 Okay, hey, this is Stefan Kinsella, this is Kinsella on Liberty. I don't know which episode number it is. You can find out by looking at the podcast, I guess. Today I'm going to talk with Matt Sands, and usually everyone that listens to this knows usually this is just me appearing on other people's podcasts, but on occasion I do an original discussion or something. And so Matt Sands is here with us today and we're going to talk about some libertarian theory issues. I don't want you to say hello and introduce yourself. Hi, Stefan. Hi, everybody. You're listening. My name is Matthew. I run a project called The Nations of Sanity, which is a representation of voluntrism as I see it and presents the idea of establishing the non-aggression principle as the terms of peace as the way to a free society. Yeah, that's probably the best way to introduce myself. Cool. Well, so you and I talked previously about your project and then you and I were both talking to Mark Victor about his somewhat related life liberty. What is it? Living Let Live Project. And so we had a lot of conversations around our common grounds and our disagreements and things like that. You and I ended up talking about contract theory, property theory and things like that. And you thought it might be good to have a talk about some of that. So why don't you take it from there? Yeah. Well, I mean, it kind of started when you challenged me on the assertion that contract violation, when I said that contract violations were nap violations. And when you sort of challenged me on that assertion, I, at first I was kind of like, well, surely they are because I could think of many examples when a non-aggression principle violation had occurred, let's say, facilitated through a contract violation, like say comes fraud or theft or something like that, that involved the contract violation. But and this is where I want to kind of delve into this a little bit more with you to kind of help my own understanding of where you're coming from. But if I if I if I understand you correctly, and this is where I think I kind of come around to your thinking on it, is I realize that it's not the contract itself or sort of the contract violation itself that is a non-aggression principle violation, even in the instances where a non-aggression principle violation is involved, like a theft or a fraud, the theft or the fraud is itself a non-aggression principle violation. The contract violation may be evidence of that theft and fraud, you know, like for example, if I made a contract to sell you my car and then didn't give you my car, that's evidence that I've stolen what is rightfully your car because I've confirmed the only transferation to you and something like that. So that's why initially I was kind of resistant to your pushback that nap violations were sorry, the contract violations were not nap violations. But then when I thought about it more, I realized no, actually, they're not nap violations, although they can often be evidence of or, you know, they can be involved in nap violations, either being evidence of a nap violation or facilitating a nap violation. But the contract itself isn't necessarily that violation. And that kind of led me to think more deeply about what a contract really is. And my kind of briefest overview of my understanding is I suppose it's a formalized promise. And as self owning individuals, we have the right to make those promises. And we also have the right to break those promises. And while there may be consequences to that, it doesn't necessarily make it a non-aggression principle violation in of itself. So that's kind of how my understanding of contract has developed since speaking to you before. And I kind of want to develop it more and just and see if I am understanding your position correctly and what you can pick a hose in sort of my understanding of it. Right. Well, and let me say, so my view is I won't say that original. I didn't come up with it. This is basically my interpretation of Rothbard and William Smith Evers' view of how contracts should work. And to me, as a lawyer and as legal theorist, as libertarian, it makes sense. It is not the conventional view of contract law and it's not what the legal how the legal system looks at it and even how libertarians tend to look at it because they take sort of for granted the the framework of how we look at contracts. And like you said, they look at it as formalized promises or something like that binding obligations, legal obligations that result from formal promises, basically something like that. So I think to sort all this out, we have to step back and and and go back to fundamentals back to the things that we agree on, which is I think that we would agree that when we talk about the nap or the nonaggression principle, aggression is a word that refers to basically physically, violently hitting another person, usually their body. So so the paradigm case of aggression is physical fighting between human beings, right? And so if you're opposed to aggression, what that means is that's the same thing as saying that people own their bodies. Because if you say that A should not hit B, that means that A should not use B's body without his permission, which is another way of saying B owns his body. So the nonaggression principle, Simplicitor by itself, simply recognizes ownership in people's bodies. Now, libertarians extend that property rights scheme, which is an ownership of your body or some people call it self ownership. They extend that to other resources, right, in the world. And so when you violate someone's property rights in another type of resource, we call that aggression. But I think it's more of an analogy or an extension of the core nonaggression. But the root of all this is the idea that every human actor has a certain proprietary right, which is why the word property comes from from rights, to control certain resources, including your body and other things that we we acquire rights in. Now, most of us believe that you acquire these rights according to certain principles like homesteading and contract. OK, so so contract really is just an implication of the fact that when you own a thing. That means that you're the person who gets to consent to other people using it or to deny them consent. That's what it means to own something, right? So as the owner of a resource in a given legal system that we all agree with, the owner is the one who can consent or deny consent to others. Now, to deny consent or to express consent requires communication among human beings. You have to somehow indicate whether or not you do consent to someone touching or using your body or the resources that you have, right? Yeah. And over time, customs and conventions develop and we use language and tradition and and common sense about how people interact with each other to understand whether or not someone is the owner of an identifiable resource and whether or not they've granted consent or not for other people to use it. And then people can grant consent. In different ways, they can do it temporarily. They can do it permanently. They can do it partially. They can do it in a co-ownership kind of way. So there's all types of ways you can grant this consent. And this, to my mind, is what contracts are. So contracts are basically the exercise, the expression of consent by the owner of a resource. And typically it involves alienable resources, the things that we acquire and that we can alienate. And typically it would involve a sale, like that would be a complete divestment of ownership. But it doesn't always have to be, right? Like if you if you if you hire a hire or lease a car, rent a car from a rental company. Or an apartment or a flat. You have the right to use it for a certain period of time and conditional upon you paying the rent and not using the resource in certain ways, things like that. So your right to use it or your so-called limited ownership right is limited by the contract between the owner and the and the temporary user of it or the partial user of it. So you can have all kinds of contracts. The the simple case would be if someone owns a resource and they they give it or the sell it to someone completely. But that's still the type of contract because it's the owner consenting to someone else taking over the resource completely and forever. Right. So to my mind, a contract is simply and this is how Rothbard never looked at it. A contract is simply the alienation or the transfer of title to an owned thing to someone else by your manifested or expressed communicated intent or consent. Now. In the law, this is viewed as a binding obligation that results from a promise in Rothbard's view. And in my view, a promise is. A legal or extra legal, it's just it's sort of like the difference between marriage and the marriage and the legal aspects of marriage. So in the law, like, for example, in some civil law states, you have a marriage, which is just a private private arrangement or institution, like a religious thing or a civil thing or just a private commitment between a man and a woman or two people. And then there are legal incidents that flow from that. Like so by two people deciding to be married and holding themselves out as married, they usually are communicating their consent, that their resources be commingled and combined and co-owned in a certain way, and that they have certain supervisory rights to make medical decisions for each other in case one is incapacitated and to inherit from each other and to co-parent and to co-own their home and things like that. So there are legal incidents that flow from a marriage, but it's not the same as marriage. So in the law, like in Louisiana where I'm from, you would have a marriage, which is a private thing, a private relationship, and then you'd have a matrimonial regime, which is the legal incidents that flow from it. It would be like if you have a home in a neighborhood and you have your door open to everyone, it's sort of an implicit signal, according to the conventions and customs in the area, that you are consenting to people walking up to your door and knocking on it to ask you a question, but not to barge into your house and use it for a slumber party or to kick you out. So all this has to do with communication and things like this. So to my mind, a promise, per se, is not really legal. It's a communication and it's a private institution or a private interaction between people. If you make promises and you don't uphold them, you break your promise, you will suffer reputationally and commercially because people will know that you're not reliable and things like that. But from a legal point of view, the only legal incident of that would be like the marriage, the matrimonial regime that flows from a marriage relationship. It's like, what can we infer legally from the promise? To my mind, and this were Rothbard and Evers made a mistake, partly because they were pioneering this field and they're not lawyers. Rothbard saw the problem with relying upon promise as the basis of contract. And we can go into that if you want to. There's there's some theoretical problems with the conventional legal theory that that contracts are are enforceable promises, right? So Rothbard saw the danger of that, but he went a little bit too far. And he basically said the word promise can never form a contract. I think that's wrong. I think that the word promise can serve as a as a substitute communication for your consent. Like if I say I promise to deliver these these oil barrels of oil to you in a month, the promise per se is not enforceable. It's not a binding obligation. However, saying that you promise it could be a way of transferring title to the barrels of oil in the future. So you could do it in two ways. You could say, I hereby give you one hundred barrels of oil in one month in one month. But that's just a communication. But as I said, communication could be implicit or tacit express or implied and using the word promise can indicate to to to communicate your consent. But it's not because it's a binding promise. It's just because the promise is understood by both parties to mean that you are transferring title to something. So if you view contracts as binding obligations, let's legally enforceable obligations, which is how the law does it now. What that means theoretically is that now because you've entered into a contract, you have made a solemn promise and you paid consideration in the common law or whatever, you have a binding obligation. And if you don't fulfill that obligation, you are in breach of contract, which you could look at as a rights violation because the consequence for violating that right is there's some legal penalty. And the legal penalty is that the court will say, you have to pay damages like a financial payment. Now, the reason they do that is because the court doesn't want to use the force of the state and the courts to compel the person who didn't perform what he was obligated to perform. They don't want to compel him to do it because that is too hard to supervise and monitor. Like if someone promises to sing a song at someone's party and they fail to show up, then they breach the contract according to conventional theory. But the court can't make them sing the song the way they would have sung it originally because they may be under duress, they may be pissed off and they may do a bad job. And then the guy that's getting the song might not be happy with it. And then the court's gonna have to get back into it again and they don't have to do that over and over and over again. So they simply say, let's just make the guy that's in breach of the contract pay a financial payment, which they call damages, okay? Now, according to Rothbard, contracts are not binding, enforceable binding obligations or promises. They are simply transfers of title, which means that if I promise to perform some action at someone's event in the future and I fail to do it, then I could have put into the contract a penalty payment, like a title transfer saying, you're going to pay me money if I do sing or perform, but if I don't sing, then I will pay you some other damages payment. So the contract is really just a transfer of titles that are conditional upon certain things happening or not happening, which is actually with the way the positive law treats it without calling it that. So in my view, there is no such thing as a breach of contract because a contract is just an interconnected web of mutual and conditional title transfers. Like if I sing, you pay me. If I don't sing, I pay you. And then if I failed to pay you the damages, then I gotta pay you something else with interest and so on, like there's a subsidiary or auxiliary claims. So it's just a web of title transfers, which means the contract just specifies the consent of the owners of things to transfer, which means there can never be a breach because you don't perform it. It just happens automatically by the consent you set in motion before. That's why to talk about violating or breaching a contract makes no sense. There is no such thing as a breach of contract. It's simply that if you fail to perform something that you promised, typically that means that you implicitly or explicitly agreed upon some damages payment to ensure that you would do it or to disincentivize you from not performing. Does that make sense? It does, I've got some questions though. I mean, I would like to, although I've got some questions first, but I would like to delve into the issue you have with Rothbard's assertion about contracts being a promise and stuff because I think I haven't read as much of Rothbard as I should have because I'm often told that things I say are things that he said. So perhaps a lot of the conceptualizations that have a very, maybe similar to him in many ways. And often when I do read stuff from him, he does say a lot of things that seem to be similar to what I'm saying or where I'm coming from. And by the way, as an aside, Rothbard quite often in his reasoning said things that Ayn Rand herself said before or her followers, but he didn't often give credit because he broke from her. And I'm not criticizing Rothbard for that, but it is true that a lot of his reasoning, not the contract theory stuff, but a lot of his reasoning. Anyway, so sometimes we come across ideas from the ethos of what we're reading or we read it and we forgot or sometimes we independently come across it and it is something some earlier guy thought of, but yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Well, yeah, so I would like to delve into that because I've got a feeling that I have a similar conceptualization of contracts to Rothbard. And I'd certainly be interested to delve into where you see the problems with that. But I'd also want to speak just about, because how I separated my initial conceptualization where I was viewing contract violations as NAT violations because I was imagining all of these NAT violations that had some kind of breach of contract involved. I want to delve into what you're talking about as well about there's no such thing as a breach of contract because I suppose from my point of view, I'm thinking of contracts as formalized promises. So you can break a promise, you can break a contract and it's almost the same thing. But the way in which I moved away from my previous belief that contract violations were NAT violations was largely due to your arguments whether I'm understanding them correctly or not. But where I kind of separated the contract from the NAT violation, when I was thinking of these examples, for example, I agree to sell you my car and take your money, but don't give you my car. The contract violation, the break of contract, the broken promise, that's not the NAT violation. The stealing your car or stealing your money, whichever way you want to look at it is the NAT violation and the contract is really just evidence of that. It's evidence that I transferred ownership. Right, yeah, I was going to say you mentioned that earlier. I think the contract is evidence of who owns what. So a NAT violation is always the use of someone's resource without the permission. But to determine that, we have to know who owns what. And we have basically two rules, I believe. Well, we have three rules. We have one rule for bodies, which is basically the presumption of self-ownership, which means every person who is an actor, which means a person, a legal personality or an economic actor associated with and controlling a human body. So I think the primary libertarian rule is that the ownership of those human bodies is determined in accordance with the rule, the human actor or the human person associated with that body is the presumptive owner, okay, that's the first rule. So self-ownership, you can call it. But for other things that are inanimate or even animate in the case of animals, we basically, let's talk about inanimate external resources or objects in the world. And things that were previously unknown things that are not actors themselves, right? When humans use these, employee and use these things as means, then there can be conflict over them, that's why property rules emerge. And then so the libertarian and the private common law rule was always basically, we determined the owner of these things by two rules. One is we ask who was the first person to use it, which is homesteading, Lockheed homesteading or original appropriation, you can call it that. And second contract, which means if there was a previous owner who contractually assigned it to someone else. So what that means is all things being equal, the first person to start using it is the owner, unless he abandoned it, which is a consensual issue or a metaphysical issue like he dies and he doesn't exist anymore, so he can't own it. Or two, he consensually transferred it to someone else, in which case the guy he transferred it to, he's not the original homesteader, but he has a better claim than everyone in the world because number one, he's got a better claim than the homesteader because the homesteader made a contract to give it to him. And he's got a better claim than everyone else in the world because he stands in the shoes of the homesteader by the legal principle of subrogation. So anyway, the point is the contract identifies an owner of a thing. So in the case of Rothbard in his title transfer thing he makes a couple of mistakes and he does that because he's pioneering and he just missteps a couple of times. The first misstep is the word promise. He sees the danger of viewing the basis of contracts as binding promises because he understands that a promise is just a word that you say. And if you believe in free speech, typically force is not justifiable in response to someone for saying words. So he says it can't just be that. So he says it's instead a transfer of title which he's right about. He's just wrong in thinking. He's like someone afraid of vampires. They have a cross up in there. They don't wanna hear the word, he doesn't wanna hear the word promise. But I think the word promise can be used. I mean, if you believe in implicit contracts where you can have a transfer of title without any verbal communication whatsoever just by context, then why can't the word promise also serve that purpose in some cases? But the second mistakes he makes and this gets to one of your points is he says that if you don't, if you have a loan contract where someone loans a sum of money to someone and they're supposed to repay that amount plus interest at a future time and the debtor doesn't repay which is a type of breach of contract in a sense or a type of failure to perform. Rappler says technically speaking, they are a thief because they're stealing something from the creditor promise C and therefore theoretically debtor's prison would be justified but then Rappler realizes that would be sort of contrary to his inability stuff and his title transfer, he says well but debtor's prison would be disproportionate punishment. So he backs off of it that way. But I think his mistake there is so you can imagine two cases. Someone borrows 1,000 pounds and they owe 1,100 pounds in one year, okay? Now on the due date of the loan contract the debtor has lots of money. So I would say that by the operation of the title transfer in the contract 1,100 pounds of his money automatically converts to and transfers to the creditor. So at this moment in time the creditor owns that money. Now it's in the possession of the debtor temporarily and that's not a tort because that's contemplated by the nature of the agreement but the debtor has to allow the creditor to receive it. In other words, if he blocks him from doing that at that point in time he is committing a type of conversion or tort of trespass or theft or something like that because he's in possession of someone else's money and he won't turn it over. So in that sense, the contract would identify the owner of this 1,100 pounds. It identifies that the owner is now the creditor and if the debtor who's holding onto it doesn't release it, he's committing a tort and that is a crime, that is a nap violation. But it's not because of the contract it's because he is in possession of someone's property and he won't turn it over. If he's pitiless however, there is nothing to steal and that was Rothbard's mistake. So if you can't pay the money back because you're bankrupt then you're not committing a nap violation because see the law would say you are because they view contracts as binding obligations and you're not fulfilling your obligation. But if you view it as a title transfer then if you don't have any money there's no title to transfer. Like there's no object that you're stealing. So Rothbard and I think Walter Block trying to rehabilitate Rothbard's little error here when I cornered him on this he sort of thought about it and said, well, you're right you can't steal something in the future that doesn't exist. So what you really stole was the original 1,000 pounds from a year ago and said, well, but how can you steal it if the lender lent it unconditionally to you to use which he had to do it had to be an unconditional loan because the purpose of the loan is to give the borrower money he can spend on some project to try to make a profit, right? He might fail his profit. Go ahead. But is it unconditional though? Because surely isn't the terms of the contract part making it conditional? Like, you know, it's conditional, no? It has to be unconditional. So think of a simple case. The lender loaned 1,000 pounds and let's imagine this is back in the days where this is 1,000 pounds of actually of silver like some commodity that keeps the value like state money complicates the issue because money doesn't even exist. But okay, let's assume it's a real commodity that you can own. So you loan the money to someone. The contract is two reciprocal title transfers. In other words, the only condition on my giving you the 1,000 pounds now is that you give me 1,100 pounds in the future now. Like you make a contract, you make a title transfer now. That's the condition. But once I do that, then I've set in motion a future title transfer, which is the payment for my present title transfer, okay? But we, because we're aware of Austrian economics we know that the future is uncertain. So any future, so the present title transfer is not uncertain because I have the money and I hand it over to you, it's done. But the future title transfer is uncertain. It's necessarily uncertain. So I am taking any, in fact, the law calls this a sale of a hope. I mean, this is what risk taking is all about. The reason I'm giving you my 1,000 pounds is in the hope that I get 1,100 in the future. But I know there's some risk, which is one reason I charge interest. One reason I charge interest is because of the time value because of time preference. But another reason is because of risk. So as an entrepreneur, I'm taking the risk that I won't be repaid. I mean, this is part of life. So the condition on the, but otherwise the transfer of the original money has to be unconditional because otherwise the borrower couldn't spend it. He's borrowing the money to start a little business where he can make a profit. He needs to spend the money to buy supplies and things like that. How can he buy supplies from vendors if he doesn't own the money? Because the vendor is going to say, do you have free entitled property to this money? Otherwise I'm not going to give you my supplies because the creditor might come chase me down and get the money back, right? The whole purpose of this is so that the borrower can spend the money. So he has to have totally unconditional title to it. And if he has unconditioned, and by the way, if you ask the parties at the inception of the agreement, they would have to agree to this because they don't always agree to it because it's common sense. But if you force them to put it down in writing, I'm sure they would agree to this because if I'm the attorney advising both sides, I would say to the creditor, do you understand that the borrower needs to spend this money? Yes. But if the creditor says, well, I'm going to put a lien on the money where he doesn't have full title to it until a year from now when he repays me, well, then he can't spend it. So he's not going to be able to make a profit to repay me it. I mean, the whole deal would fall apart. It just doesn't make any sense. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, it does. I'm trying to wrap my head around it because I do understand what you're saying because I suppose the way I was conceptualizing it before was like, I was using like the example of say, I agreed to sell you my car. But if I agreed, say, you transfer the money over to me like now, but I haven't physically given you my car yet. And let's say I'm going to give it to you tomorrow or next week or next year or whenever. It doesn't really matter. But so as far as I'm concerned, that car is now yours even though it's not in your possession yet. It is your rightful property even though I haven't given it to you. And if I don't give it to you, I've stolen what is now your car. I completely agree. The reason why I now I use that exact same thinking for the debt, like for the money, but I understand what you're saying because unlike the car that actually exists that I can actually transfer ownership over to you, if it's just the promise of some money that I'm hoping to acquire, then I suppose there's a sort of invalidation to the contract in the same sense of the, I'm not actually transferring ownership over to you because I don't have ownership to transfer. I'm just making a promise to do. Let me distinguish here. So in a loan contract, the purpose of the loan is to loan someone money. And the reason they want money is to spend it. I mean, if you don't need to spend it, you don't need the money usually. So the purpose, the nature of this interaction is to be able to spend the money. So it has to be unconditionally transferred. In the case of a car, so let's say you have a car and you wanna sell it to me and it's let's say 10,000 pounds, but I don't have that much money. So you agree to basically finance me and you say, well, I will pay you 1,000 pounds a month until I pay you the full amount, right? But in the meantime, I need to use the car. So you're gonna give me the car, but what that means is you take a security interest in the car, it's collateral, which means from our point of view as libertarian, Rothbardian legal thinkers, what that means is until the loan is paid off or the financing or the purchase price is paid off, you and I are in a sense co-owners of the car. You have the underlying right to the car. I have the right to use it, but the contract presumably would say something like, if halfway through I quit paying, then you can repossess the car and you can sell it to pay what you're owed or you can just get the car back and I don't refund me part of it or something, but the contract would specify. So you have a complicated co-ownership situation until the deal is done. There's nothing wrong with that either. I mean, it's similar to a lease. I mean, look, my wife and I have leased a car from BMW and it's a three year lease. At the end of the lease, we don't own it anymore. We have to return it, but we can buy it for a certain agreed upon price. So- But do you really own it during the lease as well? It depends on how you mean own. If you mean own in the sort of allodial sense that everyone thinks of ownership as the absolute complete right, no, but ownership can be divided. I think of ownership as a juristic concept, which is not possession, but it's the legal right to possess. So in a reduction of sense, I think I do own a car that I'm leasing because I have the right to use it. So ownership means the right to use. So the question is whether it's complete ownership or not. So I think it's a co-ownership situation. So if I rent, if I hire or rent a car from Avis, then Avis owns the car and I co-own it in the sense of, I have for a specified period of time, I have the right to use it. Now they can call me and say, you got to return the car, we've changed our mind, but certain types of leases are not like that. They're actually considered a real property interest in the law. Like if you lease a flat or an apartment for one year, let's say, I think in some cases, in some legal systems, the landlord cannot eject you until the term is up. So you have a property right that is enforceable for that whole period. You effectively own it. Now you don't completely own it because you can't remodel it, you can't sell it to someone else, but you can stay there until the year is up. And there's something in the law called life of state or life use of fruct. There are different types of ways you can divide ownership. That concept has bothered libertarians, I think because they have this allodial sense that ownership has to be permanent and complete for it to be real. And I think that's because they have this aversion to the state, assuming the role of overlord, like they do now, like in your country and in the US. If you own real estate, you don't completely own it because you own property taxes. If you don't pay property taxes, the government will take it from you, which means that the state has set itself up in the position of overlord in the common law type of system, which means you're like a lower owner down the totem pole. But for all practical purposes, you can sell it, you can mortgage it, you can have a lien on it, you can modify it, you can abuse it, you can destroy it. But what about, sorry to interrupt, but what about the, because yeah, I understand what you're saying, but the one thing, the only other pushback that I did have outside of what you mentioned that other libertarians would be concerned of with regards to the association of like, how state is the applications of it. But the other bit of pushback I have was like, when you were talking about the car being yours that you're leasing, I immediately thought back to this whole, the lending of the money and the unconditional nature of that lending of the money. Now, I mean, maybe this would depend on the specifics of the contract of the lease, but the leasing of the car seems conditional in the way that the- Correct. Do you see what I'm saying? I think it is conditional. I agree, it's a limited ownership right. Whereas in a debtor, in a lending kind of, what do you call it, a loan contract, the loan of the money, that transfer of the principal sum that is given from the creditor to the debtor is itself 100% unconditioned. It has to be unconditional. The only condition is that I only make the transfer conditioned upon you making some other transfer back to me. Now that transfer is a future transfer, which is where fraud comes in. So to my mind, fraud is the obtaining of possession or maybe title to something by deception. So to take a simple example, the simplest contract imaginable, well, the simplest contract imaginable would be a gift or abandonment. Like if I own an Apple and I give it to you, okay? So that's a one-way, unconditional, contemporaneous title transfer. I give the Apple, now it was mine, now it's yours. The second most simple would be an exchange where we exchange an Apple for an orange. So there are two title transfers happening at the same time. There's no condition in the future. Like anything that has a future component is conditional because the future is uncertain. But if it's two contemporaneous things, there's no condition except that each transfer is conditional upon the other transfer being made simultaneously. Which means that if I give you an Apple conditioned upon you giving me an orange, then the guy that has the orange who's are received with the Apple, he is fully aware that his right to start using that Apple that is handed over to him is conditioned upon him doing his part, which was giving an orange. And if he knows that he stole the orange and doesn't own it, or if it's a rotten or a fake orange, he knows that he's not fulfilling the requirements of that title transfer of the Apple. So he knows that he didn't get full consent from the owner, like he didn't get informed consent you could call it. So that's to my mind what fraud really is. Fraud is what you can call a subset of fraud and fraud law theft by trick. And so in the reason that counts as a type of aggression or a type of trespass against property rights is precisely because ownership, as we said earlier, ownership means that you are the person who has the right to deny or withhold consent to others to use this thing, but consent is a communicated thing, right? So communication is always in a two or more way interaction between people and it relies upon background provisions, custom context, because you can never have expressed communication that is complete. It's always, it always depends upon a background interpretive context. Which is why you can have two people who don't speak the same language trade with each other. They could just point and hand and they understand what happened. They understand enough for it to be a consummated transaction, right? And so the fact that communication has to happen means that both sides to this contract understand that there's a presumption of, you can call it a presumption of good faith, which most legal systems say that there is, which means they're both being honest about the material conditions of the contract because they both realize that each one is only parting with what they own for certain reasons, right? So to my mind, that's the basis of fraud. So libertarians oppose fraud, but only if you understand it as an outcome of property rights and contractual consent. Yeah, cause I mean, I suppose I've always thought of fraud as simply, like you say, theft through deception, through a trick rather than through physically taking like a mugging or something, but it's still theft. So that's why fraud is always a nap violation in my mind because it is still a theft. Whereas, as you say, there could be a contract violation that doesn't involve any fraud, doesn't involve anything like any actual theft. It could just be like, say, breaking a promise. And then it's not a nap violation cause, I mean, I suppose the way I can say, sorry, go on. So the way I look at that is, when people enter into a contract, they're aware of the possibility of someone not living up to the promise that they made. So either they build in a title transfer to account for that or they don't, right? Or either they assume that there will be an implicit one, right? And usually that's what they do. There'll be customary or default or sublative rules that accomplish that. So- Or they could make it conditional. Yes, yes, you can. You can make- This isn't really yours unless you give me this in the future kind of thing. And by the way, in a loan contract for a complicated large loan, you can have conditional aspects to it. For example, I loan you a million pounds and it's supposed to be spent on this project. Now you're not usually going to spend a million on day one. You're going to spend it over the next several months on different things. You could put conditions and they're saying, the creditor has the right to come in and inspect your records and make sure you're only spending on what you're supposed to spend it on. And if you spend it on something frivolous or outside the scope of this agreement, I would say that that spending is itself theft because you're using someone's property in a way that they don't consent to. And you know that. So that's the type of theft itself, right? Or they could say- Well, sorry to interrupt, but would that mean that that's part of a conditional loaning? So like they've loaned it to you conditionally. So it's not really yours in that true ownership sense. Correct. With that permission. I think it's, the contract would say this, the creditor owns the money. Now in those cases, to be honest, the creditor would just retain possession of the money. He wouldn't dole it all out. So like on day 40, the borrower would go to the, like it's a line of credit in that sense. So then the borrower goes to the creditor and says, okay, I need to make a payment to my vendor. I need you to make a payment to him. So then the creditor only pays who he thinks is part of the scope of the contract. If he gives it all to the debtor and lets the debtor put it into his bank account, he's taking the risk that the debtor might spend it without his permission. In which case he would be a thief, but then the question becomes the third party who received the money, does he own it or does the creditor own it? Now that's a separate, the fornier question. And in my view, if you have, it's akin to the question of stolen property. So like if B steals A's watch and sells it to C and then B runs away with the money and is gone. Now A finds C later, like a pawn shop. Who owns the watch? Does the pawn shop own it or does the original owner of the watch own it? Now, I would say that- Before you tell me the answer, can I give you mine? Sure, go ahead. Cause I mean, cause you may or may not agree with it, but I've always, my opinion of that has been that the original owner of the watch is the rightful owner of the watch and the C has basically had his money stolen because he had money taking from him, like defrauded out of him basically under false pretenses because he thought he was getting something rightfully in exchange and he wasn't. So for me, the watch belongs to the original owner and the party who took that watch in good faith has basically been robbed by B who ran off with the money, who robbed both parties basically, he robbed one guy of his watch and then he robbed the other guy of his money by pretending that he owned the watch that he was trading for it. But the point is either A or C is going to be out of something. So the question is who should the law make be the one who suffers from this deal? Now, I think your answer is probably usually the right answer and probably what the default answer would be. I also think it doesn't matter because I think whatever the legal system says, people would tend to have title insurance that would cover this. So let's say the legal system said the owner is out of luck and the pawn shop guy gets to keep it. Well, that just going to mean that people are going to tend to have title insurance or they're going to tend to be aware of that risk. When you own, if you own something, if some party B steals it, then you're screwed. And even if you find that thing and someone else's hands later, you can't get it back. Now, I think that's usually the wrong rule, especially in the case of real property. I think for real property, the original owner almost always gets it back. I do think, and I think the law has an exception for like, I think it's been a long time since I took commercial paper in law school, but I think there's an exception in some cases where it's really the fault of the original owner, like he's careless or negligent. So for example, when you have negotiable instruments like a check, someone writes a check. Now, I'm actually not sure if negotiable instrument and commercial paper law is actually compatible with libertarian contract theory. That's another thing no one's written on. There's a concept of negotiability, which is a special legal thing in the positive law, which I'm not sure makes sense. But what that means is if I have money in a bank and I write a check to someone to draw money on that bank, I'm directing my bank to give money to someone, right? The rule is if I don't sign that check, it's not valid. So if someone steals one of my checks or makes a forged check and they get money from my bank that way, I can say I never authorized it, so I still have the money and the bank is the one that's on the hook. Which, okay, let's say we agree with that rule. However, there's an exception if I was careless and I left my checkbook on my dresser in my bedroom when I had workers over at my house preparing the ceiling or something like that. So I should have known this could happen. I didn't take precautions. And in that case, I'm more responsible for the bank giving the money to the wrong party than the bank is. In that case, I shouldn't be able to complain. So you can see exceptions being made. So if I just like left my watch on a park bench or something like that and some guy steals it and then a pawn shop buys it, I mean, who should suffer the loss? The pawn shop or me? But again, in both cases, I think people would tend to have for expensive things they would tend to have title insurance that would cover a loss if the legal system doesn't go your way. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, I can certainly understand the exceptions when you are more at fault for the violation, the crime. In that case, the burden, probably a proof would be on the third party who would otherwise be left. He would be devastated of the property he bought and he would be out the money he paid for it. In that case, maybe it would be an affirmative cause of action for him to make. He would have to satisfy a burden of proof that look, normally I'm in possession of stolen property, but because of the negligent actions of the original owner, he should suffer the loss, not me. So you'd have to make that argument. Yeah, it's almost like saying the default is that it would be the original owner. I think so. But you can imagine scenarios where there may be exceptions if that original owner was criminally negligent or negligent in some way that they're to blame for the loss or whatever. So yeah, I can totally take that point. Yeah, you know, you let some, you go down to the homeless shelter, you let some junkie come live at your house for a while who's got a criminal history. And they steal your watch. I mean, it's not the pawn shop's fault that you weren't careful with your belongings, something like that. Yeah, yeah, I understand what you're saying. I mean, yeah, yeah, I mean it's, because I suppose the way I'm trying to, like I said, I'm trying to polish my own understanding of this. And it's like, it's helping me understand, you know, what a contract is, which I still kind of view as a formalized promise, but I don't see the same problem that Rothbard saw with regards to the burden of that formalized promise because I don't think that you, I don't think the promise alone obligates you. Like for example, with the title transfer, like if I, you know, like we said before, like if I say I'm selling you my car for such and such money but I don't give you my car, then I've basically stolen your car because it's now your car because I have transferred that property over to you. Whereas in a different scenario where I'm just making a promise to do something and then I break that promise, there's no actual transfer of property that you can point to of theft. I've just broken the promise. But as a self-owning individual, I have the right to do that and you have taken that leap of faith. Yeah, you've got the contractual proof that I broke my promise, but so what? All like break the promise. Let me explain the, so in the law, the law has struggled for centuries with why exactly do we enforce promises or why are contracts enforceable? So there's different justifications that have been trotted out for this. And one of them is called detrimental reliance. So the idea is that someone makes a promise to do something and someone else says, okay, I really need to be able to rely upon your promise because if you promise to supply me with inputs to my chemical plant, my refinery, my petrochemical refinery, if you don't provide it, then I'm gonna be out millions of dollars. So I need to be able to rely upon that. And the guy says, I really promise you, I'm going to do it. I give you my word, whatever. And then, so the chemical, the refinery makes, it changes this position in reliance upon you doing it. Like it starts making orders and making contracts of its own to promise the output product and this kind of thing. So that's said to be in the law. Someone relied upon your promise to their detriment, meaning if you don't perform, they're gonna suffer. The problem with that reasoning, as Randy Barnett, who's one of the pioneers of the libertarian theory of contract, he's not quite the same as Rothbard's title transfer theory. He's got a different type of theory, which is better than the conventional law, but I still think it, the Rothbard's makes more sense to me. But Randy Barnett points out, he calls it a consent theory of contract. Randy Barnett points out that the, and other scholars have pointed this out too. The problem with basing enforceable contracts based upon binding promises or promises because of detrimental reliance is that it's totally circular because the law always says that when you rely upon someone's promise, it has to be reasonable reliance, okay? Because you can't just have, someone just say I relied. It has to be reasonable, right? What reasonable people would do. But reasonableness of reliance depends upon whether the legal system would enforce the promise. Because if you know that the legal system doesn't enforce promises, then it would be unreasonable for you to rely upon it. Or put it this way, if you rely upon it, it's at your own risk, right? Just like, if a girl says she's going to be your wife forever and you marry her and then 20 years later, she wants a divorce. I mean, you rely upon her promise, but there's no contract breach in the legal sense theoretically, you don't own her body. You can't force her to stay your wife. You know what I mean? One is people sometimes rely upon promises and they take the risk that the person making the promise is going to change your mind or not fulfill it or be unable to fulfill it or whatever. So the problem with detrimental reliance is that it's circular and this is pretty well known. So it's like incoherent. It's like, it's an ad hoc, it's a make weight argument. I think the real reason contracts are enforceable is because people think it's just essential to, it's essential to commerce. Like it's a consequential thing. If you don't have this institution, then modern commerce won't work. But what they fail to realize is number one, the power of reputation is great. So people, even if you don't have a financial penalty for breaking a contract, so-called breaking a promise in a contract, lots of companies will be very reluctant to break it because they know that they'll suffer. And number two, you can, as I said, the awards given, even in today's legal system, when you break a contract, it's just a payment of money. But you could put that into a contract as a title transfer. So you can still do the same thing with the title transfer. It's just you don't have the idea of a binding promises as the core of it. Well, yeah, because I suppose, I mean, that's why I didn't feel like the issue of contract enforcement was a problem because if someone was to say to me, and I'm talking about how contracts should work, not necessarily how they do today, but how they should if they were done properly and it consistent with the principle. But like if someone said to me, okay, what are contracts enforceable? I would kind of ask them, well, what do they mean by that? Because for example, if I have a contract to sell you my car and you give me money and I agree that I've sold you my car but I don't give you my car, I've stolen the car because in that situation, and I could say, well, that contract's enforceable because you can, we're going to enforce that I'm the owner of the rightful owner of the car because this contract proves that you've gave the ownership over to me. The reason why that's enforceable is because we're not enforcing you to keep a promise. You've already done it. The fact that you haven't fulfilled the promise of handing over possession is means you're robbing somebody of something that they now own but you've already transferred the ownership. I suppose it's the difference in my mind between saying, give me a thousand pounds and I'll give you my car but I'll actually physically give it to you next week and then I don't, I run off of it or whatever. The difference between that or me saying the alternative is me saying, give me a thousand pounds and next week I promise I will give you my car. And in that situation, if I don't give you my car like you're not buying the car off me for a thousand pounds I know it sounds a bit convoluted but I'm saying, please give me a thousand pounds and I promise that I will give you my car in a week but I've not given it to you yet, if you know what I mean. Whereas, I know that it doesn't normally work that way but I'm saying like technically like I'm just trying to break apart what the contract is. Well, in that case, I would say it just is a question of interpretation of what the communication meant. So if you literally meant, I'm gonna give my best efforts to give you a car but that's all I'm gonna promise. And the guy giving you money is willing to, he's paying for that hope. That's fine. Yeah, just to clarify, sorry, just to clarify, I am working on the assumption that it's clear that these stipulations are clear, both parties understand and so I am working under that. I think that in most cases, that type of arrangement, that would be interpreted to mean, I am here by transferring title in the future in one week to you, to this car. So the transfer, the transfer is- That wasn't the case. The transfer is- If you stipulated, but if you stipulated, like, yeah, I see what you're saying there but then you're still making the transfer today, you're just saying that it- It's a future transfer. That it's a future transfer, but you've transferred the ownership today but for the next week's day or for a future day. Which means that it's conditional. So it'd be analogous to me saying, I've got this big warehouse behind me and the doors are closed and in that warehouse, I might or might not have a car. And I'm going to transfer it to you, the contents of the warehouse for $1,000. So the guy giving the $1,000, he's buying something uncertain and that's perfectly legitimate if you want to do that. That's gambling in a sense, right? Yeah, I mean, it's not a contract, I brought it into- He gives me $1,000, I open the door and there's no car there. Well, that's what he gets, right? Similarly, if I say, I'm giving you a car in a week, let's say I don't have a car, but I have an inventory, car is coming and going and I'm saying there's a very high likelihood and I will do everything in my power to get a red Corvette for you that I'll give to you in one week. And if I own that car in one week, it becomes yours. But the if has to be there because it's in the future. I can't give you a car in the future that doesn't exist. I can only give you a car in the future that does exist. Whereas with the car that I have, I can transfer ownership, even though I'm not physically giving it to you yet, I can give you ownership right away and the contract would serve as evidence that that's what I've done. And if you keep in mind the distinction between ownership and possession so ownership and possession are different things. So for example, you're on vacation and you're with your wife and you hand your phone to someone to take a picture of you, some stranger. You can't accuse the stranger of trespassing by manipulating your phone for those 45 seconds. However, if they run off with it, they're stealing it. So ownership is temporarily slightly divided and possession is definitely separated from you and you took the risk but you didn't lose the ownership because you didn't consent to them stealing your phone, right? And earlier you said about contracts being enforceable. I think the best way to think about it is to say, to ask whether not contracts are never enforceable, property rights are enforceable. The question is, is the contract effective? In other words, did it serve to transfer titles or something? So it's evidence of title transfer, that's what it is. Contract is simply a formalized non-simple evidence of title transfer. And I say non-simple because when you're the owner of a resource, it's always a question of whether you consent or not someone using it. Like if a girl allows a guy to give her a kiss, she's consenting to him temporarily using her body in that limited way. But we don't usually call that a contract. But in a sense, it's a reducible form of contract because it's just the expression of consent by the owner of a resource. Typically we reserve the concept of contract to more or less complete alienations of ownership to alienable resources based upon certain conditions being fulfilled. So they're usually future-based, which means they're uncertain and conditional. And the transfer is from A to B completely. But not always, you can have a lease, you can have a co-ownership, you can have like a timeshare condominium or something. You have three people own something. And if three people own a home, then as to the rest of the world, A, B and C are like a unit that owns it. That's what a corporation is in a sense. But as between themselves, they have a contract specifying, okay, A can use the condo on even days of the week or whatever. They have a contract between themselves which specifies how they own it. And if they can't come to an agreement, then they have to just sell it and split the proceeds. I mean, there's no other way around it, just like when a divorced couple, or put it this way, when a father dies and leaves his home to his two children, if they can't agree how to use it, then they have to sell it and split the proceeds. There's just no other, there's no other way. But from the point of view of the rest of the world, they own it, but from the point of view of each other, they have a contract between them that specifies their respective usage rights. Well, I suppose because they both own it and they both have that right, like the right that they have beyond other people being the owners obviously gives them an advantage over others, but it doesn't give them an advantage over each other. They have that equal claim to it. So they need to negotiate. If they can't negotiate how to use that product, then yeah, like you say, the only practical and it might not be equal. It might not be equal rights are not always symmetrical. I mean, you could have like a landlord versus a tenant or you could have in a corporation, someone has someone owns 80%, someone owns 20%. So you could have or at a timeshare, someone can use it in the holidays and someone can use it in the off season. So, you know, you can have, you can have a non-uniform and non-symmetrical division of ownership, which is something, I think even Hapa, some Austrians think that ownership has to be unitary. I think ownership has to be unitary in the sense of arrests or an in-rem right. Like when you look at the thing, if it's an in-rem or a property right, that means it's good against the world, even though people didn't consent to it by contract. It's not a contractual or an impersonal right. But that means that they can identify who controls it and who they have to go to to get permission. That can be one person, but it could be a group of people. Like in the case of a husband and wife, they co-own their home. You can't use that home unless one of the owners gives you permission, right? And if they don't agree with each other, then they have to divorce. Because they're basically deadlocking each other and crippling each other's ability to use their property because they can't assert dominant right over the other. Or they're both granting permission to everyone to use it. And you have conflicting uses of, I mean, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I just want to say one thing you just said that really helped it kind of click into my head. And I think this is helping me understand this a lot better is when you said contracts aren't enforceable, property rights are enforceable. Because then I immediately said, well, okay, yeah, I suppose because the contract is nothing but evidence of the property rights, like evidence of a property transfer, for example, like evidence that you now own my car, for example. So it's not a case of, I mean, again, this is why if someone said to me property is our contracts enforceable, I wouldn't give them a flat out no because I want to elaborate and explain what I meant with that no. But I would sort of say no, but property rights are and contracts can often serve as evidence of the property rights. A little bit like, and this is how I've kind of changed my conceptualization of the whole our contract violations, NAP violations, no, but they may be evidence of a NAP violation, like a theft or a fraud or fraud or something like that. And it's the same with our contracts enforceable, no, but property rights are enforceable and the contracts may be evidence of the property rights that you enforce. And promises can be evidence of a contract. Yes, yes. Because it's a communication, not because promises are themselves enforceable, but because a promise is sometimes a way of saying that you're transferring property. Like if you say, I'm giving you $1,000 as a pre-order for this iPhone and Apple says, okay, I promise to give you the iPhone in a month. I mean, that's just another way of saying I'm transferring. It's yours now, I'm just gonna give you, yeah, I mean, I suppose from the way I'm seeing it is, and it's like you say, and this is very much implied, like most people will just understand this implicitly, but like you buy my car, you transfer the money, so I've already got possession of the money. The ownership of the money was with me even before the possession of it, because you've confirmed that in the contract. The ownership of the car is with you now, but the possession of the car might not be with you now because I haven't actually driven it around to you and dropped it off yet, and maybe I don't, and I've stolen your car, but so I, yeah, this is helping me a lot. I mean, you could imagine a cheeky, a smart ass person who says, okay, someone says, I want you to deliver this honey to me in a month, okay? After you get done harvesting the honey, and I say, well, you need to pay me ahead of time, but you need to give me a deposit. And they say, am I buying the honey? And I say, well, I'm not gonna give you the honey, but I promise to do the best I can. And if they refuse to say I'm giving you the honey, but I'm just gonna make a promise that's not technically enforceable, then you're taking the risk, which most people wouldn't do. So this would be a rare case. So I think Rothbard's concern about promises is he wants to have a blanket prohibition on the word promise serving as a substitute for a contractual title transfer because he's focused on the rare, weird case. But I think there's just nothing, there's nothing in black letter law that says ahead of time what can serve as evidence of communication of consent. It can be customary, it can be by context, implicit. It can be by habit of the parties, like a long-standing way of doing things. It can be by written, it can be by oral, sorry, by oral communication. And the word promise can sometimes, I think the word promise, if you have a jury trial and use, the question is to the jury is, did the owner consent to transfer a title because he said, I promise to give you the car in a week? I think in some cases they would say, yeah, that's what he meant. And that's what the other guy thought he meant. And the seller knew that he thought he meant that. So we're not doing any justice to him by taking property, by recognizing property title in the buyer in this case. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things that are implicit and unspoken because they just implicitly understood. Like you say, we have even people from different cultures and backgrounds, there's a certain commonality with regards to our interpretation of reality and certain things are implied with things that we, we don't have to be explicit on every aspect, but like, you know. Not only that, you can't be. This is the point to recognize. You can never have, even if you have a 75-paid contract, there's always some eventuality that would not be contemplated because language is not complete and because the future is uncertain. So you can never have every condition take it into account. So you have to assume that both parties agree on some dispute resolution process in the event that the contract doesn't cover something that comes up that's unanticipated. So they put in things like forced major clauses, which is an act of God clause, or they'll just say, listen, we appoint a neutral third-party arbitrator to settle the dispute that we agree to abide by his decision, even if we don't agree, because sometimes you just have to have finality and there's no right answer, but we do the best that we can. Yeah. Yeah, okay, I understand that much more. And like I say, that has helped me because although I did understand where you were coming from with the whole contract violations aren't that, but I mean, there's no such thing as a breach of contract. I mean, that part confused me, but I did get my head around the contract violations aren't that violations thing, because I did understand real, while I was thinking of all these examples of nap violations that involve breaking contracts, I could also think of breaking contracts where there was no nap violation. So for me, I suppose, and that's what kind of hit it home for me, that it's not the contract that's the nap violation, it's if there's a theft or fraud involved, then that's the nap violation and the contract is just evidence of that. By the way, I think as a practical matter, probably 90 plus percent of cases of so-called contract breach, there is no nap violation. It's just one party didn't perform and the contract contemplates a remedy in that case, which would be like a title transfer. This is why we have things like deposits as well, wasn't it? Correct. To kind of insure against these eventualities of the contract. And escrow is sometimes used in certain cases. So a third party holds onto it and only transfers it when everyone's satisfied that the conditions were met. Yeah, exactly. And that's why there's better business bureau, people can file complaints. How much the end I've hatched is the most. And as you say also, there is obviously the reputational implications of breaking contracts and other things that, I mean, this is one point where I don't wanna divert the conversation, but this is one of the points I made to Mark when we were speaking about like enforcement for gray areas and things is, there's more than the probably enforcement is probably the wrong word, but there's more that can be done to encourage things that we can't use violence to enforce. Like for example, where we can't forcefully make someone honor a contract and you say, well, where's the incentive for them to honor the contract? Well, there's still incentive for them to honor the contract because their reputation is destroyed if they don't honor their contracts and no one else will make a contract with them. So even if you have these breaks, so the concern that people have about our well contracts won't work then is like, well, they will work because when you've got title transfers, that takes care of itself because the ownership's transferred in that, like you say, it's not about enforcing the contract, it's just about enforcing property rights and the contract serving as evidence of the property right. But also you've got, even when you're stepping outside the realms of where you can actually use force to enforce something, you've still got these other aspects like the reputational destruction, like the fact that other people won't deal with you when you're a known liar and somebody who never fulfills their promises. So I think those things combined kind of push back against the claim that, oh, well, if we can't, you know, just, you know, and this segues a little bit. The fact that contracts are not specifically enforced now, like in courts, they do not force you to perform. All they do is they award a payment of damages if you don't perform, which you could do in a title transfer system. So the way the system works now could work almost exactly in a title transfer system. And by the way, there's a, you know, the Chicago School of Economics, the kind of law and economics types, they have a theory called efficient breach. So they sort of sense the problem with calling a breach of contract a breach because they sense that, you know, in some cases it makes sense economically to breach a contract. Like if A and B are supposed to have a merger and B gets a better offer from C, and he can break the contract and do the merger with C and have enough surplus money from that deal to pay the damages to A, then that's in the Chicago School, that's called the efficient breach. So, but what that really means is you shouldn't have breach at all, right, as a concept. But the damage, sorry to interrupt, but just to clarify, would the damages that are like written into this contract, would that essentially be like title transfers that have been put into the contract? There would be title transfers. It'd be like, if I do the issue now and that kind of thing. But then the problem is in the positive law and the conventional law, if you view contracts as being binding obligations and you have the concept of breach, sometimes because the amount of damages that you have to pay for a breach is uncertain, like it's up to the jury, sometimes parties will put what's called a liquid-dated damages clause in the contract. They will have a clause saying, in the event of breach, here's how much you have to pay, okay, because it leads to certainty. However, if it's too much, the law will not enforce it because they call it a punitive clause and they say that because the law, there's a criminal part of the law and there's a civil or private law part, the purpose, the role of punishment is taken by the criminal law. So you can't have a punitive liquid-dated damages clause in a civil contract. So if you put a liquid-dated damages clause in a contract that is too high, that would be beyond the amount that permits efficient breach to happen, for example, then the court won't enforce that. Now, as a libertarian, I think that's wrong. I think that whatever title transfer you put in the contract should be enforceable, even if it's extremely high. So like if you want this guy to go through the merger, you're gonna pay them a billion dollars, but you wanna make sure they go through with it. They don't change their mind and go with a better offer from someone else. You put a liquid-dated damages clause of say 10 billion in there, and if they agree to it, then I think they've agreed to it. They basically tied their hands and they made it impossible for them to breach the contract, but that was what they agreed to. That's perfectly fine. The current law wouldn't permit that because it's punitive. Do they owe you the 10 billion then? I think they would, yes. Right. Which means they wouldn't do it. How does that separate from... Go ahead. But so the only thing, I'm kind of with you on most of this, but the one thing that that does raise with me is, I mean, is it dependent on whether they have that 10 billion? Yeah, of course. There and then, like if, yeah, okay. But the point is... So it still comes back to that earlier point. But the point is this party B is only going to do the deal with C if C can pay them enough so that they can pay off the damages to the other, because let's say they pay them 7 billion. That's not collateral for the... No, it's not collateral. It's just, so A and B have a deal. A is going to acquire B. B gets paid a certain amount of money. B agrees to pay damages to A if they don't go through with the deal. If the due diligence and all that's met. And if it's like say $7 billion, then it's just impractical that C is going to pay them 10 so that they could still come out ahead with a 3 billion extra. They might pay them five, but all the five would go to A. So then B would not defect, which would be the whole purpose. But if you imagine like a lot of employees, these traders at Morgan Stanley and these big oil companies, that they get huge bonuses every year, right? They get paid, I don't know, a million dollars bonus. And they also have a retention bonus where like they have a part of the bonus is deferred for three years. So this employee, if they leave the employee of this company, they're leaving say $3 million of future payments on the table, which means that another employee that wants to poach them, employer that wants to poach them has to pay them a sign on bonus equal to all those deferred bonuses that they would have missed out on. So that's like a poison pill in a sense. Like, so they set up a situation where it's very difficult for some other employer to poach their employees, but it's still theoretically possible. Someone wants to pay you $10 million, I'll take the 10 million, I'll leave the 3 million on the table with my current employer and I'll go and I'm happy. It's just very unlikely that if you're only worth one or 3 million to one employer, you're gonna be worth 10 to someone else. So anyway, the point is if you look at it as title transfers, then you don't even need to resort to the sufficient breach theory. You just let people negotiate whatever they want, but you have to have the enforceability of what's now classified as punitive liquid data damages clauses. Cause there's no such thing as punitive. And in fact, in the libertarian world, I'm not sure if there would be a distinct civil and criminal law spheres. I think everything would be a one unitary system. Yeah, I agree with that actually. I mean, that's actually a point I've made in debates with other people about, in fact, I think you might have caught some of those conversations with regards to, and I don't know if you fully agree with me on this, but like I've always had an objection between the distinction between civil and criminal law as it is today. Because for me, some things that are civil laws, where there's an actual crime, an actual net violation, which for me are the same thing. Is a crime, it's criminal for me, cause it's a net violation. And this whole civil thing seems to me like a perversion cause they like to put in a lot of things that aren't really crimes. And they call them, oh, well, it's only a civil offense. And I just feel like that's the kind of, it seems like a slight of hand to try to pervert law in general, for me, either you're violating someone or you're not. If you are, then you're committing a crime. If you're not, then you're not. Yeah, I think you're leaning in my direction, which is in the past, some legal theorists, some libertarians have said that you should collapse criminal law into civil so that there's only civil law. I appreciate what they're trying to see a unitary basis of the law. And in one sense, I agree with them because I do believe that even, so I think they're kind of wrong in the sense that I think civil law collapses in the criminal because in the end, the only violation of rights is force is aggression and force. And the only way to enforce a right is to use the force. And so basically the bottom of everything is criminal. So the legal system has property rights in that it identifies who owns what, but then the law is basically remediatory, whatever the word is, it basically says what you can do in response to a violation of your rights to an act of aggression. So it's always criminal. However, in practice, I think that even though criminality is the basis of everything or aggression and criminal law, the way that the institutional system would enforce rights would be civil in the sense of it would be restitution-based because... But isn't that more due to... Sorry to interrupt, but isn't that more due to it just being a proportionate response rather than it having to be a civil distinction? No, I think it's not just because it's proportionate. I think it's because punishment, retribution is way more expensive than restitution because if you punish someone, first of all, you have to pay to do that and you don't get anything out of it unless you have a slave labor camp or something and that's not gonna be efficient. So it's gonna be a big cost and who's gonna pay that, the victims who've already been victimized. And second of all, if there's a mistake made, now you're the aggressor and so there's all kinds of liability, which means I think it's very hard to envision an institutionalized system of punishment. So imagine private prisons and private punishment agencies, who's going to bankroll them? Who's gonna pay their fees? Where are they gonna get insurance from? What good would it do? So I think in general, the institutional response would tend to be restitution-based but it's still based upon ultimately the right to punish for a violation of your rights. It's just that it would tend to be worked out in a restitutionary way, because that's more peaceful, that's more rehabilitory, it's just cheaper and things like that. So- But with regards to what you have the right to do, because I understand what you're saying, like, you know, it would make more sense to approach these violations in this way rather than that for, you know, for your own benefit. But with regards to what you have the right to do, for example, if you wanted to exert that extra money and time and pressure to say, punish the person, as long as it was within what you have that proportional right to do based on their aggression- And if you're a certain you're correct and all that. Yeah, so I think that you would have occasional, say you want to call it outlaw or vigilante justice. I just don't think it would be institutional because I can't imagine agencies that emerge to do this because it would just be fraught with liability and it just wouldn't be viable. I mean, you might have the occasional rich guy who would do it. I think they would just hire a mercenary or they would go, they would just go take the guy out after the trial. They would, instead of taking the monetary payment or the ostracism, they would just plug the guy. And I think the community would just avert their eyes and they would let it go, probably, unless the guy did it in a very dangerous way. Like he did it multiple times or he did it in a way, like let's say some guy, you know, rapes your daughter and he gets tried, he confesses and he agrees to pay punishment but you don't want to take that and you can't find an agency that's going to capture the guy and punish him because they don't want to take the liability. And so you just go, you shoot the guy in the head but you do it in front of a crowd and you could have shot a bystander or maybe you do, you know? And so everyone looks at you as a, because you didn't show a willingness to respect the normal way things are done. You didn't show a willingness to accept arbitration and all this kind of stuff. You show yourself to be kind of a dangerous outlaw. You might have your insurance rates go up. Maybe no insurer will insure you now. Maybe you'd be ostracized. Maybe you'd be looked at as a dangerous outlaw yourself. So I think that there would be disincentives to people going too far outside the lines. I can imagine an occasional act of vigilance justice and if some guy gets just killed by a few neighbors because he's just hated by everyone he's a danger to society. I think no one's gonna raise a ruckus and it would be passed over. But it would be an, I think it would be Tindy ad hoc and isolated but that's just my guess. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I agree that I think vigilante justice would be relatively rare. I'm not sure I agree that institutional depending on how we're defining that in court. Like a private corporation that has a jail and a punishment in torturers and all that kind of stuff. I don't know. I'm not so sure that liability would prohibit that kind of setup. Well, it's not just liability. It's also, is it viable as a business model? Like how many people are going to be, how many victims of crimes are going to have the money and be willing to spend the money to incarcerate and torture people and to pay the extra bond in case you're wrong. And I mean, I just don't, it'd be such a limited amount of people that would do it partly because I think that a restitution system would satisfy most people. So you'd have a very low clientele. I believe. I just don't think it would be a viable business model. But who knows? Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that's the sort of thing that I think we would only be able to know the answer to if we, you know, ran the experiment. We try it. I mean, maybe you have Australia, you have Coventry, you have some island where you just eject everyone and you go let them live there. Well, I suppose the reason why I see it as potentially working in that kind of setup, like having kind of, I mean, like, for example, with what I proposed with the whole nation's insanity project of establishing the non-negotiational principles law and people say, well, who would enforce that law? And I'm like saying, well, everyone would have the right to, although obviously everyone doesn't have the equal ability to. But I said, but this, I don't see any problem with having even public serving non-nap enforcement, if you like, like an equivalent to police. I agree with you on that. And the liability that you talk about rather than like prohibiting such things being done on an institutional level, I think it would just keep them honest because for example, one of the things, one of the big selling points I make with like, you know, the idea I present is I say, like, you know, look a lot of the corruption and stuff that we've seen problems with police brutality and all of that sort of stuff. One of the many things that causes is that, is the fact that police have these extra powers, these extra rights, these extra protections and in a truly free society where the right to enforce the non-aggression principle is governed by the principle of self-ownership and, you know, and everyone has that equal right, then these organizations, these, you know, police or napping forces for one of a better word would not be able to operate with this impunity, with this immunity. They would have to have that and that would keep them more and that obligation to not arrest innocent people, that obligation to not use excessive force would be what would prevent the police brutality because all of a sudden, like right now, if a policeman, you know, beats somebody up, some of them go to prison, but most often, they don't even get punished at all and the ones that do will get some just maybe lose their job or something. They don't face criminal charges often. There's all these things that protect police and give them extra rights and powers to violate us in ways that normal citizens couldn't. If all of that was stripped away from them, true law enforcement, what I'm calling proper law, you know, protecting people's rights can still be done and I think it would be done far more effectively because, you know, like people seem to think that, you know, we need to give police these powers so that they can, the irony in me that people think that we need to give police the power to violate our rights so they can protect our rights. And I'm like, no, no, we need a system where no one's allowed to violate rights and under that system, the people that are charged with protecting rights will be accountable because if they violate rights, that just is criminally responsible. It could be that the costs of such an institutional system are far lower than I'm imagining because most of the costs now are because it's run by the state. So you could be right. The cost could be so low that it could make it economically viable. I could imagine instead something like this. There's a private system of restitution where when there's an offense, there's a tribunal or a trial or a hearing and let's say you can't even force the defendant to appear, in which case you have it in absentia and you render a judgment. But let's say the judgment is rendered and the guy is guilty of some severe crime and they say, listen, the only way you're gonna be reintegrated back into society is if you do the following. You make amends, you pay some restitution, you show that you've been rehabilitated, whatever. And if you don't, you're gonna be completely ostracized by society, okay? Now, one of the conditions of being reintegrated back into society might be, look, unless you have a lot of money, which most guys wouldn't, you need to go to this work camp for five years and you need to put your head down, stay out of trouble, prove that you're a good citizen, improve your improving yourself and earn some money paying back the victims and apologizing. So you could have private institutions running these work camps, which are not like slave camps, because the people can leave, it's just that if they leave, they're violating the conditions of their parole, so to speak, and they're gonna be ostracized from society. And I can imagine a very tight, well-functioning set of ostracism rules that mean that you better, I mean, you're basically gonna starve to death because you're not gonna get insurance, no one's gonna deal with you, you can't live in this neighborhood, you're gonna be relegated to utter poverty and outcast from everything. And so I could see them agreeing on that voluntary penalty to sign up for these so-called prisons or work camps for a while. I could see that. Well, this is an important point, I think, because I mean, as you know, I've made the point that I think that the non-aggression points was law would have to be enforced with this kind of standard of reasonable certainty because if you use force against people when you're not certain they deserve it, then you're criminally reckless yourself and potentially violating their rights. But when people come back at me with that, well, then that means that, you know, we've got nothing for the gray areas and we've got no way of enforcing that, I would come back to them with exactly what you said. Actually, we do have plenty of things we can do. When we can't use violence, we can still use, because as you say, we're not obliged to interact with people and have them be part of our society and have them be part of our organizations and trade with them and all these other things that they would want, there's plenty of things that we can do that are still peaceful, that aren't violating their rights, aren't violating their freedom, but still are very, very powerful tools for pushing people in the directions that we want them to go with regards to these higher standards that... I think there has to, in civilization in society, there has to ultimately be, just like for contracts, there has to be an implicit recognition of a good faith presupposition on the part of the parties, right? To fill in gap fillers and things like that. There has to be, on the part of people in society, a willingness to negotiate and a willingness to submit in the end in intractable disputes. There has to be a willingness to submit your disputes to a third party and to accept the results, even if you don't agree. There has to be that sort of willingness, which means that like, actually two neighbors have a reasonable dispute over a contract or property or money or the boundary line between their tracks. The only way to solve it is to have outright violence and war or they have to resort to a peaceful process, right? They can negotiate with each other if they can't come to an agreement. They have to go to a third party and if the third party rules in favor of A and not B, even if B knows in his heart he was wronged, he has to accept it because that's the price of being in society because there's nothing else you can do because we're not omnipotent, right? We're not, I'm sorry, we're not omniscient. We can make mistakes. We're not infallible, I should say. So given that you want to live inside of each other, you have to have a willingness to negotiate and to compromise and to let third parties settle disputes, which is why I think that this vigilante justice would tend to be frowned upon because it would display an unwillingness to go to the normal channels everyone else goes to. I mean, you can get away with it on occasion, but yeah. And that's why I think more institutionally, if you like, arrangements for NAP enforcement may actually be more viable in that sense because the vigilante justice person is far more at risk of making himself guilty of a crime than the organization that has the necessary training. And you won't have as much of an excuse to say, I had to resort to vigilante justice because I had no other way of dealing with it. If there is an institutional mechanism that works reasonably well most of the time and that's all you can expect in a reasonably functioning society, then if you don't resort, I mean, then you have less of a complaint that I had to go do it on my own because there's no alternative. Well, no, there is an alternative. And it's the best we can do, so you need to rely upon that. Yeah, and although the right for you to act yourself as a vigilante would still technically be there, the risk of you going beyond what you have the right to do will be very high. So it would be a risky venture for people to do. So there would be social penalties to pay for doing that. For, I mean, the law has always said that there's a price to be paid in general or it's frowned upon to be a judge in your own case or to take the law into your own hands. Now, there's been exceptions made for self-defense in an immediate situation of peril. When you can't wait for the police to arrive, you have the right to use force to defend yourself and you have to make decisions on your own and everyone understands, well, in that case, but if you can call the cops or you can go to the law, you can take someone to a court, you don't go just, you don't enforce the law because people tend to be biased in their own favor if nothing else, right? Well, and also I think you're doing, when you go through these more formalized processes of trials and evidence and proving your case and stuff like that, I think the argument, the vulnerability of you being liable to some kind of criminal process because you've done some sort of violation is lessened because you've got all of these other things in place, like, say, if you were just a vigilante, you didn't have that training, you didn't have all of these things like, whereas if you have an organization that's doing these things, taking these steps to make sure they've got that reasonable certainty, which, and that's why I say reasonable certainty because we can never have absolute certainty, that's why we have that, it's, there's an accept, like, and that's another point I think is important that I like to make and I think it's worth mentioning here is, there's, because a lot of people will point out, well, you know, no one can, you know, people are always gonna disagree and there's always subjectivity and we can't, we cannot escape that completely but what we can still have is that reasonable certainty that because it's like, we can't be the judge in our own case, others are gonna judge us but if they're gonna do so, they have to employ reasonable certainty because they don't have some divine right over us. I think your concept of reasonable certainty, I'm not so sure I would use it to replace the legal standards. I think that your concept of reasonable certainty makes more sense when we're talking philosophically about what we know is right and wrong and what the principles are. In other words, we have reasonable certainty that this is how property rights work, this is how they should be allocated, this is what contract rights are but within the legal system that emerges based upon the principles we have reasonable certainty in, you could say, if you want to have capital punishment and actually execute someone you need to have, you need to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If you want to have a property settlement, like determine who owns this piece of property in a civil case, preponderance of the evidence might be enough. So you can have different standards of legal proof in the system that everyone agrees is a reasonable, have reasonable certainty is a reasonable way to do things. If you follow me. So we go back to that last point, when would preponderance of evidence be? So in the legal system right now, the way it works is, I think this is kind of in the common law too, but in the US, in the US, there's at least three standards of proof. Bird and proof is who has the burden of proving perfect. Standard proof is how high it has to be. So typically in criminal cases, you have to have a jury trial, has to be unanimous, 12 jurors, there are some exceptions to that, but that's generally how it works. And they have to be persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt or beyond a shadow of a doubt, which you could think of as 99% certainty. That's how we think of that, okay? Because you're going to impose an afflict physical punishment on someone like put them in jail, in prison. But if it's a civil case in the current law, where the question is, who owns this piece of property? Who owns this car? Who owes who money in the contract? The burden is always preponderance, which means more likely than not. Because if two people both contest a resource, if there's a resource in A and B both claim they own it, who do you assign it to? You have to have some standard of proof and you can't make it, the problem with making it beyond a reasonable doubt is that you still have a burden of proof. So typically the burden of proof is the possessor is presumed to be the owner. So whoever's possessing it currently is presumed to be the owner. And the other guy that's not possessing it has the burden of proof to prove that he really owns it. But should he have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt or just preponderance? Like, if he can prove that it's more likely than not that he owns it, shouldn't he get it? Because from the outside- I don't think he should. Well, I just think that's debatable because the law has gone that direction for centuries for a reason. But I think that's a failing on the law. I mean, this is kind of connected to my problem of the civil criminal law distinction because like, for example, if I understand what you're saying like in a criminal case, we're gonna use force against this person, we need to be reasonably certain. But if we're gonna enforce property rights, then we need to be equally be reasonable certain because we could be potentially robbing somebody. And you know what I mean? Like the reason why I don't see a distinction between civil and criminal and because if it's an actual crime, if there's an actual net violation, then we are justified in a proportionate action, you know, in response. Now, if the severity of the crime will obviously dictate the severity of the, sorry, the proportionality of what we can do in response. So there was obviously a difference between say, for example, rape and murder than just stealing someone's car. But the fact of the matter is or who owns this house or whatever. But in all of those situations, we are potentially violating somebody if we make the wrong decision. We are regressing against somebody if we make the wrong decision. So in all of those scenarios, it would be criminally reckless of us to just, do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, I know, but it's still like you're trying to split the baby by saying reasonable certain. So by your reasoning, we should just use beyond a reasonable doubt for everything. But I think you sense that that would be a problem. So you're trying to go in between with reasonable. Well, no, no, no. I'm saying beyond a reasonable doubt with everything that's a nap violation that's criminal. Because what I'm saying is, is the argument for why we should do it for what's recognized today as criminal, like murders and rapes and stuff like that, that argument holds equally true for the lower level crimes and nap violations that are currently classed as civil. As long as they are actually crimes and nap violations where we have that right to act. But if we have that right to act, because the thing is, whether or not we have that right to act is if we don't have that right to act, then we're the criminals. You know, we're the ones that are committing. I agree with you. And I think that you notice what I said earlier, I'm saying a civil and a criminal. So I'm already going on the state's bifurcation of them. And I kind of agree we should have only one. But if you go back to the contract thing we were talking about earlier, the contract is not itself enforceable, but it helps us prove who owns what. So once you know who owns what, then you could say you have to have a very high standard of proof to prove that that right was violated, okay? Because you want to use force against someone to punish them or to respond against them. But it's not so clear to me that the initial determination of who owns what itself is the same standard. Like to prove who the contract... Well, let me give you a simple example. Let's suppose, you know, there's, I don't know, a valuable, I'm trying to think of a valuable item, like a diamond. Let's say there's a diamond and this pawn shop has it. And two guys A and B both claim that they own the diamond. Okay? So the legal system has to answer the question, does A own it or does B own it? Okay, and the pawn shop admits we don't own it. We're going to give it over to whoever owns it. I don't know, some would deposit it with them, like in, you know, they said someone owns it and A and B both claim to be that person. You can't have a, the standard can't be beyond a reasonable doubt because then you wouldn't give it to either one. So like both, they both just, they both have a claim. So the only thing you can do is give it to the one that has the better claim. And the better claim means preponderance, I think. I'm not sure about this, by the way. I'm trying to extrapolate a little bit about how a private legal system would develop based upon knowing what did happen in reality. But I could imagine in some cases, the best you can do is give it to the person who has the better claim to it. But better doesn't mean 99%, it just means 51%. Do you follow me? Yeah, but okay, yeah. To determine who owns it and then once you determine who owns it, then you can use the higher standard to prove a rights violation. But I don't know, I'm not sure about this, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, I'm too honest, I'm still leaning in my original position of saying that I think you need that beyond reasonable. Because any step of the way, I must admit, the example you gave makes it a little, makes it like not quite so black and white in my head with that assertion. But it seems to me that any step of the way, if you're not reasonably, because the thing is, is I suppose, if I'm trying to think of like in this pawn shop scenario, if neither party can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they own it, then for me, I just- It's unowned and subject to- It's unowned, yeah, I mean- Subject to re-homestead, no, that's one answer. So that means the pawn shop guy owns it because he's in possession of it. So he's the one who instantly re-homesteds it. I'd go along with that because in the day, if I found something and somebody said, well, that's mine, if they can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it is, I don't see why I should have to give it to you. Well, but still- I could probably- Proponderance seems too low. I know beyond a reasonable doubt seems ridiculously high. I could think of a better example if I was given time, but you could have met, the way this works in property title is, so let's say two people can test the ownership of an estate of land like Blackacre, some tract of land in a castle or whatever's on it. Now, according to our property theory, I think we should wrap up in a minute too. We determined who owns it by original homestead, like who owned it first and then how was it assigned by contract over the generations? So that's how we figure it out. But typically if A and B both claim to own this land, if they both agree that 100 years ago, some person C owned it. They both agree that C owned it. C might not have owned it or C might have stolen it, but they both agree C owned it. So they both claim to trace their title to C, like C left it in a will to one of A's ancestors and C left it in another will to one of B's ancestors, but so they're conflicting. So the law has to determine which one really has the better title to it. So the question's always better title between A and B. We know one of them owns it because C owned it. No one else has a better claim to it. So either A or B owns it. So we have to give it to one of them. So that means between them, which everyone has the better claim. If you say that each one has to prove it by 99%, you could end up in a situation where A neither A nor B can prove it. And so it's unowned, even though we know that one of A and B owns it. You follow me? Yeah, I could see that. Although I will say this, that even if I accepted that, which I'm potentially could, because I can see the logic in what you're saying there, but I still think I can still hold my position with regards to violations, civil or criminal, because in that situation, you're not aggressing against somebody. You're not like, they haven't proven it. Sorry, go on. I know, but that's what I'm saying. So I'm saying there's two stages. So the civil case could say, okay, A owns it because he has a better title than the other one. But now B tries to use it. So we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he's committing aggression against A's property, but A has a title to it because of the preponderance standard. Do you see how like they could, no, by the way, I just thought of one solution that could lend support to your side. You could say that, okay, in the case where A and B can't definitively prove it's theirs, then the law gives it to A and B together. And then if they can't come to an agreement, they have to sell it and split the proceeds. You could do that. Maybe there's a way. Maybe there's a way to respect this high standard of proof. I don't know. I just don't know if we can determine that from our arm chairs. All I'm saying is I think that your standard of reasonable certainty is more what applies to us thinking about what the principles are. I'm not sure if it would be the same as the standard that we would apply in a real world legal system that everyone agrees is the practical way to apply these principles to settle disputes. But yeah, but I agree with that. But then the way I conceptualize that is these higher standards that we would want to apply where we have, well, I say higher standards, where we're applying lower standards of proof and stuff like that, they would be part of agreed upon collective. So for example, maybe you're like, say you're part of a regulated market or you're part of some kind of society where you agree to have preponderance decide things. It could be that the contracts, the insurance provisions, the arbitral tribunals all tend to evolve down to a system of workable rules that use preponderance sometimes. And that's as a practical matter, what you have to agree to to be part of that system. Yeah. That would only apply with consent. And then what you would say is then all scenarios where you don't have those agreed upon relationships where you've just got say two random people that have no outlaw situations. Then you have to go back to reasonable certainty. Could be isolated or ad hoc or outlaw situations. Yeah, it could be. Yeah, yeah. Could be okay. Well, you've given me, we should probably wrap up because it's nearly two hours. That's actually flown by. You've given me a massive amount of food for four and I really appreciate you taking the time to speak to me because I view these conversations as like, I think I'd like to think these ideas obviously in my own head, but when I'm having conversations with other people like yourself, I feel like I'm kind of borrowing a bit of your brain power to think collectively a little bit and to come at it from angles that I haven't thought of myself and it really helps me polish these ideas and get a better understanding of them. So I really, really appreciate that. Yeah, me too, me too. That's what's useful about this because there's not many people like us that think of these, you can't have normal conversations like this with normal people usually. So up, you just pause. No, well, at one point that was made to me is like not everybody obviously wants to pick into this level of detail. Not everybody has to. You can still put it to people simply of, you own yourself, don't aggress against others. That's still nice and simple, but when people, if people do wanna pick apart the finer details, it's nice to have this clear understanding of the foundation, how the principle works underneath it so that we can navigate these less obvious, more sophisticated situations which inevitably come up. I agree. All right, enjoyed it. We'll do it again sometime. I look forward to it. Thank you very much, Stefan. Take care, Matt.