 Hello, politified and welcome to our official Stefan Kinsella interview. I'm joined by my friends Benjamin politics and Chris And his course our special guest Stefan Kinsella. Thank you so much for for joining the interview. How are you doing today? Doing good sit on my balcony slightly crisp day here in Houston, and I'm gonna smoke a pipe while we talk Sounds great, so we're gonna go straight into the questions starting with one from Chris Chris if you don't mind All right, so first off we kind of just wanted to start on the Election, what were your thoughts on the elections? Did you have any prediction or any preferred candidate? Oh, I prefer Trump Of course Not that I'm a libertarian, but yeah, I think that the social the Democrats are way more dangerous than the Demer than Trump especially and but I I bet against him and I was right unfortunately So I'm not surprised that he lost Yeah, did you have any any kind of views on Joe Jorgensen? I know a lot of libertarians at this point voted for her over Trump I I like I usually don't vote by the way, but I usually I usually Yeah, I liked her. I like all libertarian candidates that are actual libertarians Including I including Gary Johnson from last time I wouldn't have voted for someone like Well, Bill Weld if he had run or Who was it? What's that a guy named bar that ran several years ago the guys that are not real libertarians But even though she's a soft libertarians for as I know she seems pretty solid to me So you have come to prominence often for defending Hoppe's ethical framework of argumentation Ethics for those unaware of his ethical framework. Can you give us some of brief synopsis of it? Sure So the libertarian approach at least as viewed by most I say Thinking libertarians or principled libertarians, you know, not just freedom or prosperity But it is the non-aggression principle right the idea that we libertarians oppose Aggression and so the only laws were in favor of And the only use of force because all laws are backed by force the only use of force that we favor is a for use of force In response to someone who initiated force, right? So that's the non-aggressive principle So then the question is why are we in favor of that or how do you justify it, right? As opposed to the the rule that all other political philosophies hold I mean, I really think it's libertarianism versus everything else every other political philosophy is Is basically some different flavor of socialism or slavery really because it means that some group or someone outside yourself Basically owns your own your body to some degree even in the US with democracy like, you know The idea of conscription or taxation or the drug war implies that the government owns your body, right? They can send you off to war they can put you in a cage if you don't fall follow the rules so And some libertarians are more pragmatic or consequentialist Bella and they Just I their adherence to libertarian, you know, this is what works It maximizes happiness or utility or prosperity if we have free market rules, which I agree with but other other thinkers Bella, that's my poodle barking other thinkers Have a more natural rights approach, right? So the standard Aristotelian view is that is a natural law approach like based upon the nature of man Bella come here Based upon the nature of man. We have certain natural rights, right? And most people believe that to a certain degree, but libertarians believe it more consistently than anyone else There are some problems with the natural law approach one of them being the the is odd gap that David Hume pointed out which is You can't derive an ought from an is because you're going from one domain of statements about what the way things are a descriptive statement To the way things should be which is an odd statement like you shouldn't hurt someone I think there's still something to that but there are some problems with it But hoppa Hans Hermann hoppa who's an Austrian a German guy He's an Austrian economist and the libertarian thinker who studied under Rothbard He also studied under a German philosopher named Jurgen Habermas, so I believe is still living. He's very old He's a lefty But he came up with something called discourse ethics and another German guy named Carl Otto Appel And that's the idea that when people come together to discuss norms like which norms or rules are justified There are certain presuppositions of the argumentation context itself Which you can never deny because you would be contradicting yourself because you have to assume those are valid Just to enter into discourse about what norms are valid So then the question is what are those presupposed norms and hoppa took his teachers approach and he bent it in a libertarian direction using his Austrian economic insights and his Rothbardian political radicalism and his his basic argument is that When we argue about what our rights are right what laws are justified what uses of force between each other are justified We're doing that in the context of a civilized peaceful discussion where we respect each other's Bodily rights because if I'm trying to persuade you of something I have to be acting peacefully So this concept of peace is at the root of any discussion and therefore if you just extend that you'll see that The only higher-level political norms that are compatible with that presupposition of peace is the libertarian the libertarian non-aggression principle because Ultimately every other ethic is socialistic and a socialistic ethic in the end says that I can hit you But you can't hit me But that's contrary to the peaceful context of it or the peaceful setting of an argument So that's sort of a nutshell version of of his approach to justifying libertarian rights his approach really is to establish a filter to filter out any Norm or any political ethic that is not libertarian because any anything that's not a libertarian norm Contradicts the peaceful presuppositions of discourse itself I'm gonna be asking the next question and it's pretty much related to that one Why do we have self ownership and how do we prove that we own ourselves? so What it would mean to be a self-owner and that's actually a slightly misleading formulation which I've used myself before but You don't really own yourself. You own your body because we only All human rights or property rights and all property rights are the right to control a given scarce resource That is a type of thing that can be controlled which means this calls means scarce means of action That would include your body, but self is kind of a nebulous term So usually when we say self ownership, we mean you own your body So the reason you're the self-owner is because you have a better claim to it now This is Hoppe's argument in which I agree with It's slightly different than the argument for why we why why we have property rights in scarce resources in the world Like external objects we own those because they're unowned and some human being in acting Sees his control of those means to do something and when he does that he plucks them out of the state of being unowned and he he basically Establishes a connection between himself and the thing that other people can see and observe and They can respect if they want to respect property rights Or you you buy it from someone else who was an owner by contract So the only two ways of gaining ownership of those external resources is by homesteading being the first user of something that was unowned Or by getting up by contract from someone else But in the case of your body you can't homestead your body because you have to have a body to act in the world in the first place It would make any sense So when the question is for scarce resources in the world When there's a dispute over them and you want to know who get who has the pro the better claim to own that resource It's the person who who had it first or who got it by contract from a previous owner But in the case of your body the question is who owns your body Now that question can only be answered in a debate in a discourse and an argumentation as Hans would say Hoppe would say and whenever you're discussing with someone else you are already assuming that they own their body because You're directing your argument to them as another equal participant in discourse So you assume that you own your body and you have to assume he owns his because if you don't assume he owns his body Then you're basically threatening him. You're saying Except my argument or I'll hit you Right, which is not a real argument So if you really are engaged in genuine argument, you have to be granting him ownership of his body So that he can have the independence to consider your arguments and decide whether or not To accept it is true, right? So it's a presupposition of any any attempt to come up with who owns whose bodies that we each own our bodies another way to look at it is that I'm the direct controller of my body. So I have a better claim to it than someone else Likewise, they have a better claim to their body If anyone says they own me They're claiming to be a self-owner of themself first, right? Because they have to own their body to then claim ownership of me as the master over me But if they own their body, it has to be for some reason and Whatever that reason is I have the same reason for me because we're equally situated, right? So it wouldn't make any sense for them to claim ownership of themselves and to deny it to me Because that would not be an argument that would be just what we call a particular Risable statement it would just be saying well, this is the rule for me, but this is the rule for you But that's not an argumentation that you can have in a peaceful discussion because you have to Presuppose that we're both equal participants in the discourse in the first place. I Have another question and that is how does argumentation ethics and self-ownership come into play with a newborn or a fetus for example, I Mean opinions vary on this I have my own views and Hoppe has his views and Rothbard Who who endorsed Hoppe's argumentation ethics before his death? Have different views on this and they all are roughly the same My view is that human rights By the by the virtue of the argumentation ethic They apply to actors and actors who can communicate now a newborn infant can't really communicate yet But it is fully developed and has the capacity to communicate. So I think it makes sense as humans to attribute rights to him And in fact, I think even earlier I think I think even when the when the When a developed fetus is inside the mother's womb, I think we can say at a certain point it has rights Not in the beginning when it's just an embryo or a zygote Not the looks like we're having some connection issues, right? It's that the mother in most cases where she voluntarily has sex and becomes pregnant You can't call the fetus a trespasser like Walter block does because it's thereby invitation of the mother and So I think that abortion in later stages is morally problematic Not that I would favor any laws against it because it's still such a private matter That to enforce this would would would violate so many rights that it would be inconceivable But I think in principle, it's it's more and more morally problematic to commit abortion That's just discretionary abortion that is I mean for the life of the mother That's one thing so I think the way we look at it is when the child is born We have to treat them as a human with rights. However, it doesn't have a capacity to make decisions for itself yet So we assume as a presumptive matter that the parents are the natural guardians and can make decisions for the child until the child Becomes more independent at a certain age and I think 18 is far too late by the way And if I think very at a very young age if the child wants to declare his own independence As long as as soon as he can do it and be recognized by members of the community As choosing his own independence and he has the right to do that All right, so oh my bad Are you asking something related to that question because I was gonna ask another question, okay? So what are your thoughts on the idea that self-ownership is ad infinitum which has been gaining a lot of current popularity among menarchists What does that mean ad infinitum? Chris gave me this question You mean like an infinite regress? Yes. Oh, right. Yeah, I've heard that before I Think it's ridiculous. Walt even Roderick Long who's a fellow anarchist and he's more of a Aristotelian type And he's a philosopher He agrees with me that the the objection is is ridiculous. There is there's no reason You can't be the owner of your I won't say yourself, but of your body Conceptually and even legally The concept of a person is distinct from the concept of a body just like the concept of your mind is different than the concept of your brain I'm not saying something spooky and religious or mystical Like the brain the mind exists without the brain There's a there's a connection, but the mind and the brain are the same thing for example a dead body has a brain but it doesn't have a mind right and The brain has a size and a location and a weight, but your mind doesn't have a weight So these are just different concepts. They refer to different things in reality One is a physical object and one is a phenomena that is spun off of Or you know, it's like a computer program code running on a computer Processor the processor is not the code and the code is not the processor, but they're related and likewise the person Is not the same thing as the body. It depends upon the body. You have to have a body to be a person and so but in in in in the world In civilization and in law The question is always there are different actors in the world or persons that can have a conflict or a dispute over who gets to use a resource and that can include human bodies obviously because there are physical fights and there is enslavement and murder and assault and battery and things like that and Sexual activity interactions touching and the question is who has the right to Use that resource So the answer is either me or someone else Right or we say the body is unowned which again is saying that everyone owns it It's just fair game anyone can shoot you because if they can you know That's that's sort of a might makes right view of everything, but we libertarians want to ask want to say who the who has the right so I think Anyone who objects to self-ownership or to body ownership by saying oh you can't own yourself because You are yourself well They're really trying to find a contorted reason to say that someone else owns you and usually I'm not surprised Menarchist do this because a Menarchist doesn't want to grant full ownership of your body to yourself because that would that would rule out The government having the right to tax you or to put you in jail if you don't pay taxes Or to prevent you by force from using your own chosen defense agency by outlawing all competing agencies Right, they don't want to grant you full rights over your body So I think it's just it's just a it's a lazy dishonest way of trying to justify force It's sort of like something I think I ran said it if someone says You're too concerned about money Right, you're a materialist. You're too much. You're too greedy Hold on to your wallet because they're coming after it right anyone who tells you you're too concerned about money That means they really are concerned about money They just want your money from you and anyone who tells me I'm not a self-owner That means they want to say who the owner of my body is so I I see no To say you're the self-owner or you're the owner of your body is simply a way of saying we oppose slavery So if you oppose self-ownership, you're in favor of slavery You're in favor of someone else having the right to control your body other than you So I say the best owner of your body is you Um, yeah, I'm sure you've gone over the symposium and the in Liberty magazine that where argumentation ethics was first proposed What was your reaction? When hoppers argument was generally disregarded by I think everyone except Rothbard and David Gordon Did you think that was? What did you think of I guess? I would say even David Gordon disregarded. He was polite, but David Gordon doesn't accept it either I guess I didn't care too much. I was in law school and I read it and it blew it blew me over I thought it was I thought it was genius and brilliant and I was a little bit surprised that so many libertarians were against it But I think half of them and hop has responded to all these by the way Some in the Liberty symposium and some in other writing and he collected them. It's in the appendix to his The economics and ethics of private property. It's called for replies and and by the way about Three or four years ago at the property and freedom society meeting in Turkey, which he holds annually He gave he hasn't talked much about argumentation ethics ever since that initial round of debate in the late 80s Which is one reason people keep calling me about it because Hans is still alive and doing well But he he doesn't always respond to these things it'd be better if he did but he did give a long speech about it kind of Representing his argument and and addressing some of the criticisms. It's it's on his site and it is I think from 2016 It's 2017. I'm pretty sure 2017. Okay, so that's so that and his four replies are the or the best response to all this I think half of them are basically Kind of we're jealous of him coming onto the scene and being adopted as Rothbard's designated sort of protege and Rothbard's claim Rothbard's praise of his argument and it was sort of a new argument and it's sort of Displaces the previous attempts and it's brilliant and some people are just locked into their own way of thinking and they don't want to go there Some are utilitarians And some just seem to misunderstand the argument So I guess I'm not surprised. There's always petty bickering among Intellectuals in certain movements and they hold on to their little domains, you know Plus he's German, you know, a lot of Americans don't like Germans because they're Nazis, you know And what was your reaction to David Friedman's critique of it and also Robert Murphy I know those are too big in our co-capitalist who who's still well critique I thought Friedman's I can't remember in specific, but I remember thinking it was silly It didn't convince me at all Course Friedman Friedman's doesn't really have an argument for rights at all And in fact David Friedman despite being this high-level thinker on Anarchist libertarian topics is not even good on intellectual property and you know, that's sort of my litmus test This is one of the easiest issues of all It's an important issue and if you're supposed to be a serious libertarian thinker and you can't get intellectual property, right? There's something wrong with your approach to everything I mean David Friedman is basically some kind of Chicago type cosy and Utilitarian right which I think is totally incoherent and it's not the way to justify I'm actually surprised David Friedman is as good as he is on libertarian theory given his his weak foundations Now Bob Murphy didn't write in that symposium. He was just a kid at the time He did write later with Gene Callahan who Who I used to be friends with and who used to be pretend to be an Austrian and used to pretend to be a libertarian and now he's neither And they wrote this thing in for anti-state calm attacking Hoppa's argumentation ethics and I wrote a response to it and So I I have a lot it's called defend I think my response is defending argumentation ethics in which I tried to Represent Hoppa's argument in a way that wasn't subject to their criticism Because I thought they were getting lost in the weeds. I mean Bob Murphy believes in rights Maybe from a Christian point of view or something now. I'm not really sure exactly But I try to make the point that the sink the the central thing that they're missing is this Once you can see that there is anything whatsoever To the idea that there are normative presuppositions in argumentation then you've lost because Then the question is what are they and if you're a libertarian you already agree With the non-aggression principle. So you must think there's something to this idea of peace, right? So it'd be hard to say that I think there are some moral or normative Ethical presuppositions or argument, but they're not even related to liberty and peace if you're a libertarian And so and and this ties into what Kant called the universalizability requirement, right? Which Hoppa relies on in his argument Because he's kind of Contian in some of his thinking just like Mises was in his in his in his epistemology for his For his economic thinking If you grant that when you give an argument for something In an argument it has to be universalizable. That is you have to give reasons for it And which is what argument really is you have to give a reason you can't just assert it arbitrarily and you can't just Do something that I said before it's particularizable like you can't give an argument an ethic That's particular to you and not it's not generalizable to the other person You can't say well it's okay for me to steal your property But you can't steal mine because I am me and you're you that's not an argument. You're not giving a reason You're just stepping outside of argument And you're just saying i'm going to take what I can take which is not argued. That's might makes that's might makes right. That's Not right makes right And so I try to get bob to focus on whether they agree that universalizability itself is a criteria For advancing any kind of ethical claim and he seemed to start admitting that And once you admit that then I think you can't really have a principled Disagreement as a libertarian with hoppa's approach Uh, but we never got that far. I think we might have talked about it one more time since in a podcast bob and I I think I was on his show A couple years ago. Yeah, and I didn't make much progress. We're we're friends We have a friendly disagreement on that issue But um, I just think he's wrong because he doesn't really have a solid foundation for rights Which is not to criticize him lots of libertarians don't and that's fine They just take that for granted like randy barnett for example or robert nosik Although robert nosik Goes astray when he defends the minimal state But um, it's it's fine if you just take rights for granted That's not your specialty is to defend what rights are But if you if you don't have your own theory of rights and why you believe in them and you evidently do believe in them If you're a libertarian It's just odd to criticize hoppa for coming up with another argument for rights Like if you say hoppa's wrong for rights, but yet you believe in rights and you don't have your own theory of rights How are you any better than haunts by your lights? So here are two here are two libertarian thinkers who both believe in rights And neither one of them have a good argument for rights. So what? Right. So like murphy has no argument for rights that i'm aware of And he's criticizing haunts for having no good argument for rights, but yet they both believe in rights Okay, so what's your alternative? So all you're saying is haunts is no better than you which is just I guess it's a cute point to make but What's your argument for rights, you know At least haunts tried and I think it has some intuitive appeal and some nice rigorous appeal to A question on on the mesis institute specifically You've had a very friendly relationship with those at the mesis institute and other anarcho capitalists Who do you think is your biggest influence to your ideology and why? well chronologically would be iron rand But i've i've drifted a lot from her thinking although a lot of a lot of things she she She wrote about still influenced me But i'd say my biggest influences in terms of what i built on and what i'm really compatible with would be hoppa mesis and rothbard Probably in the or probably in the order hoppa rothbard than mesis um and mesis more for his methodology and his economics than for his politics but rothbard's radical capitalist radical libertarian thinking and his radical politics and then hoppa's um more rigorous building upon that See what what hoppa does that that rothbard doesn't do as much as hoppa keeps in mind The the central fact of scarcity And i think that's because he was such a mesisian and mesis does that too in his economics Rothbard loses sight of that sometimes which is why he wasn't quite as clear on intellectual property whereas hoppa Saw saw the right way to view intellectual property Instantly without even knowing a lot about it someone asked him in 1988 in a panel Before i even started writing on this issue. He said what about ideas who can own those and hoppa just instantly said well They're not a means of action Means of action or scarce resources that people can have a conflict over we need property rights and those But ideas are just uh like a free resource Once it's known to the public anyone can use that to guide their action So property rights don't even apply which is basically the right the right answer and he saw that right away Rothbard didn't quite get there. I think he would have if he had lived another two years He would have he would have gotten there, but he died 95 right when I started writing on this I'm confident that rothbard would have seen that because rothbard's views on defamation law were correct He he understood that you can't have a right to your reputation Because it's what other people think about you and so to own your right to to own your reputation, which is what underlies defamation law libel and slander Means you own other people's brains and like I said earlier In intellectual property is the same thing if you own The copyright to a book that it's a pattern of information And if you own the patent to an invention, it's still a design for for for for a device It gives you property rights over other people's bodies and their factories And they're printing presses And I think if that had been pointed out to him, he would have seen that What are your thoughts on like the recent accusations of any left libertarians or or many progressives have been giving hapa and the means institute saying they're Neo nazis or fascist or racist or sympathizers to these groups What do you what do you generally think about like these people? And what they do their accusations hold any water? Um, I mean, I think basically it's all bullshit I think I think this comes from the respectable libertarians the who are usually compromising Menarchist or quasi-status sellouts Part of it's from petty infighting and squabbles and personality fights over the over the decades that I don't I don't really care about Uh, I think it's it's it's not it's total nonsense. I mean these people are basically allying with the With the state and and the and the and academia and the left, right with their continual dishonest lies and smears and distortions and You know calling anyone they don't agree with a racist or Or a nazi I think it's it's insane. There there are some alt-right types who Gravitate towards more of the right leaning libertarians sometimes, but that's not our fault, you know any more than You know insane insane comedies you know following Like antifa following uh, some democrats is exactly their fault. Although I think it's somewhat compatible with what they say You know left libertarians don't have any monopoly over the the hatred of fascism and we shouldn't have to Keep explaining that over and over again, you know, they don't have a monopoly over virtue. In fact, I think that some of them You know, they're Left libertarians that especially the anarchists tend to be really good Um, I don't really care what their personal cultural preferences are About capitalism and things like that as long as they don't want to make laws about it And some of them some of them do like the mutualist types sometimes do But as long as you respect property rights like like roger along is the best among these guys because he's a hardcore property rights respecting so-called left libertarian, but um No, the accusations against the mesis institute are just are insane. I mean, I've been to these things all years and I I detest racism and I'm a cosmopolitan. I'm an atheist. I'm uh You know we're for freedom of For tolerance and diversity and all this stuff Like any normal person is you know, um, so I think there's nothing to it whatsoever so as as you know, the internet has been a Big safe space for people, especially libertarians to Discuss their their ideologies and economic thought. What do you think will be the new found revival of? Rothbardian and anarcho-capitalist movements through the internet internet Huh, well, I think that you know in the 80s and 90s the mesis institute was sort of the core place, especially because jeff tucker um started Pushing them to release so many works public domain basically right made so many resources available It was a central hub I think that that role has faded because the internet has grown so much and there's so many There's been a diaspora of groups. There's a lot of mesis institutes around the world and other groups too now I don't think it's any central place anymore I think the lp mesis caucus is pretty good in terms of the lp The property and freedom society that haunts has started in turkey is nice, but it's more of a select niche group I just think that the works of rothbard and mesis and hop hoppa and related thinkers Uh, it's very popular in other nationalities too. Like in brazil and in the spanish and latin america Um, and in europe different parts of europe, especially eastern europe Uh, formally eastern european countries all the all the place that that have suffered For their socialism more violent virulent than we've had seemed to appreciate it but there's battle carrying Radicals and some ways more radical like there's more anarchists now, but it's grown less intellectual Back when I was you know in the beginning in the in the eight seventies in the eighties and even the nineties The movement was smaller and even maybe more menarchists like the randy and the iron ran the objectivist dominated more Who are menarchists and not quite as radical But most these people were more well read because there wasn't the internet. There wasn't podcasting And there were fewer books to read too. So there was like a little more limited group of The signal books to read and a lot of people read them Modern younger libertarians don't seem to read as much in terms of books even the old classics Um, so they're a little bit less deep in their intellectualism Although they they go deep into intellectual ideas with with this kind of debating on the internet like we're doing now Um, so that has been a change. I don't know if it's for good or for for bad um Probably it's for good overall So I think the movement continues to grow and I do think that there's a um as the as technology keeps growing, right? And lets us communicate and move around the world And escape regimes um That that will make people just naturally more libertarian ish in their inclinations, right? The idea of freedom of speech is sort of ingrained in most people now um The idea that central planning fails because communism failed in in the late in the early nineties in russia and soviet union I think over time we have a gradual increase in Economic literacy of the people even though they don't have any formal Education in it Um, you've been to a lot of the property and freedom society Things with hoppa. Do you have any specific favorite ones or favorite panels you've been on? um Well, I really enjoyed most of hoppa's talks and lots of the other talks too I think I enjoyed the couple that I've given that I enjoyed giving and the feedback I gave one on libertarian mistakes and controversies something like that And I just went through things that libertarians often get wrong Not through their own fault, but just because they're difficult issues and they trip people up And as the as the philosophy matures and develops, you know, we start seeing errors people used to make um That was a fun one. I think I caught it libertarian mistakes or something like that Um, or fallacies or misunderstandings or misconceptions And then the other one was on corporations because that's always a hot topic and I got a lot of feet a lot of a Pushback like from Sean gab who's another friend of mine. He's an english libertarian um, you know Defending corporations is hard to do when you have especially the left libertarian impulse to hate corporations and say that they're creatures of the state But if you have a kind of nuanced understanding of the way law works And you think it like a Rothbardian in terms of contracts and property rights Uh, I think you can see that something like a corporation could exist by private contract alone and that the things that Some libertarians criticize corporations for as being a privilege granted by the state Um, is not really a privilege. It's just the way it would be without the state being there at all like limited liability for shareholders That was a fun one. I thought What do you think about this new critique? I think it was formulated on bleeding hard bleeding heart libertarians page the critique on uh, hot buzzer imitation ethics that he conflates a liberty right with a claim right I don't remember the nuances of that Um I think I think in my I did a long review essay um reviewing hoppa's second book the economics and ethics of private property in a law review in 1994 And I I noted that a couple places Hans hoppa, um He he sort of uh, conflates two senses of the word Uh Right or property right like in some senses He uses it more descriptively like in an economic sense like mesas would like the ability to control a resource And in some senses he uses it like a right like a legal right and he uses one sense to justify the other And that's similar. I think to this This criticism you're pointing out, but as I mentioned in my article I think that that's only a slight criticism and that he used if he just was if he rewarded it It would it would he could salvage it. It would work just fine Um, you gotta remember he's not a native english speaker and uh, he did get some editing help Uh, like from his first wife on a lot of that stuff, but sometimes talking in these hyper precise um as these hyper uh are intricate Uh, political terms in another language Uh, you know, you might misspeak on occasion, but I think ultimately his his argumentation ethic Is sound and I think it's one of the best ways to defend um The non-aggression principle that we all agree with Libertarians are very libertarians and in our anarcho-capitalists are very divided on a lot of things, especially immigration On your immigration view, do you tend to stand more with the hoppians? A more conservative immigration view, or do you tend to stand more with the blockians? I'm torn on that one It's a difficult one because As a as a plumb line libertarian I really can never defend the The police, you know, the police state arm of our federal government, which is in charge of defending the borders um And in a free society immigration wouldn't really even be a thing Because you just have private domains everywhere But by and large, I think especially in the u.s immigration is a good thing Diversity is good more people's good. We have more division of labor You more human capital Of course, it's done for political reasons now the democrats are going to Grant amnesty and increase immigration to increase the democrat vote I think that There's something to the hoppian criticism of immigration as forced integration I think Hans's basic point which is misunderstood by his critics is that So his first best solution, which is mine and which is any principle libertarians is to decentralize Political power down to the individual unit so that this question becomes a non-question But so long as we have a state, especially a democratic state Which makes a rational policy, right? As long as you have the state and you have public property that the state owns and you have voting and voting rights and welfare rights and You also have anti-discrimination law Then you have someone is going to be harmed by immigration one way or the other Hans calls these hopper calls these forced integration and forced exclusion and he opposes both and so do I forced exclusion is if If the state doesn't have completely open borders And limits some immigrants from coming in Even if I want to invite them onto my property or to my factory to like to be my guest or to be my worker Then my rights are being violated Which is correct however if immigrants come in And they can get on welfare and they can vote and especially if they can use the public roads and anti-discrimination law To travel across the country and to move into neighborhoods that would be naturally more segregated And to live there because you can't discriminate because of anti-discrimination laws that would cause forced integration As a crude thing which violates people's rights as well Right because now we have to pay taxes. We have to let them vote. We have to live near people We wouldn't otherwise live with near although as personally as a cosmopolitan libertarian who likes diversity. I don't really Personally prefer a world or to live in a in a lily white, you know Conservative neighborhood. I like a mix, you know, I'd love New York City. I love the melting pot kind of thing But some people do tend to segregate even in like say, houston my city, which is I think one of the most diverse cities in the country Um, you know, it's like say one fourth black one fourth white one fourth hispanic and one fourth asian All mixed together people tend to live in areas and there's not forced you by the government You know, there's the there's the there's the chinatown area. There's you know Uh, hispanic areas, etc. People do tend to segregate Um, if you force them to live near each other artificially Then that's that's a problem. And if you didn't have a democratic state, you wouldn't have these rules and it wouldn't be as much of a problem Um, so I think the solution to the problem in both directions is to make the state as small as possible to get rid of democracy And to decentralize as much as possible Um, I mean, we're not going to have anarchy anytime soon if ever So if you had a world of say 10,000 lichtensteins like small states run by a small monarch Responsive to the people having a rational immigration policy That would be far better than what we have now Did you ever meet rothbard? I did I went to I was living in philadelphia as a young lawyer And uh in 1994, uh, and I had never met I had never met rothbard or rockwell or david gordon or walter block or hapa But um, I had read their works. I had written some stuff on hapa and uh, they they had a conference in crystal city virginia Which is right by dc It was the john randolph meeting that was at the time of the second fusionism where the kind of paleo conservatives and the paleo libertarians were trying to get together And they had a conference there and I didn't care about the the paleo conservatives But I wanted to meet hapa And so I went down by train and I met hauns and we became good friends then and I met rothbard We sat for quite a while in the um Um in the in in one of the auditoriums alone together Maybe for half an hour before the the speakers filed in and we talked About a lot of things that had it. I it was great. He signed my book for me my man economy and state And then he died two months later in january of 95. So I did meet him and um At the time, you know, he hauns had hapa had been here for 10 years working under rothbard He had been with him in new york, and then they moved to los vegas together at unld and And hapa after rothbard died hapa became the editor of the journal libertarian studies and he became the co editor of the review of austrian economics with joce lerno and um I forgot who else maybe jeff erbender And he asked me to be the book review editor for the jls which I did for quite a while. So I quickly got thrown into things after rothbard passed because rothbard Rothbard had been the editor of both the review of austrian economics and the journal libertarian studies So when he died that had to be handled by his his chief his chief followers What is your favorite uh memory with with hapa? Well, I had a lot of favorite memories. I've been with him so many times, uh, but I'll say two favorite memories. Uh, one was one. It's a little embarrassing. Um In two, I think it was 2000. He He was invited So you've heard of the moonies You guys ever heard of the moonies? It's sort of this south korean religious cult this kind of neo christian guy reverend sunyoung moon He's not that well known anymore. I think he died actually, but um His cult still survives the moonies They believed he was the reincarnation of jesus and his wife. His third wife was the the The godmother or something like that um And they had lots of money and they were conservative in their politics And he I think he bought one of the american papers and he got convicted of tax evasion and sent to prison in america for a while So he hated the government actually But he would have these conferences around the world usually in asia like taiwan or singapore and sometimes korea And I think he had a big stake in korean airlines too And there was so he would have this international annual conference called icus the international conference on the unity of the sciences And they would invite all these thinkers from around the world like physicists and anthropologists and economists and Everything they would pay their way and they would go there and they would meet other people and give talks on a different number of things Some of them are mystical moonies and some were just regular people and they would do this to give themselves legitimate I think dan quail that he was the former vice president in 2000 when I went Um dan quail was there to speak, you know, they so they had tons of money and they they wanted to have legitimacy So they had a free market subgroup Um, which was run by some libertarians, uh, so hyacians and he had he got old and he was resigning And so hapa got asked to take that over so that year in 2000. They gave hawn's Cart blanche to bring like up to 13 people with them and they would pay their way and pay us a fee so he invited me and Walter block and a bunch of guido holzman Um to go to korea so we went to korea On an expense paid trip and we spoke at this moony conference just to each other really on anarchist theory That was fun. And I remember it at lunch one day There was a guy I didn't know on our panel He was he was a meteorologist from main And I thought he was just a libertarian I had never heard of but he was really a moony plant Or he was the moony on our panel, but I didn't know he was a moony So he asked me a question at lunch about the moonies and I just started spouting about how they're religious cult and everything and After what hawn's told me stuff and you know that was a moony. I said, oh no And so he never got invited back And he he sort of blamed me for that although I think they started falling apart after that anyway Uh, but about two years ago the mesas uk was launched by some of our friends who had gone to the He had the property freedom society meetings kair martland and andy duncan and some of these guys And a group of us. They're good friends Mostly from las vegas the people that knew hawn's when he taught there lea glody dug french jeff bar Um and hawn's and we all decided to go to london Like we had a guide trip that that weekend. It was uh five of us and hawn's flew from turkey My friends flew from las vegas. I flew from houston and we just had like the best weekend we went to museums we went to pubs So that was a really Went to restaurants. That was a really fun time. Um and We're hoping to do it again. Maybe when covet Relaxes and uh mesas uk has another another thing london's a fun fun city Uh, yeah, what are your thoughts on fractional reserve banking? Do you agree with the roth bardium view or do you take the the free banking position? well I've never agreed with roth bardians on the legality issue. Um I don't think that it's per se fraud. I do think that in practice it has been fraudulent But it could be done in a non fraudulent way as long as the bank gives adequate warning to a customer I say caveat emptor, you know, uh If a customer is stupid enough to give his money Um to a fraction reserve bank knowing they're going to lend it out And he they might he might lose his money because of the possibility and indeed inevitability of bank runs Hey, there's a sucker part of with his money every moment Um with roth bardians on the economic case. I think fractional reserve banking is completely unnecessary. It makes no sense whatsoever I think the central mistake that's made which I haven't seen anyone else point out Which I keep making but i'm not an economist, but still I have an opinion in my opinion is The the central mistake is is uh, well, there's two central mistakes, but ultimately they believe that money they equate They conflate money with wealth I think you can never print money and cause wealth You can never increase the supply of money And cause there to be more wealth because wealth is not money money is a unique good That's just used to intermediate between Goods that are wealth, right? If you double the supply of money overnight, you don't increase wealth Um and likewise, there's never a reason to increase the supply of money And expect that to increase wealth, which is what the free bankers believe and the reason they believe that I believe is They believe in the type of market failure. They think that in an unregulated in a free market uh You will have cases where there's an excess demand for money But you can't get it because that would cause prices to go down deflation and that would ultimately cause wages to fall in nominal terms And and workers are too stupid To understand that it's okay if your wage goes down In numbered in numerical terms as long as your purchasing power is even greater I think they're not too stupid. They you know, if you say, hey I'm pay I'm being paid 10 ounces of gold a year This year, but I'm being paid only nine ounces next year But that nine ounces buys me more than 10 bought me last year. Everyone's okay with that. That's that's a good thing Um, but they they call the sticky wages downward. They think wages are sticky from some psychological effect they Can't adjust fast enough and therefore you need to increase the supply of money By lowering the reserve ratio at a fraction reserve bank to basically print more credit So as to avoid dislocations that would happen, um, which is I think is a type of market failure I don't think there would be such a market failure. So I think there's no reason to ever have a fraction reserve bank And I think if you had them as guido holsman points out and some of his stuff on this Um, it's inevitable that they would fail because of a bank run The reason they don't fail now is because they're backed up by government insurance, right? But in a free market, you wouldn't have insurance. And so they would have a run would be inevitable a run would be inevitable because If you loan some money out then the assets the bank holds to back up all the claims of the deposit the so-called depositors Some of those assets are loans to people that are doing business ventures and some of those will fail Right, you can't predict how many will fail but some will fail And when they went to when more than a certain amount fail Then the bank is insolvent and it runs inevitable And so then the the contrary argument would be well, you could just get private insurance But as mesas showed in in human action When he distinguishes between class and case probability, you cannot insure against business risk It's just impossible Because that's the that you're trying to take the entrepreneur's job To an insurance company and that's just not possible. They can only insure against class probability Not case probability. So private insurance of a bank would it would be impossible to get private insurance And therefore runs are inevitable and people would soon Not want to put their money into a bank Just to get some small interest payment At the risk of losing everything. So I think there would be a clear distinction in a free market between Holding money and between a risky investment So I think people would hold some of their wealth in money and that means a solid money like gold or better better yet bitcoin And then the rest of their their wealth they would they would put into more productive things like the stock market Which can earn a higher return than the deflation returns from from money And but at the risk of losing it Okay, so we've got a few questions on books and then we can start to wrap up this interview What do you think is the most essential book for a libertarian? I guess it Well, if you're already a libertarian, I mean then the work is done So I guess it would be for for newbies or for outsiders wanted to learn about it And that depends upon their level of economic knowledge and what they can read My sort of central book is Hoppe's theory of socialism and capitalism like that's a core book But there are lots of overview books or starting places you can start with I think I have a bibliography of books I recommend it's called If you go to my website stephanconcello.com and go under my publications tab I have something called the greatest libertarian books And if you click there, I link there to hoppa's Anarcho-Capital's bibliography plus my own list of Of books and you know, there are books like Rothbard's for New Liberty, which is which is key And his ethics of liberty too And also like the law by Bastiat and then for economics, you know, there's haslitz economics in one lesson Um For mesas, I think mesas is essential actually I think austrian economics in particular not just free market economics, but and not just austrian but mesas version is praxeological approach I actually think it's not human action Which is more technical and has a lot of stuff that the average libertarian thinker doesn't need I think it's his um his ultimate foundation of economic science, which is a slim volume. It's his last one that he wrote I believe It's sort of an update of his earlier one called epistemological problems of economics, but I think it's even better So that's my favorite mesas book ultimate foundation of economic science, which goes into the methodology Of economics, right, which I think plays a role in libertarian thinking too Because it helps you understand means the means and ends framework of human action Which you have to understand to do good political theory analysis too, right Um So I don't think there's a single book out there Actually jake of hubert's book libertarianism today is a really good book which has an overview of different areas of of libertarian thinking It's written more for the layman like for a ron paul type audience, but hubert is really solid or austrian theory and on radical Rothbardian type theory and he's got a good chapter on intellectual property in there too So that's a really good starting book. Um, the title is a little bit misleading libertarianism today. It sounds more like a you know A narrow book about libertarian activism, but it's really more of a good overview of different Areas of libertarian thought So as someone who's studied libertarianism and libertarian economics for a long time What is your favorite rothbard book? I really like the The logic of action Well volume one or two, I think it's been replaced by a newer book Partly because they when they retitled it they could put it online Logic of action one and two are not online, but that's a really If you google it the logic of action one and two I I can't remember the title now Oh something like I don't think it's making economic sense. It may be that one or another one But you could find it if you google What's the replacement book for logic of action one and two? That's my Although for new liberty and and ethics of liberty for libertarianism per se are good, but the logic of The logic of what is it? What did I say it was the logic of action the logic of action one and two are really good on his economics It's a good overview. Another really good one is the free market reader, which is Basically a collection of articles written by rothbard and lou rockwell In their old free market newsletter that the mesas is used to publish That's sort of a now that's sort of comparable to haslas economic and one lesson as sort of a beginner book Like little short chapters on the minimum wage and things like that But I really love I love the ethics of liberty by rothbard and I also love his logic of action one and two So we've got one more question before we uh before we wrap things up here And as we leave we feel it's it's important to go with kind of a more serious question And it's it's it's in relation to an image and we'd like for you to kind of Kind of interpret this image if you will What is what is the meaning behind i'm going to share my screen for you um What is the meaning behind behind this image? I still don't know there was some I think a brazilian guy if I recall There's a lot of I spoke in brazil one time There's a lot of brazilian libertarians and austrians And this brazilian guy kept asking me to do the bucket thing and I didn't know what he was talking about And he assumed I knew some kind of meme And I I said he just said just put a bucket on your head and take a picture so I I got my son to take a picture of me putting a bucket on my head. I still don't I still don't know what it's about They were happy. They were happy that I played along with their meme. That's all I know Do you know what it is? I think you might have gotten tricked I I I thought there was a 15 chance. I might be being pumped But I did it anyway Well, I think that just about wraps up things here. Thank you everyone for tuning in and especially Thank you to uh to stephen consella for for doing the stream with us It is it's surely been a pleasure And uh the the chat is very satisfied with this interview and it it has been a good learning experience for for us in the chat And uh, thank you so much for coming in. Is there anything else you would like to say? Uh, I have a I've been working for a while on an edited selection of my articles on libertarian theory for a long time It's been in the background, but I think I will have it finished and I'm in a couple of months So that will be coming out this year It's going to be called law in a libertarian world and I have a link to it on my home page Which has all the material up already Uh in non edited form or in the original form, but um that that should be coming out this year All right, well, we'll leave a link to his personal website down in the description if you want to go check it out Thank you everyone so much for tuning into the stream. It has been a great stream And we will see you next week with our with our newest stream. Maybe we'll have a leftist on Thank you everyone for tuning in. This has been blue politics, Benjamin politics, mentions king and our special guest stephen consella