 Trevor Burrus Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell Joining us today is Peter T. Leeson, the Duncan Black professor of economics and law at George Mason University. He is the author of a few books, including 2014's Anarchy Unbound, Why Self-Governance Works Better Than You Think. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Pete. Peter Thanks for having me. Trevor Burrus I'd like to start with your CV, which I was reviewing before we started recording. It's quite interesting. You see papers on witch trials, on oracles, on the English longbow, on human sacrifice, and of course pirates. There was one that really caught my eye. It's a goddamn, the law and economics of monastic malediction. These all sound very interesting, but they don't really sound like economics. You're an economics professor, so what gives? Peter Well, you're not the only person to ask that question. My view, so I got into economics primarily through Austrian economics and the work of Ludwig von Mises in particular. He lays out this approach to economics that is all-encompassing with respect to any what he calls purposive human behavior, in which in contemporary economic terms is the equivalent to saying when people make choices, economics applies. There are a lot of other people who have worked in other traditions who hold similar views, but Mises is sort of my guiding light and the way that I think about economics, the way that I approach my research reflects that. I take it really seriously, and I happen to have, I guess you could say eclectic and somewhat unusual interests, and so I'm always looking for cases where there is purposive human behavior, where there's choices that are being made, that at least on the surface don't seem to make a whole hell of a lot of sense. In fact, some of them seem downright absurd, and so I want to see, examine those choices, those behaviors from the perspective of rational choice theory to see if it's possible to make sense of them, and that has sort of led to the litany of weirdness that is my vita. Mark Did you originally want to be a historian? It seems like there's a lot of pretty intense historical research that goes into some of what you're doing. There is. I had no disrespect to historians. I love history. I do tons of reading in history as you observed, but I have always wanted to be an economist. To me, history provides the sort of facts of the world, if you will, many of which are very unusual, especially historically, at least from a contemporary perspective, which is part of the reason why I end up doing a lot of historical research. But economics provides the analytical toolkit, the theoretical lens that we can apply to those often bizarre facts to try and make sense of them. The facts of the world motivate the subjects of my inquiry, but it's the conviction that the analytical tools of economics that are able to illuminate those facts that really spoke to me when I was younger and still does to me today. Mark So how does energy unbound as a collection fit into what you had said about Austrian economics and the way you approach the kind of work that you do? How does that fit into that whole theory? Mark Well, there's a bunch of different ways in which it does though, but I think probably the most important one is this idea of what Mises in particular calls social cooperation under the division of labor, which is a kind of clunky phrase for talking about the institutional foundations of civilization, which is a pretty big question. And incidentally, maybe you know this, but Mises was originally thinking of entitling human action, social cooperation. And in many ways, I think that that title would have actually spoken a little bit more directly to at least the substantive as opposed to methodological meat of what he was getting at. But so what he's challenging us to do, in my view, at least in part, is to try and understand better those institutions that undergird civilization, that that promote or inhibit, as the case may be, social cooperation under the division of labor. And one of those institutions historically and today that has been very important in that regard, and certainly from Mises's perspective, was and is government. However, given my historical interest in particular, what I noticed, and certainly I'm not the first one to have noticed this, is that if you actually look around, you know, at the world past and present, what you notice is a surprising degree of social cooperation that's able to be carried on in the absence of government. And so that presents a kind of puzzle. If we typically think of the state as providing function, basic functions, such as protection of private property rights, protection of people's persons. If those are absent in these contexts, and we think about those as promoting civilization, then how is it that at least some degree of civilization has been achieved despite its absence? So if we're looking at what happens in the absence of government, how are we defining government? And does government mean the same thing as the state? I think that government does mean the same thing as the state. But that's a that's kind of a semantic issue. You might define it differently. But I think the way that we the way that at least most political economists are talking about it, government in the state are the same. What is different, at least as terms are typically used in in that in that literature is government and governance. And governance is a broader concept that just refers to the rules that that people may or may not have for protecting property, for example, and the means of their enforcement. Government, on the other hand, is one particular institutional regime for at least ostensibly achieving those goals. However, there are others. There are there is what I refer to as self governance or what other people call private governance, which is when you've got private actors who are instead of instead of agents of the state performing or behaving in ways that perform those those functions. So then what makes government as we're talking about it here different than say the governance so that the government of Alexandria, Virginia, versus the say the institution of George Mason University, which also has systems of rules that people who are part of it need to follow and has, you know, consequences for breaking those rules. Is there a fundamental thing that sets the two apart? Yeah, so really, you know, your question is a very good one and is getting at the, you know, the core issue, I think, which maybe you asked, but I failed to answer a moment ago about sort of how it is that we define government, how do we distinguish it from non government? And that's actually a really, a really difficult question. And it seems like and the short version of it is that I don't think that there is a single answer to it. There isn't a precise way to define this is government and this is not at least in a sort of abstract sense. And on the surface, that would present a, you know, rather serious problem for people like me who want to want to make a distinction between government and private governance, for example, and to explore one or the other in a comparative sense. But I think in practice, our inability to abstractly and precisely define government doesn't end up getting in the way of our ability to engage in useful conversations that distinguish between private governance and government. Because our intuitions tend to comport with respect to particular instances about whether or not what we observe in a particular instance, we would call a government or something else. So with respect to the question that you, the specifics of what you mentioned a moment ago, I think everyone looking at the county of Arlington, Virginia would refer to that as a government. I don't think anyone would call that self governance or private governance. By the same token, I think everyone looking at the institution that is George Mason University would probably not refer to George Mason University as a government or a state, but rather as an organization that operates within the context of a state. And in a like way, there although with with admittedly much greater ambiguities in some of the cases that I want to consider, I think we generally share ideas about what constitutes the X being government and why being anarchy the absence of government. But as I say, there's there's there's haziness there. And, you know, to me, perhaps the most useful way to think about it instead of as a binary classification is to think about the extent to which we have government or anarchy the absence of government private governance as lying on a spectrum. So one end of the spectrum think institutional and social regimes that lie at one end, we we all pretty much agree our government. At the other end, I think we all would pretty much agree our are not government or anarchy is for example. But then there's these cases in the middle that are hazy and we can have, you know, semantic disputes about that, which aren't terribly important. But most of the cases that we end up analyzing kind of fall somewhere closer to one or the other end of the spectrum. So it sort of ends up being a moot point. How do you feel about the word anarchy? And the because you a lot of people prefer to use something like statelessness, because anarchy has another meaning, which is chaos, which is of course, it seems like a lot of your work is is written to at least address the theory that anarchy is chaos. Yeah. Well, you know, I like the word or at least I find it to be a useful word, you know, or I wouldn't obviously I used it in the title of my title of my book, I could have titled it something else. I don't think it's a big deal, you know, I sometimes refer to it as statelessness to, but I have no problem with referring to it as anarchy. And, you know, from a from a positive perspective, the perspective of an economist as a scientist or researcher, which is the perspective that I'm taking an anarchy unbound. I want to use the terminology that's used in the scientific literature. And that literature commonly refers to the arrangements or arrangements like those that I'm talking about as anarchy, in addition to referring to them as stateless. Now, in terms of some of these situations, because this discussion might be too abstract right now for some of our listeners, or what are we actually talking about in the sense of these kind of situations that you study? And it seems to me that especially in anarchy unbound, there's a theme that runs through the book, which is you think about a situation where most people would say, well, this clearly would not work without a government to fix this problem. And then you explain how that is not always true and and can be theoretically shown to work and has not always been true as a historical matter. That's right. That's right. So the the the idea is, I mean, it if you'll permit me for a moment to kind of all this stuff, you know, when a way goes as many things do in political economy, go back to Hobbes. And so, you know, Hobbes famously describes anarchy, the state of nature as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short and says that, you know, government is the solution. And I think it's it's pretty clear to virtually everyone at this point, that Hobbes was over pessimistic about the ability of self governance of anarchy to produce some degree of social cooperation, and was over optimistic about the ability of government to basically solve the social dilemma to make things nice. So, you know, most people realize that some governments, at least in history, have been really nasty institutions, really terrible regimes that oppressed people. And that mostly escapes Hobbes. By the same token, in the in the political economy literature on anarchy or self governance, it is it has been for a while, pretty widely recognized that at least some degree of cooperation under anarchy is possible via this mechanism that's commonly called the discipline of continuous dealings, which is basically just the idea of reputation. So if you do something nasty to somebody else, that person isn't going to interact with you again, and is going to tell all their friends that you're a nasty person, and they're not going to interact with you again. So, you know, more or less, if you're a relatively patient person, that is to say, if you don't discount the future too much, you are likely to cooperate as a result of the threat of being cut off from trade by people who you cheat. So that's a sort of mechanism that they're looking at. My book is trying to say, look, the literature understands that mechanism, and it sees it as as permitting some scope for social cooperation. But it it finds that when that particular self governing mechanism of reputation breaks down, and it may for a variety of reasons, which I can talk about more if you're interested. But when it breaks down, anarchy doesn't work. And so we can't we can only get cooperation under these pretty limited circumstances that support reputation's ability to function. So the book is looking at the first part of the book is looking at cases where those conditions that are supposedly required in order for self governance to be effective, which is to say the conditions that are required for reputation to be effective don't exist. And nevertheless, we observe social cooperation, which implies that some mechanism, in addition to or other than reputation, must be supporting social cooperation. The second part of the book is concerned with this other piece about people people understanding that governments can be bad. And so being less optimistic about government as a solution to the social dilemma than Hobbes was. But nevertheless, people still generally thinking that, well, despite that, still having some government, even a bad one has to be better than having no government at all. And there I'm interested in engaging empirically and theoretically the question of whether or not that's true. And I find that it's not. So for the one of the first on the first part, you're discussing one of very all the essays in the book are very interesting. But one of the questions you deal with is how does a do two groups who are very, very culturally different and therefore the reputation that you gain in one group, either for good or for ill, if you're, let's say a trader does not carry over to the other group, at least as a matter of general practice, how could those ever trade? So I kept reading that and thinking Star Trek or possibly the Cantina and Star Wars or just any kind of typical space alien base like Deep Space Nine, where how could the Ferringhi and Klingon's trade in that situation if they don't have the reputation work within their group and you say it does work and it actually did work. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, what I call these cultural differences, what the literature often calls, you know, social heterogeneity, the idea that, you know, people are different from each other is one of the conditions that according to conventional wisdom, when present causes self governance to not function precisely because as you were saying, it's more difficult in that scenario because of different shared understandings, for example, among other reasons for reputation to function. And if you look to the world, this would be a huge problem I should point out. If this were true, we would have a major a major issue because, you know, you got to recognize that most of the world for most of its history didn't have anything like what we would describe as governments and most of the gains from trade that are available lie outside our families and our close social networks where we share lots of similarities with other people. So that would mean that most of the world for most of its history was not able to capture at least a reasonable portion, and today I should point out in other contexts, at least a reasonable portion of the gains from trade that lie outside their group, which would basically mean that, you know, humanity wouldn't exist. Of course it does. And so, you know, the puzzle is how. And since we know that we can't rely on reputation alone in this context of social heterogeneity, we have to find other mechanisms. And the mechanism that I focus on is what I call signaling with social distance reducing signals, which is a very convoluted phrase that I wish I hadn't used, but the upshot is very simple. You know, if you've got your two alien races, for example, and one of the social differences between them is that they speak different languages. And so, you know, they don't trust each other. They're afraid to trade. They don't know if a guy from the other group is going to cheat them. What one or both of them can do is invest in learning the language of the other alien species. That investment is like a bond. It's like a hostage because it requires a large, sunk upfront investment on the part of the guy who's trying to learn the other alien species language. And he only recoups that investment over time. If he ends up repeatedly cooperating with the members of that other alien group, if he doesn't, that other alien group stops interacting with him. Hence, there is some rule for reputation. But that initial ability to realize exchange requires this sort of ex-anti-filtering of potential cooperators from cheaters and the social distance reducing investment or signal through learning language that that one side makes facilitates that exchange. One of the objections to the kind of research that you're doing that I've heard from people who are less persuaded by or less sympathetic to anarchism, whether politically or just in our daily lives between the between the various fingers of the state is that this stuff is less an example of anarchism or statelessness or a lack of government working as it is. Once you have governments that provide a basic framework, so these merchant from the different alien races have governments that are protecting them and presumably defending them against invasion from the race that they might trade with and so on, that once you have that, then people sure they can get up to all sorts of neat things without the state being directly involved, but that that's not quite the same thing as then thinking that therefore we really can get away without having the state. Yeah, I mean, you know, maybe a a similar concern or a slightly different spin on it is sort of this idea about, you know, what the difference between what you might call violent theft and peaceful theft, you know, so the idea is if government is there to make sure that the strong doesn't, you know, punch the weak in the face and take his wallet, then yes, maybe they can make they we can make sure that one guy doesn't violate his contract with the other. That would be an example of peaceful theft as opposed to the punching him in the face, the violent theft. And it's an important it's an important concern, but there are both theoretical answers to the dilemma. And more importantly, what really motivates all the stuff, you know, for me is that if you look to the world, what you'll find are cases of, you know, what we might call utter anarchy cases where the state doesn't exist, even to provide that basic framework to make sure that the strong don't plunder the weak. And nevertheless, we observe some degree of cooperation, we observe people overcoming that obstacle and being able to realize to realize gains from exchange. So, you know, a lot of times I feel like that the objections that people have, which are sensible, formed by intuition, they can, they should, you know, give pause to look out the window, think a little bit about what they see in the world, at which point they should notice that, wait a minute, you know, reality is rejecting what theory seems to be dictating, which suggests that perhaps my theory is a skew. Now, I think it's important that our listeners and those who read your work, and I highly suggest to go and read Pete's work if you're listening, but that you're not necessarily in the work we're talking about making the normative case for anarchy in so far as the literature you're writing in, because the question here is people who assert impossibility, you're just addressing that claim, not that clearly government, therefore, is worthless and it's never needed anywhere, but where people said the only thing that could do this would be government, you say, probably not. Yeah, that's definitely true, but there's actually two different issues on the table there, right? So one of them is you're right that the research that I'm doing is positive in the sense that it's trying to explain the world as it is, not say anything about, at least in this work, about how the world should be, but there's a second component which often gets blended with that first one, which is whether or not I or other people are making the claim that anarchy is a panacea and self-governance solves everything, or that government can never improve upon it, even in principle anarchy arrangements. And as a positive matter, the answer that is clearly, you know, no, government can in fact, at least in principle, improve on these things. But, and it's a really important but, the ability in principle for government to improve upon anarchic arrangements does not imply that real-world governments, even on average, are producing better outcomes than an anarchic set of institutions would produce. And the reason for that is not that, you know, real-world anarchies are, you know, magical places of unicorns where glorious things happen. And, you know, a lot of times they're not very, they're pretty nasty. Hobbes was kind of right, you know, they're pretty nasty, some of them anyway. But, and here's where Hobbes, going back to Hobbes again, where he was wrong, governments are often nastier. So it's, you know, it's which one is worse, which rather than which one is better. And here, you know, it's astonishing to me the extent to which people are able to overlook what is in effect the modal outcome of government in the world, which is a horrible outcome. So saying that statelessness might be able to improve over that outcome is really, you know, saying, is setting the bar very low. I want to go back to another one of my favorite examples. It was hard to choose with all the great examples in the book. One of the things that you discuss, which is something I had never heard of, and I'm a pretty big student of at least British history, but it's called, I believe it's pronounced the legis marciarum would be the way it pronounced the law of lawlessness, which was about a three century period in the English-Scottish border, particularly though in the 16th century, for giving governance to a group of fairly unruly, but sometimes cooperative English and Scotsman. Yeah. Yeah. This is the society of the, you know, the infamous border reverbs for those, you know, those who are interested in history. And actually this gets, this is an empirical illustration also of a case where we don't have government providing even the most basic function of regulating violence, for example. So, yeah, from like the 13th to about the 16th century, the Anglo-Scottish border, you have these reverbs who basically their way of living is not exclusively, but in large part based on raiding people on the other side of the border who were like their, you know, their long-term enemies. You know, obviously England and Scotland have been at war for a long period of time. But even when they weren't officially at war, these people had serious hostility toward one another and basically went back and forth plundering each other. And I should point out they're peculiar in that it seems to be that they derived some kind of incidentally utility from the plundering. They seem to like it. It was kind of a game. If you could think about it that way, although a very deadly and dangerous game with serious consequences. But that's a problem. That shows something to the question of, like, what about the people who just like to steal or like to hurt people? Yep, they exist. They exist as the reverbs show us. And, you know, it's an interesting thing because, you know, if you might think that if you identify a group like that and if you could show that in that group, self-governance actually works reasonably well, anarchy produced decent outcomes relative to what might be the alternative option anyway. I think it's a real testament to the robustness of self governance, because if it can work in a society of, you know, basically outlaws devoted to plundering one another, then surely it's going to have an easier time working among the more regular sort of people who really aren't interested in rating against one each other or slaying one each other, slaying one another for fun. So, yeah, I mean, in this, in this, this, the leg S. Marciarum that, that you pointed to was a sort of customary system of basically kind of cross border law that emerged among these people over the centuries to not entirely eliminate, again, particularly given that the people involved enjoyed it to a certain extent, but to highly regulate, to make less socially destructive and to preserve and, and, and promote some degree of cooperation across the members of, of both groups. And, and the institutions that emerged are pretty cool and, and they're detailed in many ways. They're not terribly different, at least in fundamentals from some of the institutions that governed anarchic medieval Iceland, for example, for, for those listeners who might be familiar with David Friedman's famous paper. But it's a different context in that it's considering, you know, sworn enemies who are socially and, and culturally diverse, lacking any semblance of, of government, even to, you know, to prevent violence among them. Can you give us examples of what those institutions look like and how they worked? Sure. So I think, you know, probably so one that's similar to, to medieval Iceland was this idea of, of what they called manboat, which was a kind of Virgil, you know, a blood payment. So if you, if you killed somebody, you were entitled under a norm, this was obviously not in, you know, legislated law under a norm to receive, you know, some kind of payment or alternatively, you could take the guy who was found guilty of having committed the crime and actually kill him yourself if you were just a vengeful type. And some of these guys were. So you might actually, you might actually want to exercise that option if you were a, an Anglo Scottish border reaver. And that's a very sort of crude, crude institution. Well, isn't that exactly what people would say that's what anarchy is like? And I don't want to live there. That's why it might be. I don't know. I mean, that's a, you know, whether or not you would want to live in a society that has, you know, blood feuding as one of its elements is a different question from whether or not the institution of blood feuding promotes co-operation under anarchy or not. Right. So I wouldn't want to live in a society where blood feuding was rampant by the same token that doesn't mean that blood feuding does not promote co-operation. And in fact, it does both today where it's used in places like Somalia, for instance, and historically where it was in medieval Iceland or in the 16th century Anglo-Scottish borderlands. So it's two separate questions, you know, that the, again, veering on the normative versus, versus the positive. Well, piggybacking off of what Trevor just asked, do we have, because the examples of anarchy that get given like the medieval Iceland one that gets brought up at every Students for Liberty event, do we have examples of anarchic societies that do seem like the kind of places we might want to live? Like we being, you know, are sheltered and not terribly river like, you know, 21st century modern man. Will they have Netflix there is what you're asking, yes? Netflix probably not. Well, it depends. So there's a couple of ways to answer this. You know, one is it's an important question. And this is a kind of another driving element in the second part of the book. But it's an important question to ask in the context of this question, who the we is, right? So if we is, if we refers to people living in the highly developed Western world, living in the United States, for example, I think it's harder to find positive answers, you know, where we would say yes, that there are, I'm going to come to something else in a moment where I think the answer is yes, or at least we do. But to me, the important thing to recognize is that places that have, in other words, we're comparing in that we people who live under extremely successful, highly functional governments, you know, for all of the problems that we have, as we, you know, make America great again, for example, you know, for all the problems that we have here, they're really, you know, not problems in the grand scheme of things in the grand scheme of populations globally. Most of the world lives in places where government is highly dysfunctional and oppressive. So the we there, you know, let's say that you're thinking about the Democratic Republic of Congo, that we, if you're asking them, I think that they may very well have prefer if the choice were sort of given to them in this way, to live under a society where you've got blood payment to a manboat system, for example, like we saw with the border rivers, then under their current exploitative government. So the we is a very important question to ask. But we can come back to that if you're if you're interested. But the case where I think where the we, you know, we're thinking about the people who inhabit the developed world, people who inhabit the United States, for example, there are what what you might call pockets of anarchy, where I think that are peaceful, that look, you know, they have Netflix, so to speak, that I think people choose all the time over government. And here it gets a little bit fuzzier, because now we're sort of back into the realm where you've got people making choices, for example, using arbitrage, private arbitration is overwhelmingly used to resolve commercial disputes domestically in the United States. And that's not because anybody makes commercial partners, you know, put these things in their contracts, they could just all appeal to the government, the state court system. But they try their damnedest to not do that. That's a last resort rather than a first choice. And there we don't observe, you know, horrible outcomes. In fact, it seems that we've got pretty good outcomes as a consequence of private domestic arbitration. But somebody could say, well, yeah, that only works because, you know, when the when the private arbitrator says that, you know, I need to pay you money. I don't end up, you know, coming and trying to murder you in your sleep because the government of the United States is there to make sure that, you know, I don't do that, or that I come, you know, more generally that I comply with whatever the private arbitration association said. This is, you know, sometimes called the shadow of the state argument. What it neglects, one of the many things I think that it neglects is the fact that in the international arena, we, meaning everybody, including people in the in the highly developed world, obviously live in the context of international anarchy. There is no world government. There is no super national sovereign with the authority to enforce arbitration decisions internationally, for example, on citizens of one country in another. And so you might not say that we're choosing that. That's a different question about whether or not we have we have chosen to live in that world versus chosen to live in a world with with with one world government. But in that arena, I think you have something closer to complete statelessness, and it seems to produce very peaceable outcomes. There isn't blood feuding that's used to enforce it. We were talking about very wealthy individuals who are prosperous and live well and anarchic arrangements, self-governance seems to be promoting cooperation pretty well. It seems like one of the almost the moral of your story or what you would what really want people to do when they talk about anarchy is to always compare it to alternatives that it is to say it's always better and say that government is always better in either the writ large sense or in a smaller sense is just sort of a nonsensical claim. It is what what institutions do you have available to you now? And would it be better for there to be no government? That's exactly right. You know, and that's the that's the economist in me. And hopefully, you know, should be, I think, the economist in everyone. Yeah, the question of, you know, is how is Somalia doing under anarchy by itself is not a particularly informative one from a comparative perspective. Right. What we want to know, for instance, is whether or not Somalia under anarchy is doing better or worse than Somalia was not under some hypothetical government that we could imagine that would be great, like if they could have a government like we have in the United States, but under their actual government, the one that they actually had and therefore would likely have if they were to reinstitute a government. So the comparative question economics, you know, requires us to always ask the ask the comparative question, you know, for libertarians, you know, when you argue about, for example, it's the same thing as when you argue about with people, for instance, about, say, the Industrial Revolution, where a lot of people will point out that working conditions were bad during the Industrial Revolution and wages were low and children were working and people were getting their arms cut off in the machines and so on, all of which, you know, it may very well be true, but it's irrelevant for the question of whether or not the Industrial Revolution was welfare enhancing to people, since to answer that question, we need to ask whether or not having your arm cut off in the machine and making two cents an hour is better than or worse than working on the farm toiling on the farm 24 hours a day for one cent an hour and, you know, getting your leg lop chopped off and a plow. That's the relevant question, you know, the implicit standard when people make critiques about the welfare effects of the Industrial Revolution for the population of the time is to apply the standards that we have in the contemporary developed world, which is, of course, not the right standard because it's an irrelevant alternative unless you have a time machine. And the same exact logic applies to comparative analysis for evaluating the welfare effects of government versus anarchy. So to keep this thing on the normative discussion for a moment, though, if we're looking around the world and so you're saying, you know, if as a as a pampered Westerner, anarchy might not the anarchic societies that we have as examples might not look all that great comparatively, but compared to what people in the Congo are facing, it looks pretty good. But isn't that like so we're not we're not talking about going back in time. We're simply saying, yes, OK, so maybe maybe anarchy would be better for the people in the Congo over what they have now. But that would be like saying, you know, if you have an infected leg, cutting off that leg is better than dying from the infection. But even better than that would be getting some antibiotics. And so even better than anarchy, like, yes, it might be marginally better, but we've got this other thing, which is good government. And so we shouldn't be looking at anarchy because that's only a marginal improvement. We should be looking at how to give these people good government that's going to improve their lives dramatically. Yes. And which is which is right, except it I think, again, ignores a another central economic concept, which is scarcity or constraints. So if among our options, so if I go into your leg example, if my options are antibiotic or sever the leg, then I agree antibiotic. If that's one of the options that's available to me, yes. But suppose that I'm too poor to purchase the antibiotic or suppose that antibiotics haven't been invented or suppose that whatever other thing you want to impose that restricts my access to antibiotics, then the relevant comparison is death or cutting off the leg. With respect to anarchy, it is again similar. So if you think that it is within the the feasible opportunity set of, say, contemporary Somalia to have a government such as that which governs the United States or some Western European country, then I think it is a reasonable comparison to make to look at what outcomes in Somalia anarchy versus outcomes in, say, Switzerland. But I think that anyone who is even remotely informed about the history of Somalia who simply recognizes that constraints are real, they are the reason that we they're the reason that I don't drive a Ferrari, even though Ferrari is better than my Subaru, right? Clearly it's a better car, but I'm income constrained. I can't have that. So Subaru it is, right? Similarly, if Somalia has Swiss government as an option, I would say yes, that would make sense. But for historical reasons, for reasons of real constraints that they confront, for example, the fact that they lived for decades under a socialist style regime that basically pitted ethnic groups against one another and has set up the set up the institutions of the state such that they can systematically expropriate people. That is to say it is not a government. They have never had a government that has had checks and constraints that prevented such predation. Swiss government isn't on the table. And so then the option is, well, how does how does the type of government that is on the table for Somalia? Which we know what it looks like. It's like the one that collapsed in 1991 or it's like the ones that are in all the countries that surround Somalia today that whose governments didn't collapse. Given that that's the option versus anarchy, we face a, I think, very different sort of evaluation. Now this probably answers your, that what you said probably answers this question, which is sort of the inverse of that. But I want to make it sort of clear. When people argue that if the U.S. government disappears or even is lessened by 2%, I mean the way people talk in this town is that a 2% cut in military spending is anarchy or 2% cut in Medicaid spending is anarchy. But let's just say it disappears. What everyone thinks about libertarians, we all want to push the button, make the state disappear, punch everyone into a absolute dog eat dog, the Copsian world that we can dominate because we're the rich ones in the strong ones, which is why we want that in the first place. And so all municipal governments, all state governments disappear. So after that, it looks like Somalia, doesn't it? I don't think it does. So just like there are different qualities of government, right? There's the government of Switzerland and then there's the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo and lots of things in between. There are also different qualities of anarchies, right? There is the anarchy that might, for example, prevail in a place like the United States if what you described transpired versus the anarchy that we observe existing, for example, in Somalia. And what shapes those qualities of private governance of anarchies? I think are the same features, the same constraints that bind or limit our abilities with respect to the quality of governments that we have. So a sort of shorter way of saying that is that to the extent that you think that a society's, the governments that are in its available opportunity set don't look very good, I suspect that any governance arrangement, including anarchic ones, don't look very good either. It's low quality government versus low quality anarchy and vice versa. So if you have a group of people, maybe in Somalia, I haven't started up on it recently, but some African countries at different times who want to kill everyone in the other tribe, that's what they want to do, then either anarchy or governments are gonna look pretty bad. That's exactly right. There's still, and then there's the comparative question of they're both gonna look bad, but which one looks worse, right? Then for a place like the United States, where we have a long history of private property protection having been provided by the state, a high trust society with a very developed economy, for example, in that world, you would think that just like our government works pretty well, some of those same very features that help support the functionality, the high quality of our state, would probably also support a high quality or well functioning anarchy. Now, there's again a comparative question, whether or not anarchy in the United States, to say that it would be better than it is in Somalia, I think is although a neglected point is uncontroversial, but what is more controversial is the question of whether or not anarchy in the United States, while being better than anarchy in Somalia, would nevertheless still be better than government or worse than government in the United States, which is quite good. And I thought you were gonna answer that question for us. You just stopped there. I was like, oh, come on, Pete, I'm waiting. Well, I think, you know, in libertarian circles, there's this, you know, would you push the button? I'm sure you've heard this before. Would you push the button, you know, question? And I'll say this, I would be very hesitant to push the button in the United States. And the reason is because I think we have it so good. Right? So I am open to and could believe, could easily be persuaded. Some days I think I do believe that marginal gains, you know, could be made by moving to total statelessness, say, you know, in the United States. However, given how good we have it, right, people need to recognize that, given how good we have it, that is a huge risk to take. You know, the downside potential is sizable if you're mistaken. And so since what you're giving up is pretty good, that's probably, I think, for most people, probably not a gamble they'd be willing to take. But I also think that, I probably just ruined all my libertarian cred there, but I also think it's not really the, it's a fun question, but it's not the most important question. Because as I mentioned before, most of the world, overwhelmingly, lives in under governments that look much more like the government of Somalia did before it collapsed than those who live in governments that look like our government. We're the outliers. North America, Western Europe are the outliers. So once you recognize that, you know, the real question is, would you push the button in the Sudan? Would you push the button in what, pick your sub-Saharan African country where the welfare gains are potentially the greatest? Right, there I think it's a no-brainer, yes, we should push the button. Would you push the button in Mexico? Things get a little hazier, I think I'd push the button there. But for the handful of super outliers, I think, you know, the gamble probably isn't worth it, but the point is that for most of the world, where the welfare gains are greatest, right? There's super low-hanging fruit, and there I think there's an unequivocal, yes button pushing, which, you know, for a sort of thinking person should make you realize that, you know, at a minimum, what's being suggested then is anarchy for most of the globe, even if it's not anarchy for all of the globe. Then in a country like the United States, where the button doesn't exist, even if we were inclined to push it, that, you know, political anarchy is not on the table at least anytime soon, what can we as citizens, as voters, as policymakers learn from the study of anarchy? What are these success stories or these questions that you've sought to answer have to teach us? So if you think about the, you know, my research is sort of examining what you might call hard cases for anarchy, cases where people are devoted to hurting each other, cases where people are socially diverse, where there are large populations, and so on, I think to the extent that we can find a surprising degree of social cooperation in those worst case scenarios, it should make us that much more optimistic about the degree of cooperation that we can get out of self-governance and archic private arrangements in regular populations, right? And so, you know, if you think, if you go back to Madison's paradox of government, right? Supposedly he says, you know, we need a government in order to make sure that we basically don't do bad things to each other, but the problem is that once we empower government to do that, how do we make sure that government isn't going to hurt us? And we know that the general problem, you know, the biggest welfare losses empirically come from government hurting us. So if you can, to the extent that you can scale back what it is that government is doing, you can reduce the potential for those biggest damages, so to speak. And if we know that anarchy works in the hardest case, that means that some private solution in the easy case, I think, becomes much easier to buy into, and so it ultimately limits, if you wanna think about it, and restricts the activities that we have the state involved in, and thus limits the potential for damage. So it's, you don't have to be an anarchist, I think, or even interested in anarchy, per se, to take away from this kind of research the idea that more private activity, more private institution building, more forms of self-governance, even in an economy or in a country such as the United States that's governed by a relatively well-functioning government can produce important, important benefits. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.