 This is Stefan Kinsella with the Kinsella on Liberty podcast. This should be episode 077 today September 2nd 2013 I'm out taking my my morning walk, which is a regular Exercise for me lately I often walk 5 o'clock or 5 30 for an hour or two in the neighborhood Just for exercise and so this is one of my podcasts where I'm going to do it while I'm walking here and Lately most of my podcasts have just been Interviews I've done on other people's shows radio shows or other forms of interviews, but I'm going to try to start doing more Just my own standalone content and response partly two questions from listeners That I get on occasion on Facebook or By email or in person So today I thought I would talk About something I've written a good deal about Which is the basic Libertarian Case for rights and the basic libertarian Framework I've written about this in various places Probably most recently would be my article how we come to own ourselves and What Libertarianism is that that article? appeared in Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Festrift and then later on Mises daily They're both on my site at Stefan Kinsella comm slash publications And scattered around in other blog posts and places Or some of the things I intend to touch on here. So what I want to talk about is Sort of the the view of libertarianism that I've come to hold After thinking researching debating this issue for many many a long time I'd say at least since 19 1991 or even earlier So over 20 25 years My earlier writings in the very beginning of my When I started publishing kind of academic or scholarly tile style articles on these topics Which was by a stopo theory of rights? Which can become my site one of them's called Something like a stopo new justification for rights or a punishment punishment theory and rights Those articles and a lot of others. I don't disagree really. I'm actually assembling a book right now Putting together a lot of what I regard as kind of my key Sort of libertarian legal theory type writings Hopefully I'll finally get around to that and finish it in the next six months And I have a publisher in mind already So Who am I spooking with? Who's interested so? More details on that later, but What I've noticed in assembling starting to assemble all these articles is I Do have different emphases now and some slightly different terminology now But I rare I haven't found many cases where I disagree substantively would have what with what I've written before It seemed to me to be largely Consistent or of a piece Part of an integrated framework that all make sense together But for example, I would be more careful now and I try to be more careful with how I use the word property How I use the word state versus government Things like that also even the word capitalism which at least according to some of the left libertarians is Is a misleading term and at least it's one that Causes us to continually getting Arguments over semantics or tactics and strategy, which I find is distracting and so I call myself an anarcho Libertarian or as George Casey does a libertarian anarchist That's a that's the most descriptive and least sort of controversial term. I think except The so-called left anarchists. I don't mean left libertarian anarchists. I mean the left anarchists Don't even think we libertarian anarchists or anarchists, but That's okay. We don't think they are either The word property I try to be really careful in using property not to refer to the thing owned which is a common usage Because that can lead to equivocation and to various intellectual property assumptions So I don't say that that thing there that car is your property. It's not a piece of property. I Would now instead try to emphasize that that scarce resource Or that rival was scarce material object Is your property you have a property right in it? It's something that you own or some person owns It's something that some person has property rights in and then our question has Political theorists in general or libertarians or humans Is to determine which person or entity or group of persons has the best claim To control that resource In other words who should be recognized as the owner of it which is to say who should have the property right in the thing If you emphasize this way, then it becomes harder for the intellectual property advocate to sneak in This is this creationist assumption. I call it which is that Ideas are property So the question is not whether ideas are property. I'm getting to the intellectual property debate Which should not consume us much here today. This is just an example There might be a little car noise on occasion. It's about five or six in the morning. There's not much traffic, but One occasion a car rolls by on these dark streets here and so The You know the IP advocate This is trying to force us to answer the question is an idea property Which is kind of a nonsensical question and a little bit question begging The question rather should simply be when we can identify a given scarce resource We need to be able to answer the question who owns it Okay, and the libertarian set of rules and framework is designed to do just that in a particular way, which is what I'm going to get at in a minute here so We don't ask is that property we ask is this is this thing a scarce resource and if so Who has the right to control its use? Which is to say who's its owner Who has a proper who ought to have be recognized legally is having a propriety in it or property right in it? Another one is self ownership That term is okay as long as you're aware that it's a little bit metaphorical and It precisely ought to be regarded as body ownership And then the question is who owns this person's body and libertarianism Has an answer for that as well, which is unique and different from that of other political philosophies So that's a couple of examples of how I would be careful with my terminology now For various reasons But I don't really think it contradicts Any of the previous things I've written The only thing I've ever written that I strongly disagree with I would say that I think I made a mistake on Would be early on a sort of an over reliance on the Hayekian knowledge paradigm and one of my legal theory articles about the nature of law but I've since a You know adopted some different views on that and I explained that in some subsequent articles and Also, maybe just some emphases, you know, I have a lot of theory in my Astopal and punishment and rights theory article About the right to retaliate the right to punish and I still agree with it. I think it's true But as I wrote in subsequent articles, you know, I Do personally predict and think and even prefer in some sense. I believe that in a private society There would not be much actual resort to institutionalized Punishment and retaliation and retribution Even though it's rightful in a sense And Nor would there even be much resort to institutionalized use of force whatsoever even for Even for restitution Purposes I think that I do believe that a system of ostracism along the lines Used in previous quasi anarchist societies As spelled out by say a David Friedman in Machinery of freedom and Rothbard and for New Liberty and most recently by Gerard Casey in his great little book Libertarian anarchy and like in systems like the law merchant. I think that would be much more Effective and cost-effective and just in humane for a variety of reasons Just for example We we have to recognize humans are not infallible This isn't to adopt some kind of relativist Stance or but it is the case that in almost every case Of say criminal justice or punishment There is the possibility of mistake as much as we try to get rid of it as much as we Try to adopt burdens of proof and jury systems There is still the chance that an innocent person is going to be wrongly convicted and actually physically Killed or incarcerated and there's just no way to undo that especially in the case of capital punishment There's no way to undo such a such a result And for that reason I think that rest the retribution and physical punishment in an institutionalized way It's hard to imagine would be widespread It's hard to imagine a company that's in the business of making profit in a peaceful future modern Cosmopolitan Libertarian Society would actually have a Division or a wing of actual physical human beings who are employees whose job is to physically Hold down people and administer you know a Death drug and just kill them in cold blood Especially knowing that they might actually be committing murder if if there had been a mistake Because the cost of making the mistake would be astronomical and in any case so but my point is that I Think these views are consistent the view is consistent that there is technically a right to retribution With also while also believing that it wouldn't be used that much in an institutional way In society because it's just too costly in various ways It might be used on occasion by an outraged victim's family in which case who knows maybe the Maybe the victims Maybe the society would turn a blind eye to that and Maybe keep a wary eye on this guy who was acted like an outlaw, but maybe they would let it go So there would be You know a little bit of a background threat to being a criminal that even if Aside from the threat of ostracism from polite society if you don't get your act straight and voluntarily agreed to some kind of restitution process and Even a read even some kind of rehabilitated rehabilitation process to get yourself integrated back into society There's always the threat of some rogue sort of family member taking law into his own hands and Maybe getting away with it by and large so But the point is so there are some more later nuances and things I have developed in my thinking but So far, I don't see many contradictions Even my case for intellectual property, which I think is fairly complete as I wrote it in 2000 or 2001 in The JLS journal of libertarian studies I've written a good two dozen or so articles and hundreds of blog posts since then Elaborating on themes and ways of explaining this point that I didn't to do in that article. I do think the first article is complete but I would probably supplement it with more even additional arguments and evidence and I might be a little more careful with how I use the word scarcity because everyone seizes upon this This word scarcity Is used in a particular way by some of us in a technical economic way to basically be synonymous with rivalrousness or rivalry But most people You when they hear the argument when they want to argue for IP they sort of equivocate and they use scarcity in the sense of lack of abundance and Then they'll say things like well, I don't know about you, but good ideas are scarce So they're changing the meaning of the term when we say ideas are not scarce. We mean they're not rivalrous and I Would be surprised to find any reputable economist in the world who would argue that any pattern or recipe Any knowledge or information is a rivalrous resource So they all agree it's not scarce in that sense So you have to be careful again with the words partly because it gives openings to people to engage in equivocation So that's a little bit of preliminary thoughts. So Let me explain Before I get to kind of the framework I see for libertarianism What the sort of standard approach is and and sort of how my thinking evolved on it and what I used to How I used to view it I mean most libertarians would Well, there's a variety you have your natural rights types. You have your tactical types. You have your pragmatic types and consequentialist You have your utilitarians. You have your menarchists and your anarchists You have your constitutionalist and your electoral politics activists You have a variety of approaches to what we do as libertarians and what we conceive of it as being But a large number of us basically say that it's about liberty, okay? That's why the word liberty is part of libertarianism or freedom. We talk about freedom and liberty Now those are a little bit vague and amorphous most people would say they believe in liberty and freedom to some degree But you have to translate that into some sort of more concrete principles or even even legal legal Precepts and legal rules that we say we're in favor of being enforced in society whether it's by the state or by Whatever legal system would emerge in a in a free society an anarchist society and by the way government and state's another one Then I try to be careful of Just to take a little aside here and again the reason is primarily equivocation by menarchists and Randians and status of all stripes Who? Get you to agree that we should have government and by government they mean what we mean by it, which is the Governing civil institutions of society justice What are the legal system? We anarchists think that can be private and ought to be private and really has to be private for it to Really fulfill its mission So just like we view roads as a independent phenomena of the state, but that the state has co-opted We also believe law and order and what you can call government It's also a private function or institution that the government that the state sorry has co-opted see I just made the mistake myself And so people tend to think of Roads, let's say and other public functions that we're used to nowadays as being inherently Associated with the state so they start interchanging these things same thing with government It's inconceivable to most people that the governing institutions society or not basically what the state is because the state has so effectively Warmed its way into these things and taken over them today, so You have to be careful with this too because the status or the menarchists will try to get you to admit that you're in favor of law and order which is Government and then he'll say aha you say you're against the government And I'm saying we say well no I said I was against the state and they say well, that's the same thing You see well, we don't agree those same thing any more than we agree that roads Or the same thing as the state roads are necessarily a state creature Although the government has taken over the function of road building In road administration by and large So you have to be wary of that type of equivocation So let's get back so most libertarians would at least say that it's libertarianism about liberty And freedom right now most have a sort of dim awareness that there's something a little bit Um incomplete About this that it requires further definition that these terms rest upon some more some deeper principles that they They rely on good book and that basically is property rights It's not always recognized this way by uh by libertarians, but that's what it is because To know what liberty you have the right to right to know what freedom you have the right to We of course have to have some conception of property rights Because To say you have the liberty to use your body in a certain way is effectively saying This scarce resource, which is your body Um We need to identify who the owner is The libertarian answer is you You are the owner now. That's not an absolute answer. It doesn't mean The person who is associated with or inhabits you could say or controls that body Um or who springs from that body however you want to put it. It doesn't matter if you're religious or not What metaphysics you you hold in this regard? The point is just that conceptually we can distinguish and identify the person or the self the legal person From the body that the person controls and uses To get around in life So we would say the person himself it's not absolute It's a prima facie if you will answer which is the legal a law term meaning the first The presumed answer right in other words unless we have some reason to oppose this answer That's going to be our default position So the prima facie owner of a human body Is the person who Is the body or controls the body So that's the libertarian view now why prima facie well because Uh there can be cases where some some other person rightfully has control of that body There's other cases where someone does not rightfully control your body like when you're enslaved illegitimately by a slave owner like in the case of The armies of egypt. I mean the slave armies of egypt who built the pyramids Shadow slavery and pre-colonial or in pre antebellum america Etc But there are also cases where The person himself is not the legitimate owner of his body And that would be if you say cases where you let's say you're engaged in An attack on another innocent person And then that person we all would say except for pacifists extreme pacifists which I don't regard as libertarian At least not required by libertarianism So in the case of such an attack an act of aggression one person on the body of another The victim of the attack has the right to use force defensive force to repel the invasion And that in that defensive force Uh includes the right to invade the borders of the attacker Like sticking a knife into his belly Or shooting a bullet into his head Or banging a club against his head Or setting fire to him or something like that something that he doesn't he doesn't consent to Explicitly, but which we regard as legitimate even though he doesn't consent to it. So in other words in those cases He doesn't have the right To control his body. So the prima facie or default right To control your body Um is rebutted in this case So there's exceptions the exceptions would be Um when you're committing aggression or even after you committed aggression if you believe in some forceful right to restitution or even retribution Okay, those are arguable, but those are examples Um another case would be if you sign a contract where you promise to Be an indentured servant or even a slave of someone Um now I have an argument which maybe I'll do another podcast about where I think I agree with Rothbard and others Um That such contracts are not proper contracts Um not they shouldn't be legally binding or legally effective for a variety of reasons But some people like Walter Block do And again, it's just an example if you Conclude that a contract is a way to alienate rights and that's another way It could be that you don't have the right Um to Um To your body if you've gotten rid of it by some means another might be if you have a child Or you push someone into a lake you perform some action where you create in another person A positive obligation or a positive need from you to to take care of them or rescue them Um some kind of need that is generated by your actual action in that case Um it could be argued and I would argue That the person who creates that situation now has a positive obligation to perform some action to Basically take care of or help the person Whom his actions have put into um You know a state of need or jeopardy So if you push someone into a lake and they're drowning you have to rescue them or try Whereas if you just walk by a lake and see someone drowning You have a moral obligation to rescue them at least Given the right context Uh or so I would argue although that's an a libertarian Uh view still it's one that I hold and I think most Moral rational people would agree to But you don't have a legal obligation to do it in other words if they drown you're not a murderer Whereas if you push someone in a lake and you fail to rescue them and they drown you are a murderer Uh, so those are examples of cases having children because you performed an action that gave rise to a dependent life form coming into being a young baby Who is helpless just like A person drowning in a river is helpless Um, so those are examples Of exceptions Okay, so you can see how and so let's take the case of property and things other Than the human body like let's say an apple So i'm holding an apple and johnny Physically snatches it from my hands and takes it Now did he violate my liberty or my freedom? Did he commit an act of trespass? Did he do something wrong? Did he commit an act of theft? Well, the only way to know the answer to that is to have some kind of theory of property rights and knowledge of the actual allocation of property rights in other words We have to ask whose apple was it If I had just stole the apple from johnny And I am now holding an apple that Was his apple and I would say still is his apple So now he still owns the apple, but I have taken possession of it from him As the owner of the apple he has the right to have possession when he wants it I've separated the two by my act of coercion or aggression Oh, by the way, coercion is another word. I'm careful about now Coercion and aggression are usually used as synonyms By libertarians, but they shouldn't be as I have a blog post about this but um Coercion just means Compelling someone to do something by the threat of force But threats of force can be legitimate or they can be illegitimate just like force is sometimes legitimate Like defensively and sometimes it's not It's aggression That we're opposed to as libertarians That is the unjustified use of force not force in general It's not even violence that we we are opposed to in general We're not opposed to violence or coercion or force As libertarians we're opposed to the initiation of it or the aggression the aggressive The aggressive use so the unjustified use of force um In any case If I had taken someone's apple from them, so I'm now possessing their apple Then the owner arguably is entitled to use Some type of force If he can to retrieve his apple from my hand after all it's his apple But if it's my apple and he takes it from me, he's becoming the thief So how we characterize an action Is being condemned, commendable or Justifiable depends upon An a prior more fundamental theory of property allocation So my point here is that libertarians Uh sort of as a shorthand Talk about property Um to talk about liberty and freedom But really to flesh these things out you need to have You must have some theory of property rights Even though even even if some libertarians recoil from that analysis and say things like they don't believe in self ownership Or by even body ownership Some say they don't believe in property at all because it's a statist institution all this kind of stuff I think these are very confused analyses Um If you're a libertarian at all I mean, I've had libertarians, uh, I had a had a long discussion with paul godfrey for example, who's a conservative Very conservative libertarian Uh type A friend of mine Years ago I remember this on the bus When I visited hoppa's Annual property and freedom society meeting in bow drum turkey paul and I were having a Animated discussion about this in the bus on the way to the airport and there's a long drive So we had a long time to talk and you know, he was insisting like a kind of conservative that there's no such thing as rights And this is where careful definition of terms and consistency is important in such discussions because It can become just semantic and talking in circles because I said listen paul Do you agree that it's let's just start from basics it's wrong to Attack an innocent person with a knife and you know stab the knife into their body and and murder them Do you think that's wrong or even to kill them? Let's just say kill. Let's not use loaded terms He says yes. I said do you think that Um that the victim would have Would it be legitimate if they were to use force to respond? Yes You know and we went through like this and he he agreed with me on all the details of the fleshing out of what you what most libertarians would call a right to life or the right to your body or Or the flip side of that And I say flip side because remember all obligations Um or all rights Have a correlative obligation or duty so if you if if if you have a right to The physical integrity of your body That means other people have a duty to refrain from invading it Okay, so duties and this is why libertarians generally oppose positive rights Because they would imply positive obligations and except in cases where you voluntarily incur such a positive obligation As in the examples I gave earlier um of creating it by pushing someone into a lake or Creating a new life form We generally oppose positive rights and by this I mean like welfare rights Because all rights have a correlative duty or obligation In the case of what we call negative rights, you know the right to be left alone The right to have someone not invade our property or our bodies Again, you see I use the word property in the Sort of sloppy way. I should say invade resources that we have have homesteaded or come to own um Then Okay, sorry. I had to pause there. I'm just gonna cross the street Anyway, so the point is We have to have a property theory um To flesh out what it means to have freedom and rights and all this and so my point was In the god for an example You know, he basically admitted everything that constitutes what we call rights But he just didn't want to use the word right to discover it Um, and I've had this conversation with other people. I say listen Just because you say you don't want to use the word rights doesn't mean you don't agree with me on what I'm calling rights I don't really care If your only objection is that you don't like the word we're using like I had a discussion with someone the other day who says he's an anarcho capitalist But he doesn't like to use the word libertarian And to my mind it's it's like It doesn't matter if you don't like to use it, you know, it's a question of definition What does libertarian mean and if you define libertarian The way which is I think justified and commonly Which complies with the common usage of the term um Then anarcho Capitalists or anarcho libertarians are just a subset one type of libertarian So his mistake was thinking if you say you're a libertarian you're associating yourself with menarchists, and I'm like well, no I mean you're a human too some libertarians some humans are libertarians And some are not some humans or anarcho capitalists and some are not And so you're an anarcho capitalist type of human It doesn't mean you're not a human and it doesn't mean that if you say you're a human that you're associating yourself with humans that are Murders or whatever. So it's just a confusion Uh, so is the Resistance to the word rights. I think a lot of the resistance to the word rights comes from Um people that are skeptical for example of the way it's been used by certain Certain um the thinkers or groups Uh, for example some Or leery of the idea of natural law For various reasons, but one might be you know, it's been used by Say the church the catholic church, uh in ridiculous ways like You know to oppose the use of uh Earth control Now you can have your own moral views on that, but it's got nothing to do with natural rights It might be a type of natural law theory, but it's not the same as natural rights Um, especially in the libertarian Western radical Sort of blocky in english tradition Okay, so So the concepts of property rights and rights Are inescapable When we get when we get to talking about these things people can disagree On the details on how it's to be applied What rights people have what property rights there are etc But really that's what they're debating about Even a socialist and a libertarian Are always debating over property rights in scarce resources. There's just no way around that Okay, so The bear terms liberty won't suffice Um, so what emerged from this so then Theorists like Rothbard, let's say Rothbard pointed out that all rights are property rights Now the nub of his insight there, which he didn't flesh out in great detail Was something Hans Hermann Hoppe Has fleshed out in greater detail Sort of in the footsteps of mesas and and Rothbard Combined plus insights from other philosophers like Habermas and Hume And Carl Otto Appel, uh, and I would recommend in particular chapters one and two. They're very short, but extremely packed with insights Um of his theory of socialism and capitalism, which is available Uh online at his site HansHoppe.com So look at chapters one and two of theory of socialism and capitalism Where he emphasizes the importance of the the role of scarcity or rivalrousness In the very origins and nature of any property system Okay, so um What Rothbard says is that all rights are property rights Now why does he say this because he's recognizing that when you talk about a right You're really always talking about The right to control something Of course, the right to control something is The right to control some physical scarce material resource that people can dispute over Okay now the sort of first um The first level assumption of how to look at um These things and what a lot a lot of libertarians say Is that everything goes back to the homesteading principle Now what is this? This is sort of the proto-libertarian View of John Locke an important, um English political theorist from the 1600s And Locke argued that he's got his famous argument which is repeated and analyzed Still to this day by libertarians uh His argument was that the world Is given to mankind in common By god But what that means is that there are parts of the world that is the natural set of resources in the world which is scarce resources um That or have not yet been appropriated by someone so You could call you could say they're in the commons Now his predecessor filmer would argue that means that they were under the kind of quasi ownership or Of of adam basically and and the feudal monarchical classes that trace their title back to adam the first guy so We have a feudalistic sort of society Justified by this type of idea that the world was given in common to mankind and therefore the first guy adam owns everything So he's sort of like a king having um You know the base ownership Of all property and then he allocates it out to different vassals and lords and Down to the surf level and they all have their order So it was used by filmer to justify the feudal order in In europe Locke Treated that common as saying the things were effectively unowned Now regarding it as a commons gave him a little problem in this theory It led to his locky and proviso which i may have time to get to which libertarians at least the radical ones of my stripe Meaning people like rothbard I believe And me and hapa and anthony de jassey for example de jassey reject the locky and proviso Which says that you can homestead unowned resources but only so long as there's enough and is good left for other people I believe that that theory is a remnant of um Of the of this mistaken filmerian way of looking at it instead of looking at the world of unowned resources as having been given in common to mankind by god With say certain strings attached as to how you use it It's better just to look at them as unowned resources whether given to us by god or not But they're just unowned resources and that's a more austrian austrian Approach as well because remember the austrian approach is a subjective Believe in subjective values the appropriate way to understand human value and human action And so as hapa has written in some of his pieces This means that the characteristic of what we call a good an economic good depends upon its subjective It's being subjectively regarded as such by an actor So whether something is a capital good Or a consumer good or a good at all depends upon the Way it's regarded subjectively by the actor who intends to employ that That resource in some manner if you intend to employ it for consumption. It's a consumer good, etc So there's no intrinsic qualities in goods themselves There are relational qualities based upon the intended use For a human being which is not subjectivism in the randian sense of Basically relativism or skepticism. It's just recognizing that humans or subjects are the values By the way rand's view of value Is compatible with that of mesis subjectivism because she says that a value is something that a man acts to gain and or keep She put the word act in their own purpose. You have to act to try to achieve it and that's exactly What mesis is getting at with his idea of demonstrated preference Which is basically the idea that values are subjective because of some subject some actor Indicates or demonstrates that he values something if he if he acts to try to use it as a means or to achieve it as an end of action anyway That's a little digression but the point is Locke had this idea that God Gave the world to human humankind in general Some of its some of it has been used and claimed some of it is not That which hasn't is unknown that which is Well, let's say that for a second and and also he distinguishes human bodies And so he says that is you know, everyone has a propriety in himself Which means it's proper for the person himself to be the one that has the right to control his body Which is another way of saying self ownership Or body ownership you could say So the Lockean idea is that you have these human beings who are self owners because of the gift of the grace of god or the gift of god and that these self owners Can then appropriate out of the state of nature that is out of the commons that means out of the unowned state of things resources by mixing their labor with them This is called homesteading. So, you know, you could establish a homestead You could go find a virgin territory and Find a good place for a farm Build a fence around it Have some cows chickens You know a water mill maybe a barn pasture Um And and the log cabin somewhere where you can you know live and sleep Uh a garden that kind of thing. So you basically transform this unowned resource You take it out of the commons and make it yours Now most libertarians use that basic metaphor or idea And when they try to systematize their views They start recognizing everything's a property right as Rothbard says and they say Um So everything's about homesteading so they'll say something like Well, yeah, you homestead not only Unowned resources out there in the world, but You first become a self-owner by homesteading your body now. This is the first Mistake I think a lot of libertarians make It's an honest mistake, but it leads to confusion Because it's mixing up things Um, I think it's wrong to say we homestead our bodies and I'm not even sure lock would have said that I think lock sort of treated bodies differently than he treated Other resources which I would call homesteadable resources Which I would say previously unowned resources Something that is unowned Is a subject to appropriation or use or homesteading Subject to some acting human being coming in and employing that as a means Setting up a boundary around it or a border And demonstrating that he is now the owner of that thing Okay, you can see how actors and the things actors acquire Are distinct you couldn't The very idea of homesteading an unowned resource Presupposes that there is an actor But an actor is not a ghost. It's not a disembodied thing It's not a soul just wandering around Looking for things to homestead you can't imagine an invisible immaterial ghost homesteading attractive land No, it's a human being with a body So it makes no sense to talk about homesteading bodies because there's no homesteading agent in existence before there is a human being with a body And this was something I've tried to draw out in some of my writing in the how we come to own ourselves article Which I think is compatible with parts of Rothbard's writing and parts of Locke And specifically with with with with Hans-Hermann Hoppe's writing I had to find some of it in the original German Which wasn't easy since I don't speak German But if you see that article you'll see that he had already kind of figured this out, although Some of it he had not called Attention to in all of his writing in English But in any case, um, so the framework that I came to which I think is compatible with a more Consistent and elaborated and kind of clarified Locke and vision ultimately and Rothbardian as well Is is that we just we have to treat bodies and um Other resources distinctly which by the way is why I think that Walter block is wrong in his idea that um We can sell ourselves into slavery because when he that argument just Omits the differences between Bodies and other types of resources and there are there are relevant differences So i'm getting down to the way I view the libertarian framework is that It's very simple We look around in the world those of us who Are trying or in favor of trying to live peacefully with each other Live good lives ourselves and we're also generally people of goodwill and empathy We want other people to do well as well and if we're intelligent Know a little bit about the division of labor and economics And just human social nature itself We realize that we're all better off If we all can survive and trade with each other and live with each other cooperatively So there's good reason for people of goodwill Rational healthy psychologically healthy humans living in the world to want to band together in society to want their own lives to be Prosperous and successful and to flourish but also our neighbors These types of people who generally have language and irrational They communicate and they argue They discuss things they try to justify things they believe in norms. They adopt norms Norms that are useful As guides to action to help solve practical problems that might arise in human society Problems of conflict And remember ultimately all conflicts all problems that could possibly occupy human time or Really always conflicts over Who gets to control a given scarce resource Which kind of gets back to Rothbard's insight that all rights are property rights Um, let me give an example people say That um, sometimes people fight over religion Well I don't think that's actually literally or technically true. That's that's not a precise way of putting it It's a more of a metaphor and again metaphors get you into trouble if you're not careful What they're really saying in sort of a colorful language or imprecise language They're saying that the motivation Okay, or the the ultimate reason For certain people's actions is a religious one. So for example If some barbarian Chops off the head not over there. Let's see some some some uh, I don't want to go and pick pick religions here Let's say religions a and b Okay If a person of religion a chops off the head of person of religious b religion b Um to come because he wouldn't because the second person would not Convert to the first person's religion Then we could say they're fighting over religion But really what they were fighting over was The head person b who got who has who really has the right to control The body of person b is it b or is it a Now a thinks a can control it now. He has a reason for that. It's a reason. It may be religious Okay, person b thinks he's the one who should have the right to control his body He may or may not have a reason for that. Maybe it's just intuitive or natural or maybe he has no theory at all But we libertarians have an opinion on this And our opinion is that b is a self owner or the owner of his body Has the right to control his body Okay, so my point is all disputes are always necessarily all disputes in human life that need political rules or legal rules to uh, to uh To uh To to respond to these problems. They're always Conflicts over scarce resources aren't what we call rabble worse resources Okay, so once you realize that things become clearer Like this IP issue doesn't even arise. We don't say Who is the owner of that idea? Because the natural answer might be well who created it all right Once because that whole way of looking at it overlooks a crucial step which was Wait a second. We're trying to come up the rules to settle disputes disputes disputes over scarce resources So what's the scarce resource at issue here that we we're trying to decide? Who the owner is Right And if you just talk about who owns the idea your sides, you're you're skipping over that step You're just making the implicit assumption without calling it to someone's attention You're making the implicit assumption that ideas Are types of things that exist in the world That are similar in some respect to other things in the world That we can own so You know, there are wheelbarrows and there are Bales of hay And there are clubs and there are log cabins and there are tracts of land and human bodies These are all things Yeah, but so is an idea so is a poem So is a recipe for for making a cake These are all just types of things in the world And just as one type of thing can be owned The others can be owned. This is the argument of people like keyboard mccann Who's a neo-objectivist libertarian philosopher? Who brings in the concept of ontology, which is the philosophy of the study of the types of things that actually exist in the world And to me it's just a confused way of Trying to say that Hey, you believe that you can have property rights in rocks and trees Well, there's other types of things ontologically in the universe like poems and manuscripts and novels and movies and songs And inventions and paintings So why can't these things be owned too? And once you grant that there are things that can be owned Well, the question naturally rises Who is the best person who has the best claim to that thing? In the case of scarce resources, the answer is always whoever used it first. Remember we're talking about unowned things the first person who Appropriates it out of the wilderness and puts his stamp of personality on it Which is another way of saying He puts up a fence or a border To show that it's his to show that it's no longer unowned He now has a better claim than anyone else who Hapa calls a latecomer So the rule is basically Who first used it now? We can have exceptions to this rule If the owner of a thing and by thing i'm talking about a scarce resource a material object If the owner of that thing Contractually gives it to someone else Well now the second person has a better claim than the first person Okay, so that would be a case where the the homesteader doesn't own the thing He used to own it, but then he voluntarily Parted with ownership of it by giving it to another person by some By some action where he made clear That his his um his ownership is ceasing because he no longer intends to own it as owner He only merely possesses it so so long as he needs to to transfer the right to own to the recipient Of his contractual transfer Um, you could think of other cases too again a case of crime or tort where you do something to someone That gives you an obligation to pay them money Or some kind of damages to make up to them the harm you've done to them in that case Maybe you lose the property rights you had and something that you originally owned but now Is subject to a claim by them for restitution But other than exceptions like this contract or restitution for some Which are both voluntary acts by the owner Um, we can always trace the owner of a given disputed resource By a combination of a few simple rules the first would be the lock in appropriation or homesteading rule Which means we find out Who has the earliest known claim to this resource? Okay, could be the first guy or it could be just the earliest guy known to history um or Who received it from someone who owned it By contract or some other claim like restitution Okay, so that's how we answered the question We always identify the scarce resource That's in dispute And we have an answer to it based upon libertarian principles. Okay, so people who just talk about What property is They are engaged in the kind of a A sleight of hand, right? They're shifting the the debate and they're injecting a lot of assumptions We don't add the question is not what is property So the question is not our ideas property The question is what's the dispute about here? What do you really want and who has a better claim to it? So let's take an ip dispute so a and b live in a community together and uh, a comes up with a way to Build his log cabin with a new technique of interlocking joists or something that makes it more stable um In strong winds so it doesn't get blown down as easily. I don't know Or maybe he covers it with a certain Um substance he finds in some trees that that that makes it less likely to burn down on the fire I don't know whatever He comes up with some way to use his resources I was going to say his property, but we don't want to say property Let's just say he finds a way to use the resources that he has a property right in now Later on his neighbor b Starts using a similar technique To construct his house He coats it the same way. He builds it with interlocking joists to make it stronger Now maybe he came up with this idea on its own Or maybe he saw a doing it and learned from what a was doing in public And emulated a In either case a might get indignant and say you stole my idea Um, I want you to stop Unless you pay me tribute You pay me five sheep a month And I'll allow you to keep using your house built with my idea And b's just minding his own business and thinking what the hell This guy's a a busy body And he's kind of a crook too. He's trying to Take my property from me Again, I'm using property colloquially. He's trying to take my stuff from me What's he trying to take from him? well a is really asserting the right to control b's log cabin Or b's sheep, right? He wants some of b's sheep in tribute or he wants b to stop using his own Logs in his own house in a certain way Now that is the claim of an owner b is basically claiming ownership of a's resources a's body a's home a's logs a's sheep a's farm a's patrimony So that's really what's going on here just like in the religion case where You know the fight's not really over religion That's just a way to describe the motivations of the people that are fighting But what they're really fighting over is Is the physical land and physical resources And the physical bodies of the people that they're Using weapons against and using That they're attacking with their armies and their hordes. Okay Same thing here What a is really asking for is he wants some kind of judicial body some kind of institutionalized justice procedure Or maybe he's going to just be A vigilante and do it on his own I don't know But the point is what he is effectively claiming is a property right The right to own the right to control Bees body bees house Bees sheep Now So the question is is that a legitimate claim? Does he have a claim to these things? Now if we're a libertarian you go back to the libertarian very simple rules And you say well, let's think about it. Who owns Who should we assign property rights to these resources in who really has a better claim to it? well be Sorry, I had an interruption there any case Back to my Back to my recording the the point is um be uh We know that b is the one who homesteaded the logs. He's the one who plucked the logs from their unknown state in the wilderness And he's the one who grew the sheep on his land And he's the one who controls his body So he has a presumptive or prima facie right to these things under standard libertarian lock-in principles How could a possibly have a claim in these things? Well, the only way Is if b has number one contractually somehow agreed to give these things to um to a Or if b is somehow committed a tort or a crime Against a which means invading the borders of a's property You know committing a crime against a A's body or something like that, but there's no allegation here that that's happened It's simply that a doesn't like Be using his property in a certain way That certain way being something similar to how a is using his property Even if a learned of it first and even if be Observed and imitated and learned from You know a's innovation Uh, that's basically what a doesn't like so a's using his dislike Of how b's using his property as an excuse or justification To take property or resources that own that are legitimately owned by a second person So you can see how the standard which which by the way is obviously illegitimate So my point is that a obviously has no case whatsoever If he asserted this anywhere he should be regarded as Laughed out of court and if he tries to act on it with force he should be regarded as an invader and repelled with force and a and b should be able to sell his sheep As his own sheep and use his house As he sees fit so That is the basic libertarian paradigm the libertarian paradigm is that we first Have a property rule for ownership of bodies, which is that each person owns his body prima facie And that bot that human human being that actor with a body having a body Acting in the acting in the world employs various scarce means By first using them or by acquiring them by contract from a previous owner And that's it. It's pretty simple really once you look at these principles um, so the libertarian project Or proje we might say in french the libertarian proje project is always identify a given disputed scarce resource That's being disputed or claimed as ownership by more than one person And we dissolve we we determine which of those claimants has the better claim to it in accordance with Very basic rules self ownership homesteading contract and tort law And uh The application can be complicated in some cases um But you can see how it solves right away a lot of problems like Intellectual property. There's just no room for intellectual property when you have such an analysis In any case, I think that's enough for today I'm going to finish my walk and uh Maybe do another one of these next week listeners can feel free to email questions or post comments on the The blog post about this Thanks