 This is my diet my Concella, you ready Freddy? I'm ready. I guess I could take my mask off What is it I can't see what's it got on it be for Vendetta. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I got it backwards. No, that's why yeah Yeah, I love that movie. I like Stephen Fry generally and it's got a very young cute Natalie Portman Yeah, she had her day. Yeah before she was in all those I think she was in Star Wars movies at some point. Yeah, yeah, so and then she became sort of a Hillary person, so true All right, we good Clay Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to the human action podcast if you have been following along You should be following along. You know that we've been working ourselves working our way through Some various Rothbard texts in the past few weeks and at some point we announced that we are going to tackle the ethics of Liberty Which after man economy and state might be the most treatise-like or full-length work of Rothbard's for our purposes And we started the the analysis of this book last week with dr. Walter Block We went through part one of the book which deals in natural law If you haven't seen that show be sure and go back and take a look because it's got a lot of Walter block isms and we wrestled with a lot of things conceptually in that show but part two of the book Where Rothbard lays out a theory of Liberty is really the meat of it And I thought there'd be nobody better for our purposes this week Then our friend Stephen Cancella who is of course someone most of you probably already know or are familiar with he's not just an IP lawyer Of course, he's written the definitive text against intellectual property But he's also written quite a bit about libertarian law more generally the idea of when is force permissible What is proportionality what is contract what is property all of these things we wrestle with and Stefan? I guess by way of welcome. It's interesting to me that Rothbard's writing this book in the 70s comes out around 82 I mean, do you think all this stuff would have been settled by 1500 or so? I mean, we're still talking about this stuff in the 80s and now we're talking about it in the 2020s Yeah, in a way Rothbard was He was lucky that he came in at the time where there's lots of low-hanging fruit, right? I think that's one reason he made so much progress, but I Always feel like the libertarian movement the modern one really started around iron and and that crowd in the 50s So it was relatively new when Rothbard was writing in the 70s Well, so his big chapter in here Property and criminality. I mean, this is a very different approach I think Deliberatarianism then a lot of people take and certainly a different one than the general public would conceive of in other words, he roots it entirely in property. So maybe we can start with this idea In in modern statutory law and positive law There's a concept of tort and there's a concept of crime in the Rothbardian conception for starters Those two things collapse into one another. So let's give everybody the quick and dirty of what this means Right. Yeah, I think most people think of different branches of law, right? There's there's contract. There's property. There's family law International law domestic law, but really there's private law civil law tort law and crime Right, so they're all treated differently And of course in the modern conception crime is considered a tort is when someone commits an offense against someone else and in libertarian terms That's basically trespass that which means using their property or their resource without their permission, right? So that's an offensive touching like a battery Salton battery Using their land or stealing their car. Those are all types of torts But they're also some of those are considered crimes and in our current system the status system We have the the victim is the state which is why when you have a crime It's the state versus OJ Simpson, right? Which is why Ron Goldman's family could sue OJ Simpson separately in a civil trial So there's different standards of proof There's like preponderance of the evidence for a civil trial that is to prove that someone harms you and owes you damages So you have to prove that more likely than not But if you convict someone of a crime, which is against the state, you have to prove by Beyond a reasonable doubt. So the different standards and People have sought to collapse law into one thing sort of like mathematicians and scientists I mean scientists physicists see search search for the Grand Unified Theory like to unify quantum theory and and Relativity So we seek to simplify and and unify these things and Rothbard's idea is that really it's all tort And of course the state shouldn't even exist and shouldn't be the plaintiff or the prosecutor in a criminal action The the victim should be the one that is able to seek restitution So when we think of torts where I guess we think of a civil wrong other than a breach of contract For which the law provides some kind of remedy and that's become An entire field of law and of course there's personal injury Which is a huge source of income for a lot of lawyers How radical do you think this was I mean in 1982 when this book comes out if we say that For example as Rothbard says, you know, all property is really private There's no the distinction isn't public versus private property The distinction is whether there's public or private actors controlling it and that at the end of the day control is the Is the most important right in the bundle of sticks that makes a property. So I mean Do you buy this this idea that the you know private versus public's not the distinction Well, yeah, and I think it was really radical at the time. I think that a Lot of things we read now that seem tame because we're so used to it, right? I remember reading something like by Lou Rockwell had written something in in the I think it was in the Hoppe festrift from just 11 or 12 years ago and he mentioned once one splash Hans Hoppe made about Maybe 10 15 years before that was when he was critiquing the US Constitution and the and the how it was a centralization It wasn't really the Constitution is not about protecting rights and he said something like you could hear a pin drop in the audience So like everyone was stunned by that Like that was a little boldly radical to say before an American audience even libertarians to criticize the Constitution and the The alleged minimal state nature of the original founding, which is all nonsense But now that seems like oh, yeah, we take that for granted or at least it's not it doesn't shock people to say that now So I think a lot of this stuff was more pioneering than we give it credit for because it seems so not tame But seems obvious to us now. I do think it was radical in part because even for libertarians to hear that it was radical because the the common view is that the common law is the thing and Also legislation is the primary source of law that Can supersede the the private common law and even libertarians seem to have this view Most objectivists are not against legislation as a form of law because they're not against the state and therefore they're not against legislatures and even democracy as a way of making law and Certainly, they're not against common law most libertarians weren't against the common law But the common law always was a vehicle of the state So you have to keep an eye on what it develops like what it develops has tended to be Private law that's more or less along the lines that's compatible with our libertarian principles, which we sort of intuitively or rationally deduce But not always and so we can always criticize a development even of the common law If it is incompatible with libertarian principles like blackmail law or even aspects of trademark law, you know I'm I'm stuck when I'm reading this. I mean here Rothbard is trying to develop basically theory of the rights of property and If you're successful in that you could as you say theoretically collapse civil law positive law common law tort contract Criminal law into one theory and and I know that for example There were critiques of this book at the time that he had just bitten off more than he could chew And that he was sort of breezing over some of this stuff and that it this would require a much more comprehensive philosophical system or approach to You know to breach and he's making some leaps here. I do you carry that away when you read this book Um, yeah a few but I think that is not at all a criticism of him He was very bold and no one else was doing it and no one else has done it since He was not a lawyer, but he was amazingly good at legal theory given given that he wasn't an attorney And all kinds of other fields. He made so many advances which are incredible. I don't know if we'll get to the contract stuff, but on contract theory he Combined with Williamson Evers, right? Not neither of whom are legal specialists. They came up with this radical new contract theory, which I think is one of his most profound achievements and it has a couple of gaps and things you can correct which I've tried to do in my articles, but That's only because there weren't they weren't legal specialists, but given what they knew history and economics and political theory What they did was was just amazing. So the you know, the few rough edges and of course, it's not comprehensive But it's it's pretty it's pretty damn good It's just chock full of insights and Yeah, we can quibble about a few things Like on the on the collapsing into one theory of law, but this is my own view which is I think is rooted in Rothbardian insights. I Sometimes think everything should collapse into one, but that it's really criminal law, but it might just be semantics or a way of looking at it So in a sense all libertarian rules, it's not libertarianism really isn't about liberty Liberty is a consequence of following our principles, but our principles are property rights principles, right? and our principles are Basically how we allocate property rights, but all a property right means is you identify the owner of a resource so that you know Who can say no to the use of that resource and if someone uses that resource without the permission of the owner That's a type of trespass now. You can call that a tort, but in essence, it's a crime or a tort It's basically a type of use of someone's resource without their permission And because all rights are considered to be enforceable and the purpose of all property rights is to stop conflict Which is physical violent clashing of people in a sense. It's all really about Criminal law or tort law in the sense of brute force. So even family law contract enforcement property rights That really all boils down to either tort or criminal law because it's about how you enforce these rights and how you stop people from Invading the borders of these things with physical force Yeah, and I think to back up your position here He uses the word just and justice quite a bit throughout this book certainly throughout this section So he's thinking of it in that in the sense that we often think of justice as a criminal law Consideration and you know, it's interesting to me that he does take a few shots at Utilitarians, you know the idea that we're talking about let's say disputed land titles Which has been very much in the news lately with Israel and Palestine And my my immediate sense was that writing this in the mid 70s Maybe Mises his death almost gave him a little bit of freedom You know to say something that that he believed but to say it in a in a freer manner Then if Mises we're still alive as his great mentor I mean because the you know, it's I I gotta think he's talking about Mises and especially haslet when he brings up utilitarianism as a as a you know a way to assess Property rights without reflection on justice itself Yeah, I think so My thoughts on this are that you know, of course, there's a utilitarianism has different meanings, right? And subjectivism as well like the Randians use subjectivism to mean type of relativity or more relativism But in Austrian economics, we mean it just to mean the nature of value that it's a subjective thing It's the demonstrated preference of the actor and the same thing with with With with utilitarianism If you mean it that we should favor policies that have good consequences, that's fine because The the purpose of justice in the law is also pragmatic in the sense that it solves the problem The problem of conflict and the goal of it is to let us lead lives of cooperation and peace and prosperity together But we have a principled approach to achieve that so I have never thought that a Deontological or a principled approach is incompatible with a consequentials approach I think Randy Barnett in the introduction to his structure of liberty makes this point that utilitarianism can be thought of as a subset of Of consequentialism so controversialism itself is not necessarily incompatible with our principled way of thinking but utilitarianism in the sense of being able to add up People's values and subtract them and come up with a net benefit Which I don't think Mises meant I don't think Mises believe that because Mises had this the subjective View of value, but I think his utilitarianism was more just a pragmatic consequentialist type of thing like we favor private property rights Because that leads to greater prosperity Well, let's get into this discussion and it's a lengthy one from Rothbard about these four scenarios for property titles so first of all he says basically using Lockean homesteading principles we can come up with An understanding of how property is justly acquired namely by transforming it or mixing it with your labor or by exchange some sort of voluntary Contractor payment or by gift so once we understand that he lays out these four scenarios for property titles and You know, I'd love for people in interested in the Israel Palestine Gaza conflict right now to to read these four scenarios And consider them because there might be factual disagreements about it, but I think he does lay out You know an approach to dealing with land disputes nothing short of that Hold on just like Jeff Sorry about that Well before we go there I wanted to mention one other thing about this property I do have a blog post about this which is interesting It's Rothbard on the original sin of land titles 1969 versus 74 And it sort of ties in with this what you're saying how he was liberated and writing something because it's 69 He had his more leftist Kind of spin on this thing and he he was talking about like how you could homestead the property of universities because You know, they're part of the state and all this kind of stuff Like you know does that sound like Yeah, exactly But in 74 he added a paragraph and I've got this in there He added a paragraph to the reprint of that which was in a later book And he basically clarified that like if there's an original sin In the in the in the origin of your property title It doesn't mean someone else can take it because all it really matters is if you're not the person who stole it Right, so you have clean hands Really, it's it's whether you have a better claim than someone else who wants to take it from you And so I think that that that addresses this criticism you hear from a lot of anti-lockeans and anti-libertarians who criticize our Lockean view of homesteading because they say well You claim that we own property by owning homesteading it in the state of nature, but The whole world is full of history of conquest and no property has a clean title So therefore so really what they want is they want to take it for themselves, right? So they want to say that your title is no good so we can take it for the state or for a Georgia's tax or something like that But Rothbard's point and one that I've elaborated on which I agree with is is look property titles are about relative title in a sense It's always about Contestants to the title who has a better title to it Yeah, and in principle if you can trace your title back to Adam or the first guy that used it You have better title But if you can't what the law has always done and this is a clever Solution is you just trace it back to a common ancestor and title So if some some man we if two people can test a piece of land And they both claim that they're the owner and they can trace their own title back to some guy from 300 years ago Who they don't dispute owned it even if he got it illegally or his title is you know, they're both claiming Title based upon his title. So then you just see well who did who did the original owner transfer it to and who has the best chain from then So that's a way to solve that and you still have libertarian property rights So that was an interesting thing how Rothbard clearly added that paragraph. I think to Not sound so much like he wants quasi-provid, you know or property that's being used privately for peaceful purposes to be fair game for anyone to just come take it to be upended Exactly Now I think he would still argue and I would too that government property And you know in a sense like is owned by the people like they're the true owners of it So, you know like I had I had a democrat friend the other day asked me well, you condemn the january 6th the taxable capital, right? and i'm like well Not a trumpeter and all that stuff, but let me ask you this whose rights did they violate? You know and he said well, they violated the government's rights because they owned the property I said no, they don't we own that property. So, you know, I'm not saying they were really liberating it But I don't think that they violated anyone's property rights in a natural sense by storming the capital Now So yes, Rothbard starts out with the locking idea of original appropriation or homesteading, right? And that is that and Rothbard makes this great He has so many insights that I like I'm reading this stuff myself and I've been in this for 30 years And I I keep refining my own views and coming Coming up with even simpler explanations for things that seemed simple a long time ago and now i'm restating them And I see oh, Rothbard saw that all along, you know Like his point that we live in the world And we need to control our bodies or our person as he calls it But we also need to grapple with and control material resources, right? And because of this need and hon hon's hoppa emphasizes this too in his development of his property theory Because we need to use these things Any human ethic like any any political ethic has to permit the first use of resources And if we're going to have property in things Not just the right to possess not just the ability to possess and use them Then people have to Then a then a property right has to Be superior to someone who comes later and takes it from you later So if you combine that together, it's almost like the Mises regression theory of money You can see that the owner of a resource has to be the first one who used it because If the first one he so the first person has to have the right to use it And if he's not secure in his ownership We don't have property rights and if a late someone coming later can just take it Then we don't have property. We just have a war of all against all So these things just naturally imply that the first owner has to have a better title And the only exception to that is if he transfers it to someone by contract Right, so you really have three principles of all libertarianism which come out of Rothbard You have self ownership which really means you own your body the scarce resource of your person or your body And then that person as an actor in the world is the owner of things that he Starts using that were unowned or that he gets by contract from someone else In a sense those three theory those three principles are the basis of all libertarian theory Well, I guess the question is then especially for disputed land titles Rothbard says well, there's no such thing in libertarian law as a statute of limitations We're interested in justice not efficiency. So talk about that Yeah, so statute limitations Technically of course couldn't exist in libertarianism because it's a statute and that is something that a legislature Enacts and that requires a state I do think that the principle of statute limitations would emerge in any developed set of private law just because Maybe not going forward, but for the past because As a practical matter records and testimony and witnesses are get lost over time So the older a dispute is the harder it will be for someone to prove Their claim that the current possessor of a resource is not the owner and that they should be given that resource So basically the law would have a system which the the current private law does which is that the possessor of Of a resource is presumed to be the owner right and that's known in the common expression Possession is nine tenths of the law Which is compatible with the very purpose of property rights, which is to stop conflict And so if you stop conflict you have to presume that the the possessor of something is the rival possessor and it's there for the owner So if you physically oust someone you're acting like with self-help like a vigilante Even if you're the owner you should go through the right processes So that people know that what you're doing is reliable and you're not being Biased in your case and all kind of things like that So the point is you would have the possessor would be presumed to be the owner And if someone wants to oust you they have to prove that by some kind of standard preponderance of the evidence at least that they have a better claim to it So the point is you know if someone kicks you out of your house Then you should easily be able to prove that they did that and kick them out and get damages from them for the trespass So you would win easily But if you claim that someone is on this farm And they've had it in their family for seven generations But that their great great great great grandfather stole it from my great great great great grandfather I believe that if you can prove that you should be able to win So I do believe that so there should be no technical limit on justice Uh here where I would agree with I think walter block agrees with this I think ha haba would agree and I think rock barb would agree Uh, I do know some libertarians who balk at that idea. They think there should be like a final Like they think they're terrified of the idea of the indians getting back to manhattan, you know something like that I'm not or I think that if you can prove that you own something you should get it back no matter what No, there are some exceptions. I shouldn't say no matter what if you're partly responsible So, you know in the law and your lawyer, you know this in the law Um, there's a thing where you know, if if someone forges a check It's not your responsibility because the bank shouldn't have let the funds be withdrawn However, if you leave the check out signed on your on your drawer when a work minutes at your house You're kind of negligent. It's partly your fault. It could be a different story So likewise if you're negligent and you allow like your watch to be stolen easily and then it's passed along and Ten generations later some good faith possessor has to watch You know, maybe it was partly your fault that this guy bought the watch in good faith and lost his money to buy it So maybe you're more to blame than the innocent buyer is so you could have cases like that But by and large, I think there should be no statute of limitations It's just that it's harder to prove it after so much time has passed Now I do think that going forward this may change because records are so good now, right? They're electronic or digital They're going to be locked in the blockchain all the bitcoin nuts say So we will be able to prove things and a lot of these claims have been told or suspended because of state action So for example, when you have a communist or a socialist Taking of property In a revolution, we all know whose property it was and it might take 70 years before the empire collapses But you know, I think these cubans that were expropriated Russians east germans Why not let them have their house back or their family farm or the factory that was taken from them Even if it's been a hundred years So here's the argument even if the temporal element, you know, there's a lot of a lot of centuries between the indians and the current owners of high rises in Manhattan So even if justice would would ignore any temporal element if you could in fact go back and prove ownership the Talk about how Rothbard deals with the idea of a bona fide purchaser In other words, a lot of people have come along since the indians and they've paid fair and square for their condo in Manhattan And they may be the current owner. So it they're different Uh, there's that's a different scenario than if the heir or the descendant of the outright thief Is the current occupant and owner I actually I can't remember offhand how Rothbard deals with the bona fide purchaser doctrine My suspicion is he rejects it, but I can't remember you can remind me Well, I mean, you know, he lays out the four scenarios and one of them is if you have you know, you have an unjust title In other words that can be proven But you can't miss it But the the current owner was not involved in the injustice So the question becomes whether they would be deserving of any compensation And I think what Rothbard basically says that if you can determine the rifle air Then yes, they're ousted and the air gets gets in immediately So there's you know, nobody is saying that all of this is without friction Right. I mean, we're not talking about a utopian system. We're talking about justice. And again, um, that comes with the price sometimes And the law speaking of unifying the law, of course in the common law, uh, there there has been two types of law There's there's the courts the normal courts of law that we're used to but then there's the courts of equity Right and lots of lots of the legal of the latin terms like I think kb is corpus and things like that You know, those are those are originally based in claims that lie in equity We call it right, which means fairness. Um, and I think there's been efforts to To unify or collapse these things or maybe we only have the latter We only have regular law now and equities supplements and now something like that Um, but there's been a lot of developments in the private law. I'm mostly familiar in this regard with the civil law because I'm from Louisiana And I think the common law has mirror doctrines, but there's all kinds of clever solutions that have been, um Developed which I think are roughly libertarian. So for example, if you're um, so number one, you do distinguish between a Bonafide or good faith purchaser and someone who is sort of incohoots or knowingly by something that's stolen There is there should be a difference there and that difference comes into play sometimes Let's let's say let's say you have a piece of land And you're you're you don't have a good title. There's a cloud on the title But you're not aware of it or you took a risk or something like that, but you're not You know, you're not directly a wrongdoer Um, and you build an improvement on that property and then later the original owner gets it back Well, as long as you're a good faith purchaser or a bonafide purchaser, I think there are some doctrines that that allow um, the The the guy that was using it for for some period of years to get compensated for the value of the improvement He put on there because the the original owner is getting his land back But now it's improved with a nice building on it. It's worth something Which seems fair, right? And that actually goes to the another equitable doctrine called unjust enrichment, right? Like if you accidentally Which I don't know if I completely agree with in all cases But the classic example is, you know You show up to paint someone's house, but you accidentally go to the neighbor's house and you start painting it um And you paint so you give this guy A fresh paint job and now let's assume it makes the house nicer and you don't you don't ruin it with Orange or something like that or what's Auburn's colors? Whatever they are More ego, man So You know, so under unjust enrichment then this homeowner comes home and he gets a bill from the painter and he says I have a defense to the contract claim because I didn't sign the contract and he's correct. He has a defense However, then the painter could sue inequity saying well You still owe me something because I made your property better You're you're you're enriched unjustly if you don't pay me something for to compensate me at least for my cost And so that doesn't seem the most unfair horrible thing in the world I'm not sure I agree with it in that case, but you can see the thrust of it Makes some kind of sense and I do think Rothbard would give some credence to that Um, but like you say, I think that ultimately he would say that if you can prove you're the owner Um, then you should get it back Whether or not some compensation is owed for the upkeep that was you know done by the by the uh by the possessor in the interim Is a kind of a detail I also believe and I can't remember if Rothbard goes into this, but I think there would be a huge market for property title insurance In a totally free market, which we have already right if you get a mortgage on your on a house you're buying The lender who loans you the funds Insists that you get a property title policy and the reason for that is you know In case the property you're buying turns out not to be owned by the seller And they lose their collateral then they get insured they get paid back by an insurer, right? Um, so the insurance company makes sure that a property title Attorney does a search and and gives an opinion saying, you know, we're 99.9 percent sure that this property is owned So that incentive system would be there and that would tend to clean up problems and give you if there's a cloud like I used to do this I started before I switched to the dark side and did patent law I was a boiling gas attorney for a couple of years And we did property title searches and so you would you do this, you know You you search for all the records filed in the county or parish records And you do a title report and then you examine it and if you come up with some Anomalies you sometimes have to cure them or you take the risk You know like uh, this guy died without a will or we can't no one found the will and it was probated in 1932 in arkansas and uh, you know You might have an adopted child that was lost or you know all kinds of things like that and um, And a lot of times in those opinions you do rely upon the statute of limitations in making your opinion and you also Is convenient for lawyers in today's world what you do is you you don't you don't have to go back to adam You only have to go back to the founding of the state because the state is the sovereign And they're considered to be in the law the fountain of all property rights So you only have to go back to when texas was incorporated or when louisiana became a state or something like that In in a private law setting you wouldn't have that convenience probably but still I think you would have property title insurance for things that were valuable And that would cause the property title records to be um, um Maintained and and by the way Property title records are good But there I have another blog post which is interesting like you've heard of the domesday book probably right from england and the Oh god around 900 or a thousand a d Um And it was but the whole purpose of this was you know It was a big survey done by the by the by the government in england to measure all the property Everyone says it's a great achievement, but of course the purpose of it was for collecting taxes So people could not pay property taxes on their on their land Well, this I think all of this leads us to our the subject Which rothbard addresses in subsequent chapter, which is proportionality, right? That's the ultimate detail when there's an injury to person or property what ought to be The compensation in a roth barding or a libertarian legal theory. So let's let's get into that I mean first and foremost the shift to retribution, which is sort of restitution plus It is just so refreshing because we have this crazy world of criminal law today where we're just warehousing people in prisons at a cost of 20 30 40 50 grand a year to taxpayers They come out worse and the whole thing is just crazy and not working correct Yeah, there's um And this is another reason why i'm not so sure that the right thing to collapse law into is is is um is tort instead of instead of Criminal law because the whole idea of proportional punishment is really a criminal law idea, right? It's about how much force you can use when you're defending yourself physically from an attack Or when you're attempting to inflict punishment After the fact in turn, which is called called retribution. There's different theories of punishment in the in the in the literature Like why do we punish people and one is the dessert theory like a retribution like they deserve it another would be Rehabilitation like we put people in jail to real to rehabilitate them. Of course that doesn't work that makes them worse Another is incapacitation, which I think is not it's probably the best of the theories In other words, when you're locked away or when you're executed, you just can't commit crimes anymore And ultimately I do think that should be my personal view is that while there is a right to retaliate with force um, especially in defense but even after the fact and that is the theoretical grounding of all rights um I do think that in in a civilized world institutionalized punishment would be very rare and incarceration would be very rare Because it's just so expensive and it's risky And I do think the burden of proof should be high for that and it would be hard to solve And if you accidentally punish an innocent person Then you're committing a crime yourself or at least a lot of damages So you'd have to get insurance that would be expensive and you're all you've already been victimized By the crime. Why would you want to pay twice for a risky? liability So I think that Restitution would tend to be the primary mode of implementing our rights combined with In a few rare cases combined with lethal self-defense, which everyone would would accept ostracism or Or just expelling someone from the community or or vigilante justice just killing someone if they have to be killed And everyone just sort of lets it go Or an occasional execution of someone that's just so heinous that There's nothing else you can do with them. But other than that, I think people would you would allow them to integrate back into society by making making amends admitting they were wrong Proving that they'd rehabilitated offering restitution to the victim or rectification It seems to me that would be a more humane and civilized Way of doing things and if the state got out of the way of criminal law, I think that would be It would be easier to achieve that and I do think that's largely compatible with Rothbard's view now What Rothbard tries to do and I believe here with his when he comes up with punishment in a civil sense for a tort He's modeling it based upon the criminal law idea of proportionality And he uses this two teeth for a tooth idea, which I believe Walter block Formulated and Walter and Rothbard drew upon that from Walter's defending the undefendable And I think the thrust of that is correct because the idea is that If someone is harming you you only have the right to do to them what they're doing to you So there's a certain symmetry or reciprocity in the libertarian non-aggression principle, right? So if someone's trying to murder you you can kill them back in self-defense But if someone is doing very something minor and mild to you You don't have the right to just blow their head off of the shotgun because that would be Disproportionate and they don't deserve that much punishment or that much retaliation So there's a proportional aspect to that and so that translates over to the civil law side of it when you're getting damages for something Someone did to you So the idea was that like if someone steals your television well, you know Or your tooth because it's based upon the lex talionis or the biblical idea of An eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth, right? So Walter says no, it's not a tooth for a tooth It's tooth teeth for a tooth because if someone takes your tooth what they did to you was take your tooth without your permission But you still own that tooth and if you get that tooth back You're not doing anything wrong to the to the to the thief. You're just getting your property back But he's still gotten away with taking your tooth without your permission So now you can take his tooth without his permission so that now you're even So you have tooth teeth now you have your original tooth back and you have his tooth And I think the thrust of that is correct However, I think it's too mechanical too mechanistic. Um, I don't think it's that rigid. It's not like two for one I mean that would follow foul of the of the critical criticism of subjective value that brothvard and walter Would have to agree with as austrians Well, when exactly but when you say we got to figure out what somebody deserves this punishment It shouldn't be mechanical like that. Isn't that an argument for common law juries? In other words, we have sort of local or temporal standards stealing a guy's horse in 1800 might be different than stealing his horse in 2020 Absolutely, but but that's also because um, um for two reasons, uh Stealing someone's horse in the 1820s is a different crime than stealing it now because the consequences are different. Um Uh by result in death in the 1820s Um The beauty of the common law and the original roman law, by the way, they're they're both customary decentralized case-based systems where law was developed by a justice finder like a judge or a jurist consult um Sometimes augmented with a jury Trying to decide what the best or most fair or just result was in a dispute a real dispute and the benefit of that was They can't sit there like a legislature and just announce laws They they only sit there and wait for people to come to them with the dispute and then they have before them two real parties each advancing their case, which is the benefit of the adversary system of the common law and represented by legal counsel and formulating their best argument drawing upon established principles of justice and established legal principles that have been developed previously And trying to get the judge to see that they should win some result and That means that the the court has available They can ask questions Because there's a real context. So that means that law always develops in a context Um, this is one problem I have with armchair scenarios people say, okay If you're starving the desert and someone has a bottle of water, can you take it from them? I mean no context is given. I think the question is unanswerable But if that was a real-world Case in a common law court, there would be two real human beings that were in the context for a certain reason And you could ask questions. Well, how did you get there? What agreement did you have? What did you do to each other ahead of time? Um, you know, what led you to this situation? Why wasn't there another alternative? But you can't ask those questions of someone coming up with a stupid hypothetical That's why I'm very leery of answering Hypotheticals are even trying to be too bold With deducing the whole body of law randy barnett again in the in the instructor of liberty makes a good point where he distinguishes between I think he calls it legal precepts and abstract legal principles We can only go so far with our armchair theorizing in our deducing So I think we can go some some distance We can come up with the basic principles like I mentioned before about self ownership and Locky and homesteading and contract But the details will always have to be filled out by custom and interaction and some some some degree of negotiating and bargaining because this whole endeavor of law um, the idea of law and ownership is that That you have a right To your possession respected and recognized widely by your neighbors in society it's almost like the idea of money is Some medium of exchange that's generally used like the more and more generally is used the more it becomes like money For law to become law and for rights to be rights They have to be respected by the bulk of society and your neighbors Which means you do rely upon people's mutual agreement with each other um To recognize and respect their rights So you're gonna have to appeal I mean look you don't want to sue someone every five days for a five dollar thing because you're gonna Annoy your neighbors that they have to be being called to the jury You know you might have the right to get that five dollars, but you don't have the right to have your neighbors help you get it So they're gonna help you to a certain extent if it's serious enough, right? This is why I think there is some core of truth to Aspects of mutualism. I think mutualism goes off the rails But there's some there's something about the mutual the mutual aspect that we have to mutually Respect each other's rights and we have to have a give and take So we have to be reasonable and be willing to compromise sometimes because If two neighbors have property that abuts each other There is no infinitely precise answer to where the fence should be put like you can't go down to the millimeter There's going to be some wiggle room there because life is real So to live in harmony with each other We have to agree to let it go at a certain amount of slippage, you know an inch or a foot something like that And if people stand on the right to say no, I want it measured down to the nanometer Everyone's just going to ignore this complaint because it's a waste of time Well the beauty of this Rothbardian conception of a private law justice system In the form of restitution to an actual victim rather than supposedly paying your debt to society or the state when you commit a crime Is that I think it allows a greater degree of mercy In other words Rothbard says hey look the the punishment that Walter blocker I come up with is a maximum But the victim is all always free to impose less than that Let's say you had a family member murdered And you find out that their murderer had a really rough childhood and this and that you're you're allowed to impose mercy On that the person in a private society in a way that's something like the three strikes law in california Which has put a lot of people in a prison for a long time for a third nonviolent offense doesn't give you that flexibility yeah in in society now people have this flawed notion that that if you're the victim of a crime and the state is considering prosecuting the the criminal You you as the victim can decide whether or not the state will prosecute because you'll hear this expression. Well, I'm not pressing charges as as if as yeah like but In probably as a practical matter if the victim is not going to cooperate with the prosecutor The prosecutor might drop the case because it's going to be more difficult to prove his case But the victim doesn't have the right to force the state to let the guy go or to forgive the guy But if it was a purely private thing he could forgive the person and that would benefit because that would be to the benefit of a more flexible justice system because As I've written in my punishment theory which is based rooted heavily in Rothbard's ideas So the victim ought to have as much flexibility as possible because victims are so different in how they respond to the crime We have to recognize that when a crime is done the reason we oppose crime is because it can't be undone It's an offense that's forever immutable and undone So pure restitution is impossible except in a very very simple case, you know, someone takes my My car and I recover it five minutes later. Okay, maybe the offense But even then, you know being deprived for five minutes can't be undone So all you can do is pay monetary damages, but because value is not measured in money Money never makes you whole So restitution is always an imperfect remedy Um, it's just the attempt of justice to let the victim do what they're entitled to do That's all you can do in the aftermath of a crime or a tort or trespass Um, but if you give the victim maximum flexibility Because value is subjective then you maximize the restitution done to them because they're satisfied They're subjectively satisfied more. So if a victim wants to physically harm the The aggressor to get to get vengeance or retribution And if they want to take the risk that they're punishing the wrong person and pay a heavier Um insurance bond and all that kind of stuff Then let them do it if they can find an agency that will take the risk on and do it But most people would prefer to have an apology And have the person explain why they did it and pay some kind of restitution Even if it won't be the full amount or even if it is the full amount and get their lives back together and one way To use this right to punish Is like you said, you don't have to punish the person to the maximum But if it's legally established because of a developed body of law that Because of this type of crime the victim would have the right to punish someone up to this amount You could use that in a negotiation with the criminal To bargain with them you can say listen, I have the right to inflict this much torture or punishment on you But I will relinquish some or all of that if you will pay me this much money right so If you just throw it to the jury and say Give an award of monetary damages for this crime. It's kind of arbitrary. It is a judgment call But if you if you conceive of it as a bargain where the victim has the right to inflict this much harm Then the jury can be asked well How much would this guy be willing to pay to avoid, you know, having his arm chopped off for something like that And then you could also take into account how much money the victim the the aggressor has So that would solve this billionaire or millionaire problem where people say well If you establish that it's only three million dollars to kill someone then bill gates can go kill people all the time not that he would ever do that right, but but But that wouldn't be the case because if bill gates a multi-billionaire murdered someone Then the victim would have the victim's family would have the right to kill him and because he's worth 200 billion dollars, he might be willing to pay not 199 billion dollars to avoid being killed Right. So the incentive effect would be exactly the same no matter how much money you have So I think this flexibility would lead to all kinds of more tailored results to the to the nature of the case And it would allow the the original goals of punishment, which is again incapacitation rehabilitation deterrence Justice they would all be able to be fulfilled in a better way If the state got out of the criminal law side of things Well, I think that's a beautiful segue into our topic of contracts. So Just like Rothbard roots his concept of criminality and proportionality In property. He does the same thing with the title transfer theory of contracts Which is something you mentioned earlier. He developed along with bill evers who is still at at Hoover. I believe still it out at stanford Still alive and kicking So for people who are familiar give us the quick and dirty on the title transfer theory of contracts And then you and I can discuss how radically that departs from the nonsense we learned in law school Yeah, and and I have a On my on my website I have a a post about and I have an interview with evers because I tried to track this guy down for a long time Because I was fascinated by this contract theory I pestered the guy for about seven years with various emails and he finally answered agreed to an interview The thing is I sent him my own contract article as a way to Make him see that he I was serious and he I wanted him to talk to me But I wanted to talk to him about his article and the genesis of his ideas All he wanted to do was go over my article because he thought that was the purpose of it. So I I only He kept saying yeah, well your article's like no, I wanted to talk about yours But he confirmed what I had started to guess which was that I had thought that Rothbard in 82 in his ethics of liberty um In his contract theory chapter Which draws upon evers's 1977 jls article. So I think in the very first issue of the jls Journal of libertarian studies evers had this path breaking article towards a reformulation of contract law So I thought that Rothbard was building upon evers theory But what I discovered was in 74 Rothbard had written a brief passage which kind of Was the precursor to all this so I think what happened was and evers didn't disagree with me on this Rothbard basically came up with this as he thought about property theory And he probably was discussing with evers and evers developed it and then Rothbard Built upon evers development of Rothbard's idea. So it was really a combination of evers and Rothbard and the idea is that um It's a natural the contract is just a natural consequence of property theory So we own our bodies because we have a natural right to our body And then we own resources in the world scarce resources that we homestead according to lock in Theory, but being the owner of a resource What does it mean to be an owner? It means that you have the right To exclude people from using it. In other words, if other people want to use that resource, they need your permission That's what being an owner means. So being an owner means the right to grant or to deny permission to people to use this Now this permission can be Simple or complex. It can be future oriented or present. It can be complete or partial Right, you could have a lease of something for a day At least a car for a day You could invite someone into your home for a day You can let someone have sex with your body for an hour, you know, or or you can alienate the title completely Which would be a permanent consent for someone to use it, which is what contract is So contract is just the way that owners Express their consent for people to use their resource and what they say What the terms of that consent are whether it's permanent or temporary Whether it's conditional or unconditional things like that. So what Rothbard did was he re-characterized Contract as just the ascent by the owner to transfer the title Of a thing that he owns to someone else And this is of course different than the legal the modern legal conception of what contracts are So if you go to law school and you take contracts one, you'll learn a lot about offer and acceptance and consideration In other words, they'll talk endlessly about the elements to a contract and then you'll learn a lot about remedies Like people think well, you ought to if somebody breaches a contract The non-breaching party ought to get the benefit of the bargain They ought to get what they thought they were going to get or at least monetary damages Approximating that and and Rothbard says no no no Correct, um, although most of those doctrines would have an analog in his theory They would just have a different basis and and it would lead to some different conclusions about some things like inalienability and debtor's prison things like that Which Rothbard slightly mangles But um, yeah, so the standard legal doctrine is that look if you Why can we have contracts in international law? By the way, it's called pac the suit savanda this latin term which means packs or agreements are to be respected Why do we have Why do we have agreements or contracts that are legally enforceable? Um, and and the idea is that if you make a promise to someone this is the legal idea If you make a promise to someone And that person relies upon your promise Like they assume you're going to do what you promise you're going to do and they change their position Like it's called detrimental reliance. They change their position to their detriment so that if you don't Perform the promise you promise they're going to be worse off So you're made this person worse off if you don't perform So then you're compelled to perform or if you don't perform you have to pay some kind of monetary damages For so-called breach of contract. So promises are thought to give rise to binding obligations in the law And if you brief that obligation, you've violated the rights of the person that is the obligee Right the obligor and the obligee And therefore you've reached the contract And you owe some kind of damages for that breach. So that's the classical way we think of it But there's many problems with that so Rothbard points out Well, if you make a promise to someone you're just saying words and that's not really aggression against them And so And also Randy Barnett points this out Randy Barnett's also made pathbreaking work in contract theory a little bit along different lines in Rothbard But somewhat complimentary He calls it a consent theory of contract but Randy points out that This traditional idea of why contracts should be binding Is problematic because it's circular reasoning because if you say that Someone someone is harmed if they if they reasonably relied to their detriment upon a promise Well, the reliance is reasonable only if there's a law that says that promises are binding if promises were not binding Then you wouldn't be reasonable and relying on it or put it this way If someone makes a promise and you know that promises are not binding like people could just lie and say You can view a promise is just a prediction of what you're going to do. Like I promise I will paint your house tomorrow That's really just a prediction of what I'm going to do tomorrow. But because I have a free will I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow. Maybe I won't choose to do it tomorrow So if you know that and you rely on it anyway, you're taking that risk So why should it be on me? Right? So it's circular reasoning to justify contracts being binding because the person reasonably relied upon it When the reliance is reasonable only if contracts are binding in the first place So I I think that's a circular problem the law. So Rothbard solves this by just saying listen It's not contracts shouldn't be viewed as binding promises That should just be viewed as the consent given by the owner of a resource to transfer the title to someone else It's very simple. It's elegant and it it clarifies so much about law And in a sense, I think this is a bigger legal contribution than even the collapsing law into one into into into tort law Well, even The modern version of contract law statutory contract law We understand that there are limits on what we're going to force people to do because they agreed to do it And Rothbard brings up this idea of a wedding Let's say a man and a woman agree to get married and the man goes out and rents a hall and spends a bunch of money on You know wedding cake and food and invites all these people and he's out these days I think he's out like 20 or 30 grand for a pretty simple wedding And then on the 11th hour the young lady says no, I've changed my mind. I don't want to marry you anymore I mean it very few people would suggest that specific performance forcing her to marry the guy Is is an agreeable remedy for this breach of an oral contract when she said I do like nobody would say that Right and from that Rothbard sort of extends it and says well How far down the the rabbit hole does that go and so he's against Specific performance in a way that Walter block is not it turns out correct. Watch this show last week Yeah, and I actually have my I think my first podcast on my on my stream was a Walter and I just debating Here in this room and right now in my house Debating inalienability and voluntary slavery contracts some libertarians take take this They take the They misunderstand this idea. I think of contracts um So the contract becomes the thing rather than the property Correct And that's why I'm surprised Walter makes the mistake because he he seems to adopt Rothbard's view But he's he's applying it like the like the so the mainstream legal doctrine has a has a difficulty why why wouldn't Um a service contract be enforceable by specific performance So why do they go to damages monetary damages only right? So they have to fix the flaws in their theory So theoretically if you have a binding obligation to do something so in the roman law and the civil law um All obligations contractual obligations are considered to be one of two types obligations to give which means Which is what Rothbard believes released. It's just the transfer of title Or an obligation to do which is a service or a performance contract but Which means that if you have an obligation to do something like marry someone or sing at their wedding or paint their house Or perform at their magic show I'm performing a magic show for them at a party or sing um Then if you don't if you're going to back out the court could physically dragoon you and force you into doing it, right? Why doesn't the court do that? Or put it this way if you fail to do it then you've committed some kind of crime You've failed to do something you were supposed to do and you committed a crime. Why shouldn't you be put in jail for that? um So the law worms its way out of that by coming up with this idea. Well It's impractical for the court to enforce this if you force the singer to sing She might do it. She might not do a good job. How's the court going to know whether she sung the right way? um That kind of thing so the court simply says well all we can do is give you monetary damages in almost every case um So really even the law although it claims that there are binding obligations to do things It never really treats it like that. It treats everything like it's an obligation to give So you could have reclassified An obligation to sing as an obligation to pay money if you don't sing, right? um And by the way under under conventional contract theory You do have this notion of breach of contract So you think of it as a binding promise or a binding obligation And if you don't do it you breach the contract and you have to owe you owe damages you owe monetary damages Under rock bar theory, I don't know if he explicitly says this but it's a natural consequence of it There's no such thing as a breach of contract It's impossible to breach contract because contracts are not obligations Contracts are simply transfers of title to property to resources that are owned And they happen according to the consent and the expressed consent of the owner um When they happen now if it's a future based In conditional transfer like let's say I tell you um if you If you pay me $10,000 I give you my car In a week I need the car for a week But then you can have it at the end of the week But if you pay me now the car is yours at the end of the week So someone pays me the money for the car I'm driving my car which is really now the car of the buyer, but I have the right to book I'm basically leasing it for 10 days at the end of the at the end of the week um The car really becomes owned by the buyer and if I refuse to turn the car over Now I'm just committing a type of theft or conversion or trespass because I So no no action of mine is needed to transfer title. It already happened when I previously made the contract But it's not a binding obligation, right? So it's not got nothing to do with that. So It also clarifies by the way so in terms of voluntary slavery um If you focus on The fact that a contract is the transfer of ownership to a resource that you own um Then the reason voluntary slavery contracts are unenforceable and I think Rothbard Is a little confusing on this. I used to think he he made a mistake Which I could fix but now I think he was basically right But he words it in a way that you have to read real carefully to see that he was actually right He just he explained it a little bit wrong. Um, what he says is that um If you owe someone money Like from a loan like you owe them 11 you borrow $1,000 now From from a lender and you owe them $1,100 in a year And if you don't repay the lender in a year, then you're you're he calls it implicit theft and I don't I think he came up with that I don't know what implicit theft is but So you're technically a thief if you don't repay the lender So theoretically debtor's prison is justified Now if you go that far then really walter would be right because that means that you could sell your body because this When you borrow money, you're effectively pledging your body is collateral, right? So you're selling your body Um, but Rothbard doesn't like that result. So he says that well That would be disproportionate punishment, which is sort of a cheat, right? But he also has this argument that your will is inalienable and therefore it's impossible to sell your body And I think that's technically incorrect. It is not impossible to sell your body um because if you commit a crime Then the victim is entitled to use force against this this criminal Even though the criminal still has a will and it's impossible for even the criminal to alienate its will and yet It's still justified to overwhelm his will and use force against him So the impossibility is not the reason why it's unjust to imprison a debtor It's rather what I what I think Rothbard was getting at is something that hawns later Articulated is the reason we own our bodies The reason you own your body is not homesteading The reason you own your body is because you have a better link to your body Because of your direct control of your body. So I think that's what Rothbard was getting at he glyphs even this early on So it's impossible to alienate your will just means that you are you the human actor your person your personality Your mind is the one controlling your body directly And that is impossible to alienate. That's why you have a unique ownership right over your body Which is why a contract to sell your body is not effective So when we imagine this Lockean origin of rights that Rothbard is based on You own your body because you are a natural owner of your body And that's because it's impossible to alienate your will which is another way of saying you directly control your body Which is what hoppa argues later um But as an actor moving around in the world as Rothbard says you not only have the need to control your body But to use material resources in the world that were unowned So you have to grapple with those he calls it and use them So you acquire them So the ownership of things that we acquire is a different character than the ownership of your body When you acquire something it was unowned and now you acquire it and you own it But because you acquired it you can de-acquire it that is you can abandon it Which is why with a contractual consent you can alienate title to something to someone else If you acquire something that was unowned by your act of will you can undo your act of will and give it to someone else So I own this this tree branch and now I give it to you I own this apple now I give it to you But you never acquired your body because there was never a separation of the actor in your body You can't be an actor that acquires things without having a body that's unified and integrated with your with your personhood All right So the ownership of your body is a thing that's a natural relationship between you and the thing that constitutes the physical aspect of yourself So that is why a contract to sell yourself is not enforceable because To have a contract for slavery be enforceable it would mean that the master has the right to use force against you Even though you you object But under libertarianism That's only permissible if someone's committed a crime But all he did was utter words saying I promise to be your slave and again Rothbard rejects the idea that promising means anything So saying I promise you your slave is not an act of aggression. So if I later change my mind I'm not violating the rights of the master So when he uses force against me to keep me from running away from his his jail or his plantation He's committing aggression against me I think stephen cancella is dancing awfully close to the concept of a soul right about now ladies and gentlemen Oh my goodness. We got to put we got to get a timestamp on this but look let let's Okay, the alienation of the will and slavery cut. Okay, very tough stuff very messy stuff But let's let's go back to your car example real quick because I want to drive this home for people You've got a car you agreed to sell it to someone For x dollars, but you need it for this last week. You're getting handed over to them when the week's up so At the end of the week if you fail to transfer the property your car to them as agreed Right, you've taken something from them In other words that's theft conversion fraud whatever you want to call it under literary laws We we don't need breaches of contract in this scenario correct, correct. It's pure property and tort there It's pure property and tort theory Well, I I want to wrap up on this idea of you know promises and expectations Which are very amorphous things, but somehow they undergird all of our current contract law from what I can tell Rothbard takes pains to point out he says look There's a moral element to all this and that is outside the bounds or the reaches of libertarian law You make a promise to someone and you renege on that promise that may well be an immoral act in your own personal ethical code But that's that's not the point here is that if we get into enforcing promises and expectations We are effectively enforcing morality and I think both rothbard and even mesas would agree You know whose morality by what god do we measure this very difficult stuff? Yeah, correct. Not only is it arguably immoral to break contracts, but it would hurt your reputation especially in the business world so the reputational effect of not living up to your contracts is far more damaging than A legal consequence of a breach of contract. I mean people are not going to trust you anymore, right? Or they're going to charge you they're going to charge your premium for your services or something like that Or or get a discount Because you're unreliable. So that's the natural consequence of all this And by the way back on the on the other example the the reason that I think debtor's prison Rothbard doesn't have to worm his way out of his debtor's prison Consequence by saying it's disproportionate punishment is because We have to imagine two scenarios I owe $1100 or let's say I owe the car. I owe the car to the buyer at the end of the week If I if I still am in possession of the car and now it's owned by the buyer If I refuse to turn it over i'm committing Some kind of offense, right? I'm committing a trespass But if the car was lost or destroyed And I refuse to turn it over then i'm not committing theft because there is no car to steal And the same thing with the with the debtor If you have the money and refuse to turn it over you're still committing a type of theft because On the day the money is due let's say I have a million dollars 1100 of my money Now becomes owned by the lender and if I don't turn it over i'm committing some kind of some kind of wrong But if i'm bankrupt and penniless there is no money to steal And I told I I I confronted walter about this. I said well you say it's implicit theft walter But if I don't have any money and I owe money to To a to a lender to a creditor What is stolen so he thought about he goes yeah, you're right. It's not the 1100 that's stolen. It's the original 1000 I said so now By some action that happens a year from now. It's retroactively making the original lending of the $1000 That money was lent to me and it was given to me in full ownership so that I could spend it That's the whole point of a loan is money is given to to a borrower so they can go spend it on a project So you're saying that I didn't have ownership of that that $1000 So now it was the original $1000 that it turns out was retroactively stolen But we couldn't determine whether it was stolen for a year Which violates a principle that hoppa and rothbard enunciate which is that Whatever property system we come up with has to always give an answer to who owns something now It can't be it can't wait upon a future condition because the whole purpose of a property system is to tell us Who the owner of a resource is so that we can avoid conflicts? It has to always be able to in principle answer the question who owns this thing now It can't say well, we'll know in a year right so And and not only that the $1000 is loaned to the borrower 100 without conditions It was done in exchange for a reciprocal title transfer But the way to conceive of a loan in rothbard's title transfer is that Alone look rothbard's theory would handle even gifts or donations. They're called one-way transfers I give you a thousand dollars now as a gift. That's a contract because it's a contractual title transfer It's not reciprocal because nothing is given in exchange Or I can give you a thousand dollars After you paint my fence. So that's a one-way title transfer of money Conditioned upon the performance of an action, right? Now we call that action a sale of services, but it's not literally a sale of services just an action that the The the the performer can do because he owns his body, right? But likewise, I could have to I could have I transfer a thousand dollars to you now That's unconditional so that you can use the money for your purposes And in exchange for that you're transferring to me 11 hundred dollars in the future But one it's a contemporaneous present transfer Which is risk-free and done the moment. It's done. It's contemporaneous The other is in the future and so it's necessarily risky because the future is uncertain This is me is right the future is always uncertain So both the lender and the creditor and the debtor both know that the 11 hundred dollars in the future Which is the object of that second title transfer is an uncertain thing Right, they both take that risk that's an uncertain thing If it does not exist at the moment that the future arrives Then there is no act of theft Now everyone thinks oh, that's unfair because then the debtor gets off He gets away with not paying the debt. Well, that's that's just ridiculous Lawyers are very sophisticated and we come up with complicated contracts. There will be augmented conditions conditional upon conditional upon conditional Of course any lender would say that okay, you owe me 11 hundred dollars on the due date And if you don't have it then you owe me That amount plus a crude interest going forward and as soon as you come into that money then you owe me that So they're not going to let the guy get away scot-free Right, or or they place a lien on the thing. He used the 11 hundred dollars to buy Correct, you could have collateral, but again, not all conscious. So this is another one little Quibble I have with Rothbard He imagines that you could have a pledge or a bond. He calls it Um, and by the way, this is a criticism. I have a lot of bitcoiners who have this What I think is ridiculous idea of smart contracts, which I think makes no sense whatsoever They seem to envision that all contracts are secured or that could be backed up by collateral But my guess is that 99.9 of all contracts that happen in the world today are unsecured Um, I mean the typical person that borrows money borrows money because he doesn't have the money So, you know, or someone who's going to be paid for a service like, you know, I pay I hire someone to To sing at a wedding and I'm going to pay them $3,000. This is their job. They're not sitting on a mound of money So they can't pledge or put $10,000 of damage payments in escrow ahead of time. They don't have it, you know So most contracts are unsecured. That is the The person extending something ahead of time is taking a risk of Of non-performance Which is why you might resort to insurance in some cases Or you might resort to a reputation agency to make sure this guy's a good risk, right? And in some cases you would ask for collateral And if someone buys a car from me, uh, and I loaned them money to do it or extend them credit I might take a security interest in their car or in their house But not all contracts can have collateral, but when there is collateral, of course, that can be the fallback option And you might even run a credit check Well, all that said, I think Stefan, I want to thank you for this tour to force. That was a great conversation We're going to go ahead and link To a couple of the blog posts which Stefan mentioned we're going to link to randy barnett's book We're going to link to how you can get the ethics of liberty at a discount from our site And we're going to keep on moving through some of the chapters in part two of this book next week with another guest So, uh, Stefan, I thank you for your time and ladies and gentlemen. Have a great weekend. Thanks, Jeff All right, great conversation Enjoyed it good stuff. You should be a uh, you should teach a uh