 to get easier? I think that's right and one of the things in the there's I mean a lot going on now where I don't know what the right thing to do is. I mean on a policy level I'm trying to work it out but it's hard to know and we could talk about the role of philosophy in all of this and trying to understand these things but there's also there's going to be a period after this crisis has passed and everybody is going to be rethinking everything and who's to blame what's to blame what kind of society should we have why did this happen what would have prevented it and there's going to be that's going to be a time to really push and we need to be working now to understand these issues and we need to be in a position to advocate for what's right not on concrete issues like what should you do once you have something that's spreading rapidly through your population but how you know what could we have done not to be in this kind of situation and to be more prepared in so far. Yeah I mean part of the problem is that the mixed economy and the mixed premises people have have put us in a position where there is no good there are no good answers there is no way to deal with problems without violating rights for example because rights have been violated for decades in in setting ourselves up for where we are today so feel free guys to ask if you want to ask questions there's a super chat we've got we've got our first question which relates to this I might as well jump into it what are both of your opinions and the infringements of our rights due to the shutdown even in a pandemic do you think our rights should be preserved yeah I mean rights should be preserved always but there's a question about what it looks like to preserve them in in different situations and I think in emergency situations there are certainly places where governments can issue shelter in place orders or things like that for short times I find it hard to justify the kind of lengths and extent of it that's happening now um but there's another aspect to this this is why I say I don't really have worked out how to deal with this um people liberty and rights are it's not like in a state of nature we're free and secure and then you know governments might come and interfere with our rights or criminals might come and interfere with our rights if you imagine like primitive people living in a tribe or people living in a really early civilization they're living on top of each other their whole life is public and controlled by the group and part of what the evolution of good government over the centuries has been and the development of individualism in the principle of rights is figuring out how when people are living together and close and on top of each other and everything they do impacts one another how can we make it so that each person is able to lead his own life by his own judgment and he can make choices and incur risks and so forth and then he suffers the consequences if those risks go badly and gets the rewards if they go well and um even like the the advent of private property someone had to come up with you know you can own land and then what you do to the land you get to keep when you improve it and you could have property and other things and so forth um one fact about human beings is that we can get sick and we can spread disease to one another and that when we live close to one another we can be vectors for spreading disease to one another and uh when we didn't understand well how that worked there was nothing we could do about it now that we do understand better how it works we have to think about well how I think more than I have about how should law handle this how do we define rights in this context and it's a very bad result in a crisis when everybody forget what the law should do when there's a problem where if you know we go out of our houses we might cause a disease to avalanche out of control and kill more people um we're in a situation where it seems like our abilities to live with one another conflict that my doing something will come at someone else's expense and someone else is doing it will come at my expense and who's going to sacrifice by who's staying in um part of what we need to understand better is how over the long run to separate our lives to disentangle our lives to define the principles that we each have a sphere in which we can act and my doing what I do will not endanger Iran or someone's grandmother or someone else somewhere and uh part of that might be thinking about like what kind of liability can individuals have for their own spreading of disease what um uh and different ways to monetize that relate it to um what kind of insurance and healthcare you have and there's a lot of thinking about how uh how to make it so we each have the maximum amount of control of our own life on our own risk given the fact that diseases like this are possible yeah and it's it it's complicated because there are all kinds of diseases and um you know you can't sue somebody for giving you the cold I don't think right um and where where do you cross the line and and this is I never thought of it quite this way but it's true that if you had a actually if you had an actual insurance market in these kind of things the market would determine what's the threshold by which in a sense you're self-insured getting a cold no big deal I lose a couple of days of work or where it gets the point where no no I really need insurance for this so and and markets would probably or all governments would develop kind of markets for what constitutes real threats what constitutes insurable threats what is non-insurable um but but we live in a world where none of this is thought out none of this is where the president can announce a state of emergency out of no way or state governors can announce a state of emergency you don't need the legislative I mean another thing is I mean if this is like a war then shouldn't congress declare war shouldn't this be legislated shouldn't congress have declared a state of emergency with regard to coronavirus and given the president some special powers in that context rather than in a sense the executive just grabbing those powers because even a war today we don't declare war the president just does what he wants so we live in such a distorted time in terms of even our constitutional protections even even the way the founders thought of separation of powers and and it it's so hard to think about what could be in a you know in a proper government including that that proper governments need to evolve not in their basic principles but in how they actually function to deal with new knowledge of what's possible new levels of technology and so if you think about how would you the principle of rights and the the structure of a proper government is meant to make it possible for you to have maximum control over your own life and separate it out distinct from other people's lives you have a sphere in which you are sovereign so given that um other people can infect you with things and you can infect people with other things if you come too close to them how do we deal with that how do we deal with the range of risk that there is well first of all I mean in a proper government all property would be privately owned so there wouldn't be public spaces where you're interacting with people all right so then presumably different property owners would have different policies about when they would mandate social distancing on their property and when they wouldn't and maybe there could be um maybe the government could determine that certain practices would be reckless endangerment um or uh there would be default things about what you wouldn't wouldn't allow that you would have to sign a waiver to you know yeah you can go over this guy's house or shop in this guy's mall but understand that it's a um he's operating in a different fashion than other people operated in and it's therefore contagion is more possible there than in other places and then uh you might have to have different kinds of insurance to you know if you're doing that there's all kinds of ways that market forces can solve this but what it means for market forces to solve it is individuals are free to come up with ways to solve it if we define the rights properly in the first place that gives them the control over their own rights and interactions and this is you know I don't know exactly what that way to set them is and what the way to define them is but that's the kind of thinking that I think has to go into understanding uh how a government should function ideally and then um what small changes to our present government would get us you know more and more in that direction and of course you know in such a in just a society people would bear the cost of their own mistakes people would bear the cost of their own decisions you wouldn't have socialized the cost of medicine so if you got sick you would have to pay for that and the insurance your insurance company would have an incentive to motivate you to behave in appropriate ways so for example there could be a clause in your insurance policy that says when there's when the government announces there's a pandemic so it still depends on some announcement and we expect you to behave this way otherwise you're not covered and if you get sick we're not going to pay for you so there's so many ways to incentivize people and to and to create the right kind of contractual voluntary relationships between people when people are free to make those kind of choices yeah there's a kind of caricature of individualism where people imagine it's based on this idea that every person is sort of an isolated like windowless monad in life this is just like somehow totally distinct from and not impacted by everybody else and every piece of property is sort of totally distinct from every other one floating and avoid and then well individualism isn't true because what you do with your property affects mine and if you pollute something it might drift over into mine and if I cough maybe it gets on you but the whole principle of individualism is of course we're not these atoms and void floating apart from one another we are human beings living in a world in which matter is continuous and everything's touching and things get everything affects everything else and what we do is in light of that we figure out how to draw the lines to separate things out such that one person's mind can control his life and he's able to live his life by his own reasoning and the next person over is on the next person over it and as much of their interaction as possible is chosen by them and the more that we understand the ways in which we can impact one another like by as vectors for disease to spread or in some other way the more we can understand how to create the laws and define the right such as to empower people to live that way so it's real individualism starts with the recognition that we're not automatically separated out from one another we're all thrown into one another and we have to figure out if we each value our own lives and recognize that our own mind and own choice and own decision making is what makes our life possible to us and worth living figure out how to give us each a sphere in which we're sovereign and keep those spheres separate so that we know what's up to whom and once you have that then you have markets and capitalism and it can solve these problems yeah and and the orientation here is very different than the orientation that libertarians have because the orientation here is towards the positive it's towards the creating a sphere in which you can positively impact your life and pursue your values and use your mind I mean when libertarians often talk about rights when they talk about rights they talk about it as you know my rights end with you know when my fist approaches your nose or something like that and it's all a negative it's all in the sense of rights uh you know as long as I don't hurt you I can do whatever the hell I want that that's the kind of perspective on rights which is completely wrong in terms of you know it's so much more about empowering the positive and positive in the sense of the right way of living yeah I mean it's it's negative in the sense that it's about empowering the positive by separating it out from the things other people can do that can make it impossible that can harm you so there's a sense in which you know my freedom ends where your nose begins or whatever is true and what they call negative rights I don't have a right to something from you I have a right to freedom from you but then why do I have a right to freedom from you how do we understand what freedom is and it's not some default state that we find value of freedom why should I why should I value freedom exactly and it's not some default thing that people automatically value or automatically know what it is or automatically exist another way I think of it with libertarianism is there's this kind of ridiculous thing that libertarians claim like every government goes bad or gets worse as though governments there was some garden of Eden where everybody nobody forced anybody and then somebody the first guy robbed someone and someone had the idea well we'll set up a government to stop robber again and for a couple of days it went well but then suddenly the Gestapo came or something um but that is totally a historical most governments haven't gotten worse over time it's not like we started in some kind of free state and it became more and more totalitarian by and large governments have gotten better um I mean if you look Mike if you look at America's government over a certain period gotten worse or other government but it's not like every time society's improved and people have become more free it's because there's been a bloody revolution and we started from scratch there's been evolution to more and more respect for not enough I mean but still over a period of time more and more respect for freedom for individualism if you think about Britain from the Middle Ages until the into the 19th century I mean this is um you know there were some revolutions occasionally along the way but it was mostly a free development mostly a bloodless development towards the better and um it's because it's not freedom is not something automatic it's not a default state it's an achievement Rand spoke about government as having the purpose of extracting force from social relations and that's something we have to learn to do and come up with institutions to do and the right institution is a capitalist a government that's based on the protection of individual rights but that's a real achievement and it's not an achievement that's been fully made we've approached it but not gotten there so I don't want to return to the question because I'm not sure we completely answered it so what is my opinion on the infringement of our rights I mean I do think our rights are being infringed today they're being infringed partially because the arbitrary nature of what's being done partially because there's no timeline there's no there's no plan there's no strategy there's you get a sense of people just acting some secondhandedly that the governors and mayors were saying well why am I doing this shut down well because everybody else has done it so it sounds like the right idea to Como saying the other day well maybe it was wrong of me to actually shut down the entire economy who know you know kind of as if you know nobody had thought this through nobody had a plan so I do think their rights being infringed primarily because of this irrational almost you know emotionalistic response to the to the crisis and also because of the failure to deal with it appropriately early on now maybe we would have got to this point anyway even if the governor done the best that it could have done with the testing and the data early on but we don't know that because they screwed it up so badly so it's you know here in Puerto Rico this in context is dropped right so you can't even take a walk here you can't even go out of your I mean it's absurd so if you believe in social distancing then okay as long as you're far away from people then that should be fine but here you they don't even want to I mean you can't literally be alone in a park because the park is quote closed and this goes to to the fact that there's no private property which which but even if there is right even if I owned the park they'd still close it wouldn't let me hang yeah there's a do you think about where the rights violations are and when they took place so in effect the way the healthcare system is run and the way lots of things are run are such that we've been shackled together years ago and so now we're kind of all in this together in a way we didn't have to be and then on top of the the the really egregious ways in which we've been shackled together where we didn't used to be because we have our medicine is so much more socialized everywhere in the world than it once was um there's also ways in which we've just failed to figure out how to um deal governmentally with the situation of infectious disease so we are by default thrown all in the same boat when better crafting of laws better figuring out how to find rights in in this domain would have gotten us out of this boat that is it's an achievement to have a good government right um so we're all kind of thrust in with one another in ways that we could have avoided based on things we already know and could have learned to avoid uh in the things we don't know and so we're in a situation where we're unfortunately in a life boat and in an emergency and so some kind of restrictions I think are unavoidable and they are violations of rights but they're violations of rights that were baked in from the beginning um that said I don't think I think there's additional violations in how this is being handled so I don't know how much locking in for how long can possibly be justified but I know that none of it can be justified without clear plans honesty about what's happening honesty about how we got here uh honesty about you know transparency about what's going on that this is a horrible abnormal situation you're being asked to do something that would normally you couldn't be asked to be done and we owe you whoever governor or government that's doing it a plan um we have no right to um any kind of petty personal squabbling um any kind of offense uh they should be you know profusely apologizing for this having to be the situation and saying we'll tell you everything as soon as we know what we're gonna and and really be doing this with a plan for how to get out of it and it's clear that our leaders are panicked and they're not doing that and um and so and there's also this weird they're not willing to actually say that some people are more susceptible than others right so we all know it but they I've seen nobody on the stage say you know and if you're over 65 or if you have existing additions you should be a thousand times more careful because you know you're likely to the probability of you dying is actually significantly higher it's as if their egalitarianism doesn't allow them to differentiate between those who are susceptible we all must suffer equally in some way in in these locker lockdowns is when people are giving personal advice on it they do make that distinction right be particularly careful if you're immunocompromised or this or that but when our policy prescriptions have been um uh too blind to it and I do think there's a kind of egalitarianism behind that and also a kind of faking of reality at a broad level I mean I think the earliest policy responses to this were let's try to do this little thing whatever little thing is consistent with what we already thought uh what kind of thing we already like to do and hope it'll fix things so for Trump it was shut down some borders right because he always likes shutting down borders that's his go-to thing and then maybe that'll fix it and I won't have to think about it anymore uh but for other politicians who have different views and different things and maybe you know whatever you think about borders maybe you think they should be shut down I think they shouldn't in general but you know if it was someone who had my policy it might be loosen this regulation or this one thing but one little thing that we imagine will fix it and then we don't have to think about it and uh when it got worse it's now we know you know we have to do this lockdown but there's a kind of I think happy talk evasive thinking that when each measure is taken this will be the one that'll solve the problem and not grappling with the fact that the problem is not fully solvable at this point there's gonna be a lot of death and a lot of destruction mistakes have been made there can't be getting out of that and then the question is how do we minimize the damage and really thinking integratively about all the levels of damage and all the different types of damage and you can't think you're going to save every life at infinite cost to the economy as though damaging the economy and locking people in their homes basically imprisoning them is not damaging their lives both in the sense of the quality of life what makes life worth living and second literally people will die because of it or they'll live their last years you're in a you know in a cage um which is not a way that's worth living so um there's gonna have to be a real reckoning with you know this measure would save some lives although still a lot of people will die this measure would save some more lives but it's the difference is not worth it and uh and people can't be demanded to make that sacrifice and part of it is going to have to be recognizing that some people are more vulnerable and they're going to have to just in the nature of reality go through higher go through more to protect themselves and we should try to help them but um we can't try to create a world in which the most susceptible to this are the most susceptible to the worst effects are prevented at all costs from dying even if everybody else is made to suffer indefinitely yeah we at some point implied that basically said one life one life and and that's uh okay let's let's do what we need today what i called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason by the intellect not by feelings wishes women's or mystic revelations any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brogues using the super chat and i noticed yesterday when i appealed for support for the show many of you step forward and actually uh supported the show for the first time so i'll do it again maybe we'll get some more today um if you like what you're hearing if you appreciate what i'm doing then i appreciate your support uh those of you who don't yet support the show please take this opportunity go to your on book show dot com slash support or go to subscribe star dot com your on book show and um and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this to keep this going i'm not sure when the next