 I'll do my best. I thought that the best thing to keep people awake after a long lunch on a Saturday would be a talk about John Locke 17th century philosopher. The title is, I've slightly changed it, Locke's Big Mistake, How the Labor Theory of Property Ruin Political Theory. And I'll try to explain why I think this is interesting and very relevant to our fight for liberty. Let me start with a question. Who is the most evil man of all history? Any guesses? There's no wrong answers. Well, there's some wrong answers. Mal. Mal. Who did Ein Rand think was the most evil man in all history? Yeah, she said Kant is the most evil man in mankind's history. Well, I mean, you might not agree with his idealism, some of his philosophy, but he was a pretty good classical liberal, so I don't know if I can agree with that. Ein Rand was known for rhetorical excesses. She also said patents are the heart and core of property rights. Now, even if you believe in intellectual property, that one's hard to swallow. But I'll give her some credit, too. She also has a rhetorical line that I love in her money speech, which was, run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leprous bell of the approaching looter. Love that line. I feel that way when people say they disagree with the idea of self-ownership. I'm like, well, I'm going to keep an eye on you. Well, I don't think Kant was the most evil man in all history. And I don't think Locke was either, but I do want to have a similar thesis to Ein Rand, is that it's identifying one big mistake in political theory and philosophy. I don't think Locke did this on purpose. I think he did a lot of good. And I'm going to try to identify what I think is good in Locke and what mistake he made. I won't even say he's evil, although he was a sort of racist defender of the slave trade, but that's ad hominem and we never do that here. But parts of his argument have caused a lot of serious problems in political theory in the meantime. Now why is this? Before I get into the details, in my view, I've been thinking about libertarianism for over 25 years, and I've come to the conclusion that one problem we face is overuse of metaphors and imprecise use of language and clear thinking. We can't abolish it completely, but we have to be wary of the dangers of using metaphors and imprecise language and unclear thinking. One of America's most famous Supreme Court justices before he was a justice, when he was a judge, said in 1926, metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched for starting as devices to liberate thought, they often end up enslaving it. He's right. I mean, you could ask, what's a metaphor? And in Louisiana, we might say, it's so to explain things better. But sometimes there's problems. Things like Bombaverk, Mises, Guido-Hosman, they've all written on all the dangers of using metaphorical language. For example, all these scientific metaphors are used to explain the economy, like friction or momentum, right? The economy has green shoots right now, or maybe doesn't have green shoots. Talk about prices communicating knowledge or coordinating behavior. And also mixing of labor, which I'm going to talk a little bit here. Let me ask you a question, just a show of hands to the audience. Who here believes that you own your body? Who here knows pretty much what your body is? It's hard to say you own your body if you don't know what it is. Now there's a difference though between whether you do own your body and whether you should own your body. Who thinks here that you own yourself? Who knows what their self really is? I don't know what my self really is. I mean, it's not as concrete of an idea as body ownership, right? So when we talk about self ownership and libertarianism, really I think we're talking about body ownership. So the question is always who owns your body? Me or someone else? Do you believe in your own control of yourself or your body, I should say, or slavery? That's the fundamental choice. And if you talk in clear language, these things become clearer. We also have to distinguish between factual questions or legal questions and normative questions. If I say do you own yourself, you're really thinking should I own myself, right? So the question is, should you own yourself and do you own yourself or separate questions? I would say you don't own yourself completely under today's legal system because the government maintains the right to draft you, throw you in jail for doing drugs, to take your money if you don't pay taxes, or to put you in jail if you don't pay taxes. So I think we're only partly self-owners in today's society. As Stephen Mullin, you mentioned earlier, a slave is someone who is a hundred percent tax victim, right? So we have to distinguish between should and facts. So there are some ideas, words and terms which I think we ought to try to avoid or at least be very careful of when we use them. Let me go through a few of those. One is conflating government with society and state, or conflating society with state or conflating government with state, or conflating country with state. The problem is, if you say you're against the government, people think you're against law and order because they think you're against the governing institutions of society when really we're against the state. So what libertarians are against is the state. The state currently monopolizes and runs the government, the governing organizations of society, law, justice, order. The state also runs the roads, but we don't say we're against roads, do we? We say we're against government roads, or state roads, we should say. Just like we say we're against state education. So we have to be careful when we say we're against government because you'll have menarchists or regular people think that you're for chaos and lawlessness, sort of anarchist, the idea of the anarchist with the bomb. So we have to say we're against the state if you want to be clear and precise. Another one is people say, well, I'm against coercion. I'm a libertarian, or I'm against violence. Well, no, we're not against violence, and we're not even against coercion. We're against aggression. Aggression is the initiated use of force, or the initiated violence, or initiated coercion. Coercion is just a type of force, right? It means to use force to compel someone to do something. Someone's breaking in my house, I'm going to coerce the guy, and it's rightful. So we're not against coercion, we're not against force, we're not against violence. We're against initiated force, coercion, and violence, or aggression. Another one, which I'll deal with in a few minutes, is labor versus action. People always talk about owning the fruits of your labor. People have a right to sell their labor, these kinds of things. They act like labor is some special thing. Now, I don't know about you, but to me, labor is just a type of action. Humans own their bodies, we act in certain ways. That's human action. Labor is just a type of action, maybe a subset of action. What kind of action is it? It's action that you, has disutility, some people say. It's not leisure, it's not fun. You do it to get some end, but it's just one type of action, okay? And then there's, of course, intellectual property, which begs the question just by saying it that way, right? Some of us don't think it should be property, so don't call it property to prove that it should be treated as property. It's better to call it an intellectual privilege, or just call it patent and copyright, what the government calls it. Finally, another one, which Jeff Tucker and I were talking about on the way up here this morning, is the idea of limited government. This one always bugs me, because every government that's ever existed is limited. There's never been an unlimited government. I mean, maybe it's Nazis, maybe the Russians at a certain point in time. But every government has limits, or every state, I should say, right? There's limits on what it can do, and almost everyone believes in some limits. So, the welfare liberals believe in a limited government. They just want the limits to be a lot less than we would like. So, what defines a conservative, I mean, an ultra-minimalist conservative, or a classical liberal, or a libertarian? It's not that we believe in limited government. It's what limits we believe there should be on the state, right? And the most consistent, most radical libertarians think that the limits should be complete. It means the state should have nothing it could do whatsoever. In other words, the state should die and not exist. But even a menarchist believes that the limits should be completely so tight that the state can only do a few minimal functions, defense, police, and courts, okay? So, when you say limited government, that doesn't really distinguish us from others, okay? So, in thinking about how to define the essence of libertarianism over the years, I think the best way to think of it is that we recognize that we are all people who live in society with each other. We all, at least, civilize people among us. We generally want our own lives to be good, and we also favor peace and prosperity. We want our neighbors to be good, and we like living in society with each other. And we all realize the following. We realize, now, this is Mises I'm going to go into here a little bit. Mises was, by my mind, the greatest Austrian economist, and he developed a theory called praxeology. That's the logic or the science of human action. So, what Mises says is just, and this is not, it sounds funny, it's a weird word. It took me a long time to understand it, like epistemology took 17 years before I finally started using the word, right? I'm still not there with ontology, but with epistemology and praxeology, I am. Mises says, look, it's common sense. Look at human action. What do human beings do in their lives? Every moment of their lives, they're taking an action. Now, an action means you're an intelligent, rational person. You understand something about the world. You know that the future is coming, and you envision something about the future you think is going to happen that you're not satisfied with, or that you want to change. This is what human action is. We don't think of it like this, but this is what we do in every moment of our lives. And we also realize that we have the ability to affect that future. How? By using what Mises calls scarce means, these are things in the world that you can use to change the course of the future, including your body and including things that we find, tools, basically. And we have some understanding or some knowledge in our mind that we've accumulated from human civilization and from society in the past, from others, from learning, from emulation. We have some knowledge about what we think is coming, what we think might satisfy us better than what would come if we don't take an action, and what means are available and how they will causally change things. So that's what human action is. It's understanding, making a choice, grabbing some kind of means, and employing that means to change the future. This is how we have to understand human action. And within that framework, we can understand libertarianism is the idea that we understand that these means are scarce. Scarce means rivalrous. It means only one person can use this thing at a time. Otherwise, you'll have two or more people fighting over this thing, clashing over it, having conflict, violent disagreement. So an example would be, you know, baking a cake. Everyone, you need a recipe, which is the knowledge of how to make the cake, and you need the tools, the capital equipment, the ingredients, the raw materials. Only one person can use this egg at a time to make the cake, or this wooden spoon, or this bowl, or this oven, right? But any number of people could use their own eggs and their own ingredients all using the same recipe or the same knowledge at the same time. This is exactly why the intellectual property idea is so fallacious. Intellectual property seeks to grant property rights in the ideas as well as we do in the scarce means. It makes no sense because you don't need to put property rights in the ideas because they're not scarce. There's no... The entire purpose of property rights is to permit conflicts to be avoided in the use of the scarce means of action. So we can all go about our daily business and our plans, cooperating with each other, trading with each other, helping each other, selling to each other, using our own scarce resources with the legally recognized exclusive right to control it. That's what property rights are. That's what ownership is. Makes no sense to grant these rights in ideas. Now, I'm not going to go into that in detail. That's the entire intellectual property argument I've been making for a few years now. I just want to put it in the framework. This is what the libertarian idea is. Now, what does this have to do with Locke? Okay. So the way to reformulate this is to think that the essence of libertarianism is a very simple set of rules. As I mentioned earlier, we can't say we're for limited government because that doesn't distinguish us from other schools of thought. And you can't say we're for property rights because that doesn't distinguish us either. Why not? Because property rights are inherent in every human society and every political system that's ever existed. Communists believe in property rights. Socialists believe in property rights. Fascists believe in property rights. Environmentalists believe in property rights. Welfare liberals believe in property rights. We believe in property rights. What's the difference? How they're assigned? That's the difference. So we look at the world and we see scarce resources that need to be controlled by someone, by the legal system so that they can be used peacefully, productively. And our rule is simple. It's the Lockean rule. The Lockean rule basically says whoever can show the better claim to a resource gets it. And the better claim is defined as either the first person who transformed it, yes, with his labor, in a sense, or if you acquired it by contract from someone else. It's very simple. Contract plus first appropriation. Now, what's the reason for the first appropriation rule? Now, Locke spelled this out in his argument. If no one had the right to be the first one to use a resource, it could never be used. Someone has got to be the first one to use this unknown thing out there. And if he's got the right to use it, then he's got a right to keep it because otherwise the second guy can take it from him, which is not a property rights system. That's a system of violent clashing. So it's almost like the Misesian monetary regression theorem, right, when you trace back the origin of the value of gold-type money to its pure commodity non-monetary use. It's like that. You can see who's got a resource now, trace the title back to the first act of appropriation. This is what we say. Now, you could add one more rule. You could say that there's, if someone commits an act of aggression, some kind of tort, you harm someone else. You violate their rights. Because you perform that action, you have committed, you've incurred an obligation to compensate them, right? So they might get acclaimed to your property because of that. So we could modify the rules. The person who owns a resource is either the person who acquired it by contract from an owner or who first appropriated it or who acquired it because of some act of crime by the original owner, okay? Other than that, there's no other ways to own property. Now, what did Locke say? What Locke said, he basically said this, but he had some extra stuff in his argument. Locke said, God created the universe. God owns the universe. God created Adam and Eve. He owned them. But God in his benevolence, he's apparently a libertarian, granted dominion of all the unowned resources that he created to men. So within the human sphere, whether there's a God or not, whether you care that God's our slave owner or how you look at that, the point is that there's a system set up where the rule is that each man is a self-owner. That's what Locke called it. And remember, the danger of saying self-owner better to say he's a body owner because that's the resource in dispute, right? I care if someone stabs my body, not if I stab myself, okay? So every person is a self-owner. And then here's what Locke said. And here's the problem, I think, with Locke's argument. Locke said, if you own yourself, then you own the labor you perform with your body or yourself. First off, I'm thinking right now, it's a critical libertarian legal theory, you know, legal theorists who wonders what words mean. Like, I'm kind of nagging. A nagging feeling is, what does that really mean to own your labor? But I'll go with that. And then Locke says, so you own this labor. Now, I'm thinking like a substance, you know, emanating from myself. And so if it mixes with something unowned, well, I own the labor, so the only way I can keep ownership of that labor is to own the thing it's mixed with. Otherwise, you're taking my labor away from me, right? So this is his argument for why we can appropriate unowned resources. Now, David Hume, writing later, that Locke was in the 1600s, Hume was a little bit later, pointed out, and I agree with Hume, Hume pointed out that this argument of Locke's is overly figurative or metaphorical. We don't really own our labor. We own our bodies. If you own your body, that means you have the right to perform whatever actions you want with it. And you can use those to sell your services to someone. But think about it. If someone pays me to sing a song, they give me a dollar after I sing a song for them. The song pleases them. But do they own the song now? Are they in possession of a song? No, they're in possession of a memory. Can I say that I gave them a memory? I suppose, but I didn't really own a memory that I transferred to them. This is all completely imprecise metaphorical stuff. And you don't need it. It's unnecessary. As Hume pointed out, Locke's argument works if you simplify it and you take out this stuff. Locke's argument works because, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, the libertarian reason, when you have an object that is disputed or contested, a scarce resource, then there really can be no other answer than that the person has a better claim to it that was the first one to appropriate it. Because if you don't give him that right, then, as I said, no one could ever appropriate anything in the first place. Or they would appropriate it with violence and people squabbling over it, which again defeats the purpose of having a legal system that permits resources to be used in a conflict-free way. So this is the problem. Now, you might say, well, he could have worded it better, but what's the problem with this? The problem is this entire mentality, this entire approach has led to a deep, vast confusion that has contaminated and infected political theory ever since his day. Arguably, it also, at least partially contributed to the rise of a related doctrine called the labor theory of value, which is more of an economic idea, which is what contaminated Ricardo's and Adam Smith's and then Marx's thought. The labor theory of value has this mystical idea that the value of a product is based upon the labor that went into it. Now, there's several mistakes here. Number one, value is subjective. There's no value in things. So all right away, he's thinking in intrinsic value terms. Makes no sense whatsoever, as Manger and the Austrians have shown, right? And furthermore, you don't own labor. Labor's not a substance. And of course, the idea that you have two laborers who mix their labor with two objects, one's high quality, one's low quality. If this guy put 100 hours into it and this guy did it in 10, they're not gonna have the same value. So then you have to reverse engineer your theory and say, well, now we have to have a multiplier coefficient on this guy's labor. So then you just kind of have a contorted theory. Anyway, that's the labor theory value, which resulted in communism and hundreds of millions of deaths. So if Locke's to blame for that, I guess we could say he's a little bit negligent. But I won't blame Locke for that because you can trace these ideas back to Muslim thinkers back in the 1200s, I mean, a long time ago. But there's some evidence that this idea of labor as this thing people can own, this metaphorical approach, did lead to the Marxian labor theory value. But the problem with Locke is the labor theory of property. Again, the idea that you own things that you mix your labor with. This is obviously not true. For example, if I'm an employee of a company, which Marx would abolish, I guess, right? And I'm paid to mix my labor to build a chair out of the employer's wood and nails. Well, I mixed my labor with it. Why don't I own it? Well, because there's a contract and I never owned it in the first place. So the problem with the labor theory of property is it has led to this idea, libertarians will say this all the time, sort of casual thinking, not very precise. They'll say there are three sources of property ownership. Number one, if you find something, original appropriation or homesteading, right? Locke's idea, the libertarian idea. Number two, by contract, by contractual acquisition. They're right about that. If you want to mention a third, it should be, you know, some kind of aggression, which I mentioned can trigger a property title transfer, but that's a way of transferring title that exists already. So let's say finding something or by contract from a previous owner. And then they'll say the third way you can own something is by creation. See, what they're doing is they're going back to this labor idea. They're thinking, they're mixing things together. They're thinking humans are productive. We labor. Our labor, our intellect, our intellectual creativity, helps create things of value. And just as I labor in a field and make a valuable format of it, I must own that because I labored on it, which means I own anything that I create with my labor. You see how they go from one argument to the next? They never stop and ask the question, well, what's an ownable thing in the first place? You know, and then sometimes I'll argue by possessives. The most maddening thing. Like, well, if I don't own my labor, who does? Well, like the word, the word my means I have to own it. I mean, I have a wife, my wife, my girlfriend, you know, my job, my customers. Do I own those because there's a possessive? No, sloppy thinking. So another dangerous word that I wanted to get to is the word property. We have this tendency to refer to things that we own as property. Like, you know, this iPad is my property. Now, I think it would be better to say this scarce resource, I have a property right in this scarce resource or I own this scarce resource because when you start saying that's my property, look, think about why the word property was used in the first place. Locke said, you have a propriety in your things. What he's talking about is that when a human being acts in the world, right? We don't just use our bodies. We have standing room. We have other scarce resources that we employ to affect change, as I mentioned. All these things are sort of within the orbit of your control. They're a property of yourself in the sense that they're a feature of yourself. They're a characteristic of yourself. They're a way of describing part of your nature or your identity, okay? So what they're talking about is what's proper for a man to be able to rightfully control. So that's why the word property in property rights is used, now it's like a type of metonymy, if you know what that is, to refer to the thing itself. But if we think clearly, we never arrive at the question most intellectual property advocates do, for example, which is, well, the question is what is property? No, that's not the question. The question is who owns this resource always because nothing else can be fought over because resources are necessarily things that can be fought over or contested. So the question in all of political philosophy is always, always, if you can point to a given resource, something that more than one person desires to use and there's potentially conflict over who should rightfully be able to control it or own it or have a property right in. But don't call it property unless you're really careful about it. If you call it property, then you're gonna end up with intellectual property and things like this, okay? So the problem with the argument is that there are three sources of ownership or property is that it conflates the source of wealth with the source of property rights. So it is completely true that if I own some raw materials, let's say some paper and, or let's say some wood and some metal and I fashion these things into a chair, I have made an object that is more valuable, more valuable to who, to me, or maybe to a potential customer. Remember, there's no value in the chair. Value is not intrinsic. It's not objective. Value is the subjective relationship between valuing acting human beings. So anyway, I transform resources into a more valuable shape or we could say in economic terms, I have created wealth. Why have I created wealth? Because I've made something more valuable to me or someone else. In fact, if two people just trade their objects, two people trade an apple for an orange. They have created wealth by that transaction, right? It's not as classical kind of, say, a horizontal trade where the values are equal. In fact, the guy who buys the apple with his orange values the apple more than the orange and vice versa. That's why they engage in the trade. So each one is better off after the trade. So wealth is created just by pure trade. Wealth is also created by humans laboring on their property. Wealth can also be destroyed. If you make a mistake and you ruin your property in an attempt to make a machine or something, then you can lose wealth. But the property rights don't change, right? In fact, for me to make a chair, presupposes that I owned the raw materials. I already own these raw materials. How did I get them? One of the first two ways. I either bought them by contract from a previous owner or I homesteaded them from the state of nature. That's it. So this ownership starts already before the act of creation or the act of production. The act of production is an act of laboring using your labor. Sure. On materials that you already own or it could be on someone else's materials. If you're an employee working on someone else's materials and then you don't own it. So the key is always who owns the raw materials to go into productive labor. So creation labor is a source of wealth, but it's not a source of property rights. And if you realize that you'll never fall into the trap of wondering, well, who owns that labor? Who owns that poem? Well, naturally a poem doesn't spring out of nowhere. If you believe a poem is an ownable thing or a movie or a song or a pattern of information or a discovery or a fact or a database. Well, I agree with, you know, T-Boer McCann. The best candidate for owning that is the guy who created it. But this presupposes that these things are ownable. Not everything is ownable. My memories are not ownable. My love is not ownable. My past is not ownable. The Earth's rotation is not ownable. These are characteristics, ways of describing the universe. You could say as a practical matter that I own my actions or I own my memory because I can control them. But that's, if you say it like that, you make the mistake of double counting, right? Because you're saying, well, I own my body and they own my actions. Well, no, you have the ability to control what actions you perform because you own your body. It's a consequence. It's derivative. It's not a separate independent thing. So if we can clear up our thinking in this way, how are we doing on time, by the way? If we clear up these confusions, then a lot of confusions in thinking arise. So as I said, property, limited government state. Let me talk a little bit about one thing I touched on, which is an objection I hear a lot. This is about contracts. Now, I hear this all the time about this labor argument I give. They say, well, if you don't own your labor, how can you sell it, right? I hear this all the time. Now, this is because people don't usually have a sophisticated or deep understanding of contract law in general, much less what I think is the libertarian view, which is the Rothbardian Evers view, which he calls the title transfer theory of contract. I don't want to get too much into legal theory, but let me just tell you what I think is a simple way to look at the right way to look at contract. First of all, in today's legal system, the way contracts are viewed is binding obligations. And that's how most libertarians look at it. If I make a promise to you in a certain formality, with a certain formality in a certain way, then the law, even a private law in an anarchist society should enforce that promise. Your promises should be binding. However, even in today's legal system, which characterizes the contractual realm that way, it doesn't operate that way. So for example, if I promise to sing a song for you at your son's birthday party and I decide not to show up, then you can't go get the cops to drag me there and make me sing for several reasons. Number one, it wouldn't be a very good song, right? I'm being compelled. And that's a practical consideration the courts use. Courts generally don't enforce what's called specific performance, which means they don't actually treat contracts as binding promises. What they do is they make me pay $1,000 damages to the guy in a contract lawsuit, which means really what the contract is is just a transfer of title to property. It's as if I had said I'm predicting that I will sing at your son's birthday party tomorrow. I'm just making your prediction because I know myself pretty well. And I don't think I'll change very much between now and then. I can't buy myself because I might change my mind. But I tell you what, to give myself and my future self an inducement to sing, I will hereby transfer to you $1,000 in damage payments conditioned upon my not singing. Okay, that's fine. So that's what the contract is. It's really a transfer of title to property. And that's what Rothbard said. Rothbard said contracts are not, should not be viewed as binding obligations or promises. They should only be viewed as transfers of title to owned resources. I just said property. Say I made the mistake too. And if you think about it, this is perfectly consistent with an outcome of the two sources of property rights, the Lockean idea that I mentioned earlier, which is the idea that you own things because of first appropriation or by contract. So contract here means the owner of a resource has the ability to give up his ownership of it in favor of someone else to transfer it to them. That's what contracts are. That's how they need to be viewed. So how do we reconcile this with the idea that you can sell your labor like an employment contract or a service contract? The problem here is the person making the objection to my argument, the person arguing for IP in effect, the person trying to argue that labor is an ownable thing because you can have a contract regarding it. What they're doing is they're thinking in terms of the standard simple contract like the apple versus the orange. A typical contract would be two people exchanging titles, apple for orange. It's an exchange. It's a contract. But remember the definition of contract I mentioned doesn't talk about exchange. It just talks about transfer. So if I give my niece a thousand dollars gift to go to college, that's a contract. It's a transfer of title. It's not an exchange, not really. I mean, you could say I get pleasure out of it. But it's definitely not a bilateral exchange. It's a one-way exchange. And this is how we have to think of employment contracts or service contracts. The sale of labor is another dangerous, confusing metaphor. The sale of labor is not really a metaphor. It's not really what happens. It's not literally true. What's happening here is people are analogizing this labor contract to a regular exchange. And they're thinking, well, if there's something being sold, there must be an exchange of title. What's being sold, title to the labor? No. It's like the example I gave earlier about the singing. What's being done is the buyer of my services, you could say, knows that I own my body. He knows I have the power to decide not to sing or to sing or to pay an expense or not to pay an expense. He knows he's got to motivate me to do what he wants me to do. Just because this guy wants something, is willing to pay for it. Doesn't mean that thing is an ownable good. He might want it to rain tomorrow. He might want there to be peace in the world tomorrow. These are the ends of action, but they're not ownable things. Scarce means are what we use to accomplish ends. They are ownable things. The ends of action are often intangible. I mean, I might pursue a girl and buy her roses because I want her to go out with me. I want her to marry me and be my wife. But that end is getting a wife. It's got nothing to do with an ownable thing. We have to give up the idea that just because you pursue something and you pay money for it, means that the thing you paid for is an ownable thing. There's the same thing with a service contract. I want this guy to sing a song. So I know that he's going to refuse to sing it unless I compensate him. So I make a deal with him. I say, if you sing, I will transfer $1,000 to you. In other words, I hereby transfer $1,000 to you conditioned upon your singing this song. If he sings it, he triggers a condition the money transfers. Did he buy the song? No. Did he buy the singing? I guess at a metaphorical sense. As long as you keep in mind that no title was transferred back, it was an outcome that I wanted. Okay? So the argument goes, well, you have to own something to sell it. So I just think I showed why that's incorrect. So the fact that there's labor contracts doesn't show that labor is ownable. Okay? Now the opposite would be what Walter Block has argued with me before. He says, if you own something, you have to be able to sell it which goes towards voluntary slavery, right? So he says, Stefan, if you own your body, then surely you can sell it in a slavery contract. It should be enforceable. So his argument is that if you own something, you have to sell it. Now what's the assumption here? The assumption is that ownership implies the right to sell, but it doesn't. Ownership means the exclusive right to control something, right? You have to have something else to make something sellable. And in my view, this is a little bit of a tangent, but my view is there are two ways of acquiring two types of property. One is your body. We own our bodies not because we homestead the bodies. We don't acquire our bodies. We can't exist without our bodies, okay? That's part of our identity or our essence or our existence. There's another reason we own our bodies and that's because we have a close connection to our bodies. We have a unique direct control over those resources, okay? So it's not homesteading. Lock alludes to this a little bit with the idea that God gives everyone the propriety in himself. He doesn't talk about homesteading there, really, okay? And for things that were previously unowned out in the world, we own those because we have first appropriation or some contract after that, okay? So for all these things, the first idea is that ownership means you have the exclusive right to control it. Nothing in that implies the right to sell, not immediately, not directly, but then we recognize, well, this thing was unowned before. I'm the one who acquired it. I have the right to abandon this thing, right? I can unown it, so to speak. I can return it to the state of nature. And because of that power, which is an implication of the nature of these scarce resources and an implication of how we come to own these things, that gives you the practical ability to abandon it in favor of someone else. You know, I can take this apple and instead of throw it into the woods, I can hand it to you. Instead of loaning it to you, I could say I would now release my claims. Now I give it up my ownership. Now you're holding this unowned thing. You instantly be homesteaded. And this is why things that have been homesteaded can be sold. It's not because you own them. It's because of the way they were acquired. Things that can be acquired can be deacquired. But we don't acquire our bodies and our bodies were never unowned. From the moment you were a legal person or a philosophical person, you were identified and tightly bound up with a body. I'm not going to get into the metaphysical or religious idea of whether you have a soul and whether you are just your body or whether there's, so I don't care. It makes no difference. If you're just the body, then your body owns your body. Fine. You know, don't get me nonsense about, well, that makes no sense because what I hear is, you don't think I'm a self-owner. That means you think you're my owner or someone else's. So I'm going to keep an eye on you. Okay? How much time do I have for Q&A? Okay. Let me mention one thing for two more minutes. There are some libertarians like Adam Masov, Richard Epstein. They're trying to rehabilitate Locke. They're trying to show that Locke did believe that intellectual property was a natural right, which he didn't. It's wrong. Locke did believe in intellectual property, but just for prudential reasons, like the same reason the founders did. Locke, in fact, did not believe that his homesteading theory implied that intellectual property is the type of right, which means I think he realized that he was using an overly metaphorical description. So I think he would have taken my side on this. And number two, so what? I don't care what Locke believed. If Locke believed in intellectual property, he was dead. He was wrong just like he was wrong about slavery. So I'll stop here. Thank you very much.