 Danny, are we ready to go? Yes. It's recording. Okay. Well, hello everybody. It's Monday the 26th, 2011. I say that for posterity, although maybe the 27th or so of you. Before we get going, if you have any questions about last week's discussion, if you want to type them in now, I'd be happy to address them now. If you have other questions, let's hold them to the end, if you don't mind. So I'll just go ahead and get going. We did have a few extra people sign up since the first lecture. So we have about 60 students now from about 10 countries. So it's a nice, diverse international group, mostly American, but some others. So let's just go on. We're going to jump into the next issue I had on my list. This is the last slide we were on. We were talking about PDA or DERA or private dispute resolution organization, their jurisdiction. And if you remember, we were just discussing the issue where a lot of theorists will say that one problem is that the PDA only has jurisdiction over people who've already signed a contract with some PDA that has an agreement with the other PDA that wants to assert their jurisdiction. And so the only remedy left would be ostracism. And in fact, I think even if that was the case, it still would probably work all right, because ostracism from society is a huge penalty. And no legal system is going to stop all crime and pose infinite punishment that will stop all crime. You just have to stop enough so that society can survive and prosper. And there's no reason to think that the punitive aspect of even an ostracized ostracism-based system would be any worse than what we have in today's inapplications and unjust penal system of state runs. So there's no reason I think you have more crime then than now. In fact, the society would be so much richer, you can expect to have a lot less crime for that reason alone. There's just less need for it. So further, if we ever had an anarchist libertarian society, that's a practical matter. The only way to get there would be if most people had already become libertarian in their outlook. So in other words, the overall quality of the human species would already have to have changed to even reach this point. So that's another reason you can expect there to be less criminal in society. Okay, so that's where we left off. And so I was getting to the point last time of emphasizing that the reason that a victim of crime, by which I mean aggression, an aggressive act, has the right to use force, let's say, offensively at least during the act of the crime, is because the aggressor can be seen as giving consent by his act of aggression, not because he's previously signed a contract with anyone, but because of his act of aggression. And so he could also assign an agent to defend him from criminals and give them the right to act on his behalf. Now I'll talk about this further down below. The way I look at it is that – and this is another issue that I think people get confused. They use restitution, retribution, and defense as sometimes related concepts. And sometimes they get confused or they have a difference of opinion with respect to me in Rothbard, for example, as to which one comes first. So we'll go over that later. I think the general concept is responsive force. That's force that's in response to initiation force. Jackson, ADA says implied consent is a legal fiction. In a way I think it is, but I think what we mean by that is that there are two ways to justify using force against someone else's body, by which we mean invading the borders of it or manipulating, changing the physical integrity of their body. One way would be to have actual consent. Like I gave the example of a girl inviting a kiss. So she's consenting to this action that manipulates and uses her body, which would otherwise be an act of aggression. So consent justifies it. Likewise, the aggression used by the aggressor justifies using force against him for a number of reasons. Libertarians may differ on why this is. I have my own reasons, but the point is believing that aggression is impermissible and that it may be responded to with force means that the act of aggression is a type of justification. It justifies the use of force against this guy. So it's a stand-in for consent or maybe you could say consent and aggression are two alternative ways of justifying use of force against him. So you could think of it as consent because it serves the same function. But whether it's really consent is more maybe a hair-splitting thing. I think actually it is a type of consent because when you act in an interaction with another person, your action has certain normative connotations. So you're laying down the normative rule that it's legitimate to use force against someone else's body when they do not consent. So if they're laying down that rule, then the recipient of that force, the victim, is entitled to act on that rule that the aggressor has laid down. I've got a lot of good quotes about this actually. If you look – let me find it on my website really quickly here. Okay, here's the link. If you go here, stephickinsola.com slash favorite slash quotes, then there's another subset on that page, quotes on the logic of liberty, which is right here. There's a lot of – I'm putting the link here. There's a lot of nice quotes from thinkers throughout history which they see the implicit logic of why it's permissible to use force against the aggressor because he lays down the rule. Jan – Jan – sorry, Jan, the lesson started seven minutes ago. The class started seven minutes ago. You're welcome. Okay, so that's how I look at that. If anyone has any disagreements or want to discuss that, feel free to pop up here. But I think that's not too controversial for libertarians who do accept that aggression is impermissible and prohibitable. If you're a pacifist libertarian, if that's still a libertarian and you think that you actually not only isn't a bad policy to use force violence defensively, but it's actually – you don't have the right to use it. My view is you're not really a libertarian. Your actions are probably libertarian because you never commit aggression. But if you deny the right of a victim of a crime to use force to defend themselves, I think you're on the edge of being not even a libertarian, at least theoretically. In fact, I think the position is almost incoherent. It makes no sense to say that the aggressor has no right to commit aggression and the victim has no right to retaliate because that would imply they're really the same or that the difference is only moral. And if you only have a moral point of view, that's fine, then that just gets down to what you should do and shouldn't do. But if you actually deny the right of the victim to use force, then it actually makes no sense because what would it mean to have a right? Rights have to be enforceable. There's something about a right that's different than a should. A right, in my view, has to be seen as a principle, a normative claim, which the use of force to defend it is not coherently criticizable. We can get into this later if you want. It's hard to come up with a definition of right that's not circular. So I try to come up with one because if you use terms like good or just or right or legitimate or justifiable, these things all sort of circulate with each other. So I try to go down to one of these ground principles, which is I call it criticalizability and coherent criticalizability. So basically, if you claim to have a right, then if you were to use force to defend that right from some other person invading that right or infringing that right, then any criticism of your use of force is not coherent. And my view is just like a stop-all reasoning or like Hoppe's argumentation of these. Anyone on the outside saying you don't have the right to use that force is himself by his engaging in this civilized discussion assuming a distinction between a peaceful victim and the aggressor. And yet he's arguing that there is no distinction because he's saying that you're basically as bad as an aggressor because you're both using force. You don't have the right to have. So I think any criticism that makes any sense, that has any teeth in it of a defensive use of force is actually incoherent. And that is why rights are justified. So the justification of rights comes up from the fact that any contrary norms can't be argumentatively justified. So let's go to slide four. I've mentioned already the idea of ostracism, and I mentioned a law merchant sometimes called Leximer Victoria. If you look at For a New Liberty by Rothbard or David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom, I don't have a link because I don't think the entire thing is online. Parts of it are online at David Friedman's website, but not the whole thing, I believe. If you study how this worked actually in ancient Ireland and ancient Iceland, I forget which one studied which. But what they and others point out is that restitution doesn't cost as much as punishment either to enforce. Think about it. Someone who's accused of a crime or a tort is going to fight harder against punishment than he would against an award of restitution. And also, if the punishing agency makes a mistake, their damages to the heirs or to the victim, to the wrongfully accused aggressor would be much greater than if they just made a mistake in terms of money. And also, so the defendant will cooperate more. And then there's also greater chance of redemption and rehabilitation and reintegrating back into the community. It sounds like liberal, can be taught to some people, but we have a real society to set up, so there is some good thinking on this and why it would work better. So you can think of this three levels. You could have a punitive system where there's actually punishment, including up to capital punishment or execution handed out, or a restitution system where the only damage awards would be against property, and then that could be enforced to either against the property of customers or some PDAs, but not against outlaws and using ostracism only for them, or you could use restitution even against the outlaws and just say, look, we've proved that you've committed this action. You do owe this much money to the victim. We're going to take it from you by force if we have to. Or maybe it would be too expensive and insurance companies would just make you whole and spend the extra money they save having better security in the first place to reduce crimes. And finally, you could have a totally ostracism-based system in the first place, not even use a force to award, to enforce restitution awards. Just, you know, you go to this court, the court says he did this, he owes $10,000, and then if he refuses to pay it, he's ostracized and he pays a big price. Brian says, Brian's Iraqi, what about the chance the criminal will migrate to an area he is unknown? Is it worth punishing some to prevent them from further crime elsewhere? Well, I mean, who knows? I mean, if he's moving somewhere else, then unless you're talking about global or very large insurance companies, why would they want to extend their resources to do something that helps other communities? They might make arrangements for each other. But I think if this problem was more than a trivial problem, more than a statistically slight thing to happen, I think societies would have an incentive to research strangers. I mean, if a guy is unknown, he comes in from out of town, then you're probably going to look up his references, basically. And so, of course, you'd have private rating agencies, the better business civil approval, maybe the better human civil approval. And strangers would tend to pay kind of a quasi-ostracism type price if they didn't have some way of demonstrating that, you know, that they're a good person and they don't have a criminal record they're running from. So I think that that would just be a feedback type thing, like the greater the risk of this happening, the more incentive communities would have to set up databases and monitor people and require some kind of someone to vouch for you. And in fact, you know, you might not even be permitted contractually into a given area unless you have someone who's invited you or who's vouching for you. I mean, you could, because these are covenant communities, maybe some of them like Hoppa talks about. Basically, you can imagine a large restrictive covenant in an entire area may be imposed by the effect of the insurance companies. You know, maybe the insurance companies say, look, it's too expensive to – we can give you cheaper insurance if everyone will agree to certain reasonable rules, like no one can have a private nuke in their basement. And no one can allow a total stranger onto their land unless someone vouchers for them or something like that. And those rules could be adopted if economics dictates it. Brett says, am I implying that we should allow normative justice to be put on the market making the legitimate use of force vary by location? Well, some anarchists do have that type of view. I think even David Friedman almost has that kind of view. I'm not quite going there. What I'm talking about is the contractual rules people would agree on. But contractual rules presuppose property rights as a baseline, which is the basic libertarian idea. So it would be assuming that everyone agrees on a certain libertarian deception of property rights, not everyone, but all the civilized people that are creating society, then would they tend to adopt contractually some derogations from that or some certain things? So if everyone agrees not to have a private nuke in their basement, that's not changing the norms. That's just a private agreement among people, just like if you enter a nice restaurant, you're not going to get in there if you have mud all over your clothes or you're carrying a big, large sword that's going to alarm the other patrons. Jackson says, I'm confused. Is force unjustified except defensively against imminent bodily harm? Well, it depends on who you ask. We can talk about this a little bit right now. I think the standard, say, Rothbardian type of answer is no. Defense is just one way that force could be justified against aggressors. It could also be – most libertarians believe this, and I tend to agree with this, too. In principle, force is justified when it's not initiated, that is, when it's in response to initiation. And defense is just one type of response to initiation. The others could include at least force to get restitution and then maybe even force to exact revenge or retribution or to punish. Now, I do have a slide on this later, but I'll talk about it a little bit right now. My view is that the fundamental right is actually the right to punish. It's the right to do to the aggressor what he's done to you because he has no right to complain if you act on a similar rule that he's acted on in harming you. So you can do that during the act of crime to stop it. But even afterwards, you're still entitled to do that, to chase the guy down into exact proportional – to inflict proportional force on him similar to what he did to you. And now, then you can use that right to punish. You could forgive him or you could bargain it, trade it for a – you could trade it for money. You could say, look, I have the right to inflict this much punishment on you. I'm going to do it unless you agree to pay me a million dollars or $10,000 or whatever. And by the way, let's – in libertarianism, some people say that there's a – not just libertarianism, but any justice theory. People talk about the millionaire problem. So what if like Bill Gates – what if there's an established penalty in a restitution system for committing a crime or a tort, like a million dollars or $7 million if you murder someone? So Bill Gates is a billionaire. So he murders 100 people because he can afford to just pay the heirs or the relatives of the victims. Well, in a punishment-based system, then the victims – the heirs of a victim who were murdered by a disability billionaire would have the right to capture and even execute him. And then they could say, I will forgive you if you will pay a certain ransom. And of course, a billionaire would be willing to pay a lot more than a normal person would. So the penalty would actually go up, unfortunately, but not because morals are subjective, but just because you have the right to punish and you could bargain against someone that has more money for more money to avoid being punished. Thomas Armstrong says, Stephen Molyneux believes that foreign governments wouldn't attack an anarchist state because there is an attack structure established. He also thinks an anarchist state would flourish economically. Why wouldn't an aggressive state want to control the infrastructure of the affluent anarchist state? Well, I can't speak for him, but I think the argument is there is no infrastructure. I mean, there's no head. When you have a government, if another government wants to conquer, they just have to go in and take over the centers of power. If they can just decapitate that state and replace themselves, then they can control society, just like the U.S. has done in Iraq, for example. We got rid of Saddam and we stepped into the positions of power. So I think he's saying that there's nothing to attack. You have to attack all these individual people. And furthermore, affluence is not like a sum of money sitting around. It's continual generation of wealth. If you take over a free society that's very prosperous, then you're killing the goose that lays the golden egg. It's not clear why they would want to take it over. I mean, it's just so temporary, the wealth that you would get, you'd get a temporary boost. Anyway, so Alexander Bussman said, what about the use of physical violence against victims, repeat offenders, and jails? Well, there are – I have slides on this later on, but we can talk a little bit about this here. I'll talk about it more when we get to the slides. But Randy Barnett in the Structure of Liberty argues, and I've talked about this in some of my articles, that if someone demonstrates that there are a standing threat by a series of heinous crimes or something like that, then they're not only a threat to their victims that they harmed already, but they're a threat to everyone in society. And society has the right to incapacitate them, basically lock them up just to protect people. And of all the uses of jail and prisons, seems to me that's really the one that makes the most sense. It's not to punish. It's not to rehabilitate. It's just to protect society from this guy who cannot be reincorporated back in society. So I think you could argue that it's justified, but libertarians differ on this. Brett Bennett said, can an objective statute of limitations for crimes be developed? I mean, not literally as you asked it because the statute is a rule legislated by the legislature of a state. So in a free society, you wouldn't actually have statutes. But you can imagine two ways that something like that could emerge. Number one, even if you just had like a kind of common law type system or an organic system that developed where tribunals or courts apply general principles of justice to given situations before them, over time different rules of thumb and legal principles will develop. And of course you can see that certain standards of evidence will develop, like what evidence do you have to bring out to convict this guy, this accused defendant. And of course the older the evidence is, the less reliable it is. So you're just going to have a point. You really get to a point sometime where the evidence is so old, it's almost never could satisfy a burden of proof to convict someone. You know, if someone says your house was bought from A, who bought it from B, who bought it from C, but if you go far enough back in time, one of my ancestors was robbed by one of your predecessors entitled like 10,000 years ago. Well, you know, the caveman level or something, we just, we can never know that. So that's sort of like a practical type of statute of limitations. It might not have a fixed number on it, but people are going to start developing rules of thumb about that. And you could have the restitution agencies and the PDA, they could actually, they could put it as part of their contract. Look, you sign up with us, it's just too risky for us to try to prosecute a crime that's more than 30 years old. So we're not going to insure you against that. You sign up with us, we're going to work as hard as we can, and we'll go after guys up to 30 years, but after that we're giving up. So standards like that could emerge just because it's too expensive, basically, because it's too risky, right? Because if you make a mistake, then you could owe a lot of money. So those kind of contractual standards could promulgate and get adopted that way, just like the rule against owning nukes could promulgate in different communities. Darren Jurgen says, do I have the right to kill as a form of punishment for murder? I mean, I can't answer that for you. I can tell you what I believe. I can't speak for all libertarians. The libertarians differ on this. I would say most of the standard principled rights-believing libertarians. Okay, I don't mean neutral libertarians. I don't mean men are conceiving. I mean very principled, when they're primarily Rothbardians and people like this. Even Randians, the answer is yes. Hoppe believes this. I believe it. Rothbard certainly believed it. So yes, I think you have the—theoretically you have the right to execute someone who has murdered someone who's rights you inherit. But the problem is an epistemic problem, a problem of knowledge and proof. So theoretically you have the right to kill someone who is a murderer. But how do you prove that he's a murderer? And because humans are not infallible, no system is infallible. There's almost always the possibility of a mistake, not always. We're sure. So I think that for this reason we can expect that anarchist societies would develop rules where the institutions of justice probably wouldn't be punishing at all. And they certainly wouldn't be executing. It's just too extensive. And what about someone who goes off and does it in private, a vigilante? You know, like my wife is murdered and I know that society is not going to punish this guy and I just hunt them down and kill them. Would I be sued then? I don't know. I suspect such things would be fairly rare and probably you'd kind of get a reputation for being a little bit of a loose cannon, but probably people would let it go. I mean, you're taking a risk when you do it that you might get killed yourself. You're taking a risk that you might be wrong and if that happens, you would get prosecuted for being a murderer yourself. You know, your insurance rates might go up. You might suffer some kind of mild formal ostracism. So there'd be a negative feedback for that kind of private vigilantism. Jan talks about Hitler taking Czechoslovakia. Right, because there was a head of government to, you know, a head of state to step into place of, to subjugate yourself into. Cam says, under an anarchist society, an invading force would have no center of gravity to attack. Exactly. It'd be like attacking the Internet, you know, by attacking one person's computer. Brent says, what would keep PDAs from fighting each other, or worse, evolving into an oppressive state? Well, you know, actually you might have missed the first lecture, Brent. You probably should listen to that when we had a pretty extensive discussion. That's okay, but we had a pretty extensive discussion about that issue last time. Basically, they wouldn't get customers, because it would be extensive to engage in that kind of warfare, and they would have to charge higher rates to customers. And so they would lose customers to the more peaceful ones that had worked out cooperative agreements and treaties with the other PDAs. What thoughts are involving into a state? Well, assuming we got to an anarchist society, as I said, we only are going to get there if most people are libertarian already in their principles. And in such a society, you'd have a very prosperous, thriving, rich economy in society. Lots of PDAs where the widely recognized rule is that aggression is a crime. And if a PDA started trying to become a government, they'd have to do it by committing aggression. And they would be viewed as a rogue, as a criminal gang. They wouldn't be a PDA then. And so that would just be a technical problem of crime enforcement, of how these peaceful PDAs would use their resources to attack this enemy force. It's no different than – and anyway, in the worst case, if a PDA turned into a government, then we're no worse off than we were in this kind of society, like we have now. Are PDAs different from voluntarism? You know, I've never – I've got a slide coming up about names. I've never been able to quite understand the purpose of the word voluntarism. From what I can understand, that's just another word for a certain – for libertarianism that maybe was a slightly different emphasis. But I think a PDA is an institution in a free society, in a voluntarist or in a libertarian society. I'm not aware that voluntarists – self-named voluntarists oppose the idea of anarchy or PDAs in it. Thomas says, what about refineries, reactors and resources? I don't know if I understand the question. Do you mean how – wouldn't that be a target for other nations to take over? I assume that's what you mean, sure. Yeah, but presumably the PDA would be – presumably the PDA would be – the PDA societies would be much, so much more wealthy. It would be kind of like the U.S. versus the Soviet Union. I mean, because we had a relatively more free market, we were so much more prosperous, and that allowed the government to have much stronger military than anyone else on the earth, which allowed our government to be imperialistic now, but you just have something analogous in a free society. The free society would – the PDAs would have a lot of resources available to have a very strong military defense. It would just be used only defensively, so it wouldn't be as wasteful as ours is now. If a society is not mostly libertarian, is it fair to expect a lack of government and protection that warlords would be the logical outcome? Well, I think we'll get what we have now. This is why we have governments, because the warlords or the kings arose because there's a need for law and order and justice, and there's a difference between people. There's a division of labor, and there are natural elites and leaders that emerge, and at first they do something kind of good. You know, you go up to this guy to settle a dispute, or he helps keep the peace, and he gets paid a tribute, and it's the small king of a small group, and eventually they get more and more powerful. A society gets richer and expands, and they become many states, and they get institutionalized, and they become far worse. So that's exactly why we have governments, because society was not libertarian at first. I can talk about this now. You know, Jan Masek says, why am I pessimistic about the prospects of achieving anarchy? I mean, look, the long and short of it is, like I said earlier, I think we're only going to achieve anarchy when a significant number of people are basically libertarians and have a significant amount of economic literacy. Now, I do think that over time, this might happen naturally. After the Soviet Union imploded, that was just a teaching moment, and even though most people are not that economically savvy, there's a general demawareness that's much greater now than it used to be, I believe, on part of most people, that communism just doesn't work. Now, they still believe in mixed economy, but they learn one thing, that hardcore central state planning leads to misery, and capitalism in some form generates wealth. So they learn something. As things like that happen over time, I think it's possible for the just general amount of common sense economic literacy to rise, almost by osmosis, about watching society get richer and evolve, if we do get richer and keep evolving, and the internet gets more and more powerful, etc. So I could see reaching a critical mass point where people realize that they need the government less and less, but I don't see that happening any time soon. My thought on the rights of children. Well, why don't we do this? We're going to get two sidetracked. Let's hold that off. That's not really, to be honest, a controversy or a misconception. Well, it's more of a conundrum, I would say. So why don't we say that to the third segment of the course? Libertains have views on this all over the map. We'd have to have a whole theory of rights laid out to discuss that. We should stick to the more discrete topics, at least for now, to make a little bit more progress. Okay, but remind me, if I forget it, ask me either in the Q&A session today if we have time for one, or when we get to something more like that topic. I might even have a slide on it later on. Let's skip this. I've already talked about slide five, basically. Well, let me mention quickly what I'm trying to say here. Just like the argument that you can't assert jurisdiction over someone unless they're a customer, just like that I think is a little bit flawed. It's the committing of aggression that gives someone jurisdiction. Similarly, even being a customer may not be enough for jurisdiction because contracts are not binding promises. This is the conventional way they're viewed, but the Libertarian view, at least the Rock Guardian or the Properitarian view, is that it's all anchored in property rights. Human beings have property rights and certain scarce resources, and one of those rights is the right to dispose of that, to transfer the title to someone else. That's what contracts are. They're just your act of transferring the title by making your consent or your intent clear to the other person. I'm now transferring title to this bushel of corn to you. That's what a contract is. It's not binding promise. It's the alienation of title to things that you own and not even to your body. Your body, in most theories, including Rothbard's in mind, your body is inalienable, so it's not really the subject of contract. That's why I promise to be someone slave without the enforceable, for example, although some, like Walter Block, think it would be. Rothbard and I would say it's not. And if that's the case, then even if I do sign a contract with the PDA saying, if I'm accused of committing a crime and if I'm convicted according to XYZ procedures, then I hear by consent to being executed. I mean, let's say I get convicted of a crime which I didn't commit, and let's say the procedure used was unfair. Well, just because I agreed to it earlier doesn't mean it's still legitimate to execute me, okay? Now, that's why I think that one reason PDAs would tend to primarily be focused on restitution, because the contract could agree ahead of time to a transfer of title. I can say, if I'm accused of a given tort, then I hear by transfer as much of my property in a restitution award to the victim if a certain court follows a procedure and orders it. In other words, you're giving the authority to someone else to transfer your title under certain conditions, and even if it happened unjustly, you've agreed to it. So that would be okay. All right. Let's do something a little bit more fun now, a little bit less brain twisting. Now, this is – I haven't seen a lot of writing about this, but you may notice in a lot of writing on Internet, blog posts, especially by newcomers to libertarianism or people who are learning about it, maybe some of you, they will quite often use libertarian as a – with a capital L, like I've got here on slide 6, the second bullet, where libertarians with a small L but were not capital L libertarians. To my mind, that – a capital L libertarian is a member of the libertarian party, and of course, at best, the libertarian party membership and who's a libertarian are intersecting sets. I would say not every member of the LP is a real libertarian, and of course, not every libertarian is a member of the LP. So remember this, overuse of capital letters is for cranks. Okay, so be careful about that. And also using large fonts, all caps, and too many colors in your emails. It's almost like you're shouting at someone with crayons, like some cranky old unibom or something. Now, as for the term – what term should we use for our movement? Now, I've been using libertarian, and that's a common word we use, but someone else already mentioned voluntarious. So in one reason I say the modern libertarian movement arose around the 1950s, is that is – I think that is when it emerged from Ayn Rand's work, Rothbard, Leonard Reed, even the sort of radical classical liberalism of visas. But a lot of it came from the work that Leonard Reed did. He was the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, or FEE. Now, in one of his books or articles, he claims that he's the one who basically came out with the word libertarian. He doesn't say he came up with it. I mean, it was already around, but he's the one who started applying it. Brent says he thinks it arose from the anarcho-syndicalist in the 1850s. Look at the links on this page, Brent, on page six, and I've got some links to the origin of this term. But hold on a second. I'm going to get to that. Actually, you see my poster, The Origin of Libertarianism. I found that it was used earlier than the syndicalist one time. Someone pointed me to this obscure publication in the early 1800s. Would I consider Jefferson a libertarian? No. I think he's a classical liberal, which is sort of like a proto-libertarian, but he's not libertarian. Anyway, Leonard Reed claims to have been the one that popularized the term, but he had a colleague at the Dean Russell who wrote an article in 1955 called Who is a Libertarian? In that article, he said, I propose we start using the word libertarian, but probably Reed had been doing it too, so I think it came around that time. Now, as most of you probably know, the word civil libertarian is used nowadays by mainstream commentators, but they're talking about the ACLU types, right? Not our kind of libertarian. There is also the word libertarian is used in philosophy to mean someone who believes in free will. So it is used by philosophers sometimes to mean someone who believes in free will. But I believe it's first used ever in the political sense similar to what we mean, even before the syndicalists. But it wasn't in widespread use until the 50s, I believe, 1950s. By the way, LP also means the Libertarian Party or my journal, Libertarian Papers. AE, some people use that to mean Austrian economics, but sometimes I use it to mean argumentation ethics, which is Hoppe's theory. I think ABCT only means the Austrian business cycle theory. ASC, we use that around Mises to refer to the Austrian Scholars Conference, but other people use it to mean the website anti-state.com. So this is not heavy. Alexander says, Bussman, what's the distinction between a proto-libertarian and a libertarian? Well, I just don't think classical liberals were not fully libertarian. They were less consistent and less hostile to the state and saw more room for intrusions. I would say that a libertarian in the ideal sense or pure sense is someone who is against all aggression on principle and in a very consistent way. They try not to make any exceptions to it at all. They simply think aggression is simply not justified. Now we can disagree among ourselves about what aggression is. We're all trying to oppose it, but sometimes it's hard to identify in the gray areas. But our basic thrust is to, we believe, aggression itself is unjustified. I don't think classical liberals did. I mean, they believed in a state. A state has to commit aggression. And I don't think there would be against all kinds of moral-majoritarian-type regulations. They wouldn't be against some regulations of the free market. So they believe in more aggression than we do. That's why they're not full libertarians. They probably believe in a lot less aggression than today's so-called liberals do. So if you see a spectrum, it would be libertarians, then classical liberals, and then way farther off would be, well, Garen says, is anarcho-capitalism the same as libertarian? I mean, that's something that different libertarians disagree with. In my view, I'm an anarchist libertarian, so I think that the most consistent libertarianism means you oppose all aggression and you have to recognize that the state necessarily commits aggression by its nature. And therefore, to be a consistent libertarian, you have to oppose the state. So the libertarian is an anarchist libertarian, and the anarchist libertarian is the most ideal or pure form of libertarian, in my perspective. Now, anarchist libertarians would disagree with that. An anarchist, in general, someone says, what's the difference between anarchist and anarcho-capitalist? I tend to use the term anarcho-libertarian, not anarcho-capitalist, because there's a lot of debate in recent years by less libertarians, primarily, who object to the word capitalist. And I don't think they're completely right, but in order to avoid fighting over a word, I think it's better to just be purely descriptive and say, I'm an anarcho-libertarian, and my prediction as an anarcho-libertarian is that our society would be heavily capitalist. But the capitalism doesn't characterize all of a modern society. It characterizes a significant aspect of its economic side, and left libertarians would disagree with that. They would think capitalism would not exist. So it's really a difference of prediction. Hold these questions for a second. Let me finish these definitions here, and then I'll get to these other things. So here's some of the other words I've seen for libertarian. I think that's not a bad one, actually, although, again, everyone believes in property. We just have differences on how property is assigned. Voluntaryist, a free marketeer. Classical liberals are liberals or liberalism. Of course, the word liberal in Europe still means classical liberal or free market type. Here it's been taken over by the left. Minarchist, which means someone who believes in a very small government, a minimal state possible. And I wrote an article for Lawry one time, and I had that word in there, and when it came out, the editors had helpfully changed the word to monarchist. So it looked like it was in favor of monarchy. I mean, it made no sense whatsoever. Another sort of synonym for the minarchist state is the night watchman state. That's the idea of the state. It should only be like a night watchman defending a property. I think some of the Randians have used radicals for capitalism. Brent is asking about left libertarian – sorry. Let me get to that in a minute. Now, some of the Randians say they use the word capitalist as a synonym for libertarian, and so did Rothbard and Wieses and these other guys. It's a little confusing. I do agree to some extent with the left libertarians that the label is a little confusing, although I don't think that they're right that capitalism is ideally understood and incompatible with the free market. I think it would be a significant part of a free society. It just doesn't characterize all of it. But the one reason it's confusing is capitalists can mean a person who has a lot of capital, like Bill Gates, or it can mean an advocate of a system in which capitalism is allowed to flourish or a libertarian. So most real capitalists like Bill Gates are not libertarians, so they're not capitalist in Rand's sense. So it's a confusing word. And again, anarcho-capitalist or anarchist or anarcho-libertarian is what I prefer. Papa talks about the private law society. I've also heard some of our critics call us libertards or libertopians, because we're supposed to show that we're unrealistic. And one of my favorites is just Austro-anarchist libertarian. And as I say there, it's a little unwieldy, but I think it's accurate. It links for a certain type of anarcho-libertarian. Not all anarcho-libertarians are Austrian, like David Friedman, for example. Now, some libertarians have actually argued we should call ourselves socialists. Larry Chartier, who's a friend of mine, and Kevin Carson, and I've got some links here to discussions about this. Now, I think that's ridiculous. If they think capitalism is potentially misleading and could be identified with modern coning capitalism and therefore give libertarians a bad name, then if you use socialism to identify what we stand for, that's even worse. I mean, we're not going to take the word liberal back. We're certainly not going to take the word socialism back. Cato, a few years back, tried the word market liberal. I think they still trotted out every now and then, but I think it fizzles. Sheldon Richmond actually thinks we should use the word neutralist, but I think that's because he's becoming a mutualist. I don't think it actually would be confusing, because neutralism is not the same as libertarianism. It's sort of an extreme type of left libertarianism that has some overlap with libertarianism, but it is not the same in my view. All right, let me see what I've got next. Maybe I can address some of these questions now. Oh, no, this is another thing that's interesting. As I mentioned, Leonard Reid in his 1962 book claims he's the one who originated the term for the modern libertarian movement. But in a later book, he said he abandoned it. So he refused to answer the question. He doesn't want to use the word libertarian anymore. So he claims he started it and then he tried to kill it. Now, I think he's wrong. I think we are conceptual beings and we need labels. Leonard Reid said he abandoned the word not only because it's come to mean something else, because it was associated with anarchists. He didn't like that. So he was actually wrong on anarchy, in my view. But he just thought it's in key conversations when you answer the question, what are you with the word libertarian? He says, what are you? I'm Leonard Reid. I mean, I think that's kind of ridiculous, to be honest. I mean, look, here's another fun one. There's a post. I've got the bottom of page 10 here. When Tom Woods had a debate and the CEO of ING Insurance was up there, and after Woods had lectured about the Austrian business cycle theory and Austrian economics, I got up there and said, I don't know why you care about the economy of Austria. They're not really doing so great. So I don't know why we would be interested in Austrian economics. So this is Austria. The economy is not doing so great. I mean, kind of funny. I mean, Woods is with a gas parade. You don't even know what you're talking about. Okay, so let's pause here and let me look at some of these questions before we go into the next thing. Brent said, you've heard many professors refer to the Chicago School at the preeminent school for capitalist thought. Reasons for this. Well, yeah, that's because Milton Friedman and his crew of free market type, somewhat libertarian thinkers, are the main figures of the Chicago School. So in the different schools of thought, Austrianism has been relegated, at least until recent years, to some kind of crank marginal status. And so of all the mainstream schools of thought, mainstreamism, Marxism, monetarism in Chicago School were the ones that advocated the most free market policies. That's why. But, you know, that's from the perspective of the mainstream. To them, Milton Friedman looks like a radical. To us, he looks like a socialist. I mean, because he advocated a voucher system, a negative income tax, et cetera. What's the difference? Oh, I've already answered that one. Well, Lee says, Lee Kate, the difference between anarchists and anarcho-capitalists, what is that? Well, anarchists literally just means someone who is against the state, okay? I would say an anarcho-capitalist, which is a synonym for anarcho-libertarian, is a certain type of anarchist. We are the anarchists who believe that, number one, the property rule that ought to be respected under a free society would be the libertarian conception of property rights. And number two, we think that under such a society, the state wouldn't have the right to exist. Just like anarcho-libertarians think we are really the most pure or consistent libertarians, or put it this way, that all libertarians ought to be anarchist libertarians. So I would say that most non-libertarian anarchists are really not actually anarchists because they're wrong about economics and or they're wrong about rights. And so they say they're against the state, but unless they are for property rights, then the rules that they're in favor of would have to be administered by a state or would allow a state to form or would allow widespread aggression to occur. So that's my view as an anarcho-libertarian. The anarcho-syndicalists and the left anarchists get really angry at us and they don't think we're real libertarians. So I mean, they don't think we're real anarchists. Britt says, you've heard of Rothbard. Jackson says, Jackson, ADA, what's the essential difference between left and right libertarians? That would take a long essay. I've got some slides on it later. But briefly, my view as neither, I'm a libertarian and I think we're better than the left and the right. I think the left is spatially socialist and confused, has a bad economic, spatially marxine economics, confusion on the labor theory value, confusion about the nature of exploitation, et cetera. I think the right libertarians, I'm sorry, the right is more socialist in another sense as Hoppe lays out in one of the initial chapters of his a theory of socialism capitalism called the Socialism of Conservatism. And they also believe in state measures, types of institutional aggression against private property for other purposes. The left and the right have had different flavors and entities. The right has tended to side with industry and business and claim their free market. The left has, and say they're individualists that oppose, you know, welfare. The left has tended to side with the workers and with related concerns like environmentalism and feminism and minority rights, partly because of their marxian pro-worker mentality. So the left libertarians would be those libertarians who share some of the aims or social goals or some of the approaches of the left. Or who think that we can learn from the left or who think that we should ally with the left. And the same is true of the right. Now I think that they're both left and right or confused. They're both just variants of socialism. They're both intellectually bankrupt and inconsistent. They're both economically illiterate. And they're both willing to condone widespread aggression. And I think that they can learn from us instead of us trying to learn from them. Brent says you've heard of Rothbard being a left libertarian. Is this nonsense? Well, not really. Sheldon Richmond and others claim it with some cause. He's got this famous article left and right of prospects for liberty. I think I've got it in one slide here. But Rothbard had different strategies over the years. He would sometimes ally himself with the left and sometimes with the right. That was largely strategical, I believe. In his later years he kind of helped start this paleo-libertarian movement. But that was more the ally with the paleo-conservatives. And it was to emphasize that just because we believe in rights doesn't mean we don't believe in other private values or morality. It doesn't mean we think that in a free society there would be no role for institutions and authority structures, which is not really a right position. It's just analyzing a prediction of what other health society would arise, how it would develop absence of state. And he also did borrow from some of the methodology of the left in their analysis of the state and power structures. Hapa has a good essay. I think it's in his book, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, which is online at his site, HansHapa.com. And I think the essay is called Marxian Class Analysis or something like that. And there he goes through the fundamental assumptions of Marxist class analysis. And he says they're pretty much all right, except they made one mistake and that's in their theory of exploitation. They think that you can exploit a worker by taking his surplus product or something like that by employing him and paying him less than the profit that you're getting. So you must have stolen some of his labor. So he says his labor theory value corrupts their entire social theory here. So Hapa says if you replace their confused notion of exploitation with the rock party in Austrian understanding of exploitation, which is that aggression, the use of force against people's property, that is the fundamental type of exploitation. If you make that substitution, then their entire theory makes a lot more sense. And so in that sense, even Hapa is left libertarian in a way. But they certainly don't go around criticizing capitalism as it would exist even in a free society. Clay says, do I think human nature is almost inherently socialistic, meaning people want the ability to get stuff without earning it? I mean, look, you're really asking my opinions here. In this course, I'm trying to stick with views I've developed over the last 25 years from debating and reading. I try to avoid just giving you my opinion, or without at least lately. But I'll tell you what I think. I think we do have free will. And I think that humans are neither inherently good or evil. I don't think it means any – if we're inherently good or inherently evil, it means we don't really have free will. I don't really think it makes any sense to say we're inherently one or the other. Except I would say if I had to choose, I think we're inherently good in the sense that our social nature, our feelings of empathy have made us into creatures that value each other's company and lives. That's what empathy means, right? I put some value on your comfort and your well-being. Because of this, however that came about, I believe the bulk of people would prefer to have a peaceful and prosperous society, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of others. So most people would prefer not to condone or engage in aggression. So I believe that as society gets richer, then the need for people to commit crime or to condone it is going to fall. And that will allow our kind of good side to shine further and further. So one more people will just become effectively libertarian. Also, as people become more economically literate. So I think there's hope. I don't know if we'll achieve it in our lifetimes, but I think it's possible that in the upcoming decades, society, if it becomes more prosperous and technology keeps improving as it has with communications, then I think it's a chance that we'll become gradually more libertarian-oriented and that it's less aggression condoning. That's my perspective. Lily and Yon, I don't think so. I guess you're responding to Lee's question. Brent says, how is the homesteading basis and objective form of initial acquisition? I can talk about it briefly, and it's 8.01 Eastern time. I will take a break in a minute, and then we'll take a five-minute break and come back. But let me take a stab at this. I think we talked about this a little bit in the first lecture. It's hard to address that in a short time without giving short shrift to all the other issues, because this takes an entire theory of libertarian ethics. Let me just tell you where I would suggest you read, and then I'll give you my short – read my essay that I posted, which is called What Libertarianism Is. I have a brief section on there with some links to other material, including Hans Hermann Hoppe's argumentation ethics. So I would read that, which is, I think, Chapter 7 of his Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. But the bottom line is that if we assume that we're searching for a way for people to live prosperously in peace and to use resources peacefully and productively, if we are trying to find a way people can avoid having violent conflict with each other and a war all against all infighting, if we assume that we're trying to find some rules that will allow this to happen, which is what you have to assume whenever you're having a discussion about it. Yes, there are outlaws out there. Yes, there are criminals out there that don't care to justify their actions. We have to regard them as outside of society and as near technical problems to be dealt with. Like, they're just a dangerous thing you have to deal with, just like disease or an animal or a hurricane. You just have to figure out what to deal with it. That's the job of your specialist PDAs or whatever. But if we're talking about a rule like that, then you have to recognize that we're trying to find a rule that will assign some owner to this resource. Now, who can possibly have a better claim or a link to that resource than the first owner, the first user? Because if he doesn't have the right to it, then someone else does who comes after him. But if you set up a rule where a latecomer can have a better claim to an object than an earlier user, then there's no property at all because whoever owns it now, the latecomer that comes next can take it from him. And you don't really have property at all. You just have possession or squabbling or fighting, which is what we're assuming we're trying to avoid. In other words, if you're searching for a rule that can avoid conflict, you have to find an objective link between the person and the object. And that link has to permit that object to have been grabbed from the comment in the first place. In other words, you can't turn it into a resource unless it's unowned and someone's able to transform it and use it. But if he doesn't have the right to do that, it could never be taken out of the wilderness. And if he's got a right to do it, that means he's the owner. And if he's the owner, he's got a better claim than a latecomer. So that's the reason. So why don't we – oh, Brent says how much labor mixing transforms. We did discuss that last time when we talked about Rothbard's relevant technological unit. So I would suggest you take a look at that. And then if you have a question – it's not addressed in last week's discussion, ask it maybe next time. So I'm going to pause the questions here. I'm going to take a five-minute break. And I'll see you guys back at nine past the hour. Okay. Let's resume. Before we do, let me cover at least one more slide. This one here I have up in front of you on slide 11. We addressed this briefly earlier because it came up. But some people used to say the non-aggression axiom, but that's used less and less now I find. Rothbard called it that. You know, I think he was influenced a lot by Rand. And I'm Rand and her sort of Aristotelian philosophical system used the word axiom to talk about self-evident truths and specifically the time that you could show that were true because to deny them led to self-contradiction, like the law of non-contradiction itself or the law of identity, the fact of consciousness, things like this. And also the word axiom can be used like in math as sort of a assumed starting point, like Euclidean geometry versus other types of geometry. So I always use non-aggression principle. And most libertarians now that I've seen tend to use principle instead of axiom. Another reason it's better is because, as I mentioned earlier in the first lecture, aggression is sort of a dependent concept. It depends upon property. It's less fundamental than property. Depending upon what property rights there are, that's what determines when an act is aggression or not. So that's why it's also not an axiom. It's not even the starting point. Let me see if there was another one here we can knock out quickly. I'll stop there for now unless we run out of Q&A here, but let's look at some Q&A now. Lilian Yon, I was in Managua at the capital of Nicaragua and saw poor people doing nothing but waiting for the San D'Anismo to return. So it's easier for them to wait than to do something about their situation. Okay, I'm not sure what the relevance is. You asked about how much labor-mixing transforms. I would say look at Rothbard on the relevant technological unit and also in my paper what libertarianism is. I think I linked to a blog post I have discussing the relevant technological unit where my argument is that whenever you have to decide this question, it's because there's dispute over a particular resource. So when you have a particular resource being disputed by two people, then the nature of that resource is defined by the dispute itself. And when you define the resource and how it's used, then the parties can both claim why they were the first one to actually use it, and then it will become clear whether one of them did or did not. So that's the kind of mixing that will be relevant. The kind of mixing that sets up an observable border that other people can see, because otherwise there will be no borders that could serve the function of property, which is to permit conflict to be avoided. For conflict to be avoided, other people have to be able to see who owns the property. So you have to use it in some kind of way to set up an observable border, a fence or transforming it in a way that is clear as some human is using it. So stepping on the continent is not enough to own the whole continent. Darren Gergian says, is being in Austria in a precondition for anarcho-libertarianism, can someone be a neoclassical economist on methodology of the realm and also libertarian? Yeah, David Friedman is an example. I just think it's a little bit harder to be a principled libertarian, and you'll see even David Friedman tends to go into wealth and law and economics type reasoning sometimes. That is, favoring rules if they promote a certain outcome in almost mathematical ways. And I think that does tend to soften the edges of you being a world principle libertarian. But sure, I think it's possible. Britt Bennett. Okay, you're just responding to Jackson, 88. Lee Kaye, how do you convince Republicans that wage war and militarism to help others is a bad idea? You know, I don't know. I haven't found that one out yet. I had a long argument with two of my co-operative libertarian, neo-conservative Republican friends this weekend. They believe the propaganda that we're the Americas that should be an exceptionalist country. We need to have a strong military presence and a badass leader like George Bush to keep the bad guys in check. I think maybe one way is to show them that we just can't afford it, but it's difficult. They're not libertarians. Tony Cape. Which rights are inalienable? Only those that relate to property, which can't be separated from our body. Okay, that's a good question. And I think I do have a slide on that somewhere, but I'll go ahead and talk about it now. And when we get to the slide later, I'll maybe go into more depth if I missed something here. In a sense, all rights are inalienable. Your right to be a property owner is inalienable. That right gives you the right to acquire title to a given resource, but that title to that resource implies that you can become an owner of it. You acquire title, but that acquisition implies that you can cease being the owner if you just undo that active acquisition. If you cease to want to possess it as an owner, that is if you abandon it. So once the conditions for you being an owner don't obtain anymore, then you're not the owner of it. So for example, if I homestead an apple and then I eat the apple or let's say I destroy the apple, I don't own it anymore because it doesn't exist. That's one way to get rid of the ownership of it. Or if I pick it up and I choose not to homestead it, then it's like I've picked it up and I've abandoned it. I leave it on the ground and I walk away. I never did acquire ownership or acquired ownership briefly and then I abandoned it. So these types of property rights can be, you could say you can alienate the title or the thing by abandoning it or you can give it to someone else. But I believe that the rights in your body are not alienable by contract, but they're not inalienable actually because you can alienate your rights to your body by committing an act of aggression. So normally I have the right for you not to shoot me, but if I'm attacking you, you do have the right. So it's like I've forfeited my right to not be shot. Well, this is a way of semantic texting because you could say that no, no, no. You never had an absolute right not to be shot. You only had a right not to be shot in an aggressive way. You never had a right to not be shot when that's defensive shooting. So if I'm committing a crime, then you can shoot me because I never had the right to be free of defensive force being used against me in the first place. So it depends on how you look at it. If you look at it that way, then no rights are alienable, or rights are not inalienable. So that's how I look at it. Rights to things that you acquire can be gotten rid of by contract. Rights to your body can only be gotten rid of by committing an act of aggression. Okay, is that clear? Brent says, is Milton Friedman a pragmatist? I think you could say he's a pragmatist. He's a pretty principled for a pragmatist. I think he's more of a consequentialist. He's got a theory of rights, not a theory of rights. His rationale for being a libertarian is, I think, a really bad one. I've got to link someone in the slides again. We'll get to it later. It was in Liberty Magazine, or Reason Magazine, I can't remember. He had an interview, and he was asked why he was a libertarian, basically. And he basically said it's because we're ignorant. So he said, you know, we really can't know what's right and wrong for other people to do in their lives. So we shouldn't use the power of the state to force them to live the right life, because we might be wrong about it. Now, in my view, that's a terrible argument for Liberty, because number one, most people do think they know a lot of things that are right and wrong. Like, it's wrong to become a cocaine addict. Most people would agree to that. I agree to that. It's wrong to insult your mother if she's a good mother. You know, it's wrong to never give the charity if you have plenty of money. I mean, there's lots of things you could – most people think they're wrong. And if you accept the principle that if you know that something is wrong, then you're entitled to legislate it, then you're going to have what we have now. You know, Friedman pretended – I mean, so I think he's wrong. And that's sort of a pragmatic approach, I would say. Now, Walter Block has an article, a draft article, it's not published. I'm arguing Friedman is actually a socialist, because of all the different policies he recommends that are socialist or socialistic. I think – I don't think he is a socialist. I mean, it's hard to classify someone. He's clearly a major libertarian influence. He was one of my biggest influences. I read his Capitalism of Freedom early on, and it's all really good. He's got the common sense free market issues. He's got a few deviations there, but I think he's not a rights-type libertarian. He's got this ignorance argument. Brian Looney, in 1974, the UN said, every man, woman, and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and non-matrition. Could you clarify what is meant by positive and negative rights? Why should I believe that the UN can proclaim any right? Well, I don't think it's a – that was in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I think. I've got some blog posts about this, too. These are all socialists. These are positive rights. And of course, well, they're just wrong. They're asserting the dominant legal positivist status mentality, welfare status mentality of the time, where people that work for the UN are all representatives of states, so they're all believing the state, right? So you've got a whole bunch of people who believe in the state, and they all have a philosophy that the state has a lot of power, and they justify their power and part, their domination over people by giving them things, right? And by pretending like they're their helper and they're good guys. So I don't think you should believe the UN can proclaim rights. I think they can try to – I mean, they can, of course – I mean, they're not completely wrong. They – some of those rights are actually rights, you know, the right to be free from, I don't know, violence. Yeah, they're right about that. They didn't create it. They just happened upon – I wouldn't say a stopwatch can be – is right twice a day. Tom, it's Armstrong. Some anarchists don't believe in rights. Would you explain this position? Well, there's probably more utilitarian types. Maybe even David Friedman says that. But they claim to be consequentialist. They believe in what works, blah, blah, blah. But I don't think anyone doesn't believe in rights. Just like I said, we're not the only political philosophy that believes in property rights. Every political philosophy has a view of property rights. They have an answer to the question, you know, who owns this object? They will give you an answer. That's a property right, even if they don't want to use that word. And I think everyone believes in rights. I had once had a long argument with Paul Gottfried, who's kind of a paleoconservative ally of ours. I remember he kept refusing to say he believes in rights, and partly I got him to admit he does, but it was just a definitional thing. Because if you believe that there is some claim that's enforceable by legitimate force, and that someone else violates that claim, then you believe in rights, even if you don't want to use the word. I think what it is that they're opposed to natural rights. They're opposed to natural law thinking. And they're afraid that if they say they believe in rights, that they're buying into the entire religious, natural law apparatus. And I think they're just confused and wrong about that. Brent, children's rights. Well, I mean, most people believe, I would say most libertarians believe that rights come from our rational capacity as an intelligent animal. Or they believe in a religious ground that we have some divine soul sparked from God, and that's what makes us human, and that's what distracts. So those latter types tend to believe that as soon as you're a human, which is when you're conceiving, you have rights from that point on. It's one reason they're anti-abortion. So for them, it's a pretty easy issue. Children, of course, have rights. Now, they also believe that God owns us, so we're really a slave of God or something in some sense. I don't know if they really believe in genuine rights or just rights relative to other people. And I would say most libertarians of the other type believe that certainly when you're born, you have enough of a developed rational faculty to have rights. And some of us believe that that happens before you're born, too. And so that's the debate about abortion. But I see now that your question is more about when you become an adult. So the way I look at it is, of course, there will be no statute of 18 years old in a free society. You wouldn't have statutes at all. But you would have customs that would arise where people are recognized as having, say, full independent status. I mean, I can't give you a number, maybe 12, 14, maybe when a certain act happens, maybe when you're able to claim it for yourself. Like Rothbard says, when you say no to your parents and when you try to run away. Now, most of us wouldn't go that far. Rothbard didn't have children. Maybe he doesn't understand that a four-year-old might try to run away and you've got to stop him and he's not going to go name you with himself or claim his independence at four years old. So I think the idea is, and this is one reason I'm not totally against positive obligations, which I have a slide on later, because libertarianism is not against positive obligations. It's just that we're against them being foisted on us when we didn't incur them voluntarily. But if I commit an act of murder, I have certain positive obligations to turn myself in and make restitution, et cetera. And I believe that if you have children, you're bringing a rights-bearing human into the world, which is by its nature, by our human biological nature. He's dependent, fully on you. And as a parent, you have the obligation to take care of him and raise him until he's able to become an adult in the sense of being self-sufficient. And part of your obligation to the child is to make decisions for him as his agent on his behalf. So the parent is like the guardian or the agent of the child and can make decisions for the child based on the presumption that that's what the child would have wanted. You know, like if you have a married couple and the husband goes into a coma, then the wife can make medical decisions about his care, because we assume he would have granted her that agency status if we'd been able to ask him. We have to make some assumptions when there's no information available explicitly to the contrary. And an infant, of course, hasn't had time to develop yet to give us his decision. So we presume the parent is the natural caretaker that the child would give the right to make decisions on his behalf until he's ready to be fully independent and mature. And, of course, it's gradual. Over time, the child's autonomy increases and the parent's authority to speak before the child goes down until it's basically zero and 100%. Okay. Tony says, are we going to go over social contract theory in another session, or can we cover it here? I actually didn't plan to cover social contract theory because it's not really, I never thought of it as a libertarian misconception or controversy. It's one that a lot of non-libertarians make, but I don't mind talking about it if you want to. I mean, the easy answer is it's just nonsense. There is no social contract. I mean, it's just a fiction. It's just a lie to justify the state. It's just a bad argument. I don't know what else to say about it. Do Austro-Anarchist libertarians, as from Thomas Armstrong, prefer agorism over reformism? I don't think there's any close correlation there. I would imagine most, to the extent they've heard of it, would be more agorist in their outlook. But that's more of a strategical thing, I think, that some libertarians dabble in. But I don't think it's – I think most Austro-Anarchist libertarians are – they don't put much hope in reformism. They believe in educating people so that gradually the state legitimacy can be challenged, or some even believe in violent revolution against the state. And some, of course, believe in agorism as one tactic, but I don't know what else I could say about that. Tony Kay, positive obligations are directly against Rothbard's version of children's rights. Well, I think so, who I think is basically consistent with his framework, but I don't think it's perfectly consistent with what he said about this. No. Brent says, wouldn't that outrule the ability to give one's children to foster parents? No, I don't think so, because I see me mean adoptive parents, foster children, or I think you mean adopting parents. Because if I think you have an obligation to take care of a child, but as a practical matter, how can you enforce an obligation of a parent to be a loving parent? If they're horrible parents or they don't have any means, then I think – let's say they're a good parent and they just cannot – they're not psychologically ready to be a parent or they can't afford it. And I think that if they're doing it for the kid's behalf, then we can assume that they still have the agency status for the child, which would include the ability to select the next guardian. But when that happens, then we can presume the child would rather this other parent be their parent, because the first one doesn't want them and can't take care of them. And the new parents have shown a willingness to do it. So there's another natural connection formed, and we shift our presumption that the child is presentably granting consent for these new parents to be their parent. In the same way that if you have an abusive parent, the parent badly abuses the child, at that point in time the parent has violated his obligations as a guardian to take care of the child. And the presumption that the child would want him to be the one to make decisions for him is no longer applied. The presumption is overturned. So now we find a foster parent or some third party or a relative or something. So it's all about the child's rights that he can expect from the parent who's voluntarily brought him into the world. Jackson, 88. Some people, like Eagle, are opposed to rights because a right imposes a correlative duty, and the duty way is another way to compel obedience without resorting to force. I haven't heard much of that among libertarians, but libertarians tend to talk about negative rights which correspond to negative obligations, just the obligation not to hurt someone. And most libertarians agree with that obligation. You have a negative obligation or an obligation not to evade other people's body or property without their consent. And as I said, I think you need to make the case that there are positive obligations and positive rights associated with that, but only ones that are voluntarily acquired, either by committing a tort or a crime or maybe creating other humans by appropriating, et cetera. What is social contract theory? That's the idea that there's a hypothetical contract between citizens and the government and that legitimizes the state under certain conditions, and then the state has certain obligations according to this contract, but that gives the state the right to exist, which is sort of the rhetoric used by the founders and the Constitution itself. Tony Cape, positive obligation can be met once it's properly transferred to another party. I'm actually not sure about that. I don't think I have this slide. This is an area that's a little tricky to me. I'm not sure if the old parent, the first parent loses their obligation. My previous illness was that the child theoretically has a claim on two sets of parents now, the new parents and the earlier parents, because just like if I owe you $1,000, I borrowed money from you, I owe you $1,000, I can't just transfer this to my brother-in-law and say you've got to pay this loan off for me and then tell you you've got to go to my brother-in-law now. I'm off the hook because I gave you another promise, I gave you another promise or to go after. I don't have the right to take away your right to come after me. I can get a co-signer. The creditor is happy to have two people to pursue, but he's not going to let me off the hook unless he agrees to it. I can't just do it unilaterally. Same thing with this, I thought, and in fact in Louisiana where I'm from, which is the civil law state, the only civil law jurisdiction in the country, there is a provision in the civil code which says that, I believe it said this, it says that there is forced airship. Forced airship means the child is entitled to a portion of the parent's estate on death. It's called a legitim or the forced portion. And in a way that's a somewhat libertarian provision because it recognizes the positive obligations the parent does have to children. And then the civil code lists several conditions that overcome the forced portion, like if your parent's in jail and you don't bail them out, or if you strike your parent, or if you don't call your parent for more than two years, something like that. But because of that provision, theoretically the adoptee still has the right to claim the forced portion of his birth parents' estate and his new parents' estate. Although most adoptees don't talk to their parents for more than two years at a time, so I don't know if that exception would come into apply. I was adopted. That's why I looked into this in Louisiana when I lived there. But now my view is that if you have a good parent, the birth parent, then until they get the child up for adoption, they still have the authority to make decisions on behalf of the child. And their last decision, in a sense, is deciding for the child to switch, to basically relieve them of their obligation, to relieve the birth parent of obligation and switch it to a new parent. And I think that's reasonable as long as they're making a good choice because it's natural to have one parent. So that's my take on that. There's not much written on this that I'm aware of. I haven't written much on it, but that's my approach. Brent, do I believe abortion will be resolved with further scientific research? Yes and no. No in the sense that I don't think that science is going to tell us anything that we don't already know morally. I mean, it's not a scientific issue anymore at this point. We know what's going on. It's a valued point of view, but we're not going to measure the soul or something like that. But on the other hand, I think that if this procedure becomes really easy to take a very young fetus out of the mother's womb and put it into another woman or raise it in an artificial womb, then there's almost no case where you would want to abort the child or need to. I mean, why would you – if you could just – in fact, there's a book on this by Victor Coleman called Solomon's Night. It's a science fiction, libertarian science fiction novel where there's a procedure called transoption developed, which is just what I've described. There's a way to take a baby from mother A and put it into mother B's womb even at a very young stage of pregnancy. So at this point, the question is, look, if you have an easy way to eject a baby without killing it, then it's murder. In fact, I think that's Walter Blocks here. He believes that he's okay to kill to abort and to kill the baby if that's the only way to get it out, because you're just having to kill it as part of the eviction process, basically. But if there was a less damaging way to evict it, which there would be in the case of transoption, I suppose he would do it as an unjustifiable murder. Okay, we have a lecture starting in 27 minutes. Danny's got to start. We should probably stop so Danny can get everything going. So let's pick this up on slide 12. It'll be slide one next time, but slide 12 next time. So good night, everybody.