 Yeah I'm here. Okay, sorry about that. This ought to be a better connection now. Okay fine so what I was, why don't we do this unless anyone has any other ideas. Let me talk for a little while and people can feel free to interrupt and ask questions if you want to take it a different direction or ask any questions but what I was going to start out with was the way I've seen in my thinking over the years the benefits of the praxeological approach and praxeology was Mises' term for the logic of action and so he used that as the foundation of his economic theorizing so he basically tried to look at what the consequences were in sort of a pure theory of human action and so he derives from this the basic category sort of an unconscious sense of of means and ends opportunity cost things like this and also some elementary notions of economics like you know the idea that if you if you increase the supply of money everything being equal then prices will go down or be inflated if you increase the minimum wage or if you impose a minimum wage on an economy then everything being equal it would cause unemployment so you can deduce certain things like this so that's the economic side um am I thinking when you think about libertarian property rights rules and locky and homesteading and things like this if you think of human action as being um a human being is an actor who is not really a deterministic behavior right but someone who has purpose and choices some human actor who looks at the world and envisions a certain future and he's basically uneasy with it or he thinks he doesn't want what he predicts will come about to come about and he imagines that he can interfere with the course of events and make it be different in a way that will please him more so that's sort of the basic framework of human action so what he does is he employs his knowledge of causal laws that is physics basically to decide what means are available that scarce means it means this term that he can use to change the course of events to achieve the ends he wants so you can see that the two successful two ingredients of successful action would be number one having available means means available to you that you can use to causally change what otherwise would happen so that means the means you employ have to actually work so if you if you uh if you try to make a magic spell to have some to make something happen it's not actually going to work or if you do a rain dance to make it rain it actually won't work it's not a good means although you may believe it so and you also have to have knowledge so if you're if you're ignorant of the ability of gunpowder to explode then you wouldn't use it to make a gun so you need the combination or the intersection of knowledge and the availability and control of scarce means now in the libertarian sense the reason we believe in property rights is because the scarce means that are a necessary ingredients of action can only be used by one person for a given purpose that's what scarcity means and that this is the purpose of property rights is to allocate one owner to a given contestable resource but you can see that this doesn't apply to knowledge which is one reason why intellectual property law makes no sense and is confused a confused notion so for example any number of people can use the same idea or knowledge at the same time like how to make a fire or how to build a hut or how to sing a song or how to cook a certain food dish or a technique for catching fish or for planting food etc but they can each of them can only use these scarce resources or means one at a time so the property rights are only for the scarce means or resources so the Lockean idea which is basically the libertarian idea says that whenever we identify a scarce resource in reality that is any possible means that could cause a given result to occur something that people can clash over or conflict over when we have such a resource then civilized people want to say instead of fighting over this physically when we have multiple claimants for this resource we're going to try to solve this in a peaceful civilized manner so we're going to try to determine who's got the better claim to this resource and give them some property right in it and they're going to be the winner they're going to be the one who gets to use this thing and then they can use it peacefully and productively and everyone else knows that it's theirs and in this way we have a free market and capitalism and trade the division of labor etc so the Lockean answer is when there are more than two or more people that possibly could contest a given scarce resource that is a scarce means that's a means of human action then whoever either homesteaded it first that has had the first use of it or who acquired it by contract from a previous owner is the one who has the better claim to it so for example if I am the first one who acquires a resource like a piece of land or some iron ore from the ground then I have a better claim than someone who came later unless I gave it to them by contract so normally between two people the one who has the earlier claim to the resource has a better title to it but that that can be defeated by certain exceptions number one as I mentioned would be contract so even if I had it first if I contractually transferred it to you by gift or by some kind of sale then the person I gave it to now has a better claim than me not because he acquired it first but because I gave it to him okay and another exception would be if I committed some kind of tort or offense or crime against him so let's say I I injure him by invading his property or his body so that I owe him some kind of restitutionary payment well now he's got a better claim to my property because I did something to him that gives him a claim to it but unless you can find an exception like a contractual bequest or transfer or some kind of crime or tort then the guy with the earlier usage right or claim to it and ultimately going back to the first homesteader gets it now the reason for this is because unless the unless you could have a better claim than latecomers no one could ever use things in the first place we would all be living in a world of unknown resources and no one could use anything you have to have the right to take things out of the state of nature out of their unknown state and start employing them because if no one could do that then we wouldn't even be able to live and survive so there has to be the right to take things out of the state of nature which means that it basically shows that the earlier claim has to be superior to the later claim because if it wasn't superior then it means you have the right to be the first one to use something but then someone else could come along and take it away from you right away which means we're back to violent clashing and conflict and we don't have any property rights system so that's sort of the basic framework of the libertarian property rights paradigm and I think it's implied by the practical view of human action and you can also see that it rules out intellectual property as a type of property and it implies what other types of things can be property the question is not what is property the question is who owns this resource that's always the question so I find it helpful not to use the word property to refer to things that we own because then you have a confusion in the discussion people say well what's property that's never the question the question is always when we see a scarce resource that people can potentially conflict or clash or fight over who owns it that's always the question who has a property right in it not what is property but who owns this particular scarce resource and when you focus on the question that way then the entire question of intellectual property and rights in intangible or non-scarce things really never arises or it becomes clear when someone suggests that what's wrong with that with that notion and it also focuses you on well among peaceful cooperative people when they when they're focusing on who between multiple claimants to a given resource who has the better claim to it then the natural rule would be the one who had it first I mean even dogs recognize this right if one dog is munching at a bowl of food and another dog approaches the first dog is going to growl and warn him to stay away so there's a natural there's a naturalness to the to the first come first serve idea that's at the heart of the Lockean and libertarian idea of homesteading I can take this in other directions but if anyone has any questions or comments right now I'd be happy to to address some questions yeah um Eric Faden has a question here in Locke's book he mentions a you have the right to your property but you you can't let it spoil so let's say for instance I have like a vast land and I can't really take care of all of it do I lose the right some of it just because it spoils I think um so so my view is that the basic Lockean idea is libertarian but a lot of Locke's reasoning he gives are not necessarily libertarian so for example Locke starts out with the idea that God owns the universe and there's a God and God grants it to human in humanity and sort of this commons and because he grants us this and he grants us self-ownership rights so I don't think you really need to start with that to be a Lockean you just need to go with the basic logic of what he's saying and then he also has this idea that there's a part of Locke which is the proviso which gets a little bit of what you're suggesting so Locke said you could homestead unknown property as long as you leave enough and is good for other people that's called the proviso and the more strict you know anarcho austrian libertarians like Hoppe and people like Anthony Diase and me would reject that I don't think that that's actually a condition on acquiring property the reason is um for someone to object to your acquiring an unowned resource they would have to assert an ownership claim in that resource in the first place which means it wasn't unowned at all so basically if you assume that it's unowned no one has the right to object to your acquiring it whether there's enough and is good left over anyone else or not so there's sort of you have to pick your sides now there's a mutualist argument which sounds a little bit like what you're getting at which is the idea that if you don't continually use your property then other people can say squat on it etc now I don't agree with that I don't think that's compatible with the strict austrian libertarian perspective on Lockeanism however as a practical matter there's something to it in the sense that let's say you homestead a huge tract that is you know I mean look it's not easy to control property you have a sort of responsibility to keep it up to use it and if you have a huge huge tract of land that you've acquired somehow unless you have a lot of resources and you're using the land productively it's going to be difficult for you to monitor it and police it all the time and make sure that five miles away in some little remote corner of your land there's not someone squatting on it and if you don't do that then over time then the community is going to recognize that you've basically abandoned your claim to it by failing to object to people's use of it so I think there's a natural limit to how much property or how many resources you can acquire by your physical use unless you're actually using it productively which is why Rothbard talks about what he calls the relevant technological unit or rtu in his air pollution piece so he talks about how in a given community there's a certain way of using a resource by human beings and everyone recognizes that and that sort of defines the nature and the boundaries of the property rights that you acquire when you use something and when you make sure labor with it okay thank you I had one more question it's somewhat similar I think I heard it online once in the case of if you own a house and your neighbor owns the house next door you you have allowed your grass to get so long that it's bringing a lot of snakes and your snake bites the neighbor's dog and he dies as a result of it are you somehow liable hmm I haven't heard that particular example before I think um the the so the basic question here would be whether and to what extent you're responsible for your property now strictly speaking in my view the libertarian idea is a day is an idea of what you have a right to not what you have responsibility for you have responsibility for your actions right in other words you have an obligation a negative obligation not to invade the borders of other people yeah so when people say if you own a piece of property you're responsible for it um they're thinking of something called strict liability in a sense or they're thinking of the idea that responsibility is coupled with ownership rights but I think that's not really a very rigorous way of thinking about it because if you really believe that then let's say you own a gun or a knife and some some bad guy steals your knife from you and then he uses a knife to to hurt someone now under the law you technically still own the knife so if you're responsible for whatever's done with your property then you'd be responsible for the crime this third party committed which I don't think is correct so I don't think you can say as a blanket matter you're responsible for what happens from your property you're only responsible for your actions so the question would be do you have a duty with your neighbors to keep your grass low the mode to not let snakes infest your lawn etc and I think that'd be a blend of inter neighbor contracts which is sometimes called restrictive covenants maybe implicit maybe explicit and it would also be a blend of the idea of the attractive nuisance or just the nuisance idea in other words are you using your property in a way that interferes with your neighbor's property now the answer to the question I can't I can't say for my armchair I would think that if you are violating you know community standards of how reasonable people use their property and your neighbors are complaining that snakes are coming out of your property on ours and you need to either cut your grass down or let us do it for you and you refuse to let them do it then probably an argument could be made that you're causally responsible by your actions right yeah for like or your inaction when when well your action would be denying permission for others to to put a fence up around your property or to mow your grass your grass on their own so I think it'd be something like that I think basically you'd have people they would go to court and they would try to settle these disputes in a reasonable way and how juries or judges would decide these things in such edge cases is hard to say but I think basically you could make a case that it was a type of negligence a type of abuse of your property rights okay all right well one more because you got me thinking about it when when you talk about so libertarianism is involves negative rights I have the right to not be attacked by another person so hopefully it doesn't sound too similar to the last one but let's say it will if you believe in like the Tannehill and Rothbard restitution system if someone's dog attacks me do I get do I have the right to restitution from them since obviously the dog can't grant me that yeah that's a difficult one I mean honestly I haven't worked out in my mind what I think about strict liability and responsibility for property like I said in the knife case the knife is an inanimate object so unless you were somehow complicit or even negligent and someone stealing your your weapon I don't think you're responsible for for that your I think the basic libertarian ideas that you're responsible for your actions so the question would be by having a dog which is an animate object that you own and by having by being the only one that has the legal right in the community to control the dog in other words no one else has the right to put a leash on your dog because you own it then does that imply some kind of responsibility to to be responsible in the exercise of those rights and I think you could argue that it does because it's an implication of the idea that you could perform any action that you want except invading the borders of other people and remember all actions involve the employment of scarce means which means your property your property right things that you have a property right in which would include your animals so you could say that because you have legally recognized right to control the dog and because no one else does they can't restrain the dog then basically the dog is an agent of your will right and it's going out and doing something that you are responsible for because it's like it's like a a proxy actor for you just like if you had an employee and you said listen I've got a successful company you know let's say we're drilling oil wells and you use your profits and you hire employees and you tell one of them to go over to this unowned area in Texas and and and homestead a well for you well he's homesteading it on your behalf so you would be the owner of the well not him even though it was his action or labor involved because of he's your agent and because of the contract between you so I think by some kind of analogy you could say that your animals um at least in some cases or performing actions on your behalf so I would think you would a restitution at least in some cases okay thank you another question here hello this is uh joshua stevens hey josh hi there okay so I had a two brief questions all right I know that uh you and Robert Wenzel are uh so speed debating uh IP issues and I've heard him uh mentioned that Dr Rothbard you know while he for the most part didn't support IP uh writes uh he did support I guess the copyrights uh could you elaborate on that he didn't support copyright he supported um um he was against state legislated patent and copyright schemes but what he said was that in a free market if you owned a product you could have a contract with your buyer so you sell something to a buyer and you could limit what they what they purchased from you so instead of selling them a mousetrap let's say you could only sell them basically a partial right to the mousetrap like the right to use it for personal uses and you would retain other rights like the right to copy it um which actually doesn't make a lot of sense I think he was confused on this but I think what he was getting at was you could have a contract with your with your with your buyer and you could say the buyer agrees contractually either that he's a co-owner of the mousetrap and you he doesn't completely buy it and so that the seller still basically owns it and is only lending it or leasing it or or giving partial rights to the buyer so that if the buyer uses it in prohibitive ways he's committing a type of trespass which is which is a imaginable relationship although it's not practically feasible um or he's imagining a contract where the buyer buys the mousetrap but agrees that if he makes a copy of it let's say or if he learns anything from the mousetrap and makes an improved mousetrap on his own then he agrees to pay some kind of damage payment to the seller which which is also feasible but impractical for a couple of reasons number one it's so hard to monitor these things and a seller of a of an iphone or a uh a mousetrap or a book you know they just want to get their money and be done with it they don't have to monitor the activities of millions of people that who are buying ten dollar or hundred dollar items and nor do the buyers want to be monitored and nor do the buyers who pay a small fee for a useful item want to be limited in what they can do with it um you know if i buy a book from someone for twenty dollars and the seller says i'm only going to sell you this book on the condition that you agree to pay me a million dollars if you make a copy of it or if you learn from it or you or it influences one of your novels in the future or if you loan it to a friend a lot most people would say i'm not going to uh take that risk on it's not worth it to me to get a twenty dollar novel i'll just go pirate it you know or make a photocopy for my friend or i'll go buy a book from a more reasonable seller um and even if the seller was able to persuade a few dupes to enter into such a contract it would only affect that small number of stupid customers who enter into these contracts it would not affect third parties what Rothbard said was that if you sell the mousetrap and you stamp copyright on it then it's understood by the buyer that he's only getting the right to use it for certain purposes but not the right to copy it and therefore under this sort of bundle of rights idea the buyer doesn't own the entire mousetrap so if he sells the mousetrap to his friend then his friend can only get the rights that you know the the buyer had in it which doesn't include the right to copy so that's Rothbard's argument the problem with it is that it sort of begs the question of whether there's intellectual property at all because it assumes that there's property rights and knowledge because it assumes that this third party needs the right to use the knowledge to make a copy of the mousetrap in fact he doesn't even need to buy the mousetrap or even need to use or touch the mousetrap to learn about it he could he could observe it from afar he could learn from it from someone else or just have it have its operation described to him by the buyer or someone else and so now he's in possession of knowledge but he never entered into a contract with the buyer or the seller so he could not be possibly bound by contract and under the first theory I mentioned he wouldn't be guilty of trespassing either because he is not actually using the mousetrap so under neither theory which Rothbard doesn't really lay out explicitly I'm just giving him the benefit of the doubt I'm saying that's the only two possible theories he could use is that the buyer's misuse of the of the mousetrap would be a type of trespass or it would be a violation of contract whichever one it is the third party is not guilty of either one because he's just using knowledge um and he could of course spread that knowledge to other people and then eventually everyone in the world knows about it and not only that to sell the mousetrap in the first place the seller is promoting its benefits and its features I mean he's trying to say my mousetrap is better than the the old generation mousetraps it's got these new improved features he's advertising he's telling the whole world he's preaching it from the rooftops he's already telling everybody what's innovative about this new mousetrap so you know he can't expect people not to learn from that action it's got really nothing to do with the buyer so um the basic problem with this Rothbardian idea and by the way it contradicts Rothbard's views on defamation law which is another type of intellectual property which is in ethics of liberty where he says that the problem with reputation rights which is what defamation law protects is that it presupposes that you have a right to your reputation which is what other people think about you and he says well it's obviously absurd for one person to have a property right and what other people think about him because you don't own their brains basically so similar reasoning would shoot down the IP idea I think because um you don't have the right to what other people would knowledge other people have in their heads and what they use to guide their actions this is why I started out with praxeology because I think it helps to clarify this it shows that you have property rights in scarce means things that you can clash over but you cannot have property rights in knowledge everyone's free to use the same knowledge as long as they acquired it um well no matter how they acquired it to be honest as long you know whatever information people have is going to guide their actions they're going to have to consult it when they decide what actions to pursue and what means to employ to achieve their goals okay and one last brief question for me all right so I understand that uh like Dr uh Hans Hoppe he mentions that uh he you know he promotes decentralization uh as a way to end the state and so I understand that in regards to like uh immigration he says well look the taxpayers essentially that the roads are essentially you know their property public property center they're probably because they're taxed their private property which is uh tax dollars goes to fund and pay for so if the you know if let's say in some city like I don't know Miami uh if voters says if voters say look you know we want to uh crack down you know on uh immigration or whatever the case may be you know uh let's do that but then I understand that Dr. Walter uh Dr. Walter Block says okay it doesn't matter roads are essentially open to the public you know you can't have you know uh you try to initiate you know private property rights over that what does your take on that between you know uh let's say roads and immigration so I think well first of all Hoppe and Block and me uh are all anarchist Austrian libertarians and so our ideal uh goal would be a totally private property society where there is no state in the first place so there would be no such thing as immigration it would make no sense there would only be private property owners and you could never enter someone's property without an invitation and would just be you know totally the domain of private law there would be no such thing as national borders etc what Hoppe is trying to point out is that um is that in a second best or even third best sort of situation what he's trying to point out is that the assumption everyone has that even among radical libertarians like Rothbard for example there's sort of a background assumption that even though our modern liberal democracy system is not ideal it was an improvement over what we had before which was monarchs and kings so what Hoppe tries to argue is that number one the move from monarchy to democracy after world war one was not really completely progressed that there were negative things about it that in some ways monarchy is even better or less bad than democracy although he explicitly rejects monarchy and democracy because he's an anarchist but what he's trying to point out is he's trying to say that if you had to choose a less bad government in many ways a monarchy would be better and he the reason is because the monarch has more better incentives to more intelligently or efficiently run the country than a democracy does and this is just in a way standard public choice you know type theory you know your elected representatives have an incentive to waste etc whereas a monarch who had a property right in sort of the base of the country they could turn it over to his heirs has sort of an incentive for quality control etc it doesn't mean it's ideal or utopian so he's kind of coming up with this monarchy versus democracy idea to criticize democracy not to promote monarchy and what he points out is that the the immigration policy of a monarch would be different than that of democracy for various reasons okay the the the rulers of a democratic society have an immigration policy designed to maximize their votes so the democrats might want more uh i don't know minorities to come in because they're going to vote democratic etc whereas a monarch would be more concerned with uh some kind of quality control quality of life issues so he would maybe let migrant workers in for a while but then keep them out because they're not part of the the the kind kind of country he's not necessarily supporting this he's just kind of contrasting it to show that we shouldn't just assume that whatever the policy is and democracy is compatible with or getting close to an approximation of a libertarian society and then he also points out that when you have the government control over borders as we have now and you combine that with public property and when you combine it with welfare which he doesn't even really rely upon too much is his argument what he's saying is that the libertarian argument is that well because in a free society we wouldn't have any state with immigration controls then an approximation of that in a democracy would be to have open borders what he says is it's not so easy to make that that call because there are good things about doing that and bad thing the good thing obviously would be there'd be no i and s there'd be no you know uh Mexican immigrants going to jail etc but on the other hand because of the government's public road system which connects people's property and because the government opens it to all and because the government makes it illegal to discriminate based upon race or race or ethnicity that opening the borders in a publicly owned system like we have now where there are public roads leads to forced integration it makes people have to bump up against each other or live next to each other or integrate with each other when they naturally otherwise wouldn't so he's just pointing out one of the harms of having a state system in the first place in other words no matter what the government does someone's going to be harmed it's just like public education right i mean if if we have government schools if they teach evolution it's going to offend the christians creationists who don't believe in evolution who are forced to pay for it with their tax dollars but if they teach creationism same thing for secular people so there's really no answer the only answer is to return you know gradually move towards a private society which is what he says he actually opposes the federal government an explicit statement from having control over this and to giving the control over immigration to to states and then towns and cities and ultimately down to the private person so that sort of goes along with the the typical decentralist or secessionist strategy that a lot of libertarians have that the smaller you make the political decision making units the more you you do approximate um an anarchist or free society not because of the decisions that they make but because it's a smaller and more granular decision making process and because they're more likely to make decisions that would be similar to what would happen in a free society i don't know if i agree with him on that last part that's more of a prediction what he's saying is in a free society you would have some sort of natural segregation or balkanization among ethnic and religious and uh you know other other grounds and i think there's probably something to that because people do tend to associate uh like with like to some degree so in a free society you could see you know different areas that have some racial or linguistic or ethnic uh or historical backgrounds in common to some degree but then they still trade with each other and they still you know visit with each other but they have some kind of uh you know jewish community here hispanic community there european community here whatever you might have some of that so what he's saying is if you if you made the decisions politically on a smaller level it would tend to mimic that which is what a monarch would do as well so that's his basic argument it's not anti-immigration it's just anti-democracy really my name is my name is donal sheldon and i've got a couple of questions for you sure i'm old enough so that i kind of live through the creation of the internet and the ideas of property rights for programs that have we have now evolved so that you can indeed of course copyright things with our knowledge based and you have microsoft out there with his bill gates with his ownership of the operating system that he's runs on his computers and then you have of course the open line of thinking where no one owns uh linux or the derivation off of unix that that is and so there's a whole lot of people that thinks that whatever you create under that genre belongs to anyone who chooses to use it and they want them to allow a fair example all the basic information to be available to anyone as i say just as a matter of utility i at one point had a computer company back when at&t still owned the rights to unix and um my uh my young programmers went around that just almost instantly picking up from berkeley and from other schools of the source code off of unix and using it prolifically and never thought anything of it it was just a whole different philosophy if you will more more more libertarian i would say than than not but um but where do we come down really today from a practical point of view you have enormous amounts of you know money being exchanged over the rights to certain types of programs many of which are quite simple and quite frankly could be easily duplicated well i i think uh there have been a lot of statements made by people like um either steve jobs or bill gates some of these guys saying that you know if if the current patent and copyright laws and the way they apply to software had been in effect in in the early days of the internet and not just the internet but computer technology 30 40 years ago 20 30 40 years ago they wouldn't have been able to create what they've created and a lot of european countries right now are having a lot a lot of studies saying that you know one reason the us um has facebook and google and all these are they're saying the one reason they don't have a lot of innovations because they're stifling regulations so and you know i think uh jeff bezos from amazon thinks that software patents are horrible even though he's got a couple um but he thinks they should at least be reduced in terms um i think the whole thing is a mistake i think that this this whole dispute among you know the problem with engineers and software people um and the open source movement like richard stallman they are working within a copyright and patent system i mean richard stallman is sort of a leftist and of course they're confused on property rights they don't even oppose copyright law in fact the idea of the open source license you don't need a license without copyright because license is permission you only need permission if someone has the right to stop you they only have the right to stop you because of copyright if you didn't have copyright this whole debate would almost disappear uh and in fact it would change because um you have people making a false equation in my view or a false analogy between um the open source movement and by the way which is hypocritical because they're not for open source in the culture nina payley's written about this richard stallman and these guys are for open source in software but not for open source in cultural works because they're not really against copyright um but you you you have people assuming that the technologists who were open source versus the closed source guys are sort of a rough approximation of the anti-ip types and the pro-ip types so they would make an equation between someone like me who's anti-ip and someone who's pro open source and i don't think that's actually correct there is some connection between the openness attitude which i talked about earlier once you recognize that information is a it's a good thing for people to learn from each other and competition is a good thing and emulation of others is a good thing that doesn't mean you have an obligation in a free market to spread to to tell people your secrets i mean look if you have a new idea and you want to keep it proprietary and you think you can do that if you want to sell a software program and just let the executable go out there but keep your source code private you've got every right to do that and i don't know what business model is going to work better the only thing is you can't rely or you should not be able to rely upon copyright to protect to stop it if someone is able to reverse engineer it or to compete with you and make a similar program then that's just competition that's just life buddy so i would i would separate in my mind this open versus closed idea from the ip copyright and patent idea what we should as libertarians be in favor of we should be in favor generally of the idea of a heritage of humankind of the idea of of the expanding pool of human knowledge of scientific and literary progress we should be in favor of emulation and learning and competition and cooperation all these things and we should be opposed to monopolistic grants of privilege which is patent and copyright but that doesn't mean that every entrepreneur has to drop his panties and reveal his secrets to everyone i think if you can find a business model that makes sense and you keep some of your some of your information proprietary and that works for you that's fine i just don't think that works very well for a lot of things like it doesn't work for a musician i mean the only way you're going to make sales or get famous is for people to learn your music or to sell a movie but you could you know come up with a process to make a chemical or again have a software program and you keep some of your your secrets to yourself so there's nothing wrong with proprietary and closed nests as long as you don't use government grants of monopoly privilege as a cudgel against your competitors you have to rely upon just business models that you find as an entrepreneur that can work okay i i hear where you're coming from it's still kind of nebulous to me open source versus the patented uncopyrighted types but also the idea you've just mentioned of reverse engineering yes now you know my experience with i am not a computer programmer let me say that but my experience with having computer programmers in my company working for me was that some of these kids are just unbelievably clever right and they can they can reverse engineer damn near anything and almost as as you speak i mean i have one that's because it could sink in machine language now that just is scarce it scares me to death and i'm fearless i mean you know well what what scares you but what's um i mean look what's different from that in your mind with just the regular competitive process of the free market let i mean you come up with a new car or or you come up with a new airplane model or you come up with a new grocery store layout design or you come up with a new fast food restaurant idea if it's popular right you're going to make profits and those are just going to send signals out into the market and other people are going to say hey you know like wendy's is going to open up after the saving donals and burger king being successful that's just the natural competitive process what's wrong what bothers you in your mind about the idea that someone might reverse engineer your ideas and compete with you nothing bothers me about it i think that the barrier to intergenerally is capital if you've got enough money to get into the game and stay in the game long enough to be able to copy whatever it is you choose to copy you can indeed do that do exactly that the question becomes one of where where do we draw the line and is there any reason or have um you said patents for example are not were frowned upon by let's say by libertarian thinking but why would there be an incentive to do anything uh in improving product or improving the the nature of what's available to the public if there were not a protection for 17 years let's say right for for your for your ideas having been put into the marketplace well let me um let me answer one other question first you mentioned the open source thing and let me just my understanding of open source is that it's kind of a hack that richard stallman came up with and what he did was he said that he's going to use the copyright system um kind of against itself in a way so what the idea of open source is that when you have a copyright in software then you release it to the world with a license and the license says that everyone's free to use this as long as they include a similar type of license in any derivative works they make from it or any use they make of it so it's sort of like a worm almost it spreads itself and so I don't actually like this is the this is the um it's similar to the creative commons um um share a like idea um I prefer the to make it as open as possible and let anyone do what they want with it but what he's trying to do is say that as long as you're going to have a new software project or program if you're going to borrow any kind of open source software out there in the commons now you've got to make your entire thing or at least parts of it open to the public under the same terms so it's a way of giving people a choice either you join with us and you sort of give up your copyright rights um or you can't use our stuff which means we're going to serve our copyrights against you so there's something about it I don't like but as as for your other question um you said what's the incentive to say innovate if you don't have a 17 year term um I think there's a lot of problems with this way of looking at it first of all the purpose of law is not to make sure you have the right amount of incentives to innovate in fact there's no way we can know whether you have the right amount of incentives and there's certainly no way the government can know this and the government has no interest in knowing this the government's in the thrall of of of of lots of private interests and it's not really trying to really fine tune the knobs of the economy to maximize innovation uh the reason the copyright term keeps going up and up and up is not because the congress has made a wise choice to fine tune the incentives it's because disney doesn't want the copyright on mickey mouse to expire you know these kinds of things um and you say what's the incentive now that's a the question is fine but you have to realize that a question is not an argument you can ask questions all you want but if it's really just a hidden way of saying unless you can prove to me that your system of freedom is going to result in x level of innovation then i'm for patent and copyright i mean that doesn't follow in my in my view you've got you've got to say what what the purpose of property rights are and why some kind of state granted monopoly privilege is justified because it's clear that they undercut property rights if you get a patent on on your process you can use the government courts to come in and tell me i can't use my factory in this way right so you actually have a limit you're putting a limitation on what i can do with my property rights when i haven't done anything wrong to you i haven't signed a contract from you i might not i might not even have learned of the process from you i might have independently come up with it on my own so in my mind the patent system is completely legitimate and but let's just take your question head on you say what's the incentive well the incentive is you can sell products for a profit now then you say well i face competition well that's the free market yeah of course you face competition so you have to keep improving or you have to go in your reputation or your brand name etc but but i would also say this no one can seriously argue that if we eliminate patents tomorrow let's say we eliminate patent on tomorrow no one can seriously argue and i don't think you would argue this that we would have no innovation ever that would go to zero i mean we've had innovation before the patent system right which originated around 1623 um and in a modern form in 1789 or 1790 in the u.s there have been innovation for all of human history so you can ask what what the reason people do that is and i think we know we people do it to make a profit because they're curious because they're universities because they're researchers because the desire to expand knowledge is um is on their present among humans or because some ideas time has come i mean you know when certain theoretical ideas spread into the public then the next revolution becomes possible you know transistors quantum telecom you know quantum computing maybe uh semiconductors flying space shuttles um you know inter ballistic missiles the atomic weapon the atomic bomb etc some ideas time just comes and that's this is why in the history of innovation and science um a lot of times there's a battle for who gets the patent now why is there a battle because two or three or four people came up with the idea at the same time why is that well because the idea was ripe its time had come right so but the bottom line is you no one can argue that absent patent law we would have no innovation you and i both know there would be some innovation so the only argument for a patent system is that absent a patent system we're going to have level x of innovation but you and i as some kind of central planners know that x is not enough or it's not optimal and with a patent system it's x plus y and that's the right amount now how do we know this i've never heard anyone tell me what x or y is and i've never heard anyone even prove to me that y is positive and in fact in my view in all the studies i've seen y is negative in other words when you impose a patent system on society you strangle and distort a lot of innovation so who's going to come up with a new smartphone right now you see samsung and motorola and google and apple fighting it out with hundreds and millions of dollars of of fees paid to attorneys in bat patent battles all across the globe now what small inventor is going to even try to enter into that they know that if i came up with a new a new phone i'm going to be sued into oblivion by one or all of these guys so what you have is you have two or three or four big players in different industries you know aircraft medical devices software um whatever they dominate because of the patent and copyright system the patent and the copyright system direct barriers to entry and give rise to oligopolies and concentrated businesses and very large super companies so microsoft for example had monopoly profits because of copyright because the copyright for years and years protected their microsoft operating system then they use those monopoly profits to acquire patents now they have patents and copyrights and they use those in tandem with each other to keep a lock on their monopoly position in the market so it's really just not the case that patents in my opinion cause there to be extra innovation in fact they they dissuade innovation the people that are on top of the given industry have less of an incentive to innovate because they have a monopoly position on their earlier innovations and other people on the outside have no incentive to even enter the field because they will be sued into oblivion so i think they dissuade innovation and even if you believe that a patent system would add a little bit more innovation how do we know that it's worth the cost so let's say this y is another billion dollars worth of innovation but the patent system imposes 40 billion dollars of cost on the economy well then it's not worth it right or let's say you said we need 17 years well why not why not 28 years i mean we could get a little bit more innovation from increasing the term well let's just go ahead and make it infinite in fact let's have the death penalty right i mean let's let's not just have civil penalties let's have the death penalty for violating someone's patent the more you increase the scope and the strength and the enforcement of these patent rights the more innovation you get so where's the stopping point and in fact you could argue that even if we can maximize that we have the death penalty and infinite patent terms so we got x plus y innovation well what if we had x plus y plus z so why don't we tax everyone let's take a trillion dollars out of the economy by taxing the people and let's let the some government panel of experts give give kind of rewards to really really really important innovators at the end of every year some government panel of scientific experts okay we could maybe incentivize another z amount of innovation every year is that worth the trillion dollars is that worth the loss of liberty i don't think so but my point is this empirical utilitarian unprincipled line of thinking has no stopping point and not only that it has no basis in reality at least the utilitarians need to tell me what x and y and maybe z are but they never tell us they never tell us what the cost of the patent system is they never prove that it's even a positive net gain to innovation so that's my basic utilitarian response as a principled libertarian i would be opposed to it anyway just like i'm opposed to any trust law even if people would collude and set prices and even if it would be uh inefficient in the economy i mean people have a right to do what people have a right to do in my opinion thank you i appreciate that i'll i'll pass it on all right sure hello hello hello hi i saw your um your youtube video on rompal.com and please explain again why the rompal.com people are correct well you want me to explain why the rompal.com people are correct yes yes yes i saw your make the arguments again oh the rompal yeah the owners of the domain well yeah um i don't really know if they're correct my view is that there should not be a trademark based dispute resolution process that trademark is yet another type of state enforced intellectual property which is totally illegitimate and i can give you reasons for that if you want but trademark is not as bad as patent and copyright but it's also illegitimate um everyone says that trademark is legitimate because fraud is wrong deceiving customers is wrong but you know if that's all you care about then we have fraud law already trademark goes beyond that and trademark says that um someone who is using a mark in commerce for like a brand or something like that can prevent their competitors from using a similar mark if it's likely to concede to confuse some consumers or if it dilutes the value of that mark now now the problem with that is that number one you don't actually have to prove anyone was defrauded and number two the cause of action should not be on the behalf of the trademark user it should be on the behalf of the defrauded consumer okay so the problem with trademark law is that basically permits legal bullying just like patent and copyright do um and because the state has foisted this this law on on on our honor on the on the private legal systems of the world when the internet i can branched out the the united states government insisted that the i can which is quasi private sort of like the federal reserve is they insisted that they adopt the uniform dispute resolution rules to enforce trademark law so the state basically wormed its trademark IP law into the very structure of the internet as a way of helping to enforce trademark law so the problem is that the rules exist they would not exist if the government hadn't influenced i can they wouldn't exist if the government didn't have its illegitimate trademark law so the problem is the existence of the rules just like the problem is the existence of patent and copyright law um can i blame apple for suing samsung for patent infringement i don't know that's an ethical question i suppose that given the patent system apple sitting on a potentially 50 billion dollar valuable patent lawsuit that they may be irresponsible if they didn't file the suit maybe they'd be ousted by their shareholders or maybe the board of directors would be sued in a derivative action for you know for not feel living up to their fiduciary responsibilities i mean if i was the head of apple i wouldn't want to see so much for patent infringement but you know i'd be using my personal belief in against patents i'd be gambling apples cash with that basically so i'd be using someone else's assets for my personal pet hobby so i don't know i can't say that ron paul himself is wrong for filing the suit i think it's wrong because he doesn't need to do it he could have just bought it hell for the amount of money he might spend on lawyers he could probably get ron paul as a domain right there's a new procedure to actually get a new you can actually get your own custom domain for about a hundred k so he could have like ron uh ron at whatever you know ron paul dot ron paul he could do that if you wanted to it it's my understanding um so i think basically the trademark law of the government which is unlibertarian and unjust has wormed its way into the the property rules of the internet and has allowed it allows you to it's like using eminent domain there are eminent domain statutes out there wal-mart can go to a local city council and they can try to bribe or persuade the uh you know the local government to take someone else's property and sell it to wal-mart at a below rent price so they can build a superstore now is the problem that wal-mart takes advantage of eminent domain laws or is the problem that the there are eminent domain laws of course the latter is the problem is the problem that people apply for welfare or that we have welfare laws you know we shouldn't have the welfare laws and we shouldn't have trademark law and it should not infect the the internet's dispute resolution laws so that's my basic position is that this is a use of trademark law to take someone else's contractual property rights so we have a one last question okay from Christopher DeLama and um well thank you so much um we've learned a lot and I'm sure something went over our heads but we'll delve into it later and I guess get a better perspective on that but sure thanks for everything sure here's uh Christopher all right so my question is basically I've always felt like there's a bit of a disconnect or like a philosophical contradiction between the support and protection of physical property rights and intellectual property rights it seems like they would kind of both be protectable under the same philosophic premise that it's of your making it's it's your own creation and as a result it's yours to do with as you please can you kind of elaborate on that yeah um I guess there's a couple ways to approach it um um one way to think about it look imagine that you I think most of us at least most libertarian leaning people we don't have a controversy that there ought to be property rights and physical things right so that's not controversial right the question is whether there ought to also be property rights in intangible things or in mental constructs things like that um so so let's suppose you own a uh let's say let's suppose you own a farm and you're next to someone who has another farm and let's suppose your neighbor would like to take a shortcut across your property because because it would save him time traveling to uh town okay so he might approach you and say hey would you mind if I um if I use your property every day just to take a shortcut across the back corner of your property to go to town and you might agree to that you might sell it you might sell him that right for a price can you hear me hello oh mr. consult yes hello hello yeah can you guys sorry you broke up a little bit okay can you hear me now you broke up a little bit I like last few seconds how about now yeah so I'm just trying to point out the conflict between it's just like um if you if you said look I believe in negative rights like the right not to be aggressed against but I also believe in positive rights like the right to the right to an income or the right to education or the right to healthcare well we libertarians realize that these positive rights don't come for free they always have to come at the expense of negative rights right if you have a positive right to a job or education that means other people have the positive obligation to provide you with it and that infringes upon their right to be left alone right because you have to tax them basically or make them pay for it so you have to take their property away so nothing can come for free so if you have property rights in in material resources the grant of an intellectual property right is effectively what I would classify under the civil law as what's called a negative servitude or a negative easement okay but the problem with that is that because the reason is because it gives the holder of the patent of the copyright of veto right over how you use your property he can tell you you may not use your property in this way unless you get my permission now the problem is he never acquired that right from you by contract or as a result of some kind of trespass or tort that you permit committed normally he can have such a right that only if the owner of the burdened property agrees to it that's why I was giving the example about two neighbors who one of them wants to purchase from the other a right to cross his property like a right of use every day to go to town or let's say we have a neighborhood with restrictive covenants where everyone says listen our property value is going to be better or enhanced our standard of living will be enhanced if we all agree that we're not going to use our property for for pig farming only for residential purposes unless we get the permission of all the neighbors so everyone could agree to this in a restrictive covenant or an easement they could give up their rights contractually they could effectively give their neighbors a veto over some uses of their property in exchange for getting a similar veto right over their other uses this is perfectly legitimate but only because it was contractually agreed to by the parties what we have with patent and copyright is the government just grants this negative servitude or this negative easement to some inventor or some designer of a song even though the guy who he has a veto right over never agreed to it so it's a transfer or a taking of property rights from the person who is now limited in what he can use his own property for so that's the fundamental problem with it is you cannot grant you can't expand property rights without taking property rights away now the question was about well if you create something why don't you have a property right in it the problem with that question is is it assumes that creation is the source of property rights to material goods in the first place but it's not it never was it's not an independent source of property rights the only source of property rights is either contract or original appropriation original appropriation means you you somehow in border or transform an unowned scarce resource thereby establishing a better claim to it than anyone else or you acquire the resource from a previous owner by contract those are the only ways to acquire property and things legitimately so creation has nothing to do with it the mistake is that creation is valuable and useful because it is a way of transforming things that you already own into a more valuable arrangement so when when you transform things or when you use your intellectual creativity right or when you labor on things you do create wealth which just means that you make the things you own more valuable right so if you transform your paint and your canvas into a into the Mona Lisa you don't own the Mona Lisa painting because you created it you own it because you already owned the resources that went into it you had to own them to to work on them in the first place your labor made it more valuable but it didn't give you more property rights okay so there's a myth or a mistaken idea that creation is a source of property rights and if you accept that myth then you can slide into this idea well I you can own property by finding it by buying it by contract or by creating it so why can't you own a poem or a song or a movie or an invention that you create well the the fallacy in that idea is that you don't own things in the first place because you create them creation is the is the means of wealth not the means of property rights so that's the fundamental a problem with with property rights in intangible things is that they have to come at the expense of existing property rights now there's one more argument that people make and they say well what's wrong with the idea that some inventor can limit how I use my property after all property rights aren't unlimited anyway in other words I can't swing my fist when it hits your nose I can't shoot my gun if you're standing in the way so your property rights always interfere with how I use my property so what's wrong with another limitation well you can't just you know just because some limitations on on your use of property are legitimate doesn't mean every limitation is by that argument you could murder anyone or rape anyone or steal you could say to the victim why are you complaining after all property rights are limited I mean it just makes no sense you have to have a good argument you have to have a good reason to limit someone's property and the reason that we libertarians think some actions are limited not property rights but actions is because they infringe on others property rights I can't shoot my gun at you because it would invade your property borders so the reason I can't perform certain actions is because of property rights so you can't take that argument that the sanctity of property rights means some actions can't be performed to say that any limitation on property rights is therefore legitimate it just doesn't follow at all all right cool thanks sure all right hello yeah hey mr. Gonzalez it's uh louis revero um I want to thank you uh again for speaking to us and answering all our questions um so I'm speaking on behalf of everybody else because I have uh the headset we had a problem with the audio so I guess you can hear him clap all right thanks guys I appreciate it I'm glad we got the technical stuff worked out and I enjoyed it thanks for your um your um intelligent and uh polite questions guys thank you bye bye