 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Once again, it is Mises Weekends. I'm really happy to be joined by a young man I'm just getting to know, becoming a friend of the Mises Institute. His name is Trey Goff. He's a brilliant young guy just a year or two out of Mississippi State University. He has written and worked for some various libertarian organizations while he was in undergraduate. But more importantly, since graduating, he has started on a project of his own in the town of Jackson, Mississippi, where he has been busy working on the concept of a model draft constitution or a voluntaryist constitution, which a startup society or a breakaway society could adopt in whole or in part as a governing mechanism or at least as an aspirational mechanism for how they might organize themselves. Obviously, this is very fascinating to us as libertarians and ANCAPs. So with that, Trey Goff, welcome and thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Well, we ran your article on Mises Org earlier this week. We've linked to it here on the show. So I really recommend that people, if you have a chance, print out Trey's draft constitution and give it a read. It's really a fascinating document. So Trey, I'll start with the devil's advocate question. I think I posed to you a week or two ago. I said, well gee whiz, you know, you call it a constitution and that conjures up or brings up a lot of baggage about our own US constitution. And it doesn't sound like articles of incorporation or some kind of ownership document for a private society. So how and why did you choose to call this document a constitution as opposed to something else? So the reason we went with a constitution rather than articles of confederation or some other related term that means roughly the same thing is because constitution automatically conjures up mental images and connotations of the starting of a new society, which is exactly what I would hope that this document would be a model for. So the choice to use the term constitution was more of a strategic marketing move than it was anything else. When you hear the word constitution, you automatically think of the starting of something radical and new and exciting and something that is going to end up being prosperous and amazing because the first thing you think of, of course, is the American constitution. In firm agreeance with Lysander Spooner that our constitution is not effective and not valid, it was yet either authorized to the government we have now or was powerless to stop it. So in either way, it's unfit to exist. But I think the idea of a constitution, as in the idea of having a document that lays out, codifies and formalizes the rights that we believe we have in a polycentric legal order in a completely distributed common law legal order, will be useful for the creation of and the seem to the fruition of an actual free society at some point in the near future, hopefully. Well, talk about how you came to be involved. What are some of your influences for the document? As I read it, I'm thinking to myself, Locke Rothbard, Hoppe, would you consider yourself an ANCAP and what's your background and what are your influences? Yeah, so I'm definitely an ANCAP. Murray Rothbard actually was the deciding factor on that. When I read the Ethics of Liberty, it completely changed my life. In fact, the only time I've ever done this, but I finished the Ethics of Liberty, put it down for about five minutes and picked it back up and restarted it. That book completely changed my life and definitely influenced my thinking here. And it was actually a sum of Rothbard's writing that I quote in that article that influenced me into thinking about libertarian constitutions as a whole, because even Rothbard himself pointed out the need to have some sort of foundational legal order off of which the common law and archaic legal order could work. And so I thought to myself, after I saw that Rothbard had pointed out to the need for this, well surely someone of Rothbard's intellectual caliber or similar has written the Constitution before, and I started digging for one and immediately realized no one had, which was a glaring gap to me in the theory in this area and the thought in this area. So I said about it myself to try to see if I can take a shot at it. And then I was further influenced by Randy Barnett's structure of liberty, who I get the idea of a polycentric legal order of that term, although I think Rothbard originated the idea. Roth, I mean, Randy Barnett put that term on it. And he too calls explicitly in his work for a constitutional decentralized legal order of the kind that we as anarcho-capitalist advocate. So once I found that there had been several thinkers who were thinking along the same line of thought that we need a constitution for this to work properly. And when I realized further that none of these same thinkers had gone about making one, I thought, well, somebody needs to, and I combined that with a stumbling upon the free societies and the startup societies movement that's currently quite active. And I was like, well, if there were ever a time for someone to need a model document to look toward as projects like Liberland and a couple of others I'm involved with begin to take shape, they're gonna need something to look for and they're gonna need a model to build off of. So this is what I was hoping to do with this. So to make sure I understand you correctly, your position and also the position of Rothbard and Randy Barnett is that a common law society as opposed to a positive law society still needs some kind of foundational legal document or it's preferable anyway. Yeah, it's preferable. Now, of course it doesn't have it because as we know, these common law legal systems can work properly without a constitution as they discover law in an emergent and spontaneous fashion. However, I do think that it would, number one, for optics purposes alone be beneficial for in the real world today, a free society attempting to be founded based upon these precepts have a document to point toward that the rest of the world can see that when we say we're anarcho-capitalist we don't mean anarchism in the left wing burn it to the ground sense. We mean anarchism in the very structured way of thinking about governance without governments, without a monopoly on coercion. So it gives you something to point toward. But number two, I think it also really introduces this sense of formality and of structure into the anarchic legal order that would not otherwise be there. That sort of gives everyone a sense of regime stability so that they all know what the very foundational rules that we're all playing on, what those rules are. Well, Rothbard made a distinction when people would challenge him, the kind of voluntary or private society you're talking about, if it were to adopt rules or modes of governance as you, Trey, suggest here in this Constitution, what is the distinction between it and a government? Let's say a glorified homeowner's association began acting awfully like a government. And Rothbard says, well, as long as it doesn't have a monopoly on force for a region would you agree with that? And how do you account for this potential of human organizations to slide into something that starts to look but off a lot like government? Right, so this is something I put a lot of thought into. And first and foremost, I tried through several redundant mechanisms throughout the Constitution, from the rights, to the definitions, to the prohibitions, to prevent as much as I could anyone attempting to monopolize force or utilize force against someone else's property. So those two things alone should prevent a monopoly on coercion or monopoly on force from ever forming. But something else I attempted to do with this document if you'll notice, I haven't actually laid out any governance structure at all. So I've not stipulated a monarchy. I've not stipulated an aristocracy or a democracy or whatever. I've done that for a reason and on purpose because I fully believe that the only way we can truly discover what the most efficient and efficacious governance institutions to guide human interaction are is through allowing a system of competitive governance. So what this document is attempting to do is to say as we move into the future and as new societies are formed and older ones crumble and other things rise to take their place, that we have all of these new societies and governance institutions that are forming be predicated on these libertarian rules. So it's like fencing in the area around which they'll operate to say, you're free to make whatever voluntary associations you please, so long as it does not violate the property rights of others, which is a very, very short way of saying what I've said in long form in the constitution. Well, as I read too, you used the term coercion quite a bit. So the way I read it, in theory, a deeply progressive left society could operate under your model constitution provided the members didn't view the arrangements they were entering into as coercive. And provided so long as they have voluntarily entered into those arrangements, that's exactly right. This is actually one of the things that I've always found persuasive about anarchal capitalism versus any other radical form of governance organization. You're completely free to be a socialist or a communist in an anarcho-capitalist society so long as you're not forcing it on anyone else. Whereas in a communist or a socialist society, you are not at all free to be a capitalist. So yeah, that's exactly right. If you and a group of your friends want to form a communist collective commune, then by all means have at it. You and I can sit by in our anarcho-capitalist city and watch as your little commune crumbles. Right. And you touched earlier on the idea of Lysander Spooner and how the constitution didn't work for us. So there's a couple of things to discuss here. First of all, you and I would agree certainly that this isn't a contract per se and that contracts only bind people who sign them. How do you deal with the thornier issue of future generations? Because that always seems to come up. If we had a society, and let's not even talk about a society perhaps as private and as free as the one you might envision, let's talk about a one that was more private and more free than the one we've got. How would your document answer the question of future generations? I think under that situation, this is where the voluntary consent to this document becomes paramount. And the problem you run into there, and this is a problem that Rothbard grappled with as well, is determining the age at which people become viable adults, become able to voluntarily consent to contracts, be able to own property. At what point did they leave the temporary ownership of their parents, if you will, to become sovereign individuals capable of agency on their own? And I don't know that I certainly haven't been able to figure out an answer to that question specifically, as I know many other prolific thinkers are far more intelligent than I have than either. I think what you have to do in that situation is moving forward for future generations, require at some point, whatever that age of consent is, that those children or those future citizens of your society be presented with the Constitution in much the same way that their parents and grandparents were before them, so that they too can voluntarily consent to it. And it doesn't even have to be this physical document that you're literally signing. This is the beauty of blockchain technology moving into the future. You would be able to easily sign a document like this on the blockchanges using your own private key that is associated with your identification so long as it's an Ethereum-based blockchain contract. But the point is with a smart contract, the problem almost solves itself as soon as the person becomes of age and they decide that they do in fact want to stay in the society, well then they can easily sign the smart contract in 30 seconds over the internet and be done with it. And of course, all societies have to grapple with the question of children and agencies. Nobody ever asked us about a communist society. What about the kid who's born there? One thing I really like is the definition section because this has been a thorny problem for US constitutional law since the document was ratified, defining terms, and you lay out a very, I think, thoroughgoing and interesting definition of private property, one of the bullets you list talks about measuring property in physiochemical characteristics. So by that I assume we're eliminating intellectual property, so-called. Yes, and that was the exact objective of that. And in the spirit of full disclosure as well, I worked closely with Steffan Cancella on the development of the definition section specifically, which is why you see such a stringent admonition against intellectual property. But I think moving both philosophically and then consequentialist terms, I don't think there's an argument to be had that in a truly free society, you will have people being able to claim ownership over the ideas of themselves or another. That's tantamount to saying that you have ownership over the thoughts that occur inside of a man's head. So I think there's a variety of both from Steffan Cancella's work and from other work. Another great book on this called Against Intellectual Monopoly. I think the libertarian or otherwise case for intellectual property fails on all grounds. So we specifically strove in this definition section to keep intellectual property from ever propping up. Well, and look, if a society thinks otherwise on IP, I would disagree, but they're free to adopt or not adopt sections of this. It's a model code as you term it. And for those who are familiar with the term model, there's all kinds of model codes that organizations under the auspices of like the American Bar Association in the US create, like the model penal code or the model probate code that state legislatures are not necessarily equipped to draft themselves with their staffs. And so they just adopt in fuller and in part, a uniform code that someone else has written. And so that's where Trey's going here. Trey, article two deals with rights and it lays out nine different kind of bullet points about rights. What I love about this is you're codifying rights that you or we would deem important, but you're silent on the question of whether they're preexisting or natural or God-given or whether they're utilitarian. In other words, you don't have to come down on either side of the natural law question to understand and accept and abide by this section. That's exactly right. And my aim here was to do exactly that because to me personally, regardless of whether or not you approach it from a deontological perspective or a purely utilitarian perspective, I think we can all agree to some extent at least that these rights that I've listed out here, the right to self-ownership, the right against aggression, the right to voluntarily contract and the right to voluntarily trade goods and title to property are the cornerstones and the touchstones not only of human freedom and of human liberty, but of human prosperity as well. So you don't have to have a deep understanding of philosophy or you don't have to disagree with someone else regarding the foundations of their philosophy. This just simply states, look, these are the rights we would all agree would create the most harmonious liberty-filled, prosperous society that the world has ever seen. It doesn't matter where you arrive at those rights from, here they are, and this is why, again, I keep harkening back to this, but this is why it's important to me as well that you have to voluntarily consent to the code so that you can say regardless of how I came about my personal philosophy regarding natural rights, I agree with this, so I'm affirming it by signing it. When you talk in article two section on rights, when you talk about all parties of this constitution have an absolute right to self-defense, do you think the term parties is loaded? Does that conjure up a contractual document and rights flowing from a contract or did you use that particularly and knowingly? So I use that in lieu of being able to ascertain a better term. So this leads me to something else, which is that this is, as you probably saw, this is version 1.0. So I buy no means of proclaiming that this is the perfect model code at all and in fact, I invite any and all feedback on the document. So for instance, if someone could come up with a better term to use there than parties, buy all means, email me and let me know. I'll be happy to change it. I look forward to collaboration on this. Yeah, isn't that interesting? We sometimes, it seems like we forget that the whole point of being a libertarian is because we don't know. Because we don't know what's best for 7.5 billion people on earth. So this is really interesting. Now talk a little bit about that though, the utopian trap. When you get into talking about self-defense, you mentioned a concurrent and proportional response. We're always gonna debate what that means in any society. We're not utopianists. How do you fight back against the charge that that's precisely what this document is, some sort of utopian dreaming? So I pushed back on that on a couple of grounds. First off, I'm not at all attempting to say with this document or with any of my ideological claims more broadly that anarchal capitalism will create a perfect utopia. All I'm saying is that I will firmly believe this constitution predicated on these ideas will create a marginally better, more prosperous and freer society than the constitution that we have now in the United States or that any society has currently on the planet. So I'm not at all claiming this will create a veritable perfect utopia, merely that it will be a marginal improvement on the governance institutions that we currently find ourselves living under. But I think I would also push back on that claim by saying a lot of these little nitty gritty details like what you're talking about, how what level of force is exactly appropriate in any given specific example. I think that's the reason that this common law system, being a common law system is so important that this can be decided completely on a case by case basis such that you don't have to make a sweeping proclamation about exactly what proportional defense is or exactly what the correct amount of violence in a given situation is, that the justice of the matter can be decided on a case by case basis and the law in that area can be discovered as judges and juries continue to make decisions in the matter. Well, you have an interesting section, article four on justice. There's a lot of positive law crimes, malim prohibitim versus malim and say for people who are familiar with the legal term that we would say as libertarians ought not to be crimes. What I love about this section is it would really reduce the scope of criminal justice in society, right? Because we'd have fewer crimes. That's exactly right. The whole point of that justice section is I was trying and striving as hard as humanly possible to make it such that the only things that would even be considered a crime would be things that have a direct and obvious victim. So a victim is going to have to bring the suit forward for a crime to be tried at all. So this would massively reduce the amount of things that are considered criminal offenses in society, which I think it would end up with a more judicious and more just society overall. Give me or give us your thoughts on using tort law and civil court judgments as a regulator in society versus this terrible administrative regulatory state that we labor under in the West. Right. So tort law is going to be a better system overall for precisely the reasons that we've been discussing, which is that it is more decentralized in nature and it allows for a specific resolution to a specific problem predicated on the unique circumstances of that problem. And further than as the body of decisions is made and as stair to ceases continues, you end up with inevitably having a system that discovers the law as it emerges and discovers what the best resolution to a given dispute is as that problem continues to arise within your society. So you end up with again, a more just society overall and one in which people know what the rules of the game are, one in which people recognize what the institutional norms are for their behavior. So you end up with a higher degree of stability overall, which as you know is incredibly good for economic growth overall. You don't have this instability of not knowing whether or not the administrative state is going to persecute this supposed violation versus not that one. And you don't have the uncertainty of the administrative state that we have today. That increase in certainty of entrepreneurs is being able to predict what the institutional environment is going to be like is massively important for their developments of longer term projects. Talk a little bit about article five, which you've termed prohibitions and it talks about some things that are not permitted in a voluntary society like slavery, et cetera, and basically coercive relationships. Tell us your thinking in this section. So the objective of that section and in my opinion, the single most important few words in the document are actually the lead into that section, which says that these things are not to be permitted on other people's property who have not voluntarily and expressly consented to it beforehand. So I've made sure to try to leave out so we're not to not have that in there. This section would outlaw homeowners associations or anything like that, which is not what I was going for. Those are voluntary associations. The point of this is just that you cannot utilize coercion in any way, shape, or form unless the person has agreed to this nominal level of coercion beforehand as in a homeowners association where you've contractually agreed to keep your lawn clean and the association can find you or do something to you to get you to keep your lawn clean. Well, this is a similar thing I was trying to avoid here was just that short of someone voluntarily consenting to the abridgment of their property rights, it cannot be had. And the entire point of this entire section was I was thinking to myself basically, in how many ways can I attempt to prevent the possibility of a state ever forming? And this ended up being, I think it's either nine or 10 points of different ways in which each one of them taken alone should prevent a coercive state from forming. And even the last one, and I did this on purpose to try to leave the last word in the document also some of the most important to me, no one can institute a coercive monopoly on violence in the territory period. Meaning that it is literally impossible for a government to form. Even if you ignore or somehow misinterpret the entirety of the rest of the document that alone should let you say, oh, well, this is the uncrossable bridge, so to speak. Tre, I wanna wrap this up with one last question for you. Don't you find it interesting that almost every aspect of human life in the digital age is becoming radically decentralized? It's only governance that seems to be becoming national and federal and supranational and even international. Talk about this. Why are people so resistant to decentralized ways of organizing human society? I don't know that they're super resistant to the idea of decentralized society as an idea, as an esoteric idea. I think they're resistant to it almost purely for a number of psychological reasons, so the strength of confirmation bias and status quo bias among human beings is incredibly powerful. It's not that they're against the ideas of decentralization per se, they just don't want things to change and be anything other than the way that they are. But I think, unfortunately, they're gonna have to adjust to the change and pretty rapidly coming up. I mean, if you look at global population projections, over 85% of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2050, which is part of what spurred me to take on this project in the first place was, I firmly believe that around that time, or maybe after, maybe before, people will rapidly come to realize that the governance institutions of the nation state are horribly and irrevocably and irreparably broken and that we're going to have to move to a different system that doesn't rely so heavily on the coercive monopoly on force, a system that doesn't rely so heavily on these archaic notions of government. So moving forward, I hope that as those systems devolve and as those systems alter, we end up with a decentralized system of smaller jurisdictions throughout urban areas that have lower exit costs, meaning you have competition between governance institutions and that you end up with an overall freer, more prosperous society as hopefully, and again, this is the reason I put this together, we can kind of cut them off at the past, so to speak, and get ahead of this evolution to say, hey, any startup society or free society or new country project, I've got a document here for you that can help you out in the creation of your country or of your startup society that will make it freer, that will make it more prosperous and will prevent the takeover of a coercive state moving into the future so that we're using this and working with some of these projects, we can pave the way for real liberty moving into the future rather than being always behind the eight ball and trying to tear down the institutions that already exist, but rather forming new institutions in light of what we know about human liberty and human prosperity. Well, look, I applaud you for what you're doing. I think that this may be a much more fruitful path than libertarians trying to garner 51% of the electorate in whatever jurisdiction we're talking about. Trey, how can people find you and follow you on social media or otherwise? So I'm on Facebook, just my full name, Trey Goff. They can also find me on Twitter, app against the state. Shout out to Lou Rockwell for that. And those are the main two places that I'm active, Facebook and Twitter. Okay, we will post a link to the article Trey wrote for us this week, which includes the entirety of his voluntary as Congress constitution, which is far fewer words than the US constitution if I'm reading correctly. Hey, Trey, we really appreciate it. We thank you for your time, ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud, or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.