 Any questions? I'm going to check online if there are questions too, but if you have questions, that'd be great. Anybody? All the ways that taxes don't work and what not, is there an ideal way, regardless of whether that could ever happen, is there an ideal way where we can have services that everybody participates in, but without the wastefulness of the government? Well, I think the simple answer is that yes, there is. I mean, if this is what you're asking, there is an alternative. And the thing is, basically all the services that the government provides can be better provided in the market. And in fact, most of them already have long historical precedents of being provided in the market. So, I mean, if that's what you meant, then yes. I mean, it's entirely possible. And they would be much less wasteful and more efficient ways of providing the same things. And it's not just the market. I mean, there's a market society, but it's also civil society, family society that just because there are public goods doesn't mean there can't be privately provided public goods. And so some things that for which they're a profit motive wouldn't actually come out of, then the civic-minded, a charitable motive would come into being. And so basically the alternative is to say that, oh, well, charity only works if it's nationalized. We have to nationalize charity. Could you compare that to, say, a credit union versus a bank to make an analogy there where the credit union is actually owned by the members? So it's a collective when they provide the same services, but it's not like the government in a sense of taking it. Yeah, I think you can use exactly those kind of analogies because kind of building on what Danny was saying. I mean, we talk a lot about the market and the market is, of course, very important, profit and loss are very important. But these arrangements for getting around these problems of providing public goods, they're much wider than just the profit motive. And so, yes, you have all kinds of arrangements like this, like credit unions or cooperatives, collectives and all kinds of alternatives to strict profit and loss that come up to solve these problems. And the reason that they're sort of unobjectionable is because they're just the result of people getting together and deciding that that's the way they'd like to organize the production of whatever this good is. And then so the big point is that it's, despite the fact, of course, that we do talk about the market a lot, it's really the big distinction is between government and private individuals and the use of force and social cooperation. Those are the big things and it just happens to be that the market is one very important mechanism for social cooperation. But yeah, you have all these other arrangements too that people come up with to try and solve these problems. What level of government would be acceptable? We have to have some form of government. If you just get away with everything, what's the key, complete anarchy from writing, complete total chaos? Well, one thing is that you have to distinguish between anarchy and anonomy. Anonomy means loss. So arc means rulers. So just because you don't have rulers doesn't mean you don't have rules. Oh, no, no, no, sorry. Go ahead. I think what we're trying to say is that we don't necessarily need government in the sense that's conventionally understood. We need rules. We need law. We need a society. But it's not necessarily the case. I think we would argue that you need government in the sense of somebody who forces you to abide by laws that you did not in fact have a real role in setting up and then you never agreed to. So I mean, we do think that a lot of these fundamental services that government is supposed to provide in terms of just ensuring the very stability of society. Those can be provided by private individuals who don't need to force each other at gunpoint to follow each other's will. We do. That's something that I think that we would agree on. And there's also a distinction between government and governance. So we do need governance. We need security enforcement of laws, judicial services, protection from foreign invasion. These are things that are important, but they're all things that have at some point been provided by private individuals. Every single one of these services has been provided by private services. In Ireland, for a thousand years, they were provided. They were all provided. And in most other societies, at least some of them have been provided in different ways. And just as a practical matter, a solution that was proposed by Joseph Sobert and he was a great libertarian writer. He just put it like this. He said, you look as a practical problem. What we should basically do is just start stripping government away. And if we ever get to some point where the social fabric is threatened, if we cut any more government, then we'll stop there. And if we don't reach that point, well, then we'll just get rid of it all. Could you have a workable system that's more localized? In other words, it's part of our problem today in our United States government. The fact that so much of what we do is under the umbrella of the national and federal level. If we were to, as a practical matter, we were to be able to take away some of the functions of the federal government and put them more in the hands of state local governments. Would that be more a move toward that kind of cooperative society? I would certainly think so. I mean, decentralizing and localizing is a very big key to this. Because of course, you're much more likely to be able to have a productive conversation about governance with the people who live in the same community as you then, you know, the bigwigs in Washington, D.C. I mean, I think that's, people understand that, and that's definitely true, is that decentralizing power is a very important part of this process of increasing liberty. And that can be another process along the lines of what he was talking about before, of just taking off layers of government until you find the stopping point that works, where you can also secede until you find the stopping point that works. You can have states seceding from the federal government. You can have cities seceding from states. You can have neighborhoods seceding from cities. And ultimately, if it's possible and if it works, then you can have the individual seceding politically from that little micro-state. Which is not to say that you're seceding economically. It's important to realize that we're not talking about economic atomism, that you still have the division of labor, that just because we're not part of the same state as Canada doesn't mean that we can't buy and sell from Canada and that we're not part of the same civilization and part of the same society as Canada. And just like the Italian city-states, just because they weren't at one point part of one big Italian super-state didn't mean that they weren't a civilization that bought and sold from each other. This is a great point, is that you have these two effects, because as you become more decentralized politically speaking, at the same time there's this great effect where you become more integrated economically. So even more decentralized type forms of government results in much more global communication and economic activity and so on. So it's an interesting effect that goes the other way, but that's an entirely good thing. So there is a question from the online audience. Harold asks, which type of tax do you consider to be most destructive to society? Sales tax, personal income tax or corporate tax? And what do you consider to be the most destructive aspect of that tax? Which tax do you consider to be most immoral as opposed to destructive? Thanks for the session. Thanks. Want to take that? Yeah, well, I mean as always it sort of depends on where you start from and exactly how you look at it. In general, you might say that corporate income taxes can be among the most destructive because if you're taxing say entrepreneurs, we're supposed to be the driving force of the economy. If they're prevented by through taxes from doing this, from playing this very important role, that's obviously going to have very serious implications for the whole economy. It's going to prevent us from being productive and growing and things like that. That's going to in turn have a huge impact on standards of living. So that might be one way to look at it. Murray Rothbard said that too much focus is given to the type of taxation and not enough to the level of taxation. That it's the level of taxation that matters the most. And so actually the most important part about the type of taxation is how it contributes to the level of taxation. So that's why Joe was talking about how a poll tax or a head tax, people talk about flat tax as being like everyone pays the same percentage. No, a real flat tax would be everybody paying the same amount. And that by its very nature would limit taxation because you can't charge, like Joe was saying, that you can't charge too much of a tax because the poor have to be able to afford it. So it forces you to have a very limited, very low tax. And so Murray Rothbard wrote an article about Margaret Thatcher because she tried to institute a poll tax. And he said, but she missed the whole point of the poll tax because she instituted it, but then she tried to make it really high. And that's missing the whole point of the poll tax is that it's supposed to force you to make it low. And then just to add also because they asked about the morality of taxes too, a lot of people have made fairly convincing cases that things like personal income taxes are the most onerous sort of taxes from the moral perspective as well because they're basically punishing you for being productive among other things. But again, I don't think there's a clear cut answer to either of those. It depends a lot. It really depends on what you're looking at. And in general, internal taxes in general, including income taxes, but also including excise taxes that those are particularly hated, especially in the Anglo-American tradition because of the invasion of privacy that they entail. So that's part of the reason why the Americans were so hated so much when the British switched from tariffs to excise and direct taxation, internal taxation because it involved troops coming in and snooping around on your property and trying to assess how much you owe. Whereas with a tariff, it's paid at the dock and it's seen as less intrusive. But again, it's really the principle that really upset the Americans that even though the revenue level was really low and that it was the principle and so that's what's amazing about how easy we are in terms of the taxation that we're. Even just this tiny, tiny taxation, just the principle of it upset people and like Ron Paul said, that once you give 1%, you're giving 100% of the principle. Oak? So how do we get from where we are now with fairly high tax session to that point where people said that it would be like where the fabric of civilization or something would break? How do you get from here to there when everyone thinks the taxation is okay? Well, I mean, all political systems depend to some extent on the fact that people consent. So really, all that has to change is that people just have to sort of withdraw their consent and say that look, we're simply not going to pay these taxes anymore. Now, that's a very simple thing to say, it's a much more difficult thing to actually do because it's not very wise to encourage people not to pay their taxes and nobody wants to risk imprisonment. But the real key is to just communicate this idea to people that taxes are unjust and that they are destructive to the economy. And when enough people realize this, really begin to understand this and put it into practice, then you will see a lot of people at the same time withdraw their support from the system. And only then will it be in a situation where there will be some kind of alternative that we'll have to propose, like you said, and that's when we can start whittling away at the taxes and other regulations and things. So in American history, one tactic that was used was just civil disobedience. Murray Rothbard has a great article on the whiskey rebellion, which was a widespread rebellion against an excise tax on whiskey. That was successful. Even though George Washington actually came in militarily but it stopped to one particular revolt where they were actually manhandling tax collectors, it didn't stop there, that it was still really hard for the government to collect the whiskey tax, and so then ultimately it was abandoned. And that was the last time that there was a peacetime excise tax in America until the Civil War. Yes? You mentioned the Rothbard article about the bull tax. At the end of the article it said that Scotland did not have a forced tax and that a third of the population was defused and payable. And then we were talking earlier about a circum. And so I wonder, there seem to be two voluntary taxes, two systems of government under monarchy. So I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like the only moral governments are no government of all of anarchy and monarchy. I mean, I miss those taxes and I don't have another one. Hans Hermann Hoppe makes the point that there are some that in a monarchy you know who the state is. If King Obama tried to say the state is us, it wouldn't fly. And so there's built-in resistance because of that. And so that's one way in which that's true. But then you have kings like Philip the Fair who were really rapacious at the same time. Does the Federal Reserve have anything to do with taxation and if it does what does it have to do with it? There are some connections but really we tend to think of the Federal Reserve as an alternative way of influencing the economy. Generally speaking you make a distinction in economics between monetary policy, which is the Federal Reserve and basically just changes in the money supply, changes in interest rates, things of that nature. On the other hand there's fiscal policy, which is the government's budget, taxes, spending, and so on. And those are generally viewed as alternative methods of trying to influence the economy, push it in one way or another. So in that sense the Federal Reserve is not connected to taxation. Although of course I think you were pointing out the inflation tax. Of course this is one informal way that the Fed very much is involved in the business of taxation is because it changes the purchasing power of money. It imposes this implicit tax on all people who hold money. And at the same time even if there isn't price inflation, there's no such thing as a free lunch. I mean there's a certain amount of goods and services that are out there and so if you print a bunch of money out of nowhere and give it to a bunch of bankers and suddenly they have the wherewithal to command a greater portion of these goods and services that are out there at any given moment then when you're talking about one given moment it's a zero sum game. So if they are suddenly richer then in that given moment other people are poor. So anytime you just print money out of nowhere it is a redistribution. And so even if there isn't noticeable price inflation it still attacks, it's still a redistribution of wealth. Any other questions? Okay, thank you.