 All right, this is the portion of the program where you ask questions and we make up answers. So, who's going to be first? You, sir. Yeah, yeah. How would a loaning work in a hundred percent for a zero banking system? How would a loaning work in a hundred percent banking industry? You want to give that a, oh yeah, Walter can't wait. Murray Rothbard and several others of us favor a hundred percent banking, which means you don't have fraction reserve banking. Fraction reserve banking means you give the bank, let's say, Ubert is the bank and I deposit a hundred dollars in the Ubert bank. And now Ubert gives me a demand deposit for a hundred dollars and I can take that money whenever I want. And then Ubert, the dirty rat, turns around and gives Roderick a loan for ninety dollars because he keeps ten as a reserve. And now Roderick also has a demand deposit for ninety dollars. If Roderick and I both show up at the same time, Ubert can't possibly pay this money unless he's got the Fed behind him where he can print up more stuff. The point is that we have an over-determination of ownership. Roderick and I are each the full owners of ninety dollars, not the partial owners, but the full owners. And you can't really in the libertarian society have two people owning a hundred percent of anything. There was this wonderful movie, The Producers, where Cyril Mostel went around and sold a ten thousand percent of a play. This is fraud. There are people like Seljan and White, who I regard as renegade libertarians, at least on this issue. I don't think they're libertarian at all. And there is a debate among the Austro-libertarians on that, but I've just given you the one-minute version of why I think that fractional reserve banking is fraudulent. It creates the Austrian business cycle. It creates inflation. Whereas a hundred percent backed money is if I give Ubert the hundred dollars, he can't lend it out to anyone else. And if he were a greenery, he couldn't lend out greenery on a fractional reserve basis. The question was how would that work? If I might take a stab at it, because I understood the question a little differently. How would it work in a hundred percent reserves? I think you would have a banking split the way it should be. You'd have deposit banking and you'd have lending banking. So for those who would invest their money in a bank that lends money, they would know their money was at risk and they would know that they can't come and get it at any time. Whereas in fractional reserve bank as it is today, deposit banking combined with lending bank, that distinction isn't made. So bankers lend out money that people can come and get at any time, which is what Walter just described. But in a hundred percent banking, it can certainly take place, and I think it can especially take place in technology where borrowers and lenders should be able to be hooked up. The world over in a matter of seconds, capital here should be able to find people who need capital there and not just at the bank down the street and lend out fractional reserves. So I think that's how it will work. I don't think it will happen through legislation. I think it will happen through technology. Next. Oh, everybody. No, everybody understands fractional reserves. I'll take a quick stab at it. I have no idea, but I know that most bankers don't understand it. Anybody have anything to add? Not many people know what's going on. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Historical examples of anarcho-capitalist societies. Do we have any historians here? Iceland, perhaps? Okay. There's never been a society of exactly the kind that we advocate, but then there's never been a perfect example of a menarchist society either. But what you can do is you can look at historical cases where various different mechanisms that we talk about were in place. Maybe nobody had quite the whole package, but every part of it's been tried. So one example people talk about is medieval Iceland. Medieval Iceland may not have been absolutely pure energy, but it came pretty close. Basically, your protection agency was a local chieftain, but you could sign up with a different chieftain without having to change your geographical location. The chieftain was also your representative in the legislature, and seats in the legislature could be bought and sold. The problem was there was a legal limit on the upper number of seats in the legislature, so there's a legal limit on the number of seats. And that created a problem. It wasn't really free entry into the market. In terms of a market for rights protection, pretty much they had it. People talk about other cases. Medieval Ireland, the American Western frontier in many respects was stateless and had a competitive legal system. Other examples people want to talk about? There was an article, The Not-So-Wild Wild West, the Journal of Libertarian Studies of which Roderick was the editor, and it gave that as an example. Joe Piedin does stuff on Ancient Ireland. David Friedman did stuff on Ancient Iceland. I would crawl with the question. The import of the question is, you say you're in favor of full free enterprise and laissez-faire anarchism. Has there ever been an example of it? No, well then your claim is invalid. We also claim that we want a society with no murder and no rape. Has there ever been such a society with no murder and no rape? No. Therefore we have to retract our desire to have a society with no murder and no rape? No. So just because there's never been a perfect example, and we're on the wrong side of the Garden of Eden for perfection, just because there's never been an example doesn't undermine the claim that it's a good thing. There are many other examples, the law of the sea merchant in the 15th or the 17th century when somebody from Belgium was trading with somebody from England and they had a dispute, they had Admiralty Courts and the law merchant. The institution of kosher foods is an anarcho-capitalist kind of a thing because they certify foods without any government approval and people are free to accept it or not. We live not in a pure anarcho-libertarian state, of course, but there are vestiges of it. Whenever two people trade anything, whenever you go to the store and buy a newspaper for a buck, that's part of anarcho-capitalism. Sometimes you can see kind of seeds of that in completely unexpected places. I went to Republic of South Africa recently, which is almost a socialist state, but because of the failure of the state, there is private protection agencies to the point even that I took a picture of the headquarters of Cape Town Police Department, so huge building, high-rise Cape Town Police Department. There was a little plug there, it said, protected by ADT, we shoot without warning. You go to Disney World and it's very safe, there's no murders and no rapes there and they got ducks and geese and mice and if you act obstreperously, you're surrounded by them and they're all packing heat and they say, come with me. They've got cameras there, you're very safe there. You go to Audubon Park in New Orleans or Central Park in New York City or any of the big parks and it's like anarchy. I mean, wait, no, chaos. Because when people get murdered there, nobody loses money. There's no weeding out of inefficient management of public spaces, whereas in private spaces it's pretty safe. This place here, this club is a pretty safe place because if it weren't they would lose money and they would go broke or they would tend to go broke. If something happens in the streets of Chicago, the mayor of Chicago doesn't lose money, nor does the police department. So we have little vestiges of it all over if you look carefully for it. Just one quick last note. People often point to Somalia as an example of the horrors of anarchy. But the question is, what's the relevant comparison? And it's been interesting, some research done, there's an article by Ben Powell and some other people. I forget who the co-authors are, but you can find that online. Somalia after state collapse. And the point is that if you compare Somalia with its earlier state-ridden self and also you compare it with its neighbors of comparable economic and cultural and political development and so forth. It's safer and more orderly than those places. So what that suggests is that the market always does the best it can with the materials that it's got. So if you've got a very poor country with a horrible history of and stuff, then it can't do as well with it as it could do with another country. Any country will do better under a state than it will. Any country will do better without a state than it would do under a state. Question. Requiring a short answer. No, a long answer. Who cares? Where? Behind the pole. There's a pole? Oh, okay. I feel a lot of open borders as a solution to liberty. Open borders as a solution to liberty. So this is the old libertarian immigration versus closed border debate. This will do it for the... That'll be the last question probably we have, but no, go ahead. I think most of us here are open borders up here, aren't we? We didn't have fair representation of the other side. So I'm for open borders, but I think others have written about it more so I might pass it to them. Yeah, I'm for open borders. And you know, you can say, well these people, you know, if we don't have open borders, people are going to come into our country and they're going to vote for more socialism, and that's why we can't let people in across our borders. But if you do that, you're punishing them for a crime before they've committed it, and a crime that many of them won't commit at all. So it seems to me under libertarianism, open borders, closed borders are just ruled right out. You have to commit aggression to have a closed border. And so it's just, sure, maybe we'd have more socialism if we have more immigration, but you can't take that speculation and then use that to deny people their rights. This is a very divisive issue within libertarian circles. Murray Rothbard changed his mind on that. I have an article where I say Rothbard 1 was correct and Rothbard 2 is incorrect because he switched to the anti-immigration border. Hans Hoppe, an eminent libertarian theoretician, I would go so far as to say the most eminent libertarian theoretician is wrong on this issue. Ron Paul is wrong on this issue. Whereas the four of us, I think, or the five of us are on the other side. To me, the question is, does coming into a country, per se, violate the non-aggression principle? And as Hubert said, obviously not. And if you want to take a reductioid absurdum of it, there is this country from which people immigrate. It's called Storkovia. Now, you people think that babies come from, you know, the mother and the father get together, not so, not so. They come from a country called Storkovia. The stork brings them here. The point I'm trying to make in my ineffable way or my idiotic way is that they are immigrants from this country. And if we're really against immigrants and we want to be logically consistent, we have to stop all babies from being born. Because in 19 years or 18 years, they too might vote about whatever and they might commit crimes and God knows what else they'll do. So if you want to punish people for their future crimes, well, babies will commit crimes in the future, so we've got to stop all babies. Yeah, and I would add to that. I mean, okay. Okay, I'll finish my thought that I was going to say and then I'll address that one. Yeah, I mean, elaborating a little bit on Walter's point, if we're going to, so the anti-immigration people base their anti-immigration policies on the idea of what the people are likely to do. So based on where they come from, based on their national background. So think about if we started this with babies, as Walter was saying, well, you're from this demographic background, so we're going to abort you because we're not, you know, we're not confident that you're going to be supportive enough of libertarian policies. It's just totally untenable from a libertarian perspective. It's terrible. Yeah, well, I don't want to shoot people on the border. That would be consistent with this abortion principle. But from another hand, there's another point of view. I mean, I wouldn't say that we can decide this issue. This was for a very long time. Well, I think there's two major points of view, one of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, that if you have a freedom of association, you have a freedom of non-association as well. That means people in this country can decide whether they won't have more new people coming from somewhere else or not. So it's one, I think it's a pretty, I mean, pretty kind of reasonable argument, right? And other open borders, Hayek, for example, he used to say that today a lot of people are coming to the United States, not in search of American Dream, not in search of hard work, whatever, but just to go on welfare roles right away. His point was that's not the problem of these people, that's the problem of welfare system, the problem of welfare system. So we are sending these wrong signals and we are getting, and so that the kind of the best Misesian approach would be that to have open borders and then you have people immigrating and what not. So this is very, very important. But what I want to kind of, because I am an immigrant myself, I would again, I would like to reiterate this, I maybe will think I'm obsessed or focused on that, that please keep this country free because I'm already an old person and I don't want to shop for another defection destination again. I think we're talking about peaceful immigrants, we're not talking about invading armies, I think there's a relevant difference between an invading army which is intent on using violence against innocent people and immigrants who are not intent on doing that. If you really debate the issue, that's the saturation, how do you deal with the foreign military force in invading the country? If you could look at that, that's a really dangerous deal. But if you're dealing with a lot of these people who are a part of immigration, that they are, they don't like these people, they don't like those people, but they don't want the system of liberty that still hangs on by the threat in this country to destroy. So they are worried about foreign immigration by effectively a military. And they may be wrong, but that's the true moment. If you want to talk about borders, that is the true moment of Americans who are worried about immigration. If you remove the threat of foreign immigration by foreign military that wants to impose the humanitarian system, then that's a very different thing. That is the central issue. All the minds of Americans who are concerned about immigration, are you evading the issue? Well, I don't think I'm evading the issue. I think that we can make a clear and distinct difference between an invading army and by definition, an invasion is a violation of the non-aggression principle. I think most people are concerned with what Yuri talked about, the welfare or getting hospital care or getting free education or whatever. And the obvious answer to that is get rid of those things and you won't have that problem. I think that anyone invading anyone is a violation of the non-aggression principle, but when some people come peacefully and they're not going to invade, they just want to live here or live in a... I travel sometimes from Vancouver to New Orleans and I go right over the Rocky Mountains and I tell you, that place is empty. There's just no one there. Now suppose somebody from China or Mars came in there and started homesteading some land in the middle of, I don't know, Wyoming in the Rockies. Are they committing per se a crime against anyone? I don't see how they are. Now if they come with bazookas and guns and they start shooting people, well then they're an invading army and we should stop them. And I think Ron Paul is sometimes accused of not being in favor of defense. I think he's in favor of defense. He would like a very strong, what do you call it, coast guard. If I could put words in his mouth. He just doesn't want to have armies in every country. So you have to distinguish between peaceful immigration and invading army. Do you know the difference between a bathroom and a living room? Don't come to my house if you don't. Well, if you don't know the difference between an invasion and peaceful immigration and you don't know the difference between offense and defense, then I say stay out of political economy because those are crucial concepts. Next. Yes, sir. I hate to continue with that but there's a second side, another side to that issue. I had gone from post-orders to the libertarian open borders and I'm moving more back to the post-border police in New Clause and reading more of our western culture and Dr. Long's law, Austro-Athenian belief, kind of well. But finally the western culture, it doesn't matter do we care if the country is shifting. Wall Street Journal just said European guarantees people down about 10% last decade is down to 24%. Big issues of multiculturalism, non-assimilation of the cultures. Is that something that before you or Dr. Long care about is it, are we incrementally changing the nature of this country? Are we going, are we just a fraud boiling in the pot and there's not no doubt. Are we losing it, that western culture that created this country or do we not even care if we are? I've known the name of my blog was going to convert some of the closed borders I would have chosen a different name but if you think, if you look at the history of this country and it seems to me that the deterioration of commitment to ideals of liberty has come primarily from immigrants. It seems that it's come from right here in this country, right here from people of western European descent have been quite committed to undermining liberty. I don't think that that comes to liberty is something that's unique to western culture. What western culture ended up with is a certain set of institutions for complex historical reasons but you can find ideas of liberty in other cultures. Often they just didn't end up with the right institutions to go with them. I have an article online called Austro-libertarian themes in ancient Chinese thought, Confucian thought. So if you're going to stop people from coming into the country because they might move us in a more status direction that's a reason to kick out of the country everyone who is already moving us in a more status direction unfortunately that's the majority and our prospects of kicking the majority of native citizens out of the country I think are slim. Others on this? Yeah, I mean if you talk about our European traditions well Europe has had that. Before they had immigration what did they have in the 20th century? They had half a century of brutal war and half a century of socialism. Their European tradition didn't save them so I think it's us spreading the ideas that makes the biggest difference. Not what happened in the distant past. All right we got less than five minutes left and I would urge us to try another topic. Operating on trade and black markets, that's the way to bring about a free society. Views on working on the black market to essentially display our freedoms right, I guess? Is that, yeah, okay Yuri Maltsov should be an expert. Well I came from the black market kind of place and everything we could get was from black market there was nothing on the I don't know white market there was no white market was central plan in black market. The problem with black market is because property rights are blurred in the black market it's all the time source of violence people shoot each other. In the United States we shoot each other because of illegal drugs market for example and for example if you go south of here and you will buy something on the abandoned parking lot and you will try it and find out that it's crashed aspirin or chalk not what you wanted then you cannot return it back for fully funded 30 days you cannot call Illinois office of consumer protection cannot call your lawyer you can just take a machine gun and enforce property rights and contracts that's what our drug industry is producing 46% of crime in the United States at least 46% incarceration in socialist societies almost everything is prohibited not only illegal drugs everything entrepreneurship is illegal making market goods is illegal so everything went there and so it's the Soviet Union became a murder capital of the world so black market is from one hand it provides people with something it's better than no market at all but from another hand it's a source of violence in many cases and then the idea was for example reformers in Moscow just legalize a black market and we will have a market economy but it's very difficult because people operating entrepreneurs of the black market they kind of know how to shoot others or how to poison the competition but they don't know much about about initial public offerings or stock market or rule of law so that's why I think that the market should go hand in hand with the rule of law it can be private law one of the most despicable things that the government does is the FDA will not allow you if you're dying of cancer in your last legs and they've given you a week to live or a month to live they will not allow you to use an experimental drug because it's not yet approved by them and I think that's he and this and I think if you can get the experimental drug you should get it another very he and this government regulation that creates black markets is they don't allow markets and use body parts and people die and have to go on dialysis machines because they can't get a kidney if they would allow a market in this we'd be up to our armpits and kidneys to screw up a phrase we wouldn't have the shortage anymore we have the shortage because the price level is zero so if you need a kidney and you can't get it and you have to break the law to do it I think you're justified on libertarian grounds I mean the drug market is probably one of the most violent cases of a black market but it takes something that's a lot more benign take downloading songs now if like most of us up here you're against intellectual property there's nothing wrong with downloading songs now you could have there are two ways you could work to be able to get free songs one is you could lobby the government to try and get copyright laws changed the other is you could just go and bypass them and download stuff yourself and the second is the black market way it's the aggrist way and so I think you know as I understand aggrism it's a matter of building alternative institutions alternative practices of course it's risky sometimes more than others there are fairly low risk ways of doing some of these things but it's a matter of building institutions and practices we bypass the government get it so that more and more people come to find it natural and gradually the government loses support and eventually sort of social power shifts to these market institutions so I wouldn't advise people to go out and get involved in the drug market but there are other I think more promising ways in which we're bypassing the state anybody over here anybody you sir you are the last question of the day make it good and make it short yes okay we have the last question of the day is there a six year plan that anybody up here has and I only have one little thing I would do if I could do one thing I would stop withholding from people's paychecks that is the if I could do one small thing if people had to write a check on the 15th I think it would make all the difference in the world but I give it to the panel well I'm going to suggest an agriest approach trying to get the government to do something I've got no plan for that but working with the right on things like homeschooling working with the left on things like raw food various nonviolent things like the people in the homeschooling movement are shooting each other and the people in the raw food industry are shooting each other and of course the government is backing down more and more from regulating some of those things like homeschooling so building alternative institutions getting more and more people involved in seeking things through those institutions rather than through the state I think that's something we can start doing right now we can convince 51% of people to vote on something you can just get a smaller number of people voting to put together institutions right now very quickly I agree completely we can't get rid of the withholding tax because the withholding tax was offered initiated by Mr. Libertarian Milton Friedman and therefore it must be pro-liberty I'm kidding, I'm kidding although to be fair to Milton he did later recant and apologize for that you're not going to find Murray Rothbard or anyone like that coming up with that my suggestion I notice there's not one single solitary black person in this audience I've long had this initiative among the black community I've been on TV on this thing called Our Story trying to get them to see that the war on drugs is an anti-black law that young black men are killing each other like flies that the blacks are disproportionately in jail for victimless crimes and that this is something they should put on the top of their platform or the top of their agenda this would certainly be an opening to the left instead what you get when you hear Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams or any of these other black people who are free enterprises although they're a little weak on the war but what the heck, you can't get everything they say they're Oreo cookies they're white on the inside and black on the outside they're Uncle Tom's this is a horrible thing and perhaps if we had an initiative to the black community to get them to see the heanness of this now it disproportionately affects their community maybe we can make some progress in six years when I came to the United States the first thing I published was at that time they were discussing 500 day plan how to get out of communism and I wrote my own one day plan I don't really need six days even not six years because change should be going overnight otherwise the enemies of change would mobilize themselves and you cannot just you cannot gradual change should be stewed in favor of dramatic change overnight change look how Soviet Union collapsed it wasn't collapsing in 500 days it collapsed overnight and I would quote a famous conservative near conservative imperialist Margaret Thatcher but she had sometimes very good sense of humor she said that if for example gradual change it never works the United States would try to switch from our left hand driving to right hand driving and do it say in 100 days sending the first week only big trucks to the right so that would not that would not work I think that we should and speaking about plans yes the last kind of thing about Mr. Gorbachev can imagine he really believed that planning system works that didn't have a good plan can you imagine that central planning works and I see so many of my colleagues in American Academy saying exactly the same that central planning works which has never had a good plan and I think that in a decentralized society in the society of individual self-ownership we should promote what we believe in and try to make change as soon as it possibly can occur