where people live together with lots of cultures lots of uh ethnicities and it would just proceed like that but i could imagine some more isolated kind of enclaves and regions which are more socially or culturally conservative so i think that was what he was getting at there he's pointing at one of the harms that state immigration policy um imposes on society well do you feel like we've covered all those issues pretty good today i think so i think so um i do and you know my i wasn't writing you to chew your uh chew your head off i just you and i agree on so much i just i thought that was you're missing a little bit um some of the the nuances of this approach personally i myself and i don't think hoppa as a libertarian you cannot support the i and s really you cannot support any federal agency doing anything right so that's not the point the point is to try to move in a more decentralized localized world that gets us closer to the approximation of how we would envision a private um a private property world um i should mention also this disclaimer should have been in the beginning but uh you know i've actually hesitated i've had people ask me over and over and over by email and on bad quicker forum and a lot of different places they have asked me to take on hoppa in his uh in some of his different views that he's had and what i've actually done i i have tried to get in contact with him hoping that he could come on my show and we could clarify these things working out like you and i just now talked and here's the thing though i realize he is an extremely busy man he uh he has a life he doesn't do a whole lot of personal appearances at at small things and he doesn't do a lot of podcast appearances and things like that so i don't blame him for not coming on the show i i realize uh i certainly sympathize for him in you know and how busy he is and i realize that if he if he went on you know every single one of these things that that pop up and everybody who tries to get him on their show and he would he would just be overwhelmed and you have to set limits on yourself and you have to when you get to and i don't mean this at all is an insult to him but when you get to a certain age you get to the point of where you say you know what i've been doing this for this long i have committed so much of my life to it and now i'm going to rest and that means i'm not going to go on 30 shows a day you know so um so in my defense i probably could have come up with a better a better thing had i been able to actually talk to hoppa and get this straightened out ahead of time um and and but i wasn't able to do that so i've literally for years i have not taken on his position and not criticized him on those things uh and then i just i saw that thing at lou rockwell and i thought you know what his argument uh is flawed because he uses some basic tricks here to get you to think the way he wants and perhaps the full article rather than that little excerpt that they put on lou rockwell perhaps it's written good enough that it makes up for those but in that little article i it's just uh i don't like um i don't like bad arguments like that coming from really smart people i i i understand where you're coming from um i do think his his article several people the longer article that it was an excerpt from several people told me um oh this is old news this is just rehashed hoppa stuff but i'm i'm a pretty big hoppa uh aficionado and i think the way he linked that together in a very concise fashion was a really good overall presentment of his entire social theory and the immigration stuff to my mind was just a minor part of it the rest of it is his argumentation ethics his theory of property rights the reason property rights emerge which i know you're a big opponent of intellectual property as i am and i actually think his social theory his mizizian and rock barty and framework for understanding the the purpose and nature of property rights really provides the strongest argument against intellectual property for example so to my mind the really key stuff is about homesteading about the nature of property rights about disputes the social theory is something some people can take or leave i think you know he there was a controversy a few years ago when he gave an example about time preference and his his illustration of time preference was that for example gays don't have children as often as heterosexuals and therefore their time horizon is not as extended as as the children of parents would be and it's kind of a logical point it's a blend of empirical assumption but of course it's going to upset people because it's not politically correct whether he's right or wrong about that empirical assumption i think is totally irrelevant i think it's just a reasonable example that you could seize on in your mind to try to grasp the concept of time preference the point is not whether gays have high time preference and and heteros don't the point is that different aspects of your life could affect that so he's had controversies over fairly small issues like that which i think are fairly uh kind of not that important really um so i would just encourage people i i think really if you wanted to read hoppa the the best where the best place to start would be be it's really it's actually really short and simple it's chapters one and two and maybe seven of his book a theory of socialism and capitalism just those three chapters alone has nothing to do with democracy theory or immigration or social conservatism it's about the nature of interpersonal relationships how we justify rights the thing that's always fascinating to be most about hoppa's thought is his argumentation ethics defense of of libertarian rights which i don't know where you stand on that been uh i don't know what your own personal uh defense of rights is whether it's intuitionist or consequentialist or or what but to my mind that's what's always really impressed me about his thought well we should probably wrap it up we're uh we're well over our hour so uh stefan i really want to thank you for coming on the show with me and uh i kind of i'm gonna i have this is for the listeners to hear i have uh in the scheduling process i have maybe one or two shows that are coming up that uh that i've talked to people that that are going to be in interview shows like the one we did today and uh and then i have a probably about a two to maybe two and a half hour uh show coming up we might or might not split it into two pieces with my daughter kai and uh and i want to just give a little teaser for that because that's going to be there's going to be some pretty big announcements and um it's you know if you've been a regular listener to my podcast you're not going to want to miss that and with any luck we should have that coming around in the next week or two so just dip those drop those out there to tease people with and and uh get their attention with so stefan thank you very much for coming on the show with me today ben i enjoyed it really did and folks uh there's be sure and get to badquaker.com and hit the links that are going to be there i'm going to have a link to that let's talk bitcoin uh podcast that i mentioned earlier we'll have a link to stefan's website and we'll have a link to stefan's book that i really like that i really push people i you know i i say this all the time but i literally have two copies of it right behind my bed right behind my head on the bookshelf behind me i keep two copies because if i'm trying to explain this to somebody and i'm being and i'm stumbling or i'm it's late in the afternoon i'm not thinking very well or whatever i can literally just hand in that book and just say here take this if you enjoy it give it to somebody else and i'm and it it is so cheap that i'm not losing anything by giving it out like that and i encourage as many people as possible to do that and then of course when stefan's new book comes out as soon as that happens we want to all jump on that and buy it as well so okay so i'll wrap this up um folks thanks for listening today and remember to visit badquaker.com where liberty is our mission thank you very much folks