 Broadcasting from the heart of Soviet-Kanakhistan. It's better red than dead with Redmond Weisenberger. Okay, welcome kind listeners. It is Friday, April 18, 2014, and this is your host, Redmond Weisenberger, Executive Director of the Mises Institute of Canada, Mises.ca, and Managing Editor of the Dollar Vigilante. For all your expatriation needs, when you need to get your ass out of dodge and your assets out of dodge, go to redred.dollarvigilante.com and check it out. Now joining us today is Stephen Kinsella. Stephen is a Libertarian attorney in Houston and the Executive Editor of the Libertarian Papers. He's also the author of the book Against IP, published by the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Welcome, Stephen. Thanks very much, Revan. Hey, so I've had you on in the past to discuss intellectual property ideas and whatnot on my YouTube channel, but now that I'm running my podcast, I've got to get Stephen in here because he always has so many insights into what's going on in the world, this world that seems to be, in a lot of ways, dictated to us by so many, I mean, it seems to be carved out and formed by all sorts of different kinds of laws, doesn't it? Absolutely it does. And positive law, state legislation, a growing mass of international law and IP law and other laws are, of course, a big part of that. And I wanted, I guess there was sort of a funny, I saw this on Facebook, so I decided to share it. And I think I wanted to share it with you because I thought you might appreciate it. The title is It's From the Manchester Evening News and the title is Little Rooney Three Told He Can't Have His Name on Easter Egg Because It Would Breach Copyright. So this is, the staff of a company called Thornton's refused to put this toddler's name on his egg because it was the same name as a footballer and for those in the United States and Canada who don't know what a footballer is, that means you actually play soccer. Now what's pretty funny about, what's interesting about this is that somebody had put down right under, somebody had put down right under this post on Facebook a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, of course who wrote the book, and this is from Democracy in America. And the quote is, it's from the chapter on what democracies have to fear. And he said, society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules through which the most original minds and most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannize but it compresses, innervates, extinguishes and stupefies the people till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd. So why don't we start with this story and that quote. So yeah, the story is interesting. It's just another example of, what we're talking about, the control the government asserts over society in the name of IP. One way they do it is they make companies like this little bakery afraid to do things. You can't really, you can't blame them because they're afraid of secondary liability or whatever. This is the same reason YouTube takes down videos when there's even a threat of a potential copyright issue or there's DMCA takedown notice filed even if it's without merit or even if there's a fair use defense. So these companies become gun shy which leads to a chilling effect on what you can do with your own property or contracts. Another example I heard recently was, I think it's Dropbox. Someone actually posted a screenshot of what happened when they tried to share a file in their own Dropbox account privately with another person and Dropbox had a notice that this file may contain copyrighted content. Oh, no way. Which means that Dropbox is actually looking at the contents of private data that you think of as sort of your hard drive in the sky. Or at least they have a hashtag associated with it which correlates with some hashtag that looks like it's copyrighted material. So it's getting out of control. So the effect of these laws is to incentivize companies to be very careful. So reputable companies have a lot to lose. So they're the ones who implement these things because they're risk averse. So you're going to have to go to shady companies and two bit fly by night companies to start getting your copy jobs done or whatever or your cakes made with your son's name on the cake. Well, it's so funny. I think I just had some, I guess there's a place called Staples or Office Depot. I think you have it in the States as well. But I just uploaded a couple things there to be printed. And of course, yeah, it came with the standard boiler plate. Make sure that you do you have permission to publish this or make a copy of this. And of course I said yes. I actually did, of course. But it's so funny as well with these companies like Dropbox. Just now I went to their terms of service and they try to make it really friendly and relaxed. So it's like your stuff and your permissions, your stuff is yours. These terms don't give us any rights to your stuff except for the limited rights that enables us to offer services. You know what I mean? So it's so funny. And then they do but they do have a DMCA policy. Dropbox respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects users to do the same. So there you go. Well, what was unique about this recent case was okay, Dropbox, if you're sharing your link publicly to anyone who can download it, it's more like a YouTube kind of case so you can see Dropbox getting concerned. But if I send you a private email link, so it's like me sending a file just to you and no one else in the world can see that. In this case, Dropbox still monitored it with the hashtag and they detected a possible copyright infringement and warned the guy or blocked it or something like that which is very troubling. And this just highlights the fact that you cannot have both. Just like you can't have positive welfare rights and negative rights, right? One has to come at the expense of the other. You can't have a right to an education and food and housing and a job and the right to your private property protected because the positive rights have to come at the expense of the others. You can't have them both. Same way, you can't have intellectual property rights and property rights and material things. One has to bend. And in fact, intellectual property rights are a way of reassigning property rights and things which we can get to in a second in a servitude issue. But let me give you one more example I've read about. You can find examples of this on my C4SAF.org blog. There's been threats in recent years by copyright holders against like famous people or even regular people who have tattoos. If the tattoo is of some copyrighted or baby trademark term. They're threatening to basically control people's bodies. What's the result of the lawsuit going to be against someone who has a tattoo on their face of Mickey Mouse? Do they have to go to a doctor and have the tattoo removed? This is like a form of almost slavery or physical coercion against someone's body. Well, yeah, for sure. So what I found interesting about the de Tocqueville Servitude comment, he was writing what, a couple hundred, 150 years ago or something. And he points out that in democracy you're going to see this web of servitude sweep the earth which controls people's freedom of action. Now, he writes in a little bit more flowery language. And the word servitude is used in a technical sense by lawyers like me. But also, most people think of servitude as like bondage or some kind of indentured servitude. When you're someone's temporary slave, basically, or temporary worker. And so I'm not sure if de Tocqueville meant it in that sense or in the technical legal sense. The technical legal sense of a servitude in the civil law, the continental law, the Roman law, the French law, the Louisiana law, and I think Quebec. The term servitude is roughly equivalent to what the common law calls an easement. It's sort of like a partial property right or a property right for someone to do something with someone else's property. When I have an easement to say for a driveway for my car or something like that. Exactly. So the easement is like a partial property right. You have the right to drive over it, but the owner of the basic land has the right to do everything else to it. He just can't stop you from driving over it. And usually those are negotiated contractually. So there's no problem with servitudes or easements in the libertarian sense as long as they're contractually negotiated. Just like a sale of property. So if I transfer my property to you by outright sale, there's nothing wrong with that in the libertarian theory. That's an exercise of your property rights. But if the government takes it from you by imminent domain, we regard that as theft. Even if it's compensated, it's still a type of theft or trespass against your property. So the key issue is not the transfer or how the transfer is done or what type of transfer it is. It's whether it's voluntary and consented to the owner or not. Now, in the law, there's different types of servitudes. The one you gave would be more like a right of use or a right of way or some kind of limited servitude defined by the agreement to have a driveway or something like that. But there's another type of servitude. It's more like it's called a negative servitude or in the common law, a negative easement. That's not really a right to do anything with someone's property. It's just the right to stop them from using their property and a typical example would be the practice of restrictive covenants, which people use when they have neighborhood or homeowners associations and there's like a master plan agreement and all the contiguous lots or units in this neighborhood are subject to restrictive covenants, which means there are certain things you can't use your home for. You can only use your home for certain residential uses, not commercial uses. Or you can't put a pig farm on your property or you can't have a smokestack on your property. Or you can't have noise too loud or you can't paint your house a garish color. So these are not really rights to use. Your neighbors don't have the right to use your home, but they have the right to stop you from using it a certain way. And again, those are contractually agreed upon. And so they're called negative servitudes or negative easements. And so what I've come to realize is that this is the best way to classify and understand the nature of intellectual property rights or patent and copyright law. Basically what they do is we have the government, the state, granting to someone a negative servitude over other people's property. So for example, if I hold the patent, the government gives me the power to go to the government courts and use physical force or compulsion or coercion to stop someone else from using their property in a certain way. Now that's a classical negative servitude. And if it was contractually agreed upon by the burdened estate owner, that is by the person who is now restricted from using his body or his property in a certain way, there would be nothing wrong with it. But the problem is the government simply grants this. So it's basically a taking of property. It's very similar to eminent domain. It's just that it's disguised because it's not a complete taking of eminent domain, which would be the taking of someone's land or house or something like that. It's a subtle transfer of this negative servitude, right? And it's done under the guise we call it intellectual property. So it sounds like it's a grant of property rights to someone. But that's very similar to the positive, negative rights distinction. If you grant someone a positive right, it sounds like you're just giving them something. But really that's just a disguised way of saying we're limiting other people's negative rights because now they have an obligation to pay for this guy's education or housing or whatever, even though they never agreed to it. So likewise, these negative easements are granted by the state and they call them patents and copyrights. But they basically amount to restrictions on how people can use their property. So I think to Tocqueville maybe was prescient here. I'd have to look at it in fuller context. But it seems like he was onto something as a result of democracy. Previously there were negative servitudes. It's called protectionism and censorship. This was copyright and patents origins. Protectionism, mercantilism and thought control and censorship by the state. But it wasn't confused with the property right. And everyone saw that it was done by the monarch or by the state or by the church. And they saw it as an infringement on property rights. Maybe they had to put up with it. There was no confusion about what it was. Under democracy it becomes institutionalized. It becomes subject to legislation. And it becomes woven into the fabric of capitalism and property rights. And even mislabeled as a property right. So that everyone is confused about it. So we basically have a massive web of negative servitudes. An example you and I are talking about is 3D printing. Imagine some of the patents on the original technology are about to expire. But how many other patents are coming up that cover 3D printing that are going to last for another 20 years? So it's this web of restrictions that are going to last for decades that will slow down progress and freedom of action and freedom of innovation. You can just look at cell phones and look at how far they've come along. It's amazing to think it's kind of crazy and sad at the same time to think about how far we could have been alone technologically if we didn't have some of these restrictions in place. Of course some people will say some people will say, well if we didn't have all these restrictions then nobody would actually do anything because they couldn't make a living doing it which is absolute nonsense as far as I'm concerned. But this sort of brings me to maybe a bit esoteric but there was this funny article called Private Property the Least Bad Option and what was kind of funny is that he made some points wondering about copyright or ideas being non-scarce in some ways because he sort of starts off and says Private Property is a coercive structure. Stricture is what he says and then he goes on to say we would be better off, much better off if we weren't tormented by scarcity which of course again he's sort of just talking about this weird utopian it's more of a daydreaming piece I see it as being really anything important because he's just talking about what if reality didn't exist that would be great as far as I'm concerned. I forgot who was that by Joseph Diedrich is his name. I think he had another piece out today which was arguing against IP so I think he might be on the wrong track I only skimmed that piece. But it's sort of funny he says one thing he says a super abundant world does exist however any ideal resources ideas, patterns, concepts words, expressions, information, knowledge etc but in some ways in my own mind I was questioning that because I was sort of thinking at the same time somebody in their mind knows how to let's say they might know how to actually make an internal combustion engine is what he was saying he actually used that exactly that exact thing the same goes for the design of an internal combustion engine now somebody might actually have that in their mind but even if that person told me that I probably would still have no idea how to use it knowledge in some ways the knowledge that I have in my head is actually sort of unique to me in some ways it is this sort of it's because I'm personally I'm scarce and the experiences that I have in my life are completely different from anybody else in the world and so I actually particularly view things in a certain way and we'll put ideas together in a certain way so in that way in some ways the particular thoughts that come out of my head and the words you could say that they are scarce because they're filtered through my specific and would that be something that Ayn Rand is trying to get at when she was sort of talking about these things I don't think so Rand had a wholly different conception of the purpose and nature of rights and how they're justified which I think she was in conflict with in her own theory when she talked in Atlas struggle about how no man has the right to initiate force she was kind of talking the way you and I would talk about it but when she tried to come up with this elaborate justification she had this sort of overly metaphorical approach where the importance of human life is productive achievement to do that you need some property rights in the values that you create now she's already going off the rails there because values are not things that exist values are subjective phenomena so you see she's conflating she's just kind of saying that if you create something that's of value now you have a property right in it and you have to have protection and therefore ideas have value therefore their property rights too to me it's a completely confused argument she should have focused on scarcity again and the purpose of property rights so this approach I guess the guy sounds like he's on the right track he probably has different emphases than I do for example people that a lot of menarchists that favor the state say that it's a necessary evil I've always been confused by that if it's necessary then it can't be evil and likewise this guy seems to be saying that property rights are the least bad option or there are necessary evil he seems to be implying also he's using the word coercion if he uses the word as you indicated probably imprecisely coercion is just a type of threat of the use of physical force that compels someone to do something he says it is not coercive in the sense of putting a gun to someone's head or stealing wealth in the form of taxes but coercive in the sense that it fromstrives dictates and restricts our interaction with the natural physical world well it's like I'm sorry but well yeah I mean that's the fact that I can't fly is not coercive in any sense it's simply reality that I cannot fly yeah and this highlights the problem with being imprecise in your terms because a lot of libertarians will say that oh we believe in liberty and freedom but if you're that vague about it then you can have some leftists say well you're not free if you don't have any food in your stomach or you're not free a lawyer can insist that you do something and if you refuse and you get fired then you're out of a job and you starve to death you're not really free so that's why I go back to property rights well you know I'm going to become I was thinking about becoming a subsistence farmer but I decided that the plants that I'm growing are actually going to be coercing me because if I don't put labor into them and make them grow then that's coercion so it's not coercion so there's two ways you can use coercion a lot of libertarians use the word coercion as a synonym for aggression which I think is imprecise but at least if you're doing that well then the guy would still be wrong here because it's not a type of aggression when your options are limited by nature or if you use it in a technically precise sense as a threat or force to compel behavior it's not that either it's not a threat by another human actor to use force against you to legitimately acquire scarce resources so that's one problem with it now I've written about this before and I have observed and acknowledged that as Hoppe has most explicitly and clearly pointed out the world is a world of it's not a world of super abundance it's a world of scarcity of means which is implicit in Mises' human action when he talks about human action is the choice of an end and the selection of scarce means to achieve that end so the scarce means and the choice requires and the selection of means both require knowledge that's where the informational part comes in which is what IP is directed at you could say I suppose the way I've put it I'm lucky to say that it's a bad thing that we have scarcity of knowledge in life in other words we live in a world of physical scarcity and it's always a challenge to find energy to find sustenance to find food to accomplish our goals but to me that's part of the the fabric of life that's the way reality is and to say that it's a bad thing or that it's unfortunate or it's a negative thing to me is to posit some unimaginable unimaginable plenty that we would all be ghosts with totally different characters, identities in a world I would say that that was the problem the problem was I guess left libertarian sometimes or whatever they want to call themselves is that they start sometimes with something like this it makes them sound almost like the classical utopian socialist of the 19th century who sort of said well don't listen to those guys because they don't know what they're talking about they're trying to imagine if we had this world imagine if we lived in a post scarcity world and by the way the best way to live in a post scarcity world is hey it's called socialism now follow me to my commune and we'll all live together in this post scarcity world and we'll never be in a post scarcity world human action is characterized by the employment of scarce means human action is literally inconceivable without scarcity of means and it also reminds me of these naive utopian environmentalist wackos who sort of want to take us back to this bucolic age of a man with nature etc and it's like they have no realistic conception of the basic living in nature before we had modern comforts and defenses against it and ways to conquer and manipulate and achieve what we've achieved they have this rosy notion of the past which is unimaginably naive in my view or simply evil because they want more people to die well that's the worst extreme of it right you even have these people called v-hemp voluntary human extinction movement and voluntarily not procreate and finally die off because we're a blight on nature we're natural and what's funny about that too is that further down this sort of thing in this article he says something like immortality unlimited space and unlimited time would seem to be preferable to the opposite but it's just like science fiction we would cease to be human if we lived in this if we were omnipotent we would not be human but this goes to the point though and again this sort of left libertarian or whatever they want to call it again this left libertarian idea there was a guy, I was at sort of a summer event I think it was called the liberty summer seminar a couple summers ago this guy John Tomasi wrote a book called free market fairness and so he was sort of giving a lecture about this and free market fairness this and free market fairness that and then I piped up and I asked him a question I said well I said who owns me you know what I mean basically he was claiming and he actually just sort of dodged the question it was kind of funny I said because he was talking about these and negative rights he was just trying to say that there were some sort of positive rights that could be justified in some way and then I you know he was talking about ownership and well nobody actually owns you or whatever it was and I said well you know who and it came down I said well who owns me and he said oh here take a copy of my book that's sort of what I said and this is sort of it seems to me that they're trying to figure out a way to justify positive rights in some way and they're trying to have it both ways and you can't and they try to glide over that with these look they can play philosophical games because to my mind the more precise question is who owns my body and the libertarian answer is me because the body is a scarce resource now that's what we mean when we say self ownership or I own me but if you start talking like that then these guys they'll just they'll just be sophisticated and they'll just say well the social constructors not really clear what you is and you don't have an owner because you is just a concept or I mean they can just they can just get away from the main issue and avoid admitting that they're basically in favor of a type of partial either a type of partial slavery or a type of communism where everyone owns a bit of each other which makes no sense it's got a circularity problem yeah well and that's and that's the problem that I see with some of the you know I guess there's you know as let's call it libertarianism or you know whatever because of Ron Paul and because it's sort of growing in influence or growing in I guess people just are coming to it and they're like oh this is interesting you do have these problems where I guess you know and I mean Jeffrey Tucker I had a brief conversation about it you know Jeffrey Tucker might call you know somebody a brutalist or something but you might say well you know why should we be in favor of you know using the language like privilege you know in the way that say Kathy Ryzenwitz might start talking about oh well we need to think about privilege well you know the people who are using the term privilege as far as I can tell are Marxists you know what I mean it seems to be almost adopting this sort of Marxist language and leftist or collectivist language and bring it into bring it into libertarianism I think that may be part of what like the bleeding heart libertarians and Matt Zwolinski well I don't even know why they call themselves libertarians well that's enough that's another issue some of them are like Roger Long but they're trying to do something there was a little discussion of some of this on I think it was the Cato Libertarianism podcast with Aaron Powell I think just to let you know this is going to go into overdrive people so catch the rest of this on the red than dead.com website on iTunes and on Stitcher so continue on Stefan. Yeah I should say just a couple days ago and today is what April 16th day after tax day anyway in the US the guest was Arnold Kling and he's got this interesting breakdown of the three languages of politics and he identifies the three basic political groups as the progressives the conservatives and the libertarians and he says that they each have a different polar way of speaking about what they think the most evil thing is and what the best thing is and the progressives basically think the most evil thing is oppressing people their axis is oppressed versus oppressor the conservatives is barbarism versus civilization and then the libertarians is coercion versus freedom so it's an interesting way of looking at it and what he points out is that if you just try to adopt the language of one of these other groups like I think of some of these left libertarians and like maybe rising with their privilege talk and the bleeding heart libertarians with their authoritarianism talk and their oppression talk they're trying to appeal to the progressives by using their language but it's not going to work because these other people aren't stupid and they're going to see that you're a wolf in sheep's clothing just trying to subtly manipulate them and I don't think that's going to work and anyway if it is that's not my specialty but let me mention one other thing about the deedrie thing I guess you could put it the way that property rights are the least bad option to me that's a question of emphasis I would say it's the only workable and good option I guess you could say that glass is half empty I would say it's half full and they're both accurate physical descriptions I'm just reluctant to say it's a least bad option because it implies it's still a bad option but I don't think it's a bad option it is a very great thing that we come out of sort of primitive human society and we come together in civilization and we by and large have rules that are designed to let us use scarce resources peacefully and productively and cooperatively that's what property rights are for it's to basically remove one barrier to human action the barrier of scarcity is always going to be there and if you have other people trying to forcefully take your things from you that is to have conflict that's another barrier to successful human action you're going to spend your time fighting or get killed and not be able to use these resources productively because two or more people are physically fighting over the use of the resources if you come up with a workable system to assign the right to use these things so that you can minimize or reduce or even get rid of conflict that's a good thing it's not a bad thing so I'm reluctant to call it a bad thing to and also the only reason to call it a bad thing again is if you have this conception of a better utopian society but I think these things are virtually unimaginable it's almost like Rothbard's evenly rotating economy it's sort of this hypothetical construct that is not real because it's almost unimaginable like it's unimaginable to have an acting being in a world of non scarcity because if you have no scarcity you couldn't act it's almost an impossible logical scenario if I was in all places at all times exactly I wouldn't be a human being anymore I would be something else it almost means nothing to say that because it's not defined yeah exactly well this is the whole key is that reality does exist as far as I'm concerned and that's the purpose of philosophy and all these political discussions is to find a way that you can exist in a satisfying good way in reality so to come up with this hypothetical that can never exist and cannot even be defined I think is the totally wrong approach unless you do that you have no reason to disparage property rights as the least bad option it's not a bad option it's a good option well and that's sort of what I think I was having a conversation with somebody a few months ago and I said you know whatever conservatives or let's say libertarians like I said your intellectual framework the way that you view the world I mean that's sort of what you do because it's how you think the world works because you wake up in the morning you're going to go walking down the street and you think you have to watch out for certain things you should be afraid of certain things and a progressive might think you should be afraid and this is the way I should organize my life in order to respond to you know what I need to do what I need to get what I should be afraid of what I should like all those sorts of different things so it is really a way of organizing reality you could say as a common sense human being you could say it would be better for me and for most people I know for maybe everyone if there was more plentifulness if scarcity was in a sense reduced it would be better if people didn't fight with each other so there's the only way to achieve the first goal is to have production and increased efficiency and the division of labor and trade and the only way to solve the second problem is to have a system of agreed upon social rules where people by and large agree not to violate not to have conflict with each other by respecting property rights we face technological problems technical problems we face scarcity problems and we face conflict problems and there are ways to reduce or overcome those problems well what's funny about you saying production and of course what the socialist of course once said was and the communists once said was that once we implement capitalism is wasteful once we implement socialism we'll be far more efficient because the capitalist won't be extracting all this excess labor out of the system and we'll have much more and you won't have redundant competition you won't have advertising waste all that kind of stuff and what's funny though is that with the fall of Soviet Union and the collapse of that actually existing full on socialism it became very clear that of course exactly the opposite was true is that socialism produced poverty and what's hilarious is that so many of these socialists then of course went into the you know flipping back the environmental movement a lot of them moved into the environmental movement and now say that socialism essentially is good and collectivism is good because it doesn't produce as much I agree completely that's the impression the impression I get is the original socialist did want material prosperity they were just wrong about the means to achieve it and when it became clear that the means to achieve it that they propounded which was you know centralized control of the economy was not going to work instead of saying we were wrong let's find a different way to achieve material prosperity and abundance which would be capitalism they changed their the goalpost they said well that's not really the goal anyway it's some other goal which really in some ways for me it really is collectivism versus individualism and discussing this stuff further you know it's because we're sort of touching on the Marxists and collectivists and these sorts of things I understand that somehow that Hans Hermann Hoppe who's sort of a leading you know Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist once said that the Marxists the Marxists were basically right was he giving the Marxist too much credit there no I think so he has this essay about I think it's Marxist and Austrian class analysis and I've got a blog post about it which I can send you the link to he basically argues that the Marxists were essentially correct they had a fundamental error which was their concept of exploitation and that was based upon their fallacious economics which is based upon the labor theory of value which leads them to believe that you know when there's a capitalist or an employer who makes a profit that they're kind of they're exploiting or stealing the surplus labor from the workers now what about that just quickly now but what about the whole dialectical Marxism thing you know the Kantian you know synthesis and antithesis coming together and forming and you know we're at some point we're going to reach the end of history obviously Hoppe wasn't sort of agreeing that there would be some sort of it wasn't agreeing with that he was more talking about the economic class analysis part of it basic class struggle like how there's an exploiting class and there's a dominated or exploited class right and the different stage the different ways that the central exploiting class comes to dominate the others and the main problem with the Marxian analysis is that they view exploitation as this capitalist profit because of their flawed economics and what Hoppe points out is that economics is wrong as we know now but especially with Misesen and Austrian economics to guide us well that I mean but they were coming out I mean Marx in a lot of ways was like the last classical economist wasn't he I mean he was following in you know because Adam Smith certainly believes in the labor theory value as well didn't he yeah and and and and you can even find traces of it in this in like Locke and his labor theory property which is I think somewhat related to the labor theory of value which right which also leads to confusion about the nature of property rights and leads to intellectual property so I think this labor this whole labor metaphor has led to lots of confusion in both economics and political theory it's led to intellectual property it's led to the exploitation theory of the Marxist it's led to the labor theory value so Hoppe basically says if you understand that exploitation is simply an act of aggression that is the invasion of the borders of the unconsented use of a scarce resource that which is either someone's body or some other external scarce resource that they have acquired legitimately that is either by original appropriation according to Locke or by contract from a previous owner so basically aggression is what exploitation genuinely is and if you understand it that way then you see that the true exploiting exploiter is the state because the state is institutionalized aggression against private property rights so once you understand it that way then you see that the class struggle is a struggle of the exploiting parasitical class which is the state and its hangers on its you know its crony capitalist buddies and then the exploited class is the taxpayers the productive people who work in the kind of semi free market economy that the state permits to exist and that it parasitically lives off of so that was his point and I think this came up and I've blogged on this before but I think Thomas Knapp who I think is a kind of left libertarian on the Libertarian Alliance blog Sean Gabb's blog a couple days ago had blogged about how he agreed with Hoppe's paper even though he's not a fan of Hoppe because the left libertarians characterize him as a right libertarian but he said the only difference is he would say that it's okay that employers exploit their workers and the workers also exploit their employers I think that's a dangerous equivocation there because he's using the word exploit in a neutral sense he basically means to employ but the word exploit because you can say yeah well I mean you can say I'm exploiting the resources of this certain area and all that means is I'm digging I'm cutting down a couple trees so you have to be clear on your connotations because if you say I admit that employers are exploiting their workers and you mean exploiting in a neutral sense or even in a good sense and then the Marxists will say aha you're admitting that there's exploitation which they mean in a pejorative so there's a danger of equivocation there not by nap but by people that are going to try to do everything they can to muddy the waters and to argue for the state so you have to be really clear with your terms and not let them get away with it equivocation I'm starting to see is one of the biggest dangers we face in political discourse and that comes from unclear definitions and the overuse of metaphorical, overly loose, flowery sort of language well I mean politicians are always going to want to equivocate because they don't want to ever they don't ever want to be held to a certain standard right I mean the goal imagine a presidential candidate imagine a republican presidential candidate debating a democrat admitting that that employers exploit the workers and that's a good thing I mean it just wouldn't go over well yeah yeah yeah well I guess I find that some of the writers who work for Mises.ca are very good writers and I'm exploiting these guys I'm exploiting their you know their skills to bring more people in to read Mises Canada it's absolutely ridiculous and especially I mean I guess these terms over time or you could say I'm using them well you are using them in a way but you're not using them even that oftentimes is a pejorative you know and I'm using them I employ them I think the proper term in any of these cases is I employing them I've come to an agreement with them that they will do a certain thing I will pay them a certain wage and that's it if they don't want to do that that's fine then I just won't employ them what's interesting is Mises in human action he talks about scarce means the means of action and by that he means things that are naturally scarce in the world that you need to employ to affect a causal change that is these are causally efficacious things in the world external resources that can help you achieve what you want they can change the course of events but he also admits that in a division of labor other humans serve as means now I think his meaning is subtly different there he doesn't mean that you own them like a scarce resource but they do help you achieve what you want to achieve if you want someone to make a cake for you you're taking advantage of the division of labor and trade and commerce to get something done that you want done so one means to achieve your goals is to work with other people and to use the division of labor so that's an interesting sort of terminological thing Mises says he extends the concept of means to cover other human beings that you can cooperate with well exactly and I think that's sort of the whole point that's the point of capitalism that we work together we extend the division of labor that's why I think that I guess what the labor unions and the left would sort of critique as being globalism the dropping of trade barriers I just see that as increasing the division of labor to a global scale and I don't think there's anything wrong with that this gets to the Marxist concept of alienation which is another false flawed concept which some of the left libertarians seem to buy into a little bit when they talk about this ideal rosy world of self-sufficiency and you kind of live in a little village and everything is local there's no fruit ship from New Zealand and it's like they have a kind of aversion to globally extending the division of labor and also specialization of labor to specialize on a certain task because they think you can get alienated from that or you're not self-sufficient or you're just doing some monotonous task that you don't feel connected with etc you know what would be monotonous task farming being a subsistence farmer who spent every waking hour every waking minute being self-sufficient in all ways that would be incredibly alienating left libertarians sort of try to have it both ways because they imagine a future state where we take advantage of all this open source advanced capitalist technology which lets you just have a little generator in your backyard and grow your own little hydroponic pods and you have a lot of leisure time so they have this sort of rosy view of things now maybe something like that will come to pass what did Marx say you'd be a farmer in the morning a writer in the evening hunter in the afternoon something like that I think Marx was saying when communism comes about that's what we'll have but what of course is hilarious about is that when you have this world where I mean what's hilarious about is that in some ways capitalism is almost I mean that's exactly what capitalism would eventually produce gradually reduce the number of hours you need to work and productivity will increase some might I was going to say some might people might say that we're already there given that you've got 50 million people on food stamps in the United States 100 years ago when Marx was alive writing this stuff something like 60-70% of the population the United States was involved in farming simply to provide food so that people could live if they weren't 60-70% of the people weren't farming they would be starving you'd have a portion of the population starving now we're to the point where 1-2% of the population is involved in farming feeds the entire population of the United States and exports food or take your average middle class person say in the West today they can earn a decent living from specializing and working a certain number of hours a week and they have other pursuits and hobbies they might paint on the side or take an art class or they might get into wine collecting or becoming a tennis nut so people are already using their leisure time which capitalism has given us to do one thing in the morning and one thing in the evening and it would be more and better if the government didn't expropriate so much such a big cut of what we're producing already we'd probably be multiple times richer if the government would just go down by 60% or something 90% oh yeah I know it's amazing how much productivity but I think a lot of that comes from like we were talking about before this interview protectionism and whatnot and people want to protect their little fiefdoms and whatnot and using the government to do it they're saying it's the old and I've even had debates with people that are the old idea that you know robots will take all our jobs they just sound like Luddites you know like really you would rather we there's only so many jobs in the world oh we need to make sure that there's enough jobs for people we basically have a version of a prisoner's dilemma in society and it's created by the existence of the state a democratic state where people can all lobby the state and bribe it for protection in their little industry so the prisoners dilemma is that you know you'd almost be irrational not to lobby the state for your piece of the pie or your protection because everyone else is doing it to you yeah um you really can't expect people not to take advantage of the state when I mean okay you got one percent of the population might be principal diehard libertarians who just refuse to do it to their own in detriment in some in some way but you can't expect that tendency to survive or to be widespread well I was I was having a conversation earlier yesterday with a woman in Kathy Shaddle and we were sort of discussing that point because you know you know certainly you know these sort of cultural marxists are perfectly happy to use the state to sort of create these things like um you know the Ontario Tribunal on Human Rights or whatever which these seems these things seem to be organized to just you know destroy freedom you know free association destroy free speech um you know all these sorts of things and they have no problem using all these tools to you know essentially well what I would say is sort of in the same way the communists destroyed the economic system they destroyed the social system in some ways well when anyone starts talking about human rights I get really nervous because that's a catch phrase for this plethora of positive welfare rights and related that's whatever they want just so they can get power but anyways you're going to say about people not and you were going to continue about people uh choosing not to use these tools well no I just I'm just saying the existence of the state creates a situation where especially a democratic state where conflicts among different classes is inevitable right you're going to have basically a war of all against all which is the opposite of what civilization is supposed to be about well yeah so you know the smaller the state the less need there is to do that well yeah and and I would say that and I've said this I would think I had this said this to um uh Stefan Malno a little while ago I was having a conversation with him saying that you know essentially uh government in a lot of ways is the is the ultimate tragedy of the commons I mean it is a tragedy of the commons that's the problem is that it's this common thing that everyone's trying to use to their own ends and uh and let's just let's just finish this off by sort of just touching on this whole hoppa and immigration things as we were discussing it and um I guess some people again within the you know I hate to use the term libertarian you know the the liberty movement the freedom movement because I don't really consider I mean I guess I'm such a radical individualist that I don't consider myself to be part of any movement but um you know they complain well hoppa doesn't like immigration well you know if the idea is that we reduce the state to the smallest size and that we have you know total private ownership of all means of production of all land of all these sorts of things essentially immigration as we know it today would not exist is is that sort of what he's getting at well I think um I think hoppa he's an anarchist libertarian like like you and I are so his his his preferred situation is a society a world where enough people recognize that aggression is wrong and the state commits aggression so that states wouldn't have perceived legitimacy and they wouldn't be able to exist anymore and if you didn't have states then you would the the entire idea of immigration would be wouldn't make sense because there wouldn't be national borders there wouldn't be a policy there would just be property owners and each one would have the right to invite whoever they wanted to their property etc so you just have free movement of people so long as property owners consented to it exactly his main point well first of all he thinks the state should be abolished he's also a decentralized so he thinks that you know to the extent there's immigration control say in the u.s. it should be it should be reduced to a lower level like to the states or the towns and ultimately to the individual which is a libertarian decentralized idea but his point is is that if you just as a libertarian say we have an existing state system and the government shouldn't have immigration controls um well if the government has immigration controls it does violate rights if I want to invite someone to my land or my factory to work there and I'm not permitted to because of immigration law that is a violation of my rights to use my property as I see fit yes hapa admits this and in fact that's why he says that if there's going to be immigration controls um as long as someone's invited they should be permitted to come so he admits this so that's the main case of violation of rights is when someone who's invited is not permitted to come so he thinks that that should not be prohibited but he's also pointing out that if the government so the government has closed borders or limits immigration some people's rights are violated that could be ameliorated by requiring someone to be allowed if they have an invite an invitation from some property owner um but he also points out if the government takes an open borders policy and maintains it's um it's anti-discrimination laws a system of public roads it's affirmative action laws it's welfare state then someone's rights are violated that way too because uh now you get a phenomenon he calls forced integration so i see nothing wrong with a social philosopher analyzing the consequences of the state's existence and the state's interference with society if they do one thing they violate rights if they do another thing they violate rights this is why we shouldn't have a state in the first place because there are no winners in some situations mhm absolutely well yeah for sure i mean these are tough issues sometimes and and i think it's sort of funny because i mean this is the whole idea um you know that states create create i mean the funny thing of course is that the idea and i guess this is why he touches on things like a monarchy and these sorts of things because i guess the whole idea is that uh states are an organization of people and the people who and i think this is why you have to get back to libertarian class analysis i think is that you really need to again the state collectives in my mind really don't exist you know you really have to think okay well who is controlling the state right it's a group of certain people you know and within the borders of you know the territorial monopoly on ultimate decision making i guess as he would put it you know they they take a certain group of citizen certain group of individuals again and confer on them this designation known as a citizen right now the citizen has you you get a certain and a certain a citizen who is a certain class of person a certain class of individual that we have decided upon well you will get certain benefits you know of being a citizen as we have decided it you know and this is just another way of conferring you know positive rights on a certain group of individuals you know as a as against another certain group of individuals right yeah and the reason he brings up monarchy is this number one he's explicitly said he's not in favor of monarchy he's an anarchist his point is twofold number one to to step back and rethink this assumption a lot of libertarians have most libertarians are not in favor of democracy but they they sort of accept the the idea that the transition from monarchies around world war one time to the modern more democratic system was a step of progress was a movement towards a more legitimate liberal society and he's pointing out that it was actually retrogression in some ways and he does that by by explaining the incentives faced by monarchs versus democratic leaders have a lot more short-sighted incentives and monarchs have more of an incentive to maximize the actual economic value of the country that they're basically a kind of a quasi owner of now he's not in favor of that but he's pointing out that if you are wondering what policy a state ought to have for immigration short of abolishing the state which he's in favor of it might be helpful to imagine an ideal society which is a cat which is an anarcho-capitalist world where everyone is a property owner and can make invitations to people to their land and to and to imagine how they would act and then let's look at the incentives a democratic state would have about setting their immigration policy versus the incentives a monarch would have and his point is that the monarch would probably adopt an immigration policy closer to what you would have in an anarchistic society than the democratic states would do because the democratic states just want to get in voters who are going to need their welfare support they're going to vote for the government etc so they don't care about the quality of the people they're letting in whether the law abiding that kind of thing or they don't care as much as a private owner would so he's just using the idea of monarchy as number one to say that don't assume that the progression from monarchy to democracy was progress or unalloyed progress and number two if you imagine the policies a monarch would implement they're probably closer to what would result in a free society and that ought to give you pause when you're trying to think of what second best policies our democratic states should implement well certainly it seems to me that we now reside in sort of this unlimited totalitarian democracy where you know at least in Canada you know a relatively small percentage of the population you know quote unquote votes for a political party and then that vote that political party gets to impose its will on the entire population you know and do whatever it sees fit for you know four years you know or whatever it thinks it's you know it's whatever it thinks it's entitled to and it's to it really is to a point where you know as Bastia said or everybody's just trying to loot each other you know everybody's just trying to loot everybody else and it's and it is kind of funny as Stefan Paul you know I think you know it's it is sort of funny because you know we teach in kindergarten you know don't hit don't steal but then at some point it sort of transitions to well hit that person so I can steal from him for me and going back to that classic Benjamin Franklin quote when the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the Republic that's a that's a insightful point yeah exactly man anyways but we should we should discuss this further because I because we have been going for a while now and I do want to let you go but I would like to discuss this idea monarchy a bit further because I think it is because that is in some ways I think the monarch at least at some point saw themselves as the owner of that particular piece of land and you know they and I think that was the whole point right and I know that my own I think my own ancestors at one point they had moved from Germany to Hungary and they were yeah they were invited by a monarch this monarch said we need you know this got all this empty land come on down and start farming in Hungary but anyways Stefan I guess where are the websites where are the websites we can we can check out to they can find all my stuff at just stefanconcella.com so and that links to the other things I'm doing like c4sif.org and libertarianpapers.org excellent man okay thanks again and let's talk soon thanks man goodbye