 Mae cwestiynau i'w hanes. Mae'n ddweud o'r iawn, gan A, ganddo gan B ac ymdyn nhw'n ddweud o'r llyfr, yn ymdyn ni'n ymdyniaeth yn ymdyn ni'n ddweud i'r ddweud o'r llyfr Oherwydd, rydyn ni'n ddweud i'w ddweud o'r pwyllt, mae'n ddweud o'r enghreifft, mae'r ddweud o'r llyfr o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r rhyw A rydych chi diannaweth ymddangos â.... gweld o'r ysgolwll gan B, a'r profiad i nucleus mae achos yn gweithio Dwi ddweud ymwli'n dengyfan yn amser ac fe wnaeth bethau y bydd y Bry fini beth yn hyn i, I want you to clarify if you can how you justify being a conscientious objector in those circumstances. Always difficult to understand questions sometimes acoustically. So you think if the entire population is in favour of going to war how difficult it is for conscientious objectors? No, it's how the conscientious objector responds to his family group because families were broken up by this. And they were saying to him, if we all did this we would lose immediately. So you are looking after your conscience and letting all your fellow guys go out to get shot. And it's quite difficult psychologically to deal with that questioning. You should probably prevent that situations like that emerge in the first place. There should be a sufficient number in a country who holds the opinion that we are not going to war against another country and we are not collective enemies or collective friends with somebody else. Yes, if you have a situation where the overwhelming majority in one country wants to go to war and you resist it, then the best thing is somehow to be a fellow traveler to do absolutely nothing. You don't have to volunteer to go to war even though all your neighbours do go to war. You can tell your kids, no we will not participate in that even though all our neighbours and your friends do go to war. If you have a situation where the overwhelming majority is in favour of it doing it, then all you can do is try to stay private as long as you can protect whatever is dear to you and hope that the whole thing goes over and you are still alive. Just a little something to add. There's a very nice movie of an Italian director, Womini Conto, about World War I. It's one of the hardest anti-war movies that were ever made and in fact he was tried because it was an offence to the Italian army, the movie. In a scene of the movie one of the soldiers says, we are all armed to the teeth. What we should do is point the guns not to the Austrians on the other side but to our officers behind and the war would end in a minute. This should be the attitude no matter what the other people think because war is always a useless slaughter. Even if you are just one conscientious objector against all the rest of the country, you are still right. It doesn't matter what the other think. Nonetheless, you might not want to risk your own life if you know that you are completely alone. Even if you can shoot your officer but you know that they will retaliate. So there has to be a realistic assessment of what the situation is. In my speech that I give on Sunday afternoon I will address these problems to a certain extent. Yes, sometimes the best thing is I give up. That's it. There's nothing I can do about it. But you have to make an assessment of the situation as it exists and depending on that assessment your decision might be this way or that way. But in any case I would recommend that you try your very best to stay out of all of this. Sometimes that is all you can do. If I have a big bully living next to me, sometimes the best thing is to simply say I have to just be on peaceful terms with this guy. I hate this guy. I wish the guy would be dead. But I'm not in a position that I can kill him. He will likely be more successful than I am. I was just about to say that turning guns on officers didn't seem to work very well in Russia, if I remember right. A critical question to Hans and then I'd really like to get Anthony's view as well as the body historical narrative. Hans, you talked about how a Ukrainian libertarian should see the whole thing. Now I know quite a few Ukrainian libertarians and Russian libertarians as well. And maybe surprisingly maybe not a single one I've talked to agrees to this kind of radical neutrality. But interestingly all the Ukrainian and Russian libertarians I talked to agree with each other on seeing the Putin gang and the society surrounding it as the bigger threat. And the Russian libertarians rather leaving Russia and the Ukrainian libertarians rather staying in Ukraine. Are you demanding something utterly unpatriotic and unhistorical of them? Or how do you explain that anecdotal evidence I'm trying to share with you? Or have you met a single Ukrainian libertarian that shares this approach or is able to remain neutral? I do not know every Ukrainian libertarian. I'm pretty sure that they have different opinions when it comes to some of these questions. Obviously a libertarian living in the Don bus might have a very different position than somebody living in Lemberg or Lyf as it is called right now. The Ukrainians are not one homogeneous blob of people. So some of the Ukrainians have no interest whatsoever at the Don bus and they would be gladly giving it up. Others of the opinion we have to defend the borders under all circumstances as they exist historically. Even though historically of course the borders of the Ukraine have continuously shifted. The Soviet Union was the one who gave parts of Slovakia to the Ukraine. They gave parts of Romania to the Ukraine from Poland parts were taken away and given to the Ukraine. Now to pretend that all of them have identical interests is obviously wrong. So I would just simply say to these people, do you care about all of the Ukraine? Give me an argument why all of the Ukraine in the present borders has to be defended. Or are you actually only interested in whatever defending Galicia? Which was traditionally part of the Austrian Empire for instance. So the same thing applies by and large to a country like Germany. Not all Germans have the same idea about what Germany should be like. Germany existed in the 19th century consist of 39 states. Most of the people identified with very small units. They did not identify with all of Germany. So to them I would simply say what is your objective? What part are you willing to defend? If you are willing to defend the entire Ukraine as it is right now then I think you would make a big mistake insofar as you override the will and the wishes of large parts of the population who would rather want to have a rather different solution to this conflict. Good afternoon and thanks for the talks. They were amazing, the ones that I managed to catch. From a practical perspective what is the panel's opinion on what is happening in New Hampshire in terms of the free state project moving oodles of people into the state to take control of the local politics. Thanks. The free state project of New Hampshire is very interesting. The idea is very simple. Let's move as many libertarians as possible to one state in the US and so even without doing anything and with the same legislation, with the same structure it will affect some changes. We had a similar idea in Italy. There are very small cities where you have 30 people living there and they even give you money to, if you go there and take up your residency there and we thought we could move there a thousand people and we set up a libertarian city. The mayor could make all police officers so we could be all armed although it is forbidden in Italy so it's an interesting model of trying to do something. I think no one has the right recipe to set up freedom in our unfree world as Harry Brown would phrase it. But anything goes. Just a little note on Raheem's question. I think we must stop being attached to national states. National states are just an artificial construction of historical forces which are way beyond what we believe, at least we libertarians believe about how you should live in society. If I am Ukrainian, Russian, it doesn't really matter. Ukraine for example was the theatre of an ongoing war about languages and both parties, the Ukrainians forbid the people to speak Russian and vice versa and there have been shifts in population so to say that there is some sort of unity but this is true of any country. I come from Italy. Italy is not one country. It is an artificial construction which was organized mainly by the British and French Secret Service in the 19th century and we share some common cultural heritage and maybe a little bit of common language and that's it. The best way for Italy would be to explode in many different states and I would say in many different individuals, sovereign individuals and this could be the way out of the mess we are in. I made that point, the decision to go to war and what war to conduct, in which way to conduct it should be done on the smallest scale possible. Yes, sometimes you have no choice, you have to just do what the central government tells you and then you just give up but nonetheless, yes of course I would defend the village in which I live. I would even take up weapons in order to defend my immediate neighborhood but whether I would defend somebody living thousands of miles away from me that I have never met and who might have committed all sorts of provocations against other people to go to war for fools that have caused these types of problems that I would refuse. On a small scale everybody knows what they would defend. Everybody defends their wives, their kids and things like this but I don't necessarily want to defend the wives and kids of people who might have committed rights violations that I personally despise and this is what you have of course in all collective big scale wars going on. Ukraine is not one homogeneous blob of people. They have people that have very different views of who is right and who is wrong and yes the first insight always has to be we do deal with gang leaders on both sides. None of them loves us very much. None of us would, none of them would help us in any way. Why should I help any of them in their conflicts that they have with other gangs? If they force me to do it, yes I might do it. If they say I kill your wife, I kill your children unless you now fight the Russians or fight the Chinese or whatever it is, then I have to make a decision will I do this or will I not do this? That requires in any case a decision that you have to make for yourself in some specific situation, in some specific location where you are and based on the assessment of what the world is like, who is on whose side, who will come and rescue you or who will come and attack you if you do such and such. There is no uniform recipe that works in all sorts of situations. All I can say is I wish you luck defending your house against tanks. If the tanks are there, they are there. Again, this will be a topic that I will bring up on Sunday. It depends on small, every attacker needs support in public opinion of his own population, so to speak. Without some reason you cannot persuade any population to support going to war. There must be popular opinion behind it to a certain extent and you need an excuse. Small units give you very little reason to attack them. Why don't people attack Liechtenstein? This is a teeny country. The Swiss could roll over there in one day and take it over. The Germans could take over Luxembourg in one day. Why don't they do it? Because they would not find any support in public opinion in Germany that would justify such an attack. People would say, why in the world would we attack Luxembourg? Why in the world would attack Switzerland, Liechtenstein? The smaller the units are, the more difficult it is to find a justification for it. The larger the units are, the more easy it is to find a justification. In the Ukrainian case, they mistreat the Russian-speaking population. Of course, Russia has an excuse now to come to the rescue of the Russian-speaking population. The smaller the units, the more difficult to find an excuse to attack. People do need an excuse for an attack. Even gang attacks in cities usually have some sort of justification why gang A starts beating up gang B or vice versa. I see your point, but again, there is no uniform recipe in order to prevent any type of war going on. The only thing that we can do is minimize the risk of wars. To minimize the risk of wars, one method of that is to decentralize the political units because the smaller they are, the more difficult it is to find a reason to go over and attack them. I have a question for Professor Hopper as well as the other two speakers. In your lecture, you mentioned about the underperformance of the Ukrainian economy of Ukraine as versus Bulgaria or other eastern bloc countries. But one past, this conference, a past participant, he told me is very important for Ukraine to join NATO, not necessarily the EU, but NATO, because without the security guarantee from NATO, there wouldn't be a long-term investment like infrastructure, talking about more than 20 years of commitment. So that explains the underperformance of Ukraine versus the other countries. So what is your take on that? Not all countries joined NATO Switzerland is not a member of NATO, for instance, Austria is not a member of NATO, for instance. NATO, I think, did have some rationale as long as the Soviet Union existed as some sort of at least allegedly defensive alliance. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the raison d'être of the NATO basically disappeared. What the Russians did, the Russians withdrew all their troops from East Germany. I mean, keep that in mind. The Russians, all the troops that East Germany was occupied with Russians, they withdrew all the troops, not a single one was left. The Americans did not withdraw their troops from West Germany. They still have atomic weapons stationed in West Germany. So NATO basically had no reason to continue on after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union also withdrew all of the troops from other countries that they previously belonged to their empire. There were no Russian troops anymore in Poland. There were no Russian troops anymore in the Czech Republic or in Slovakia, as far as I know. There were no Russian troops anymore in the Baltic countries. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved. The Russians could have said, just as you keep NATO, we keep the Warsaw Pact. They didn't do that. NATO made promises to the Russians that they would not expand NATO further to the East. Even though that was not fixed in some official agreements, it was the understanding of the Russians that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO taking place. In fact, of course, it has taken place. Russia was surrounded increasingly by NATO members, and that NATO is not a defensive organisation was also proved by what they did in Serbia, for instance, where there was something similar taking place. Provinces wanted to secede and something like this, and there they just went in and attacked the Serbs. They had basically the same justification or the situation was basically the same as in the Ukraine case, except that in the Serbian case, of course, it was a good thing that they intervened in this situation. It was considered to be a bad act. As far as economic development is concerned, you don't need to be a member of NATO in order to economically develop. As I said, Switzerland is the richest country in Europe, has never been a member of NATO. That the Ukraine is the worst of all of these countries indicates that the level of corruption in that country is much higher than it was, for instance, in the Baltic countries. The Baltic countries, yes, they are economically far more successful than the Ukraine. They became free of the Soviet Empire at the same time. So you can be successful as a small country. Lichtenstein is even more successful than Switzerland is, it is even smaller. That the Ukraine ranks below Albania. Albania is also not a member of the NATO, by the way. That is a striking performance that indicates that in terms of corruption, Ukraine is no better than Russia is. I'm not saying that Russia is a great country or anything like this. I'm just saying the difference between the two is not all that great. They are used to widespread corruption. There are large regions that wanted to be part of Russia or at least wanted to have granted some autonomy to speak Russian in these territories and not be told by Ukrainians. No in schools, no Russian can be taught anymore. Ukrainian has to be taught and so forth. The Ukraine is an artificial place. One of the big heroes in the Ukraine is Stepan Bandera. Stepan Bandera cooperated with the Nazis when they invaded the Soviet Union at that time. Stepan Bandera had three goals. Kill as many Russians as possible, kill as many Jews as possible and kill as many Poles as possible. He wanted to have a homogeneous Ukrainian nation. When the Nazis discovered that he did not want to be a protectorate of the Germans but wanted to have a purely Ukrainian place, then they arrested him, put him in a concentration camp. He survived it, he died in Munich. He is considered to be a hero in the Ukraine. They have monuments erected for him, streets named after him. The Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, who is now a vice foreign minister for the Ukraine, Melnik, was one of the most impudent person in Germany, always demanding this and insulting all sorts of people who were of different opinion. Under normal circumstances, he would have been immediately expelled from the country as a diplomat. He went to the grave of Stepan Bandera in Munich and celebrated him. There are some reasons to be sceptical about this view that the Ukraine is a Western country. They defend our freedom and so forth. They don't defend anybody's freedom. They kill their own population in Ommas. Zelensky has arrested all sorts of oppositions. He doesn't do anything differently than what Putin does in his country. So why should we be so one-sidedly in favour of the Ukraine and at the same time preach nothing but hatred and hatred and hatred towards the Russians? All sorts of people were dismissed and invitations were revoked from the famous singer. They cancelled most of her contracts because she had once met Putin and didn't distance herself from Putin sufficiently. Nobody has ever distanced themselves from any Ukrainian who has committed these types of atrocities that they have committed Ommas just like the Russians do. So treat them equally. That's all I'm asking. Just a few words. I don't think that belonging to a military alliance can have any connection with economic development or at least not directly. Then I'm very sceptical about the phrase economic development. What sort of economic development? Capitalism doesn't exist anymore and so economic development in a normal fashion doesn't exist as well. We live in a world of cronism, of privileges given to certain industries of a huge financial system which lies on top of the real economy. So what is economic development anyway? I remember a famous interview by Milton Friedman in 2003. He visited Italy and the interviewer asked him what were the strengths of the Italian economy and he said tax evasion and black markets. This should be our attitude. Black markets are true markets. All the rest is just cronism. Alessandro, thank you for your speech. Outstanding. I wanted to direct your attention towards the end. You made mention of the psychological mechanism as the key line of effort. Within that, first is the exposure to better ideas and second would be civil disobedience. I think you're really spot on with that. Even under official security dialogue, think tanks and initiatives there's a focus now on cognitive warfare, this term that's being bandied about quite a lot. So even the state is focusing on that cognitive aspect in an overt fashion. And with that in mind, what is the method of breaking out of conditioning and then second, would you also place any type of institutional arrangements, changing institutions within society if you had any goals to move towards rather than just breaking existing conditioning and civil disobedience? Well, psychological conditioning is the main instrument of ruling. I cited Desmet's book about the psychology of totalitarianism and there he quotes a book by Ellenberger about the unconscious and he quotes a very interesting studies about the shamanic deaths. So in certain primitive villages, the shaman kills you by enchanting, by saying some enchantment and he says that the victim actually dies because both the whole village, the victim and the shaman, they are all convinced that there exists this power and this is exactly the same situation we have. We are not much different from the primitive dwellers of villages. We have a whole big superstructure which was religious until a certain time and now it's way more complicated with all our institutions and democracy and all these things but at the end of the day it's still a psychological way of conditioning people into believing that they have to obey that the ones who have the titles of presidents, of rulers, of ministers and so on have the right to demand obedience from you. So disobedience is the first thing. Institutional changes. I think the single most dangerous institution which hampers our freedom would begin at least, it's an impossible task to change this world so we always turn around the same problem but anyway the single institution where I would begin are central banks. In fact there is an experiment going on now in Argentina. There is an outspoken Libertarian candidate Javier Millay and he pledged that the first thing he will do is abolish the Argentinian central bank and dollarize Argentina or better to say try to establish a free money situation like in Hayek's book, The Nationalization of Money. This could be an experiment. Anyway, taking away the power from central banks and from financial institutions could be the way to begin. It's hard, it's close to impossible. I am very skeptical as well as Hans told us today about the project of establishing a new currency of the BRICS countries somehow tightened to gold. It's very difficult but still this is the first and fundamental question in my opinion. I want to get briefly back to Tony's remark. How do you defend yourself if they come with a tank? How do you defend yourself against your defenders who also have tanks? Szilenski also has tanks. If you don't participate, I smash you with my tanks. Putin says, I smash you with your tank, it's my tanks. I cannot defend myself against a tank but I cannot defend myself against a tank of my own people either who defend the entire nation. Just briefly, I pass you on. I think the second amendment should extend also to tanks so you should be entitled to have a tank. Again, I would say life is often a tragic choice between two bad alternatives but there may be a better and a worse alternative. When I vote, I don't vote for the person I like. I vote for the person I least despise. Okay, but that was my point with the Ukrainian people too. They should just be left and make the decision who they despise less. I'm not sure, the answer will be always Putin. It will be very frequently also. I despise Szilenski even more than Putin. I agree perfectly. There is no recipe that we can avoid these things entirely and sometimes there is no way that we can make a decision that makes us perfectly happy and perfectly safe. In life we must make compromises that are sometimes... To nobody's personal liking but appear more suitable in this situation and less suitable in others, I don't think we have much of a disagreement on all of this. Okay, I have a question for Alessandro. I really enjoyed your lecture on sovereignty and state of exception. My question is two-fold. First, about Schmidt. Do you think Schmidt's view that the sovereign is he who decides the state of exception? Do you think that view applies only to the modern, the Weberian nation state that arose after the Reformation because as you know in the Middle Ages, Schmidt himself says that the phenomenon of sovereign dictatorship arose during the French Revolution. So the sovereign is also the dictator. This concept of sovereign dictatorship didn't exist in the Middle Ages. So my first question is do you think Schmidt's... Perhaps we could even say his understanding of politics is attributable only to the modern Weberian nation state or can you generalize it to all states including pre-modern states? My second question is what do you think about the classical legal tradition? So the classical legal tradition says that the purpose of law, should be oriented towards the common good. This is an idea that you find in Aristotle. With political modernity you get the idea that... with Hobbes for example, Hobbes says that elects the transfer of rights to the absolute state occurs because in the state of nature men are warring with one another and the state rules by brute force. They surrender to the law, which is a kind of all positivistic conceptions of law arise from this. Whereas the classical legal tradition, which emphasizes the common good, says that all laws should be established in such a way that the purpose of law is to allow for the flourishing of the political community, to allow for the realization of the common good. I asked this question because you said the purpose of the law should be to protect our liberty. But the conception of liberty that you proposed in your lecture or talk, I think was a kind of negative conception of liberty, where it's the common good, the classical legal tradition views liberty as positive. It's the ability to realize one's inner possibilities, which pertains to the whole political community and ultimately the political community scene is having one shared common good. You find this in Aristotle and Saint Thomas. Those are my two questions. What do you think about Schmidt's thesis applicable to pre-modern states as well, and what are your views on classical legal tradition? It's called common good constitutionalism now in the United States with legal theorists like Vermeul, Adrian Vermeul. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that. Yes, Schmidt is quite clear about the fact that he thinks that the idea of sovereignty is especially to Jean Baudin and his book about the Republic and to Thomas Hobbes. He says that it is a modern conception. In fact, the medieval states with this hierarchy between kings or emperors and the pope on the other side with an inbuilt mechanism of limiting the power of the political rulers was quite different. The king in the medieval tradition was subject to the law, and the law was represented mainly by religious authority or religious principles. The medieval ruler was never a ruler in the modern sense. In fact, making up laws, you could say making fiat laws as we have fiat money, was not in the realm of the possibilities for a medieval ruler, so it was completely different. Schmidt is quite clear about this derivation of the modern sovereignty from the tradition of the 17th century, and in fact he sees an acceleration after the French Revolution, which in fact not only the French Revolution, but let's say it's the paradigm of getting rid of the personal sovereign, and substituting the personal sovereign for an abstract concept. At this time and with the rise of democracy and of modern states, you have these gangs of robbers who are in competition against one another in order not to be the owners of the states, as Hans Hopes said in his democracy book, but just to reap all the benefits to be the user-fructuraries of the states. This is one of the reasons why we are in the present situation. As far as the second question is concerned, I don't think that the common good approach is a good approach to define law and to find a solution about the problem of law. In fact, there is the famous definition in Roman law, which is use est ars bony et equi, ne minem ledere sum cuicue tribue, which means the law is the art of good and equity. It's the precept never to harm any other human being, and to recognize private property, because to recognize to anyone what is his means respect for private property. So this definition is very close to what we define the non-aggression principle, and so I would say the purpose of the law is not the common good, but it is the individual good. It is the defense of individual rights, and with this in mind you can establish a just legal system in my opinion. There's a word about the purpose of law. The purpose of any norm is in a way to avoid conflicts among people. The purpose of law is to make it possible that peaceful relationships exist between different individuals with different interests that they have. I think what the modern libertarians do is they did not really discover anything new. The basic rules are really simple. Every person is sovereign as far as his own body is concerned, can do to another person's body only if he is asked to do that. That is one element of making for peaceful relationships. The second is if there is scarcity in the world and people can fight over who is the owner of this or who is the owner of that, then if we want to have peace from the beginning of mankind on, then the idea, lox idea basically applies whatever has been unowned before becomes owned by the person who makes first use of it because only the first user can acquire this thing peacefully because there was nobody else there. Then transfers of property have to be voluntary and all present ownership of people must go back either to original appropriation, which does not longer exist by enlarge that we have passed that age, or through voluntary exchange. There are then of course sometimes questions did that originate that what I own right now in this entirely peaceful way and there the rule has to be whoever holds it presently has a better claim and anybody who comes along it says no that had been stolen from my grandparents by your grandparents and because of that you don't own it then the burden of proof has to be on the person who disputes present ownership. So any type of proof, when people say, once upon a time the Rhineland was occupied by Romans and they took it away from some Germans that might well be the case but the person who claims this right now must show that he is a direct descendant of the German person that had been exploited by the Russians at that time and the question is simply a time question. In East Germany for instance when the expropriations were taking place records existed of what people owned before. It would have been easy for instance for East Germany to restore the original owners to their property because they had titles. It was far more difficult to do that in the Soviet Union because the time when they took over was far further back in the past and lots of records simply did not exist anymore. So there how you privatise for instance collective property is a more difficult question. I have written on these questions too how that can be resolved in a way but it is completely different from a situation where you have clear records. The reparations questions for instance of slavery that they start in the United States. In most of the cases it is simply ridiculous. You cannot show that my grandparents did this to your grandparents I am the direct descendant of this and because of that that is my property. These are just all vague claims I can claim any type of thing I want if that is the only thing that you have to show. The burden of proof is on those people who change the current arrangement of property. What we all can do nowadays is of course yes the taxes that the government collects out of which they pay their salary those are things that currently happen so I can clearly show they have no government official in Germany, in England or in the United States has title to any of these things that they take away from me. None of them. We cannot show that we are the owner of Germany. Where are your documents? You are the ones that have some claim to Germany as it is. Has any person ever conducted a contract with you that stipulates that 10%, 20%, 50% of your own income you have to deliver to me? No, they can't do that at all. But as I said, things that happened way back in the past the past is past, there is not much to do unless you can just present clear cut proof that you were harmed by this and you go down the line and say here it happened and these are actually stolen goods and because they are stolen goods they have to be returned to me. So I think the purpose of law is to make peace among people and the rules how to make peace and how to create peace from the beginning of mankind to the end the rules exist. Yes, people break these rules and then we have to find a way how to deal with people who break the rules how to deal with criminals and how to deal with states how to deal with bullies next door how to deal with attacking warring countries and so forth but what is needed in order to create peace what sort of rules should exist is by and large clear that there are cases where certain problems arise for that we have lawyers and judges who look at the case specifically and investigate exactly this is what happened this is the witness that he has this is the witness that he has and so forth but the principles of creating peaceful relationships among mankind are worked out by countless theoreticians for hundreds of years I'm not in complete agreement with Locke's views but essentially is right to hear a psychiatrist talk about history and to witness last year during PFS a student of Hulsman give a lecture about supposedly economics but it was merely empirical research which had no theoretical or useful knowledge at all I want to ask the question what is your attraction to history because to me it seems that for economics it's clear that we do not need history to derive the rules of praxeology economics can be known without this thing it's like logical mathematics you don't need any type of history to it also to live a good life the patients come to you as a psychiatrist with moral problems, ethical problems, psychological problems and I understand that a lot of the problems are to give some kind of meaning to the past but in essence isn't finding out what is moral finding out what is the good life for you isn't that also in essence a priori doesn't the knowledge of how to live a good life has its epistemological basis in a priori reasoning, rational philosophy do you not understand another person just as good as you understand yourself doesn't any testing, any experience an sich cannot bring you any knowledge of the good life so also ethics, we all know here I hope that indeed the fundamental principle of law is that you can do with your means whatever you want and I can do with my means whatever I want but this is not something that is testable either you cannot go out in the world and try and see if we try it another way we have to deduce it I question just I love a good story and you can learn something from a good story but history itself, what is the attraction of history itself and is it really truly necessary to know anything about history in order to live a good life in order to not harm anybody's rights in order to live a just life with other people I think if you don't know anything about history I agree perfectly with you then you are just living animal life in a way they also don't know anything about history but I'm not quite sure if I understand all the implications of your question I just wanted to point out what libertarianism is not to tell you what a good life is like they only tell you what should be punishable and punishable offences and what should be considered to be sins or bad behavior I'm a controversial figure in the libertarian movement too because many libertarians tend to be leftist libertarians people can do whatever they want as long as they don't harm anybody but imagine you have neighbors who just only stink up their own place who have table manners that makes you throw up when you see them eat so there is far more to a decent and good life than just abstaining from aggression against other people I know quite a few libertarians I would not want to be their neighbors under any circumstance and I know quite a few people that are not libertarians that I would consider to be perfectly behaving neighbors with whom I would like to live in close proximity so the question to what makes for a good life is something where I do not feel qualified to give a definitive answer that you have to find out yourself the minimum requirement is that you adhere to these libertarian principles but those are just the minimal requirements as I said I have met libertarians I would not touch them with a pole but you could have reached these libertarian principles and you probably did without having to test it and without having to use history so I suppose that we are listening to the history talks because it teaches us something else about life which then maybe brings us closer to a better life but then isn't reaching that point in reaching a moral good life ultimately also not testable and also just an a priori kind of science an a priori reasoning again look you need history in order to even know the options that you have right now what possible good lives are there for you in this situation you must understand what you inherited from your parents what is yours, what did they do before what did the neighbors of your parents do before all of these things are important to know in order to make your decision what would be a good life for me in this particular situation I was very glad to hear that Hans doesn't have the answer to how we should live the good life come on I'm a very modest person I think your attitude is a kind of complete rationalism which does not work I don't think man will ever understand himself fully I certainly hope he never understands himself fully because some people are going to have much better understanding than others and you can be sure that that understanding will be used for no good but you sound rather like Mr Gradgrind at the beginning of Dickens's hard times and he starts by saying facts alone are what are needed in life facts are everything and you're implying that principles are everything now a man without principles is a scoundrel but a man with only principles is a fanatic so you need experience of life and that experience of life can be vicarious through reading history after all you might start having great ideas it's very unlikely that those ideas will never have been thought before it's very unlikely that nobody has ever tried putting your ideas into practice and it might help you to see that they haven't worked in the past and in the western world socialism for example has made great inroads into youth as if no one had ever tried these things before so I think history is of some use I think we should stop this session now Tony's remark about a man without principles is a scoundrel a man with only principles is a fanatic I think I perfectly agree with that assessment we should all take that home as profound advice and with this I will end this session and remind you that James Henry will now present a little preview a few minutes of his video on the Dutch farmers fate and if you want to stay after the preview you are free to do so and if you prefer to jump into the pool you are also free to do that I have no principles when it comes to this and because of that I don't think I'm a scoundrel