 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. So today we're going to do something a little different. A while back on our Facebook page, we asked for listener questions and we got a lot of really good ones. So we are going to try to answer as many as we can in the time we have available. And I'd like to start, Trevor, with I think the hard one. This is the one that as libertarians we get asked all the time and it stops us in our tracks. I mean it's the end of the conversation. Libertarianism is done as soon as this question is raised. And that's what about the roads? What about the roads? Now, if you're not included on this joke, it's something that we make a lot of reference to as a joke around if you're hanging out with libertarians a lot because as Aaron said, it is this thing where it's supposed to be this silver bullet that takes you down and therefore everything you say is invalid. So first of all, I want to say that as a broader point, the fact that that argument is brought up as much as it actually is, is a demonstration of how libertarianism is treated that's different from other political ideologies because a lot of times the idea is that if you can find that libertarianism can't account or will allow something horrible to happen like there being no roads, then all of our points about, hey, we have a debt problem. Hey, we shouldn't be putting people in prison for basic drug violations. All those are out the window just because you can't tell me about roads. And that seems a little bit inaccurate to say the least and unfair because I don't argue against other people in a similar way and say, hey, Mr. Progressive, what about Mao? Like what about when the entire government decides to kill millions and millions of people? Now I look at their points that they make and we can have an interesting philosophical conversation about bigger points. So on to the topic of roads though, what about roads? The funniest thing is private provision of roads is one of the easiest questions you can answer in terms of how it would be done. Roads are not public goods. And this is a very important point. Public goods is a defined economic concept. And if you want to check my sources, just wiki public goods and see what the first thing it says is. I'm sure it will say that public goods are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. A non-rivalrous good is one that says when you use it, you don't take away any of it from someone else. And a non-excludable good is one that you can't exclude other people from. So the classic example of this would be national defense. National defense. If we have a military that's defending us, me using it doesn't remove it from you. Exactly. The marginal cost of an additional unit of supply is zero is the way an economist would say it. So the fact that there are 20 people in a country versus 21 people in a country, you still do the same thing. Now clearly, an economist who are libertarian or not would agree that I would say that public roads are not public goods. They may be good for the public, but that's not the same thing as a public good. You can absolutely exclude people from a road. And that happens all the time with toll roads. And it's rivalrous because traffic jams are a problem. And one of the things that you see when you publicly provide something that maybe shouldn't be publicly provided in all instances, we can talk about the scope of this. But one of the things you see in that is you see overconsumption to human people use it because they don't have to pay for using it because they think it's not rivalrous. So you see the traffic jams we have. And you also see the roads or whatever we're talking about with this instance roads being used and going to places to where people may not actually want to use them. So one of the things that government without price signals, if it's providing something, it's really good at providing either too much of something or not enough of it because it doesn't really know how much needs to be provided. So let me push back on that just a second because I can see kind of two answers to the two prongs that you just gave of this question. The first is people do have to pay for roads in the sense that they have to pay for the gasoline that they use on the road. Like gasoline, you know, once it's in your car, it doesn't really have any other use besides driving. So and it's you're using it up on a per mile basis. So as you drive, you're paying for it and gasoline taxes towards roads. So there's that the other one is it seems like roads more or less anywhere one wants to get right now. There's a road to it unless it's wilderness and that also the presence of roads creates places people want to go, right? So these towns that grow up along the interstate or used to grow up along the railroad tracks. So to say that roads go places where people don't want to go, does that sort of tell the whole story? That's a great question because it forces us to think about the way the state does certain things in a different way, because it is absolutely true that if the state decides to build a road where at the time no one wants to go, that eventually people may want to go there because there is now a free or at least no huge cost of them pathway there. So, you know, we're in Washington, D.C. right now and there's a commuter district around D.C. And if they decided they wanted to build a road to the middle of Pennsylvania, although right now no one wants to go there. If they did that, there would be towns that developed along the road to Pennsylvania. And then and then people will come along and say, well, hey, look, like if we didn't have this road, then the people from Pennsylvania shouldn't wouldn't be able to get to D.C. And we have to say, why are people from Pennsylvania commuting to D.C. And this is an interesting question for what happens when you publicly provide roads, because one of the things you do is you subsidize sprawl and you also subsidize pollution. And this is this is a broader libertarian point for something like global warming or just pollution in general and also sprawl something that the left generally likes to complain about is that if you build free roads that go out to the outskirts of the city, then people are not paying what it actually costs them to drive into the city. And so they all live in these suburbs that are heavily criticized and everyone says we need high density living. And if you wanted high density living, then you shouldn't be subsidizing roads that go out to places where initially people don't want to go, but then eventually they do want to go there. And then you say, well, how could the people in the suburbs ever get into the city? OK, but let's so let's agree the government doesn't have some problems with the way it builds roads. It may be builds roads in places it shouldn't doesn't build roads in places it should it doesn't necessarily maintain them as well as it could. But I think the question is not so much, you know, how should the government build roads or does the government do a good job of it? But in the absence of a government building roads, how would we have them? I mean, how would would we basically be stuck in our driveways with nowhere to take our cars? Well, I think the roads would look. Well, OK, first of all, I think that clearly there would be roads without governments. And if you went to if you thought about the actual organic-ness of roads, whether it's it includes even another species, if there's a group of antelope who constantly, you know, trod on one piece of land and wear it down and there's just a path there. Well, people do the same thing. And if you've ever seen a park in the way that, you know, shortcuts, cut through different parts of the park, become become new pathways that they don't want to use the sidewalks, you get an idea of what sort of spontaneous human movement is like versus controlled human movement. So there would definitely be roads. I think that that's clear. I've never really heard an argument, the serious one that said there wouldn't be any at all. The only question would be about the provision and scope of roads and whether or not they did the right thing. And straight roads, for example, are not very common in an organic community compared to something the government builds in with very straight lines. And they often built them for military purposes, for example, the Appian Way in Rome was the big highway in Rome. That was primarily built for military purposes and then used by other people. The federal government actually built the Alaska highway, the US government built the Alaska highway between British Columbia and Alaska in order to move troops back and forth during World War Two, fearing a Japanese invasion on the West Coast and then gave it to Canada. So that's why you get a lot of straight roads that create different things. But in generally speaking, if you go to downtown Boston, for example, I was there recently and I noticed how haphazard the roads were because they were just organically grown from where they were set down. And so that's what we would see. We would see people, there would first be a pathway is created and they'd be used generally and then maintenance would be a different thing. And if someone wanted to take over one of those roads to maintain it and charge people, there would be people who would want to go on the better road versus the worse road and they would be willing to pay for that. And the big question always is I can name a lot of things that people want to use, but they're not willing to pay for. And then it would include a lot of different roads. I mean, I can name an infinite number of things that I want to use that I don't want to pay for. And so just saying we need these here to be pathways that people don't have to pay for, well, if they paid for them, they would be a better upkeep and we've seen this in Turnpikes and Tollways in America. If they paid for them, they would be a better upkeep and they would be more used and you wouldn't be wasting resources on other things. It seems like part of the concern, though, with this libertarian view of private roads. And I should note that this isn't, it isn't like all libertarians believe that we should have private roads. And of course, the roads are one of my least grievances of the government. Right. So it's possible. Yeah. The government can do things. Roads might be one of them. This isn't this isn't kind of a uniform. Yeah. We're not libertarians because we hate roads. But I think that one of the concerns is like, yes, a toll roads is kind of the model, you know, like if we didn't have government provided roads, we'd have more toll roads. But the concern is then that toll roads are potentially expensive. Building roads, especially very long roads, is quite expensive and that therefore people without a lot of resources would have a really hard time achieving the kind of mobility that they would like to achieve and the kind of mobility that is often necessary in order to earn more money and move to places where there are better jobs and whatever else. So that's that's first of all, it's an important point. That's a distribution criticism, though, and not really a market criticism. So it wouldn't it's not necessarily a market failure based on what the distribution looks like in the traditional sense of the word market failure. It's just saying whatever the market ends up providing, it will not be distributed in the way that I would like. So I can kind of grant that, but we have to compare it to something else, for example, the gas tax, which is very retrogressive and by itself in the sense that if everyone pays the same amount for gas tax, it's not adjusted for rich people versus poor people and the poor people have to drive somewhere, they pay the gas tax, which is mostly used to it's mostly pay as you go on the roads, although it hasn't been that way for a few, about a decade, but for most of the Federal Highway Act, it's been pay as you go. So we still are a funding system right now that disproportionately hurts the people who have less. So I'm actually trying to advocate a system, not total private roads, but more private roads, which we've been seeing. We've been seeing congestion pricing becoming a thing. People are using market forces on these public thoroughfares because there's other costs that emerge and they're also put on the poor. Congestion is a cost that is put on the poor if they have to live in the suburbs and rich people can afford to live in high density, modern urban housing and then walk to work. That's another cost and maybe the situation there is not totally equitable for the way we have it now. So we have to compare it to actual alternatives as opposed to saying the roads that we provide are for everyone and everyone has equal access to them. That's not true at all. Okay, so just the takeaway then is roads would be built. Even if the government wasn't building them, they would be built. They might look different than they do right now, but we would still have them. Yes. Even in a libertarian state, there would be roads. Yes, the sort answer is that, yes. And if someone wants to give me an example of how that wouldn't be, I would love to hear someone say that there would be no roads in a libertarian state, that would be amazing to me. So thank you to David Paul Milner, who was the one who raised that important question. Miller, sorry. So let me let's move on to the next question, which is from John Elwood, which is who or what would control corporations in a libertarian government? And I think that before we say who would control corporations, we need to get it. There's kind of an assumption behind that question, which is that control happens because of government. So there are lots of things that I don't do in my daily life, that I don't go around committing crimes. I don't go around lying to all of my friends. I don't go around behaving badly. And some of those things are illegal, but many of them are not. And I still don't do them. And so it would be odd to say like, well, in the absence of government, what would keep people from lying to each other? That most people aren't jerks for one. And there are social repercussions for these sorts of things. And those controls exist now controlling corporations, which are just people acting in groups for common purposes. Those controls exist now, and they would continue to exist with more corporate regulation or substantially less. But now as to the specific controls, what would stop corporations if they figured out they could make a ton of money by, say, selling dangerous products, this toy that explodes the off chance and injures people? Without a government passing laws and making that illegal, what's to stop them from just taking these risks with our lives in order to run out profits? This is a very good question. So this goes back to the comparative analysis when I was talking about roads. We clearly have this now. There are corporations that have products out there that hurt people in a variety of ways. There are also corporations out there that have products that don't really hurt people. This has been happening with automobile regulation where there's a recall because the National Highway Transportation Safety Board, they decide that something is not safe enough and it might be the plastic fender on a car and that has no real danger to it, but now there's a bunch of extra costs. So they overestimate the cost, but we have a system here that's trying to create safety and I would be wrong and overstitting myself to say it never does that. But of course, the other side is wrong in overstitting themselves to say that the market never tries to guarantee safety in any way. It doesn't make a lot of sense to kill your customers is the basic idea. And a lot of people will roll their eyes when you hear this. It doesn't make a lot of sense to kill your customers. But in a modern society, consumers have a lot of avenues out there to try and figure out where the safety lies. They care about safety. They care about safety to different degrees. A lot of times when I lecture I ask this question about meat regulation, which is who here wants safe meat? And everyone raises their hand. And I say who here will shop for meat in the absence of meat control authority from the government? Who here would shop for meat looking for safety as one of the reasons they would shop for meat and everyone raises their hand? And then the other question, which is who here has different desire for safe meat? Who here will eat raw beef and see a few people raise their hand? Who here will only eat well-done steaks? Who will eat street food in Bangladesh? All these type of questions. So there's a huge diversity of the amount of risk that people are willing to take and people want it. So from that, I infer that corporations will generally, I think it is a safe bet, they will generally try to make their products safe. The question is what about the one guy who doesn't, right? Right. And it's not like that one guy isn't around today and it's not like there aren't corporations that produce dangerous products that slip through the regulations. So the question is, how well do the regulations work, the trade-offs of them and the liberty that they impinge in other ways, the regulations themselves, I'm sure you can speak to, you can have pernicious effects beyond any safety benefits that they create. So we need to have a realistic picture, but we can recognize that there are all these checks against bad behavior by anyone, including corporations. And it's not like, again, it's not the case we believe in a non-regulated market. And it's not even the case that I believe in no top-down regulations. But I take the question seriously about which ones will be more effective in a cost-benefit analysis and there's another type of regulation which is bottom-up. And that occurs both because of consumer choice and that also occurs because of litigation, tort litigation. But consumer choice is even more important in this. I mean, you talk to any businessman who's successful and they care most about the consumer thinking that that business is a good business that they can trust and they play the long game, the long game being like, I want that consumer to be my customer for 20 years and I don't ever want to alienate them because they got sick once by something they ate here. That's how most businessmen think. But I'm not going to say at all that there are many rapacious businessmen out there. They exist under both the government system and the more free market system. And in the government system they also can be more in government, which is a problem by itself. But of course, the corporation's question is even broader and I think you can talk about I mean, who controls the corporations as about as general as you can get. I mean, corporations and government really antagonistic to each other? No, not at all. I mean, this is this is what regulatory capture and these ideas that, you know, the powerful as a corporation becomes powerful, it can influence political actors to rig the system in its favor. And so to say that corporations and government are always at each other's throats, the government is what is protecting us from the corporations is just in most cases not true that in fact, government, a lot of the bad things that we say corporations do are enabled by the government are enabled by the regulations that are passed in their favor when a big business comes in and says, you know, this little guy over here is competing against me. I have a lot more money than he does so I can afford to bear certain costs that he can't. So I'm going to go talk the regulators into passing a regulation that's going to cause us to have to spend money to do something. We have to comply with it. We have to file more paperwork. We have to buy a certain sort of equipment or whatever. That's going to hurt him a lot more than it's going to hurt me. And once I drive him out, I'm going to benefit greatly. And this sort of stuff happens all the time. I mean, it happens when we watch the taxi cab companies, lobby state and city governments to ban the startup Uber, which is a bride at transport. You call the vehicle up. You get a vehicle sent to you by with your phone. It's an absolutely terrific service. In many cases, it's much better than using a taxi, but they can't stand it because it's competing with them. And so they get the city governments to pass laws basically outlawing Uber. It happens with restaurants that get they feel threatened by food trucks because food trucks can operate at lower costs and can go where people are. And so the restaurants get regulations passing. You know, only so many cars can be parked on the street or you have to be parked a certain distance from different locations or whatever. And all these are designed to use the muscle of the state to benefit themselves, not just at the expense of these other businesses, which is bad in and of itself, but it's at the expense of us as consumers because the reason these other businesses are a threat to the incumbent companies is that we as consumers want to go to them. We prefer them. Uber gives us a better experience. We want to use it. The food trucks give us tastier food at a lower price or more convenience. We want to use them. Yeah, that's the double-sided. I mean, it is a demonstration that they have to use government that they're hurting the consumer. Right. Yeah. I think that that also occurs, of course, on the bigger level. When you get into the SEC, you know, the Securities Exchange Commission, I mean, it occurs at the high levels and more things we put into place like the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. These are all going to be something where the corporations have more influence. The bigger ones have more influence than you do if you're trying to compete against them. And some of the worst things that government has ever done are sort of the silliest things. I wouldn't say worse. We go pretty far on that. But the sillier things they've done, such as during the New Deal, they created the National Recovery Act and the National Recovery Administration, which was an entire cartilization scheme created by FDR to have big businesses write their codes of fair competition. I'm putting fair competition and scare quotes here in order to create nonruinous competition. They thought competition was destructive of productivity. And if you read some of their accounts of this, you see a perfect example of big business capturing government and doing it in favor of outcompeting their smaller competitors. There's a story about a tire company in Ohio. So in Ohio, they had a code of fair competition for tires, which was written entirely by Goodyear, Firestone, and Michelin. And if you were there's a company called the Ferris Tire Company, P-H-A-R-I-S that wrote into the Senate and said we're trying to compete against them, but they wrote the code of fair competition, which means we often have the same prices. And the only way we can compete against them is to have a lower price because we can't compete against their national name. We have a lower price tire and they have a national name. And if the customer has to pay the same for every tire, then they're going to buy the national name because it's the one they know more about. That's just generally true. That's what it's like to compete against a big business. And if you look at just the massive pages of federal regulations and how much they prefer big corporations the name of small businesses. Now, that being said, I mean, our ideal world does not have corporate malfeasance in it. It's going to have that. It's just whether or not you exacerbate it by government regulations that are captured by corporations. Our next question, it's actually two quite good questions, comes from James Michael Gerard Jones. So the first is, are all libertarians anarchists? And the answer to that is no. I mean, libertarianism is a big tent that runs the gamut from, yes, there are outright anarchists who believe that there should be no state to say classical liberals who argue that there should be a state and it's much larger than the anarchists would allow a state that protects our rights. You know, it has police and national defense and potentially builds roads and provides all sorts of services. They're, I mean, what, what ties these together, what makes them all libertarian is the respect for liberty and that they want a state that's much smaller than the one we've got now. So no, you don't, you do not need to be an anarchist to be a libertarian and not all libertarians are anarchists. Some people, there are some people who would say libertarians have to be anarchists and they're the same thing. I think that I'm a little bit more ecumenical about the people that will include libertarians, especially in terms of the fight we have before us, which is an incredibly large state that is constantly growing and doing more and more things that are not in anyone who believes in limited government, classical liberal down to anarchists, none of these things are okay with any of us. So I think we should all be on the same team in fighting for that. I do think though that even, even not being anarchists, anarchism should be taken seriously for the questions that it provokes. I think this is the value of anarchism no matter what your particular political views are because what anarchism does is, it says every action that the state takes has to be justified and justifying it is often very difficult. And so the anarchist arguments, the arguments that they raise, even if you don't ultimately accept their conclusions that therefore the state is not justified in any form, still make it difficult to answer in the affirmative this justification of each step that the state takes. And so you can listen to our prior episode with philosopher Jason Brennan on the duty to obey the law where we go into a lot of these sorts of questions that anarchism raises and how difficult they are to overcome. But I think that's the value of anarchism even for non-anarchists is that it puts the state at least more on the defensive than it usually is and makes it have to work harder to violate our freedoms or to limit our liberties for whatever benefits it might create. Yeah, and I also, I heard Jonah Goldberg say one time that conservatives should always have a libertarian in the room because they keep conservatives honest because the libertarians is the first person to say, why is the government even doing this? And I can say they say the same thing about libertarians. Libertarians should always have an anarchist in the room because they're the first person to say, why is the government doing anything at all? And that's a valuable point if it's not done in any sort of, I would say lowbrow or punk rock way. Just, you know, when you actually have intelligent anarchists who usually know a lot about the possibilities of a stateless existence and will be the first person people to point out to when someone says, well, we have to have the state to provide money and they'll be the first people to say, well, the United States didn't provide money until the 1860s, so we clearly don't need that. Sure, and we'll put a link in the show notes to we have a lecture video with David Friedman, an economist and an anarcho-capitalist who in that he explains a lot of these ways that he thinks that a stateless society could provide many of the things that we think our, that a state is needed for. So that would be probably of interest. So let's move on to then the second James's two questions, which is similar to the first one. So in the sense of asking this question of who can be within this libertarian tent? And of course, there's no one, there's no one at the gates of these tents. There's no one saying who's allowed to enter or not. But the question is, you know, are my views that I particularly, that I happen to hold generally libertarian or not? And so his question here is, can Christians be libertarians? Well, absolutely. And depending on how far you wanna take this, you could say that, you know, Christians should be libertarians if you agreed with me on what helps people the best. So if your biggest commitment from a Christian standpoint is to help people, well, then I would say look at government programs and private programs and this program, this libertarian solution versus the other ones and see which one you think helps people the most and which one would be something that Jesus would be most in line with. But of course, it doesn't mean that a Christian must be a libertarian or that he can't be a socialist either. Of course, the libertarian view is a bigger tent. Unlike socialists or let's more say communists who actually said you couldn't be religious and be a communist. We would never ever say anything like that, not only because we don't really care and we want 1,000 flowers to bloom in a world of human, diverse human flourishing and we don't think there's only one way a person can be to live in our world. In fact, I find that world pretty boring and I don't want to use the state to try and make everyone another the same type of person. It is interesting to look at how and why socialists or communists did have to eventually say that Christians couldn't be part of their society because they had allegiances that were not to the state and they had allegiances of charity that were not through the state and all these other attitudes that didn't work with them and we are on the exact opposite of that. The private charity and the beliefs that Christians have are a huge part of the world that we advocate and a bunch of other beliefs too. Timothy M. Barrett asks what objective basis, on what objective basis does a libertarian determine right versus wrong? And answering this question, I think the first thing that we have to note is that libertarianism is a political philosophy and so any given set of arguments for libertarianism is going to assume a moral philosophy behind it and so answering that question, how do we determine right versus wrong? That's not a political question ultimately, that's a moral question so how a given person answers it, libertarian or not, is going to depend on the moral philosophy that they're grounding their beliefs in and so a consequentialist or utilitarian libertarianism. So utilitarianism is the idea that an action is morally right if it maximizes happiness in the world and so an action is better, the better action is the one that more maximizes happiness and the worse is the one that either doesn't or creates more pain. So a utilitarian libertarian is going to say precisely that we should maximize utility as it's called. A natural rights libertarian is going to say well we can tell right and wrong based on this set of natural rights that we have and what's wrong is what violates those rights and go on from there. A virtue ethicist libertarian as I tend to call myself will say that what's right is what a good person would do in these circumstances. So you say like I don't know what I should do in this situation so you try to imagine the best person possible, the person with the best character traits, the most admirable person, you say how would they behave and that's how you ought to behave and then from all of these we can get to libertarian policy prescriptions to a libertarian political philosophy because a limited state best maximizes utility or a limited state is most in line with natural rights or a limited state is the one that both allows us to be the best people possible and gives us the most options for leading really good lives. But so there isn't one libertarian way to determine right from wrong and this question isn't unique to libertarianism. We could just as well ask like how does a progressive determine right from wrong and again that's not gonna be contained. You're not gonna draw that answer directly from their political prescriptions because it'd be weird to say like well we should have absolute democracy and majoritarian rule and so the way we determine what's right is whatever the majority thinks. Most people would say that doesn't sound quite right. That's a fairly troubling view so there would be an underlying moral philosophy there as well. Yeah it's important to point out that so if all three of these schools of thought and Aaron listed the three that are usually in what if you took an ethics class and philosophy class and undergrad, your three ethical systems will generally be consequentialism or utilitarianism, deontology which is the natural rights type of theory. Right to rules based morality. What's right is following a set of rules. And not looking at the outcomes and then virtue ethics which is sort of a grounded first and Aristotle. Now all of those can point to libertarianism. All of them theoretically could point to any system. Right given that they're kind of the big three chances are that any given person's moral philosophy no matter which political system they believe in is going to fall within one of these three. Exactly but interestingly I think it's something to commend libertarianism that all of them could lead someone to libertarian thought and in the, there are other types of political philosophies though extreme progressives, communism for example, where in the natural rights theory cannot lead you to that theory. They have to go completely, they have to discard that one and say no, pure utilitarianism is what we're after. We don't look at rights at all, we violate, we don't believe in them, we violate them all the time and if we can kill 10 people or 10,000 people to make 100,000 people better off, we will because rights don't really matter and I think that that's something that puts the huge detriment in their scorecard that they don't really pay attention generally speaking to rights based or deontological rules based ethics. It's something that libertarianism has in its cards that they don't. So quite a few people asked us about this next topic which is abortion. So where do libertarians stand on abortion? And this of course could be its own podcast but we can talk a little bit about it. Right, so I should say that generally speaking my sense is that people who identify as libertarian tend to be pro-choice but there are certainly plenty of pro-life libertarians and the reason for this is that basic libertarian principles I think can arguably lead to either position. Both positions can be justified within a libertarian framework, can be plausibly justified. And so let me just start by saying that abortion, I mean abortion is a really complicated and difficult moral issue. I think it is the most complicated and most difficult moral issue imaginable actually. Yeah, I would probably agree with that. So to say like well there's one answer on it it's there may be one answer on it but arguing for that one answer is not an easy task. So for the pro-choice, to be a pro-choice libertarian say the argument goes let's start with kind of rights. Like I have a right to control my own body. Every person has, women have a right to control their body and so abortion is an act of controlling your body. You know there's this fetus growing inside of you you want to get it out. So the rest of us don't have a right to tell you what you can do or can't do with your own body. So therefore pro-life or pro-choice sorry. The pro-life argument simply says it takes the rights question instead of looking at the rights of the woman it says well this fetus is a person and there's again is a very complicated issue of whether a fetus is a person or not and whether a fetus is the kind of thing that has rights or not but this argument says it is and that fetus just like every other person has a right to life and that right to life trumps anyone else's right to control their own body. So I can use my body to do all sorts of things but one of the things I can't use it to do is to kill you and so abortion would be the act of killing again if we see the fetus as a person it would be the act of killing a person. If one of the core functions of the state is to protect life, liberty and property then it's a minimal state would still step in there and prevent that harm. Right and so then we get to pro-life that the woman's right to control her body does not trump the fetus's right to life. And the other question which I won't go too into because I said this could be its own podcast but a lot of people also forget that there's a secondary question on abortion which is who decides? And by that I kind of mean what level of government decides and that's interesting that when anytime you bring government into a moral equation that's always a question because it might be the case that there is a fundamental right that exists but it should not be the case that the UN for example the United Nations should be the enforcing mechanism for that fundamental right. So the secondary question which comes into libertarianism is should the federal government or the states be the ones that decide it or maybe even the UN. But that's a second moral question to say this is the right choice and then secondly I want this level of government to enforce it because if you think that all things that you think are morally correct need to be enforced by the highest level of government then I guess all these things should be reposed in the UN or everything should be in the federal government not just as a matter of morality but just as all good things should be in the highest level of government and I disagree with that and most libertarians would disagree with that so that's the second question which we hopefully can maybe figure out a podcast on this in a future date to talk about it more in depth. Right but as a general answer to this question of abortion there are libertarians who fall on both sides of it and so no matter what your view on it that's not a reason to exclude yourself from libertarianism. Absolutely. Next up Albert Greer asked what would a libertarian party government look like today and this gives me an opportunity to clarify something because it's a confusion that I think shows up a lot which is the distinction between the libertarian party as an organization and libertarianism. They both have the same name which ends up causing I think this confusion but think of it this way like there are people out there who identify as progressives and then there's the democratic party the democratic party is made up largely of progressives but it's not the same thing as progressivism progressivism is a belief system and ideology a political philosophy and then there's an organization that claims it and says you know like we represent some of its views but they're not, they don't include all of it. They're in conservatives same thing. Conservatives same thing like not all conservatives are Republicans and the Republican party is not conservatism because conservatism is a set of ideas so similarly the libertarian party exists as an organization but libertarianism is a political philosophy and Cato is not associated with the libertarian party right and nor is libertarianism.org is not in any way associated with the libertarian party. So then I guess we'll just rephrase the question then to be what would a libertarian government look like today? Well of course that's the big question that's a lot of what Aaron and I have devoted our careers to a lot of what we talk about at Cato and one of the great things about Cato is that we have such diverse experts on so many different fields that I've given what I specialize in realizing that I can't tell you everything that our foreign policy is gonna look like everything that our trade policy is gonna look like because we have specialists who do that. So it might seem like a cop out to say if you wanna get an idea what a libertarian government would look like, look at Cato.org and see the proposals that we put forward for all different areas but I'm not an expert in all of these areas. Generally speaking I can tell you this it would be way, way, way smaller. I can tell you that and I can tell you as a consequence of that growth would be faster and more dynamic and maybe we'd have flying cars. Now that's a little bit of a challenge. And we'd all be a lot more free than we are today. It would be a lot more free than we have today. We wouldn't put people in cages for putting things into their body. I mean there's some basic things I can tell you that would not be, we'd open up federal prisons and say all right guys, sorry, are bad. We wouldn't have trade restrictions like start trade restrictions. We wouldn't invade countries randomly because we didn't like what they were doing. Just a lot of those things, we wouldn't do those things in the libertarian world. The more nuanced stuff I would say look at Cato.org. And should you not want to just plunge into the whole of the internet's writings on libertarian policy? Let me recommend, our colleague David Bose has wrote a book called Libertarianism a Primer which is short, very easy to read, covers the history of libertarian thought. It covers the philosophy behind libertarian views but it also has large sections on what this would look like in practice. There's, there'll be a new edition coming out so I definitely commend that book to you. So on Facebook Josh Caldwell asked us. He said, I'm a union government employee but the libertarian set of values is very appealing to me. Where do I fit in? Well of course as a union member and a government employee you can be a libertarian. You might be a union member because you had no choice which is problematic from a libertarian standpoint but if you look more at the government employee issue I guess the question there that you might have to wrestle with is whether or not you can advocate putting yourself out of a job and sometimes people do. I've said that about my work here at Kato and I think Aaron said the same thing that if we could actually put the government in a place that we thought it could maybe some parts of Kato could close up and we could all go and do something productive rather than criticizing this huge Leviathan entity. They make us, they give us work to do by doing what they do best which is growing and taking. It's also I guess it depends on whether the work you're employed in for the government is one of the legitimate functions of government. I mean for non-anarchist libertarians there's going to be a government of some kind and so if you're employed in one of those things then that certainly doesn't conflict with libertarian views. I think though that there are certain things that make it harder to really hold libertarian views if you're doing them. So I think if you, to call yourself a libertarian while locking people in cages for non-violent drug offenses. Or kicking down doors as a member of the DEA. Right, so if you're a cop busting people for this or you're a prosecutor prosecuting people for this that's, there's some dissonance there and that's going to be a hard thing to. Hold the values, yeah. And you could always say oh well if not me who would do it but I'm a believer in civil disobedience. I would be amazing if tomorrow everyone decided not to enforce the drug laws and I think it would be a moral, it would be a moral uptick, it would be a more moral society tomorrow if everyone decided to stop enforcing drug laws. So running out of time and I want to close with this final question from William Wright which I think is an important one. And that's how do you or how do libertarians or how would libertarian policy prevent states from allowing child labor? Well child labor is a difficult question. It's difficult because we all care about it and we all care about children not working. But of course children not working occurs because poverty goes away or children working occurs because of poverty and the best way of thinking about this is the farm and this is something that when you hear progressives particularly progressives now talk about the progressive era which is the 1929 when child labor laws started being put into effect for factories and other situations like that. They often say libertarians are okay with rapacious capitalist employing children. But of course on the farm which is where these people were coming from the children worked all the time and even more. That's because poverty is what really causes child labor. Every parent would love their kids to just enjoy their childhood and have a great time and not have to slip away in the farm or in the factory. But for many of these parents in poverty it wasn't a choice it was either they do that or they die they can't feed themselves. And of course wealth invented a bunch of these things that we take for granted now. You could say in some way wealth invented childhood and I mean a childhood of leisure where you get things from Santa on Christmas morning and it's against the law to have you work and then after so first invented childhood let's say up to 10 years old. And then people got wealthy enough in the 50s that it actually invented teenagers. And teenagers were now not supposed to work either and they could consume rock and roll music and start garage bands when they had garages so you had teenagers. And it's funny because the progression has even moved to 20 year olds because you have people saying that 20 year olds and you should be allowed to live off their parents and the government should facilitate your 20s as being a time to figure out what's best for you. But all of these are only possible in a world of wealth. They're kind of this interesting way of taking the fruits of capitalism which is incredible wealth that it had not been seen for most of human history when most of humans have always lived in dire poverty when children have had to work. And then trying to redistribute it down and saying well this needs to be an entitlement for everyone to not work until your 30s. So that's just the general observation. Now do I think there should be child labor laws on a local level? Yes, in America. But in other places it can be very difficult because in Thailand for example child labor laws can force children out of the above market the non-black market labor market and put them into the black market labor market because the poverty makes it so they have to work. And the black market labor market for children is way worse than the non-black labor market. It includes things like child prostitution. So you have to make an analysis about the world as we have it which is that the government doesn't have magic words. It cannot simply state that something shouldn't exist and then have that happen. And that doesn't occur no matter how big the state is and on a libertarian level the government could pronounce this magic word and say no child labor and I would be okay with that but we really need to focus on wealth if we wanna eliminate child labor and create childhoods for people in poor countries now just like childhoods were created for us meaning the Western world and nearly anyone who I imagine is listening to this. Thank you for listening and thank you for your questions. We really appreciate hearing from our listeners and if you have other questions you'd like us to answer because we plan to do more episodes like this in the future you can contact us on Twitter. I'm at A-R-O-S-P that's A-R-O-S-S-P and I'm at TC Burris, T-C-B-U-R-R-U-S. And to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.