 Welcome back again to the Bad Quaker podcast where Liberty is our mission. Today is Friday, May 23rd, 2014. My name is Ben Stone. This is podcast number 371. And I have two very important guests with me today. And before I introduce them, I just want to mention that I will be at, well, I should say I will be, I can't control the future. I'm going to do everything I can to be at pork fest 2014 in the White Mountains of Northern New Hampshire near the Canadian border, because there's no better place to be in the heat of summer than Northern New Hampshire. And so I'm going to be there speaking, or at least that's the itinerary. And if you can make it to pork fest, go to porkfest.com P O R C F E S T. And take a look at it. It's it's it's a hoot and a half guaranteed or you won't get your money back, but you can certainly complain about it. And folks with me today is, uh, Stefan Kinsella and Jeffrey Tucker. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining me with a very special, special double, um, podcast where we're going, going three way on this one. Well, it's wonderful to be here. I'm glad to be here. I'm linen, uh, Stefan Kinsella's marks on the IP question. So, so it's good to be here. Yeah, Ben, welcome back. And, uh, this three way, uh, uh, this is going to be, uh, a good combination. I think is this, uh, is this going to be your podcast as well, Stefan? If you permit me to use this, uh, pattern of information, these bits of the internet, uh, maybe I'll, uh, post it on my podcast too. And Jeff will just let his legions of fans post it on various YouTube channels. So, so, so Stephanie, you just kind of basically, you're going to steal the podcast. So that's what you're saying. I'm going to totally steal it. Steal the thoughts from our minds and the airwaves. Everything I say, well, I'll be unable to say again. Now, for people who are, uh, real nerdy about the bad Quaker podcast, and they know all kinds of trivia, uh, for the longest time, Jeffrey Tucker was the most frequent guest on bad Quaker podcast. I don't, I have a lot of guests, but I don't have a lot of repeats. And Jeffrey, uh, held the title for a very long time as king of the guests, and he recently got kicked off the throne by Bill Bupert. Bill passed him with a, uh, a double, uh, two podcasts back to back where I interviewed Bill. And so this almost catches Jeffrey back up. Uh, he's one behind Bill now, but we'll do all we can to catch Jeffrey back up in the process. And it reminds me of, of the ongoing competitions we're having on, on liberty.me, uh, over at Karma. It's funny when you, you put in places that are competitive systems, people get, they're obsessed with them. Hey, let's talk just for a second about, uh, liberty.me, because when you started setting that up, uh, that's, I, I wanted to follow along on that and see what was happening and maybe even get involved, but I was in the process of my health spiraling out of control and I just couldn't follow it. So Jeffrey, tell my listeners what liberty.me is and how it works and stuff. What we've put together is the world's most comprehensive, fully engaging, uh, a massive solution to the whole problem of what are we going to do to make our lives freer, given the existence of the despotic state? Um, you know, we can't control the state, but we can control our lives. So the question is, what are we going to do? That's what liberty.me, my answer is, uh, all embedded within liberty.me. So we've got, uh, massive instruction on everything from like next week and we've got, we've got firearms, we've got firearms training, instructions how to develop your first armory. We've got experts in, in homeschooling. People understand immigration, uh, you know, both directions again, travel tips, uh, making money. We've got some of the world's top investors in, in the discussion, uh, boards. We're, you know, we've got experts on every topic there to sort of moderate, um, uh, engagement, community engagement. And the, the idea is essentially to get, get control of your life, to, to, uh, to discover ways to, uh, to, to live better despite the existence of Leviathan. I, I think this is an important step to building freedom in our world. We have to change our lives. We have to, uh, consult my teacher on this. He was the first one who taught me that if you start publishing without using copyright, you're, you're actually going to, uh, achieve a greater degree of freedom than you would otherwise. And I saw it happen. That was the inspiration for building, uh, comprehensive platform to make this, this possible. We also have total Facebook, uh, functionality replicated in hundreds of book downloads and basically everything I can possibly think of to contribute to the cause of human liberty is embedded in this one piece of real estate. And let me just jump off track there to something you said, the cause of liberty. I'm just picking out that one phrase. You know, I, for a longest time, I was uncomfortable with the phrase liberty movement because it seemed like something faddish, uh, fad FAD faddish, if I didn't pronounce that clear, but it seemed like something that was passing something like, you know, bell bottoms or something. It just, it didn't seem like something that had any substance, but really, uh, there's so much more than just a liberty movement. There's really, I've been calling it a liberty mission, but it's, you know, however you want to look at it, uh, it's really more than just a passing thing. And the problem too with the word movement is it implies some sort of, there's a lot of problems with that word. It implies it's exclusively political and we, and we know what happens to political movements. They fail. Yeah. 100% of the time. Yeah. And it's a, it's kind of a collectivist motion. It's got leaders and followers and homogeneous interests and we're all marching the same way. That is not the way liberty is going to take place in those world. We need a multiplicity of efforts in every area of life depending on your interests. Uh, the idea of reducing it all to politics is a share of prescription for failure. And you, you know, um, I think, and this is way off of anything that we talked about in pregame here of what the things we were going to talk about, but I think what you just said is really important because there are people, and I'm not going to be rude and name names and call people out or, or whatever, but there are people, uh, who, who are kind of upset that there are different people taking this whole thing and going in different directions. And there are people who are wanting to define what liberty is in very tight terms and others and very, very wide terms. And I think there's a lot of feelings getting hurt and a lot of anger right now that is really unnecessary if, if you just realize that, that we're not going to have leaders. We are, there are very important people in their voices that stand out sometimes above others, but, um, this is not something that is going to have a central committee and a leader take us into the next phases. It's just simply not going to happen. I don't care how important a person thinks they are, uh, you know, get over yourself because it's not going to be central planned and you're not going to be the leader. Yeah, that's, I think that's a really, uh, important point. I mean, the development of the cause of human and liberty is going to take place the way civilization developed, essentially. And that's, that's decentralized and focused on particular talents of individuals and their, and their focus interests and their own, their own way of going about things. What we, what we need is some degree of expertise and some degree of inspiration and we need communities, you know, to, of conversation and support. But I, I agree. We don't, we don't need a sort of a top-down, um, uh, structure that it doesn't need to work anything like a political party, uh, and it shouldn't. Well, there should be a, a massive, massive diversity and then I also agree there's absolutely no reason for, uh, for purges or, uh, witch hunts, or saint-making or any of these are sort of what I think of as being like old world warfare sociology. You know, this is a digital age where we have infinite scalability. Well, let, let me say something here. I think, um, um, you know, Hoppe talks about this idea of natural elites and he's analyzing sort of the way culture and society developed to the present day. But I think there's something going on there in the internet right now, right? The barriers to having a microphone are reduced. So it's almost pure merit, right? So you're going to have, I won't call them elites, but people that are natural, um, and not even leaders, but people that, uh, that other people learn from and respect naturally because of what you're teaching them. So I think this is a good thing. It's the division of labor. It's a specialization of labor. It's, uh, it's a communication relationship between teacher and student and those people aren't always the same. In other words, the teacher is the student of their own students and they're the teachers of each other in some ways, right? It's a bilateral communication. That's brilliant. I mean, I mean, have you heard stuff in this term? I wonder what you think of it. In the peer to peer literature, there's this, this term called equipotence. Equipotence. Or equipotence. I'm not sure what the best way to pronounce it is, but that is that we all have the same tools. And so you don't have a kind of, uh, asymmetry of power rooted in sort of what you possess, the access you possess. And this is bringing about a kind of a different world than we've ever experienced before. No, I've never heard that, but it, it instantly resonates with me, um, um, uh, because yeah, I think that's exactly what it's getting at. We have this kind of world of pure meritocracy in a sense. And this bothers a lot of the gatekeepers from the past, right? And they're going to struggle to reestablish our gatekeeper role. And it also bothers people with with quality control issues, right? Because there is a cacophony of voices in that sense. But that just gives rise to the need for cultivation, right? And people to find a way to cultivate the best of this clattering of voices. But the clattering of voices, I think it's basically a good thing. Yeah, it requires a certain degree of critical intelligence, you know, which is, which is a wonderful thing to suddenly discover in life that actually you have to think and make like good decisions rather than just blindly following some leader. The straight, the state trains us in a strange way, um, to be sort of passive and compliant. And when you lose faith in the state as everyone should and we must, then that implies a sort of a new consciousness that we're really in charge of ourselves. And that means most, especially in charge of our minds and what we think. You know, I always find it interesting and I hate to, I almost dread bringing this up because my listeners are probably get getting tired of me picking on people on this topic. But, um, on a religious philosophical level, it just always strikes me odd that the two of you gentlemen are friends, seeing that you, that you look at the worldview in such different ways as far as religion and philosophy goes. And yet you have this so much common ground between you that you can look beyond those differences. I'm sorry to bring that up. It just, it's like, to me, it's the elephant in the room that I have this contrast. Dan, we're both fighting over who's going to be the bad Catholic. I think Jeff will let me have that title. You know, in spite of what some media people have portrayed, I can't imagine Jeffrey as a bad Catholic that I don't know. I don't know. You know, the Catholic girls kind of kind of funny. I don't I don't know in any Catholic who would, who would naturally and comfortably describe himself or herself as a good Catholic. You know, it seems a little bit dangerous in some way, you know, Catholicism in so many ways is this kind of out of reach ideal. Well, you know, let me not be inappropriate here. But Jeff and I have a good friendship and a relationship and I have that with a lot of people and then a way it's like this, I hear my female friends tell me they have a different relationship with their female friends. For some reason, you know, my good friends, maybe it's because of my personality, maybe because I'm a man, I really don't know. I'm not trying to be sexist, but I just don't know. But guys can just focus on what they're interested in and or at least the intellectual kind of, you know, obsessive guys that I'm friends with the people that I'm friends with. And we just focus on what we're interested in and we don't we just gloss over these details. Well, I mean, you and I talk a lot of, you know, we go through phases, right? You remember, there was something like six or eight months ago, you and I were talking about about theology all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was weird. Yes. But when we disagree, it's not really like it doesn't bother. And maybe that's because of a comfort level. Like maybe people have contention when they're discussing things they disagree with, because they think they're going to be attacked. But if you're sort of each person is comfortable in their scan, they know that you're not you're bringing this serious this topic up seriously, right? You're not just trying to find a reason to attack someone to say you're superior. People are more comfortable to just be honest in expressing their their ideas or whatever. But then I don't know what it is. I'm sure you've had you have and have had relationships with different people that are all varied all over the map. And some people you can communicate better with some you can't some you have to avoid certain topics. Some you have to patch things up and after a fight or whatever. So it just what I think is most funny about about about stuff and can tell us sort of internet personality that always stumbles me is that you have kind of like a like a bad ass image, you know, you know, people believe that you're kind of sort of sort of a tough guy. He's a tough guy. Yeah, like a tough guy. Yeah. And you know, like like slapping people around or exploding in a rage and you know, and people are always emailing me all the time, like, it's like you're the bad cop or something. There are people emailing me, anything you can do about Stephens, you know, Stephens. So anything you can do to kind of like, you know, you know, help them be a little nicer and stuff to people. I'm like, probably there's nothing I can do. But, you know, it all depends on the way like when I read your stuff, stuff, I laugh. I think it's funny. It's I know it's partially serious, but it's also like really funny because you're kind of playing a character in a way. And I think it's amusing and charming. And basically, I think people need to develop thicker skin, you know, I guess my problem is, well, first of all, I thought we were going to talk libertarian political theory and all these extrude ideas. And now we're talking Cancelo's image on Facebook. But, you know, hey, these things devolved to where they go. But I think some of the problems I think of myself as some hick from Louisiana, who's just a smart ass in class, just trying to throw just mess with the teacher. And at this point, some people actually listen to what I say and basically disrespectful that that's a good that sums you up completely. But I'm only that way when and I don't have a self diagnosed, but I am only that way when I feel someone is kind of getting out of the bounds of a certain type of propriety. I don't know how to explain it. If I meet someone who's a total noob or an idiot, and they're totally confused, I'm totally patient and nice with them. If someone struggling with something, I'm totally nice. But when I get someone who they just leap to three levels above where they are, and they just start pontificating on something they're obviously wrong about in a sort of arrogant authoritarian way. Yeah, it drives me bonkers, and I just won't tolerate it. Well, also, I think you don't like you really get upset when people just sort of have a studied ignorance of something, you know, like Oh, that's, yeah, that's a ten dintages. Sorry, they're not really interested in the truth. Yeah, recent examples. I had a debate with Jan Helfeld recently and Jan Helfeld is this kind of stubborn, monomaniacal, almost Asperger's type menarchist who is good when he talks to Nancy Pelosi. But when he confronts a real libertarian, namely an anarchist, he always just starts reading this script and repeating these stupid slogans. And once this bizarre format that just allows for nothing. And in our debate, he started criticizing me for not adhering to the debate format. And he said, this is the problem with you, anarchists. You can't follow the rules. And when he said that, it just set me off because I'm thinking, listen, I'm not going to pretend reality is not what it is. The truth is I'm an anarchist and I am being stolen from and persecuted by the state that you support. And for you to sit here and pretend to have a civilized conversation with me and to criticize me for something is not following a stupid debate rule. When you're supporting the mammoth Leviathan state that is killing and murdering people, causing war, causing inflation, robbing me of untold amounts of money every year, it's a little bit disproportionate. And I would be happy to trade places with you where, you know, you don't get to steal from me and you get to mouth your quasi-socialist menarchist crap all over the Internet. And I can't complain about it. I'd be happy to make that trade with you guys. So I'm not going to, you know, so that kind of stuff gets my blood going. I'm just not going to let someone who's stealing from me pretend like they are not. That that's sort of my little red line that just makes me go crazy. That's why we love you. That's why we love you. But I mean, she's this is who is this again? That you were. Oh, that was Jan. No, it's not a she. That's he, Jan Hellfeld. OK, and he said he got on. So, but he was not stealing from me. I mean, holding opinions about politics is not amount to stealing from you. No, I agree. I agree. But he was supporting an idea that was much worse than me not abiding to a debate. Yeah, OK, that's horrible. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And what I'm not to pick on Jan, but what I never understand with menarchist is, you know, Jan is so sharp on his ability to take logic and take somebody like Harry Reed or whoever and just make an absolute fool out of them with three or four basic questions, you know, confronting the logic of what it is they do for a living. And yet with so many menarchists, their inability, their their ability to see that goes right up to like ninety nine point nine five percent. And yet they can't apply that other tiny little portion back to their own theories and see the inconsistency within what it is they believe. It's very strange. I'd like to get your thoughts on this, Ben, because Jeff and I have talked about this before. Is it an age thing? Is it that you get set in your views at a certain point and you just pretty much can't learn anymore? If you're a randian and you're forty two or forty seven or fifty three or sixty, you basically are stuck in those views forever and you just cannot go any further. Is that the problem? Or is it something else? I mean, you must have some opinions on this. I I've toyed with that thought quite a few different times that it was age related or culturally related or whatever. And then every time I start to adopt that I run into somebody who's like sixty five or sixty eight or something. And they just ran into this in the last two or three months and are just going crazy with it. They're just running with with anarchy. And so I have to kind of wonder about it. And I honestly think this is something that Michael Dean and I were talking about not long ago and I and I think you rang in with Michael on it a little bit. I think it has to do with the development of what I believe to be an actual religion that the people develop, you know, I was taught as a little kid that if you let's say you have a favorite car, you have a car that maybe it's a hot rod or it's a collectible item or whatever. And you just absolutely that car becomes the center of your life and you go out and rub it with a diaper and you just, you know, you do everything to it except drive it around where it might get dirty or something. And that that object because because starts to become an idol and then eventually it becomes an actual God in your mind. And I think the the the position of the state to some people takes on that persona that it actually becomes as real a God as Zeus ever was or as Thor ever was or, you know, and they can't, they can't let go of it because it becomes part of the reality just as deep as any Catholic or Jehovah's Witness or Mormon. Oh yeah, they go crazy if they see a flag hung upside down or something and they really are deeply offended. It rocks their world. Yeah, but I mean, how do you know that's actually integral to the to the status? I mean, that's kind of weird. The surgical apparatus that's emerged out of the war culture of the 20th century. You know, in many ways, the statism of the 20th century had this weird effect of of promoting a strange sort of Hobbesianism. I mean, the state made the world a very dangerous place for like a hundred years, you know, mass murder, bombings, you know, gas chambers and gulags and detention camps. And you know, you can't you kind of have a world like that that doesn't have a psychological impact on people. And, you know, I think about people like Hazlet and Mises and at some extent Hayek, you know, who like they love freedom, but they couldn't finally give up that final fear that without without some some overarching authority that the world is going to collapse into some sort of some sort of terror. I mean, this this impression was very much, I think, subsidized or got a big boost out of the sheer danger that the state itself created in the world over the course of the course of a century. They gave Hobbesian, that sort of Hobbesian terror, terror that life could it's like civilization was like so fragile that that it could just be shattered and destroyed with a one wrong move. They gave that that view a huge subsidy. It's almost like the state itself created a kind of Hobbesian mentality, which actually, I mean, Hobbes himself lived, you know, lived in a road during the English Civil War, which is a time of great danger that the state itself was creating, you know, so it's a matter of kind of like sorting out the cause and effect. I mean, I think of menarchism emerges out of this. I don't know any menarchist who wasn't raised in the height of during the Cold War period, you know, where you wake up every day fearing nuclear war, you know, and that kind of that kind of terror does not lead you to have confidence in a purely free model of what the society would work like. Well, it leads you to embrace, you know, fearfully embrace out of faith, you know, bad solutions like the state. Well, the state says that order is not possible without the state and then they perpetuate a state of of war of all against all, right, by pitting groups against each other. So they actually bring into being the shibboleth that they say is the big That's exactly that's what they always do. I mean, it's in the same way that that the state made the economy work like the Keynesian system predicted it would work. Yeah, yeah. So then they didn't have an excuse to come in and regulate or say the market's not perfect. Or they create it's much failure. It's the same the same way with racism and sexism and all these all these other ideologies. I mean, state intervention actually generates the problem that they then claim to be solving, you know, so it's this endless cycle. Well, just think of environmentalism to switch a little bit. Yeah, pollution, you have global warming, you have this threat of nuclear winter, which is the last thing. Almost all these things are exacerbated or even caused by the state. I mean, the US military is one of the biggest polluters in the earth, right? The threat of nuclear war is the threat behind nuclear winter. And so you have the state itself, which is the cause of the problems that the state says it's needed to solve. It's just bizarre. Unemployment is the same situation. Lack of access to medical care. Exactly the same thing. Yeah, that's one of my points that I hope to bring up at porkfest. I'm going to be on a panel that's discussing the libertarian views of abortion and and this is a topic, you know, when one of the porkfest people put a Facebook post about the the upcoming discussion and immediately it broke into this dichotomy type argument of, you know, right against left and all kinds of anger and somebody made this statement that, you know, hey, folks, let's calm down and save this till porkfest when everybody's drunk and armed. But make a phone. Yeah, yeah. But I believe and this is the point I hope to bring at porkfest. I believe that what we're seeing people get so angry and arguing about is exactly what the state has brought about a situation so that we would be at each other's throat rather than realizing that the whole problem is government created to begin with it with if there was no government involved in health care and there was no government there enforcing one law or enforcing another law or saying this person can be a doctor, that person can be. If none of those things existed, then the abortion problem would figure itself out. But and that goes all the way into like adoptions and how much the mind boggling I can't even think of the word that gauntlet that you have to go through to to adopt is just utterly ridiculous. And the same thing, oddly enough, I see it is very much the same thing as the problem with organ transplants. Organ transplants would be an unbelievably easy thing if there was no government completely fouling up the whole process. So I see abortion is the same thing. If, you know, if there wasn't a government there messing things up, creating the problem, there wouldn't be a problem. That's to be very specific about what that problem is. The bottom line is that there are very strict rules that that do not allow a woman who's carrying a child to term to benefit fiduciarily, even to the extent of recouping the opportunity costs of her wages that would otherwise she would otherwise be earning for carrying the child to term on a on a profitable basis. That's just illegal. Yeah, that's not allowed. That's the basic economics. And and we were going to this is actually the topic we're going to talk about was property ownership, homesteading and how you own property and how you can exchange property. And that's kind of what we're talking about here that interrupts the whole the whole birthing process that creates the problem of abortion. Well, it's definitely we're talking just this morning about about this. We're like, what if what if on a woman was seeking out, you know, an abortion and she was presented with a with a with a deal? It's like, OK, your abortion is five hundred dollars or a thousand dollars or whatever. On the other hand, here are a number of offers that are for the rights to to raise a child if you carry the baby to term. And and it's it's 30,000. It's 50,000. It's 100,000. And these were choices that were put before a woman in that in that situation. I, you know, so that's how you put it, like there are millions of people who choose abortion and there are millions of people waiting for children to adopt. Why does this situation persist? It's because of a of a of a controlled markets, essentially, if you had an active market for child rearing rights, you would might see an equilibrium achieved. And but that is a product of massive state intervention that women are not given these kind of of of choices. To put it unbelievably simply, what we're looking at is price and wage controls, and that's why there's an abortion problem. I think it's I think it's true. And I, you know, it's not to say, Ben, that that that makes everything go away. I mean, the issue of pregnancy and abortion are unique. They're bound up with with very, very complicated life choices that are radically heterogeneous and ultimately come down to, you know, the question of a woman's own right to choose and things like this. But but nonetheless, we have serious, serious government interventions markets that are that are ironically preventing choice from taking place. And this this isn't even being discussed. It's not even being discussed in the public debate over abortion, like at all. I mean, I can think of two or three people who have ever brought this topic up besides you. You know, it's it's very intriguing. It's like it's just presumed that these markets have to be radically controlled. And I don't know when this began. I would love to do some research on this. But I can't believe that in the 19th century, for example, there was these kind of strict controls on markets for child rights. I don't believe that. And there were also, you know, in the 1800s right up until about 1900, when all the progressives started taking over different functions and putting them into government hands. There was a wide variety of of charity organizations that that a woman could turn to at any point in that process and get anonymous help. You know, even if that just meant going down to the local church or whatever and handing them a basket, no questions asked and it's taken care of. If you did that now, you'd be arrested. That that's against the law. Yeah, you're exactly right. I was telling Stefan this this morning, he was a little bit taken aback by it because Stefan Stefan said, well, wow, you know, a marketing for parent or parenting rights would obviously, you know, it's provide something like a compromised position for this this grim abortion debate going on. And I said, well, unfortunately, Stefan, I've proposed this to many prolifers and they they say that that the solution of of of a real active market is unconscionable and that actually they would prefer the status quo over over that. So so they act like preventing fetal infanticide is their biggest priority, but it's really not. It's really fornication or degradation of social morals or whatever because they they won't stand for that as a way to solve the problem. They think that they think that a market for parenting rights would would set up a moral or moral hazard so that suddenly you'd be you sort of be promoting promiscuity and pregnancy you know, as a means towards, you know, sort of personal profitability. And I said that to Stefan this morning and can tell the answer was, you know, what could they possibly be talking about? I mean, like, and how does that change the existing status quo? You know, I mean, it's not as if people can say, oh, wow, yeah, I've been living out like an incredibly virtuous life up to now. I think I'll just be promiscuous. No, and like I said, if that was the if that was really the case, if there was really an intelligent person who was dedicated towards trying to start producing babies for this market, they would go to a sperm bank and they would get the best sperm they'd advertise their, you know, their progeny that way. And it would be an artificial insemination. It wouldn't be even promiscuity. So it's just the idea is ridiculous. It's not like there's a demand for crack babies. There's a demand for crack babies because the government has corrupted the market, you know, and these babies need help and they've actually caused this problem. Yeah, I hope I hope I hope both of you are like fully aware of how like incredibly radical this this discussion is. Like I never heard a public discussion of this topic, like ever. So this is kind of weird in a way. It's it is radical. But in another way, to me, it's just like the argument of well, who will build the roads? Well, if there's a demand for roads, roads will be built. But how do we know that roads are the thing that the market will demand? You know, it could be for flying cars or it could be for individual zeppelins. I mean, the only way we know that roads need to be built is because the government is forcing that issue now. And that's the process that the government has decided is the best. And and that's I whether we're talking about abortion, whether we're talking about drugs, whether we're talking about, you know, how groceries get to a grocery store and who determines whether this chicken is acceptable or and that chicken is not acceptable. All those things, the mark I believe and I think that's why it falls back to a faith question. I believe in the market. I believe and I believe the market is the will of people. If people want rotted chicken and dead babies, they're going to get rotted chicken and dead babies no matter what we think about it, you know. Another way to put it, Ben, is that, you know, it's that you don't believe in coercive control and its and its capacity to improve society. You know, that doesn't mean you want everything in the world to be subjected to some sort of price system. It's just that you don't you don't believe that that using aggressive force in that sort of centrally central planning command and control mentality can is capable of improving on what people could otherwise achieve through their own ingenuity. Well, let me let me say what I would say is I don't quite agree with what's a little bit maybe implicit here is this kind of Chicago supply demand idea that everything, in other words, if something is valued and demanded, it will be provided. A lot of anarchists point out that a lot of these victimless crime laws, right, like drugs and prostitution, et cetera, that in a free market anarchist private law society, no one's willing to pay for them because they're not really being victimized by them. OK, so you can see a tendency for these laws to fade away because no one is willing to pay for it. You know, you don't really want to pay $100,000 this year for a cruise missile to bomb Afghanistan because you don't really get much out of it. But people are willing to pay for real defense and stopping and prevention of real crimes. So the question is where does abortion fall on that issue? As Jeff and I have talked about and the way I sort of lean towards the issue, I think most normal decent people, including libertarians, think abortion is a little bit, at least, of a horrible thing to go through, right, if you don't have to. There's something morally questionable about doing it, not saying it should be prevented. You can even argue that there is a rise for our election. You could even argue it's a type of murder, type of infanticide. You could even argue that parents have an obligation to protect their children, including their unborn children, and that there's some argument for a type of rights violation. But in the practical world we live in, I think the right answer any society would have to gravitate towards is saying the question is, who is the right decision maker about this? Who has the jurisdiction? Is it the state? Is it the county? Is it the local government? Is it the local community? Or is it the family and the mother herself? And I think that a hands-off, manly, respectful approach means that we have to say you can have your own opinions about abortion. But the bottom line is it's up to the mother to be the jurisdiction here to make the decision about what happens. And everyone else should butt out. And that jurisdiction includes not only the termination of the pregnancy, but also the carrying of the pregnancy to the end on a fiduciarily rewarding basis. Right? Absolutely. And so if the state stops interfering in other mechanisms that would come about, and if this Puritan culture we have that frowns upon our sexual nature, stops penalizing and shaming women for admitting that they ever had sex by being pregnant, they wouldn't be so embarrassed about being pregnant for a few months. There's actually, I don't know if you guys know about this. There's a science fiction libertarian science fiction novel by Victor Coleman, which I read maybe 20 years ago called Solomon's Knife. And it's a pretty interesting thought experiment about this procedure which he proposes called transoption, which is some medical procedure where imagine it's possible at pretty much any stage of a pregnancy to take the developing fetus, embryo, zygote, whatever it is, and put it into another woman's body. And if that was really an option, then there would be very, very, very little excuse for having an abortion. I mean, if you're two months pregnant, instead of having an abortion, if you really don't want the baby, you could just transopt it into some other woman who would be a willing recipient. But if the market's not working... I recommend that novel, by the way. Yeah, it'd be the market working with technology. But if the market's not working, we're not gonna see those kind of technological solutions emerge either precisely. And the law blocks the market by making certain experiments illegal. Also, the government taxes, and I don't mean taxes as in money coming out of your paycheck, but the market, the government, taxes the research community in the sense that a certain percentage of the very smartest people who would be doing the research that would make that possible are instead doing research that one might consider silly or unnecessary or that just wouldn't be taking place in the market if the government weren't subsidizing some odd thing. A bizarre thing that the government might subsidize doesn't necessarily come to mind, but something like the length of butterfly wings as opposed to the taste buds of a hawk or something like this. Whatever goofy thing that the government has subsidized to be researched, those researchers in a true market situation would have the opportunity and be pushed by the market into doing research into more productive stuff like how do you transfer a newly fertilized egg from one female to another without damaging either of the three? Maybe one of you understand something about this, and I wish I knew more about it, but as I understand it, there is an active market for women to serve service. The surrogate mother's now on a profitable basis. I think I'm right about that. My understanding is that's only in the case where they get implanted with a in vitro fertilized embryo from a separate mother and father so they have no legal DNA. Okay, but I mean, the question is why? I mean, how can you enter into this kind of contractual relationships on a remunerative basis under those conditions but not under a natural biological basis? Because the birth mother in most cases, my understanding is correct, the birth mother has no legal claim based upon the existing family law legal rights system to the fetus because she's simply the host, but she has no genetic claim to it. In normal case, let's say a man and a woman are married and the woman is infertile. And so the man's sperm is used to artificially intimidate some surrogate, but it impregnates her egg. So now biologically, she's the mother, she's the mother of the child. So if she wanted to back out of the contract, she could do that because these types of contracts are not respected because there's this sort of inalienability aspect or this kind of inviolable right she has to be the mother of the child because she has a genetic connection to it. So it's because of government restrictions that people resort to, well, we're gonna have the in vitro fertilization so you have no genetic connection and then we can have a contract that's gonna be respected by the courts. So of course the courts distort the market. I mean, the government laws distort the market, distort the culture and distort the practices that we would otherwise engage in. Yeah, this is assuming that simply because there's some genetic material that links the woman to the unborn child, this assumes that there's a property right in that link. But does that really match libertarian theory of property rights and of homesteading and so forth? In what way does a genetic link create a property rights link? So I don't think it quite matches that. I think it matches with some intuitions and it's sort of a leftover of a previous legal order where you wanted to have a presumption of the parent's obligation to take care of the children and in the previous pre-technical days that was genetic or just by sex or whatever. This view is not, I would say, it's not settled at all among libertarians. Not even discussed a lot. My personal view is that, so let me just mention one thing here. It's a way to get started thinking about it. Libertarians often try to distinguish their theory from every alternative political theory by saying that unlike everyone else, we don't believe in positive obligations or positive rights because a positive right, like a right to welfare or a job or to be supported implies a positive obligation on the behalf of someone else, which means they're basically your slave, right? So in other words, if you have the right to a job, that means someone else can be taxed to take money to give you a job or housing or clothing or education or food or whatever. So libertarians generally are knee-jerk against the concept of positive rights and positive obligations. I think they've misstepped a little bit there. I understand the enemy they're fighting against, but what we have to recognize is that we're not against positive rights or positive obligations in general, we're against unchosen positive obligations or rights. So if you choose to obligate yourself or to be obligated to provide someone with something by a contract or by some kind of relationship or some kind of action even. So one example I've given is, let's suppose you're walking by a lake or a pond and you push a stranger into the lake who can't swim. Now this person is now drowning in the lake. Do you have an obligation to jump in and try to rescue them? Now normally the libertarian law and the common law would have said if you pass by a lake and you see a drowning stranger, it may be a moral obligation to try to rescue them, but you don't have a legal obligation such that if you fail to do it, if they drown, that you're implicated in their death, that's the normal rule. But in the case where you cause the position of peril, then I think you could come up with a good argument that you have incurred a positive obligation to remediate the harm, to make the harm less than it otherwise would be as the result of your actions. And you could use arguments along these lines, I think, to argue that parents who cause dependent, helpless, rights-bearing, sentient human beings to come into the world, you are the one responsible for their upkeep and their care, and you even have some obligations towards them because of natural connection and because of your causal role in causing them to be placed in a position of helplessness and of need. So you could use an argument like that to argue for some kind of positive obligations for a parent towards the result of their actual actions in life, just like if you have a negligent car accident and you harm someone or you've hurt someone in some other way, you thereby incur an obligation to help them. So I think there is a way to argue for some kind of natural, even legally enforceable positive obligation of parents that mirrors what we morally say is an obligation. Of course, we all believe in these moral obligations. How far that can go, how practical it is, I don't know. Stefan, every time you talk about these issues, it intrigues me because I like the way you quite often will invoke the common law because you're drawing on history, human experience of time and place, moral, intuition, a sense of what's happened before, drawing on subtleties of legal regimes that are very much connected with the real experience of human life. Yes, it's more like an incremental, gradual, cautious, humble approach towards gradually developing our understanding of social relationships. I like it when you, it always intrigues me when you talk like this because yeah, it causes our hearts and minds to be a little more deferential to the reality of human experience and sometimes a kind of a reduced form of severe doctrinaire NIP-based liberty thinking would cause us to be. I mean, our views do have to be tempered and I don't wanna say moderated, but at least somewhat corrected by the reality of human experience. Right, right. And I mean, look, these types of considerations arise in a lot of contexts, like when libertarians and other people disagree about issues like spanking or child discipline or child education or whether you can raise your child religious or not or circumcision, there's a certain blend of tolerance and live and let live and minding your own damn business and also economy. How many resources do we have to fight every problem in the world? What do we really wanna devote our resources, our personal, our cultural, our community and our economic resources towards fighting? And normally it's self-defense and it's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs which Jeff, didn't we talk about this? We've rediscovered the lowest rung on Maslow's hierarchy of needs is Wi-Fi in the hotel. I don't know what to say. Why, but wait, this is, what you're describing is why I'm an anarchist, right? I mean, this is, you have to have anarchism in order for society to work, for it to be in this constant discovery mode of, because life is complicated, there's always surprise, there's unique circumstances of time and place, there's technological development, there's advancement of ideas, there's remixing of ideas, life is beautiful and kaleidoscopic, but if you want the natural evolution of the social order to generate solutions to problems, you've got to have anarchism, because the great evil of the state to me is not just as violence, as wars, as death, as destruction, everything else is very apparent, but what's also evil about the state is how it stops the workings of social evolution itself. It zooms a kind of final regimented model of imposition that disables the capacity of the human mind to constantly think of better ways of living. Yeah, and it gives rise to problems that the state can then say, now we need to come in and solve these problems that we've created, by the way, but yeah, so it gives them a role of being the problem solver. Yeah, it's funny for me, because I think every intellectuals has to be sort of internally self-critical, but one thing I have a lot of doubts about a lot of things in this world, like I don't know the answers to a lot of things, but I am as dedicated an anarchist as like any other proposition that exists in the world of politics or society, economy. I am so dedicated to anarchism, and sometimes I have to ask myself why, and I think the bottom line is exactly this. The state always sort of short circuits the capacity of the human mind to find solutions to the always emerging problems that exist around us. So long as the state exists, we're disabled from finding the best possible way out of those valetiers that constitutes the world in which we live. And Ben, let me just mention something here, because there's a couple of thoughts, Jeff and I talked about it this morning too, so I don't know exactly what your thoughts on the abortion issue are. I can't see how libertarian can be other than pro-choice in a practical sense, because the intrusiveness of a regulation to stop it, now I'm not saying there should be social sanctions or cultural sanctions or whatever, and it should be as rare as possible, but it has to be pro-choice at a certain point. But to me, a more interesting libertarian issue, which maybe we can talk about another time, would be issues such as adoption as another, and I have a special interest in that, given my personal history, but also surrogate father issues or sperm donor issues, and also let's say a boyfriend of a girl who gets her pregnant wants her to have an abortion and she doesn't, then is he responsible for the child? So to me, these are more practical legal libertarian questions that are going to arise in the real world, and that we could talk about more interestingly. It's unbelievably complicated. I mean, these kinds of issues are just, we could talk all day about them, the circumstances of time and place involved in these kind of mysterious issues. I mean, I don't know any other solution other than to let the social order work them out a little bit of time towards ever increasing degrees of approximating better solutions. The idea that you would codify one homogeneous answer for the whole population and impose it through force using the state strikes me as just utterly preposterous. Stefan, unfortunately, we've hit the time limits that you had mentioned. Do you need to, do you need to get going, or did you wanna? I think I've got a few more minutes, we can wrap up. I've got five or so more minutes. Okay, great. Go ahead and use it. I'm just so intrigued by this conversation and I'm challenged and delighted by it. Even though we haven't talked about IP even once. No, but Ben did give me an opening earlier, but I let it go. So I streamed myself. He said something that made me think about IP. Well, we can give a teaser and maybe have another one of these after some time goes by and pick back up on that. We need to talk about some fundamentals. So Stefan and I have talked over the years about this whole issue because I think, I think for me, the IP issue is very interesting because it starts with why copyright and patents are an example of government intervention, but that's only the first step. Because through that, then you discover something unique about information and its unique properties for being the sort of the life of the social order and its functioning. And once I discovered that, it really, really affected the way I began to think about politics, libertarianism and everything else. And so I should actually say a public thank you to Stefan because he opened up this whole world to me in many ways. You're welcome. That's my poodles again, right on time. Come on in. Let me just say one thing before we close off. I sent you guys, it's for a teaser, Ben, I sent you guys a note, I wrote it five a.m. this morning. I don't know if you guys operate this way. I'm a procrastinator and things just- That was a great memo, by the way. It was like a masterpiece written, you know. It really was. It was like an article. I read it and wrote it, yeah. And that's what happens, right? You kind of let things germinate in your head for a while and then they finally are ready to come out, right? And I woke up at 4.30 a.m. and I just said, I gotta sit down and just write this down because otherwise I can't get back to sleep. And so we actually didn't get to it and that's fine, but maybe we can do that for another one. It's just about the relationship between aggression and homesteading and contract theory and confusions that people have understandably had along the way and the way I'm beginning more and more to think about these issues. And I think we could have a productive and interesting conversation about that. It speaks, your memos spoke to the heart of a very important issue to the Liberty-minded tradition or libertarianism having to deal with private property and the rights surrounding private property. And you'd think that within the world of liberty that would have already been long ago worked out and we would have a settled doctrine and for years I believe this. And then only to sort of look very carefully and discover that actually, there's still a lot of questions that remain about this. And Stefan is responsible for raising a lot of very fundamental issues concerning Lockianism, whether or not property is really is a kind of a natural right in the same sense that we think of self-ownership as a natural right or whether or not it's a social construct based on strange circumstances of scarcity. These are foundational issues. And what I found out actually that we as a community of thinkers are essentially unsettled about this, that didn't alarm me. It actually excited me to imagine that there's still so much work to do on such foundational areas. What excites me also is that, but also I actually see progress coming because I see that, look, I know some people criticize us because I say, well, our movement's only 50 years old. Then they say, oh, you haven't figured out child rights by now? Well, come on, we're pretty young still. But I just see these things are slowly coming to the surface. We build upon each other's insights. And I do see lots of potential for lots of progress in the upcoming say decade or so. I don't think we're done yet at all. So I'm actually hopeful and optimistic and inspired by the idea. It presumes a sort of template of civility, a teachable spirit, a willingness to listen to each other and people that are invested in finding solutions to these ideas. And not to turn it back around to my project, but this is the reason I started Liberty.Me that I wanted to see this sort of firmament of civility and openness to new ideas so that we could actually work on perfecting things rather than that sort of Facebook-based bromide culture and wickedness and viciousness that the public enter that tends to promote. Yep, I agree. Stefan, how can people get ahold of you, look at your website and buy your books? Probably the best source is just under my name, stefanpinsella.com. And I'll put links in today's show notes to that as well. And Stefan does have a podcast. How often do you podcast, Stefan? Oh, it's irregular. It's roughly once a week or two lately. So whenever I do a show like yours or think of something I need to do, I put it up there. Do you need to get going then? Yeah, I think I need to close out. So why don't we do this again someday? I enjoyed it. Like I told you before, you're one of the best hosts I've ever had. So I appreciate that. Let me echo that. You're amazing. And Ben, I should probably close out too. And if anybody wants to find my work, you can find my own website now, tucker.liberty.me, which I'm excited about. And you can find all my work there. I'm doing now a twice-week podcast too. So it's pretty fun. Gentlemen, I really appreciate you coming on the Bad Quaker show with me. I really like both of your work more than we have time for me to go into and kiss both of your butts and tell you how great you've done and how you've inspired me and everything. But we could spend the next hour with me just saying that stuff. Well, if we don't talk before Port Fest, I guess I'll see you there. I'm gonna try to arrive on Saturday. I didn't know you were gonna be at Port Fest. Well, I'm at a fee conference and then I'm trying to touch down in Ohio, I think for the Libertarian Party event on Friday and then I'm just really gonna take a plane right out and get to Port Fest as soon as I can for Friday night and Saturday. So, I'll cool you. And next year I'm gonna bring Stefan with me and make sure that he, and he'll be greeted like the star that he truly is. He will be. If I'm there, I can get. Oh, well gentlemen, I won't take any more of your time. I really appreciate you coming on the show with me. I'll do my little exit here for my listeners. Folks, be sure and get over to badquaker.com where Liberty is our mission. And thank you very much, gentlemen, for coming on the show. And folks, thanks for listening today. Thanks again, dear friends. Thanks, guys.