 The Nate the Voluntaryus livestream episode 202. All right, what's up everybody? It is Nate the Voluntaryus and today I have another great show for you. I have a returning guest. He is a patent attorney and Austrian school theorist and probably one of the best anarchist thinkers out there and that would be Stefan Kinsella. So Stefan, welcome back as always. Thanks very much and I'm actually number two on the rankings right now. Oh, so we will who's first? Wait, who's first? Oh, of course. So anyways, we will see. I'm going to put some poison in his drink when I see him in Turkey this year and claim the throne. So we will see if we can do another show without talking about IP because so far we have been doing a show where we're basically talking about IP but I don't know. We'll see if that pops up or not. Or Bitcoin. These things always seem to come up lately. Bitcoin and IP. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's another thing. Megan and Megan and Prince Harry too. That too? Wow. Depends on what circles you run in. I mean, it's weird. I never watched. I just didn't watch the wedding. I wasn't interested in it but I just watched the bad lip reading version of it if anybody has seen that. Anyways, so also joining us is Tom. It's his first time on and Ethical Pirate. All right, so I think a good place to start is one of the topics that Tom and I discussed during the in the DMs on Discord. So I'm trying to figure out how to word it. What's the date? Hold on. March 1st. March 1st. Yeah, so let's see. It says libertarian strategy and what the next generation of libertarians and anarchists will be up to. Something like that. Unless you have a different way of wording it. You're asking me? I mean, I was kind of asking Tom how he would word it just. I don't know. I kind of forgot about that. So I guessing it means sort of like I forget where I asked this, but it was sort of like me. I asked someone the question of like how the Austrian school has kind of like a torch thing going on. First it was Manger, then Bumbawik, then Mises, then Rothbard, and now Hoppe. And I was asking like who's going to hold the torch after Hoppe, I think? Yeah, that's a good question. I've seen that kind of question asked about libertarian leadership, you know, intellectual leadership, and Austrian, as I was, you know, last 15, 20 years, everyone talks about it. Now, keep in mind there's, you know, there are different strands of Austrian thought. I mean, there's the Hayekian sort of wing and the Misesian wing, and then there's even others. So you had like Carl Manger at the beginning, right? But then after that, I'm trying to remember and trace all the names that. So then you had like kind of the Rothbardian wing would be like Manger, Bumbawik, Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe, like that. And then a lot of the other Austrians associated with the Mises Institute like Salerno and Herbert, Jeffrey Herberner, Guido Holzmann, Bob Murphy to a degree, well actually completely. And then on the other side, I think then you had like Wieser, Wieser early on, and then Hayek, and you know, people like even like Lachman to a degree. And the Hayekian sort of focused more on this dispersed knowledge, price signals going through the economy type thing. And the Misesians focused more on praxeology, like analyzing human action in a catalytic or a market economy framework that you make some assumptions about, you know, we have money and we have trade, analyzing kind of deductively using the means in the framework of praxeology. And then so Rothbard adds kind of his radical politics onto that and Hoppe builds on both Mises and Rothbard and all this. There are a bunch of young, really sharp Austrian thinkers like Guido Holzmann who's, well, he's my age, 54-ish, so I'm not that young anymore. Philip Bagus, so there are several who I think are in Bob Murphy, you know, the younger ones. It seems to me that system builders are getting far fewer and far between, you know, like Rothbard was like, say, Ayn Rand who Rothbard sort of was influenced by was a big system builder and Rothbard was a big system builder. Hoppe has also a broad vision, like his views encompass not just economics, but also libertarian theory and also some cultural, conservative stuff, some history stuff. But I don't think his view is a comprehensive view of the world as much as Rothbard's tried to be and certainly as much as Rand's tried to be. So, the new generation is more, I mean, I always thought like, like Guido and I are best really good friends. We've always been good friends. We met together around 1994 or five, no, 95 on a bus from Atlanta Airport to Auburn when we were going to meet Hans. I met Hans once before and he was going to meet him for the first time to study under him for his PhD dissertation in economics. And so in a sense, like I sort of absorbed a lot of my libertarianism from Hans and Guido absorbed a lot of his economics from Hans. And although I'm Austrian too, Guido is libertarian too, it's sort of like we're like, you had to split Hans in two to get the two of us, you know what I mean? Like, I'm not like Hans on economics and Guido isn't like Hans on libertarianism, right? So you have more specialization now. You have, I think you're going to have to pick and choose to find people that are specialists to know it all. Like Tom Woods is good on history. You know, I need to go right now. Oh, you need to go? Yes. Oh, okay. We lost Tom. I think so. Yeah, we did. Okay. If you want to finish what you're saying, that's fine. Well, so who's going to carry the torch? I don't know. I mean, there's always, I don't despair. I think there's always younger people rising through the ranks. I'm always impressed by the people that I see who I could name as like the new Hoppe. I don't know. I don't, I can't, no one comes to mind. I think lots of people have different aspects of that, of that, of the kind of, and partly it's because Mises and Rothbard and then Hoppe almost have, almost say completed it, but they've honed it to such a great level that, you know, in a way there's less and less improvement to do or work to be built upon. I mean, you can always find new things, but we're to a more sophisticated level than, than what Rothbard inherited, you know? Uh, let's see. I would like to apologize if I'm not really talking that much because I kind of stayed up all night trying to type my agorist script. Ah, video. Who's that? Is that ethical pirate talking? Yes. Yeah, it's okay. Yeah, your, your screen's not glowing. So I could, I wanted to be sure. Weird glitch, I guess. But yeah, they're, they're, like you said, there, there's tons of people that could take Hoppe, Hoppe's place and stuff. I see like a lot of, like people my age, actually, you know, doing, doing things like writing articles and posting as many free thoughts as they can, which is pretty cool. And it shows that we're not lazy. Yeah. And I think, you know, Mises and Rothbard and Hoppe have spawned, you know, generations and dozens, if not hundreds of very smart people who've learned from them. So their ideas will survive because of their books and their, their right, you know, their, their, their talks. And people will keep promoting that and then building on it and applying it to current events. So, you know, I see no crisis. I think it's, it's good that they, their ideas have spread so much and there's so many followers and fans and devotees. It's kind of like with Sam Konkin, you know, Victor Coleman just started to go fund me to get his, get Sam Konkin's works archived online. Yeah, he did. I actually, I donated to that and same year should promote, maybe we should promote it because it was, it was, it's a, it's a worthwhile cause. If you have the website, he sent me an email today, actually. Yeah, Konkin, for people who don't know, was like an early kind of underappreciated agorist or agorist. I think they, they pronounced it. Sam Konkin, Sam Konkin would have said agorist. That's what I always said agorist in my mind, but I heard on the video that, on the GoFundMe page that, that Coleman did. He called, he said agorist. So maybe that's, because it was called the Agora, the open marketplace. I mean, agorist is an easier way of saying it. Yeah, by the way, Coleman himself, I read, I think three of his novels back in the day, they were, they were great. Solomon's Knife and the Jehovah Contract of the two I remember. Oh, so that's the two I read. I don't think I've ever read the Kings of the High Front here, but I did like those two a lot. Yeah. Yeah, I just, I just ordered my copy of the new Libertarian Manifesto because, you know, not only am I interested in what Konkin has to say, I, I don't want, I don't, I would hate to see his works be swept under the rug because, because I think he made a lot of important contributions. Yeah, I think it's copubco.com, K-O-P-U-B-C-O.com is where he's putting the archives. And maybe there's a link there to the GoFundMe page. Yeah. All right. Why don't we go ahead and take a look at some of the questions I managed to get on Twitter. Tom, Tom has a question though. I think I can deem, I can like email it or deem it to you. Let's see, because he's, he's asking about a wallpaper that he has on his laptop where your thoughts are on it. Let's see, Leonardo Chapa Cast asked what, what is Hapa up to in his next book? Well, the Mises Institute is right now, well, there's two things that I'm aware of. His book, The Great Fiction, which, which was published, Jeff Tucker added to it in maybe 2012, it was when Jeff was at Lesley Fair Books. And that was sort of like a sequel to the economics and ethics of private property, which came after the theory of socialism and capitalism. So theory of socialism, capitalism, sort of like a comprehensive book written from the ground up. And then some of his articles were collected into economics and ethics of private property. And then a second batch of those articles were compiled into The Great Fiction. And now the Mises Institute is coming out with, with a second expanded edition with some additional material, which is coming out, I think just in a couple of months. So that's one. And also he delivered this, I think like a 10 lecture seminar on history and property and society about maybe 12, 15 years ago at Mises. And it was recorded and they transcribed it all and it's cleaned it up and that's coming out as a book. I think later this year as well from Mises. As far as what he's working on himself, I don't know, but let's see, we can go to, so he's having his annual property and freedom society meeting in September of this year in Turkey, which was canceled last year because of the COVID. And he usually presents whatever he's working on there. I know he's been working, thinking a lot about history of man, that kind of thing. And I think some excerpt or some shorter versions have been published. Oh yeah, so his talk this year doesn't, his talk this year is the idea of a private law society, the case of Carl Ludwig von Holler, so who I've never heard of. So that'll be interesting to hear. So he will present that later this year. All right. Let's see. Wait, I think this is from, it is from you. Ask him why he didn't listen to Yeah, we all kick ourselves for not buying more Bitcoin earlier, right? Eric has been getting jumped on for not talking about it enough. Yeah, I saw that thread. I thought I must have walked in midway through because I didn't understand the, unless it was a background, I missed, I mean, some guy just started berating him for not talking about Bitcoin enough on his show, which is an odd criticism. It's like, what, is that his job to have a Bitcoin show? Yeah, I mean, I mean, there's other cryptocurrencies that exist. Yeah. Oh, if you were saying that on Clubhouse, you'd be booted. Yeah. Well, House is rife with Bitcoin maxis and they just kick out the, the shit coiners they call them as soon as they say something like that. The thing that baffles me about this whole thing is like, you know, if you really, if you want Bitcoin talked about enough, then create your own show or something, right? I mean, it's, or do a video about it or, or create a Twitter and promote it or something. I mean, I'm just, it just baffles me that it doesn't, it just never came to mind with these people. It's almost, I've seen this so many times with Eric July, and it's happening with me. It's like, people want him to hold a position that he doesn't hold. Like, yeah. Yeah. Like, I think that happens to you as well. You know, kind of like, oh, looks like we have to talk about IP. And it's like, you know, they're, I'm sure you've been called a Marxist several times because you oppose IP. Oh yeah. I'm not a commie. A commie usually. Yeah. I'm a commie or a socialist. Yeah. I'm a commie or a socialist because I don't think people, I don't think that God or its proxy, the state ought to guarantee an income to people for the work they put into the project. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's just, you can't, that's essential. That's essentially the IP view. And I told you Bitcoin would come up and so now so is IP. It's, it's unavoidable. Yeah. Yeah. You can't own an idea. You, you actually cannot. That's correct. Yeah. A lot of times libertarians that kind of agree with me, they'll say something like intellectual property doesn't exist. And, you know, I don't, I'm not pedantic and correct them. I don't think that's actually, that's not the argument really. The question is like not whether there's intellectual property. The question is whether intellectual property law is justified. That's the question. I mean, you know, it's like, it's like saying, do you own your wife? The answer is not do wives exist. Do you know what I mean? It's right. Yeah. Should you, should you own your wife? Right. Or it's, or another way of looking at it is if I go into someone's house and take their television, they don't have their television anymore. But if I, but if I like make a copy of a video, they still have the video. Well, that's the thing. People always say this is, well, it's wrong for you to take my idea and make money off of it. And I'm like, well, they're not taking it. They're copying it. Okay. The reason we use the word take as majority of connotations is because normally when you take something, that means the owner doesn't have it anymore. That's why he objects. I mean, I don't want you to take my cow because I need my cow. If you take it, I don't have it anymore. But if instead you were like a magician and you looked at my cow from across the field and you waved your wand and you made another cow in your land, it wouldn't be taking my cow. It'd be copying my cow. Right. And then they also say you should make money off of my work. It's like, well, what does that mean off of? I mean, we all make money off of other people's contributions. That's called the division of labor and society. I mean, we all benefit from cooperation and from each other's contributions. So it's weird. It's just weird how people keep bringing the same old things up, up over and over again. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, I figured out my position on like borders immigration on my own. I didn't have anybody influencing me at all, not even, not even Hoppe, not Bob Murphy, no one. And then once, once I figured it out, and then I discovered that they pretty much hold the same position I do, it's like, oh, it's like, it's like, it's, it's, that wasn't stealing. That was, I figured it on my own. It's an idea that's kind of being spread around. So is that, so if, if Hoppe came up with it, did I steal it from him? No. And all, all ideas, all, all innovative, creative works, all discoveries, everything's incremental. It has to be incremental. It's always at, you know, this new bit of knowledge added on top of what we knew already. So everything is incremental. And interestingly, Hoppe, you know, in a couple of interviews where Hoppe goes into this, and I've talked to him about it. So he was kind of a lefty, but very smart kind of, you know, academic type influenced by Kant and some of his teachers like Hopper Moss and these guys in Germany. But then he started discovering on his own that like the, the standard approach to economics is flawed, right? So he started kind of coming up with, on his own, without exposure to the Austrian school, he started coming up with basically what was praxeology, all the category. And then he's, then he somehow stumbled across, across Mises. And he read it was, oh, finally economics makes sense. And this Mises guy basically has already figured out what I was kind of recreating myself on my own. So he abandoned, you know, his, his own attempt and just became Misesian. But I often sort of wonder what would have happened if he had never, you know, or if he'd come across Mises later, like he finished his own approach, it might have been, maybe it had been better or different than Mises is, you know, be hop hop of praxeology or something. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. Here's, here's another question. Tom wanted to bring that, wanted to bring this one up, but at least it's here. Anyways, Daniel W. said, I would love to hear his thoughts about the kind of NRX Machiavellian's red pill cathedral stuff that some in the Liberty movement have been talking about recently. How do you say his name? Pete Quinn, it starts with a Q. Oh, Peter Quinones. Peter Quinones. There we go. And, yeah. And then let's see, Michael Malis, Matt Erickson, and Keith Knight. Is there any good information there? Oh, I mean, this is, this is one thing. You're just not, I'm not going to be, this is one thing I'm not an expert on. I don't, honestly, I still have trouble understanding the pill things that the memes that everyone, you know, the red pill, blue pill. I mean, I saw the matrix, but it just doesn't resonate with me as a rigorous way to understand reality. I just don't find it useful. I guess it's kind of funny, but I, it's sort of like calling the Republicans, Democrats blue and red. I mean, I just think these things are just inaccurate conceptual categories. So I don't follow the neo-reactionary stuff or I don't know if I really don't know what the, what pill did he say? The red pill? Yeah, the red pill. Oh yeah, blue and the red, like one is blinding yourself to the reality being a sheep and the other is opening yourself to the reality that's really there, even though it might be uncomfortable. I forget which one is which. I guess red is the, is the open-eyed one. But the orange pill, I guess, is learning about Bitcoin because their logo is orange. Now, Michael Malice has a new book coming out called The White Pill, which sounds interesting. It's about the case for optimism, basically. Oh, EP, you wanted to ask a question. Oh. Yeah, I was wondering what your thoughts were on voluntary syndicalists. I mean, I'm okay with anything that's voluntary, but it seems to me that all these little enclave ideas have to be built upon a private property superstructure, right? So you can do whatever you want within private property rules, but if you do, then you're basically respecting anarcho-capitalism in a sense. So, and if you think about it, it's sort of like the tolerance issue, the one-way, two-way issue, like, you know, we libertarians are tolerant of socialists and comies because we would let them form their own enclaves and do whatever they want as long as they respect each other's rights, and it's voluntary. But they would not do the same. Like, if they had their socialist society, I mean, the real socialist, you know, they would not allow an anarcho-capitalist or a libertarian village or enclave where, as Nozick said, you know, capitalist acts among consenting adults were legal. They would at some point have to outlaw private property ownership or claims or contracts. And a lot of these mutualists and these, I think, probably the syndicalist types, ultimately the flaw is they want, they don't want to respect certain contracts. So for example, if you believe that an owner of a piece of property, like a factory who is absent, absentee owner, they call it, loses his ownership of it because he's no longer there possessing it. Well, they're making like one of two mistakes and probably both of them. And one is the idea that they're conflating possession and ownership. So if you lose your rights to it as soon as you're not using it, that means that there is no right to ownership. There's just a right to possession. But the whole purpose of property rights is to distinguish ownership from possession is to say that possession is one thing and ownership is the other. Ownership is the right to possess in a sense. So if I have a car and I loan it to you, I still own the car, but you're using it, you possess it, but you don't have the right to sell it or destroy it. And you have to give it back when I ask you for it, right? So those are just the same concepts. And if you don't have ownership, then all you have is a world might makes right. Like whoever has it has it. It's just power, which sort of infects this new, this sort of maybe the neo-reactionary stuff too, right? The Curtis Jarvin stuff, all these neo-monarchist types. They basically reject rights talk and rights language and normative language and kind of believe power is all that there is. And then the other mistake they make is like you say that you can only possess something that you're controlling. Well, but you are controlling it through your agents, through your employees, right? So the contract with them says, I'm going to let you use my property and I'm going to pay you money if you do a job while you're working there. But you're holding this property sort of in my name, like as my as my renter in a way, but you're not owning it. So if you just say the worker owns it anyway, then you're violating the contract between the owner and the worker. And the same thing would be true with owners of apartment complexes or condominiums where people are renters and they rent it and they live there. The reason they don't homestead it is because they're tenants, they're not owners and they're not even squatters because they're using it with the permission of the owner. It's it's kind of it's kind of funny. I'm actually planning a special where I have almost all of the colors of the rainbow of the different flavors of anarchist thought. So it's going to be interesting to see how that how that goes. I mean, I usually see like an and calm or an and kept on together, but I've never seen an and prim or or a or a transhumanist on together. So that's understandable because they would be against technology, at least technology that comes from the state. I mean, they have a point about the fact that the way social media, you know, while well intentioned, you know, it's kind of gone down hill, you know, especially, especially how it has impacted the culture. I mean, I, which actually comes up with another question, which also comes up with another question. What are your thoughts about how social media has taken things? I mean, I'm not hysterical about it, like a lot of people are. I mean, I'm still a strict plum line libertarian. So I don't I do think people have the right to do whatever they want with their private property. And I'm not surprised that they've turned kind of leftist. So a lot of these tech, these tech liberties, I used to call them tech libertarians, the ones in Silicon Valley, they're just showing that they're kind of soft headed, mussy headed, you know, kind of lefties in a sense. And I'm not surprised by it. I'm not surprised Hollywood's like that or the press. You know, some libertarians argue that they don't really own their property because they're embedded with the state. I think that's a slippery slope and not true. I mean, you can't just run around classifying the New York Times or Facebook as effectively fair game for violence or unjust laws. Just because you don't like their politics. I mean, just because they're socialists doesn't mean they're embedded with the state. Everyone's embedded with the state to a degree. So I just think it's better to try to work to disentangle it and to reduce the state's power rather than to run around trying to blame people for being slightly tainted for having some association with the state and then using their taint as an excuse to hurt them. I mean, that's not the goal of liberty. The goal of liberty is not to find excuses to hurt people by characterizing them as some kind of quasi aggressor, which is effectively what all this is. Even when you hear people saying, oh, we should remove their Section 230 waiver of liability under the Communication Decency Act because they're acting like a publisher instead of a neutral platform now. A lot of conservatives are saying this, but even some libertarians. But that's because they don't understand that the CDA Act only protects publishers, I'm sorry, platforms, protects them from liability for the defamatory acts of their users. But defamation is an unjust law because it should not be illegal to commit defamation. So any statute that protects someone from liability for defamation is good. It's like right now, certain people are exempt from prosecution for drugs like medical researchers who have some special permission, let's say. Well, just because not everyone is immune from prosecution for the drug war doesn't mean the solution is to make the medical researchers subject to it. Or like some of these stupid evil Democrats say that they want to re-estate the draft because right now it's predominantly, you know, the military service is voluntary, so-called, actually don't think it's completely voluntary because I think people are forced into it by economic circumstances caused by the government. So we actually have a former conscription now, like economic conscription. But the solution to that is not to draft rich white boys who are who could get out of it now because they don't need to do it for money. You know, that's horrible. That's sort of like these, you know, the people that want integrated schools and they want to, you know, they want to force integrate people because they want like the privileged smart kids to be in school with, you know, the, in public schools with the, with the kids that are not as smart or maybe they want the brown kids to have white kids in their class. I mean, it's sort of condescending to the blacks to say, oh, they need a good example. I mean, they need the white example there to learn from or something. I mean, they want to sacrifice, make some kids sacrificial lambs, right, to for the masses who are suffering because the schools suck because the Democrats have ruined it. Um, I got off on a tangent, but where were we? Sorry, I, I, I, I was just soaking everything and I kind of lost, I'm kind of lost too. So sorry. So, um, I don't know. Anyways, um, here's probably my most favorite question of all the other questions here. What's it like being such a heavyweight? Oh, the, the head is, what does it say, the crown is, the crown hangs heavy on the head. Uh, no, seriously, um, I mean, it's been sort of fun to have climbed to a position where my work is known and discussed and respected and, you know, I'm just working for liberty like everyone else and my, my, my personal role and it's been to work on a libertarian theory, right? Um, other people work on more activism things or practical applications or spreading the message or just supporting causes with their money or with their time. So I, I think I've developed some specialties in a few narrow areas like intellectual property theory and a couple of areas where praxeology and legal, I kind of have a unique set of knowledge in a, on a pretty high level like legal theory, partly because I went to school in Louisiana, which has a civil law state. So I learned both the Roman civil law system and the common law, which has been helpful to me in my libertarian theory, plus Austrian economics, plus the influence of the radicals like Hoppe and Rothbard. So I try to just bring that to the table when I discuss some, some issues. So, but there's lots of things. I mean, people ask me all the time, I mean, I'm an end cap. So people always ask me the, the anarchist questions like competing defense agencies and that kind of stuff. And I have some thoughts and I've read on it, but I haven't really written much on it. It's just not my area. You know, I defer to like David Friedman and Randy Barnett and Hans Herman Hoppe and Maulanaari and Bob Murphy and the Tannehills, people like that. So I just try to know my place and work on the areas I can make contributions at, which I think has been pretty narrow, but I've always tried to approach things incrementally, like, like I have my book coming out later this year, which is a collection of my essays, articles, but they kind of come together like a book because every time I wrote, I tried to build in a consistent way on the last one. And a few times I would, I would plan like I knew there was a chunk missing, but I was going to write on it later. So I kind of planned around that. So they sort of fit together. So I've tried to carefully go and only go where I'm pretty sure so that and it's resulted in a pretty consistent edifice, I think, not comprehensive, but pretty consistent and somewhat broad. So I mean, I'm kind of joking. The heavyweight thing was, was, was sort of a funny mean that came because, like, like right now I'm giving my time, you guys are giving your time, we're all giving our time in the service of liberty. It's kind of a hobby, but we're doing it out of a good motive, right? And I actually happened to have a lot of deep knowledge I've worked on for 25, 35 years in a few areas. And, you know, a lot of people that write these books on these things, they're not accessible, you know, like Hoppa's disappeared, you know, or he's just old, old school, he's not on the internet. But when I go into these topics and someone is new and they start asking questions, that's fine. But I'm always willing to politely answer questions and have patience. But when you get belligerent and you don't even like, you know, it's like, you're just wasting your time in mind and people listening. If you just hit me with stupid arguments that I already debunked and the funny thing is like, so someone will ask a question. And this is usually Twitter or Facebook. So there's not a lot of space to write like a treatise, you know, and plus the attention span of the modern generation is pretty low. So I'll give two or three links to a couple of blog posts like that have the answers. And then they'll get mad and say, oh, you're barraging me with links. It's like, Jesus Christ, what do you want, man? So I just think people should, when someone's willing to give you their knowledge and they're specialists, you know, take advantage of it. You know, like when I talked to George Selgen about free banking, I don't agree with all of it, but I asked questions and I know he's studying it a lot more than me. So that's where that came up with. Someone asked the question, like, what do you think? I said, what I think is, realize you're talking to a heavyweight, take advantage of it, don't be a punk. And I kind of was joking, but it became a meme. I think you kind of gave some good advice to Jan Hellfeld in some ways. Now, Hellfeld was, so everyone thinks I'm rude and I'm arrogant and kind of descending, but usually I'm not because like this, you know, if someone has a question and I'm caught patiently to people that have different views all the time and I don't mind if people disagree. But Hellfeld started out like, I never pretend like something is what it's not. So Hellfeld was sort of attacking me for not following the stupid rules of the debate, which he claims we had agreed to in email, which is like he asked me 12 questions and I asked him 12. I mean, imagine a debate like that. So I just said, this is stupid. I'm not going to do it. You're like, this is a problem with you, because you've never followed the rules. And I'm like, okay, so you're criticizing me for not following the rules in an impromptu, unpaid, informal debate. But you are sitting there advocating that I be taxed. So let's keep things in perspective. You know, don't get on a high horse with me. And he said I'm insulting him. I'm like, okay, let's say I'm insulting you. Let's say I'm not following the rules of the debate. Those are pretty minor offenses compared to you endorsing and condoning and advocating the institutionalized power of the police to come into my home and threaten to arrest me and put me in federal fucking prison if I don't pay taxes to support your little state. So don't criticize me for something trivial when you're advocating for criminality. And I will give you the benefit, not the benefit of the doubt, but I will treat you as a civilized member deserving of respect and have a debate with you, even though there's a lurking threat of force behind what you're doing. So you barely deserve to be treated with politeness and respect in civilized company because you're basically advocating for criminality. So I'm willing to do that, but don't push it, buddy. That's my attitude on that. Oh, man, I just couldn't get over that all his arguments were basically, suppose you were in the desert and you were dying of thirst and you needed to steal some water, would you do it? It's not an argument. Yeah, it's like asking the question, you were tied down in your seat or in your chair, and then you had a gun to your head. Would you take the bullet and the bad guys wanted to blow up the world? Would you take the bullet or would you let the world blow up? What would you do? It's like, if you were the mother of Sophie's choice, which of the babies would you give up to the Nazis? I don't know, why don't we pause the fucking interview and let's go watch it, let's make a decision. That'd be real interesting. I don't know. It was just hysterical, but I honestly, I think I would have to agree your debate with Robert Wenzel was far more hysterical because he's like, Steph Fyde, Steph Fyde, why'd you call me a clown? You seem like a clown to me, what are you going to say? Oh gosh. That guy is like, there's some stories I could tell about him. I'm not going to tell it in public, but when I met him in person before that in the lounge of the bar at the Auburn Hotel, and I was sitting there, I'll tell part of it, I was sitting there on my iPad, I think, some Apple device, he walked up and he started making fun of me for using an Apple device because I don't believe in intellectual property. So I guess, you know, I'm a hypocrite for using Apple products or something. So I just smiled and I offered to buy him a drink and I bought him a drink and I was polite to him. And then he started telling me these stories about his youth, which are mind blowing, either they're true or they're completely fabricated, which either one is not a good sign. But if they were true, they were crazy. And if they were false, he's got a weird imagination and a weird way of talking to strangers. So anyway, he's an odd dude, very odd dude. And I don't think his name is Raven Robert Wenzel. Someone has done research. I mean, he's got like about a dozen pseudonyms he's gone by. So he's got some weird shady past. He's a weird dude. Didn't he like say he went to the Federal Reserve or something and like recorded? My speech of the Federal Reserve, he delivered a speech of the Federal Reserve and then it turned out he sat in the lunch room with a couple of buddies and read his paper to him while having lunch. Oh, that's odd. And so his argument, so this all happened because he, you know, he was cozying up to the Mises Institute and he got annoyed by Jeff Tucker and my at the time we were both closely associated. We were pushing the anti IP line and he got annoyed by that. So he got more and more rude. That's why I called him a clown because he got more and more rude and then we decided to have a debate. And then, you know, his argument was, I know a formula that I can use to get links from the Drudge Report. He goes, tell me the formula stuff on tell me the formula. I don't know the formula. Aha, there's IP because I have the formula and it's valuable and you don't know what it is that proves there's an original property. I mean, wow, never thought of that amazing genius sophisticated argument, Bob. And that's, I think that's one of the biggest problems when arguing for IP just because it says property doesn't mean it's legitimate. Correct. So that's, that's, that's the issue. I mean, if it's not only that if it's a state creation, then that should be a red flag. Yeah, I mean slaves were property too. So, so what? Yeah. So, so does that, does that, I mean, yeah, these people, these people don't have a, they don't think in conceptual and principal terms. They're not consistent. They can't even distinguish what since they mean words in, I mean, you know, they can't distinguish prescription from description right from wrong. What is the law and what the law should be, right? What's aspirational? What's descriptive? You know, what's is and what's odd? I mean, you can't, you can't just say, and then they also make, you know, they make the same mistakes a lot of the Bitcoiners, like a lot of the anti Bitcoiners like Peter Schiff, they keep making this argument that, you know, well, Bitcoin, unlike gold, doesn't have intrinsic value, you know, as if gold hasn't nothing has intrinsic value number one, right? Yeah. And gold did and does have a non monetary value, but they sort of like act like, well, gold is back, so gold is backed by its intrinsic value. It's non monetary value. Well, it's not backed by it because once gold, gold has a value on the market before its money, right, like for jewelry. And then when it starts becoming used as money because it's suited to be money, it becomes even more valuable because now it's the thing that's used in the monetary network. So it acquires a value on top of its monetary value. So that value is what people rely on when they save in gold. So if it stopped being used as money, it would collapse down to the non monetary value. So it's not backed. You know, maybe one tenth of the value is backed. So you're still not protected. Nothing, no money can ever be backed by anything. Right. Anyway, it's so I think they're making the same mistake, right, this intrinsic value mistake. And so the IP guys say that if something has value, that means its property. See, they're conflating property and things that have value. And they also make a similar mistake. If you can sell something, it means you own it. Right. But that's because they're not thinking carefully about these concepts sale. And they're not distinguishing economic behavior, which is descriptive from, from law, which is prescriptive, right, which is normative. So selling something in an economic sense is just a way that we explain people's motives in the means in the praxeological framework. Like the reason I gave you the apple was to get the orange. So you can call it a sale because that's just a compressed way of explaining the characteristics of that action. Like I employed my apple to get an orange. The means used was the my apple. The end was the obtaining of an orange. But I might want something other than an orange. So I might want a girl to kiss me. So I give her an apple she kisses me in the means in action framework. It's still praxeologically the case that I use the apple to get something I wanted the end that I wanted, which was for her to act in a certain way to give me a kiss. And you could say she sold me the kiss because it's analogous to the other one. And you could describe it that way. But that's just a way of describing the motivations for what she did. She kissed me in order to get an apple. She used the means of her own body and her control over it to perform an action that satisfied me, gave me, made me, induced to give her an apple. But that doesn't mean she owns her kiss. I mean, that's just a metaphorical sloppiness there. It's what we call a reification when you take a concept that's abstract and describe something usefully and you turn it into an existing sort of thing, right? Like my love for my child knows no bounds. Well, how much does it fucking weigh? You know, I mean, or they'll say we'll do rights exist. I mean, that kind of language starts pushing people into confusion about sort of the metaphysical status of these things or the ontological status, whichever one you want to you want to say. So value is just a concept we use to explain why people do things. So we say that when someone employs a means that they have in their possession, their command, their control, to causally interfere with the world, according to the laws of cause and effect, to change the course of things that would happen to achieve an end result in the future that's different than what would have otherwise happened. That's their purpose or the end or the goal of their action and they employed means to achieve it. So we just say that that demonstrates that they valued that end that they pursued and that they valued it more than other ends they could have pursued instead, right? This opportunity cost comes into it. So value just is a way of describing the interplay of choice and use of means to achieve ends. It just describes it's a way of almost total logically saying that you chose that end. You chose the end that you preferred. You demonstrated that you prefer it because you chose it. You acted to achieve it, right? Doesn't mean value is a substance or a thing that's inside of something. So just because something has value on the market, which in all that means is someone is willing to give you money to get you to give it to them. That's what has value means. Has value means other people desire that thing. The fact that someone subjectively in their intentions in their mind desires an object does not mean or I should say more broadly, they desire an end result. Doesn't mean that that end result is property. Like the end result might be I want to see the sunset. So I get in my car and I drive to the beach in time to see it. That's the end result I wanted. That's the goal of my action. I value seeing the sunset. Doesn't mean it's something I might even pay money to do it. So I purchased the sunset. I own the sunset. The sunset is an ownable thing. See all these people don't think carefully like this because they're not steeped in praxeology. If you are then you start you start seeing things right away. Did you have any other questions if you're still there? Yeah, I'm still here. Basically, I don't really agree with the like terms and stuff, but like it's semantics at this point. I don't care. I guess you could define things however you want as long as you can understand each other. That's correct. I agree with that, but you got to be careful then, especially if you use terms in an idiosyncratic way. And you also have to be careful that people aren't doing it on purpose to be disingenuous or to equivocate, which they do sometimes sometimes they do it sloppily and innocently and just out of ignorance or carelessness, but sometimes they do it on purpose. Like, sustainists often will say something like they'll try to argue against anarchy by saying that they equivocate on the word government. So they'll use it in one sense to mean the governing institutions of society, which we anarchists believe in, like not unless you're a chaos anarchist who wants the world to collapse. Most of us anarchists think that you would have hierarchy and rules and order and law in a private society. Now, the statists, the menarchists, don't believe that. They think there would not be law in a free society, but we do. So that's a difference of opinion, but we don't favor lawlessness. So we favor what you could call governance, like the government. So whatever institutions would provide law and order and hierarchy and rules, we just don't think it would be state. And so they'll get you to admit that you want law and order. And you say yes. So let's say, okay, so you believe in government. I'll say yes. They'll say, well, then you can't be an anarchist. And I'll say, well, no, anarchist means you're against the state, right? So they switch to the second word of government, the second meaning of the word government, which means can mean state. So it depends on how you define government. If you say, do you believe in government? Well, if you mean by that, the governing institutions society, yes. If you mean by that, the state, then no. So you tell me how you mean it and just be careful with it. But they don't want to be careful with it, right? Because they think they mean the same thing. They think that you have to have a state to have order. And so to them, the two senses of the word government converge on each other. But they're using a confused form of semantics to make their case, which is just is invalid and usually dishonest, I believe. But that's just one example. Another one's the word scarcity, by the way, which, you know, they'll say something, you know, so like, when we say property rights adhere to scarce resources, in Mises's sense, what that means is rival worse resources, because that's what, that's just what they are. That's an economic concept. So we mean scarcity in the technical economic sense of rivalrousness. But there's another sense, which means just lack of abundance, right? Not very abundant. And so you point out that property rights adhere to scarce resources. And someone will say, well, you can have property rights and ideas because good ideas are scarce. I mean, you see how they do that equivocation there, they slip from one meaning of the sense of the word to the other. And so there's one way that I try not to use words scarce anymore, or I try to define it every frickin' time, where I say rivalrous. In fact, I've come up with my own concept, my word, which I don't use that much yet, but I might like in future writing, I call resources that have property rights in them conflictable. Like, so that's the essential characteristic. And rivalrous kind of means that you think of rivals or people that can have conflict with these other people that are rivals over something. But it's the property of something that there can be conflict over it, which gives rise to the need to have property rights, to settle the dispute about the thing. So it's really things that are conflictable, or things that are subject to property rights, in my view. One last thing before we end this. I remember in the last show, we talked about how it just because you're an IP lawyer and you're against IP does not mean that you're being a hypocrite, because you're basically there to put an end to all this. Wouldn't you say that a primitivist who wants to use the internet, even though they don't like technology, do you think they're hypocritical for trying to, for having to work around in stuff to promote their ideas? That's interesting. I don't think the situations are analogous, but the question of whether, I'm not so sure about that. I don't know if a primitivist is necessarily hypocritical for using technology, because it depends on what it means to be a primitivist. If being a primitivist means you should not use technology, then yeah, he's being hypocrite. But it's sort of like the Libertarian thing. To be a Libertarian doesn't necessarily mean that you think people should not commit aggression. It really means you think that the only laws that are justified are those that are directed against aggression, right? So it's not a personal moral code necessarily. Rothbard sort of pointed this out. So just like there can be cases where you doing something that's within your rights is immoral, you know, like being rude to your child or something or your grandmother for no reason. That's immoral, but it doesn't violate anyone's rights. Well, your child might violate his rights because you have a positive obligation to be a good dad, but let's say your grandmother or a stranger. And likewise, it could be argued that there are some cases where it would be immoral to respect rights or it would not be immoral to violate rights, you know, because maybe you should violate rights in some cases to save your kid's life or something. But then you have to be willing to pay the price of violating the right because the legal system is justified in holding you to account for that. So it's just a personal decision about, you know, I think by and large there's a converges between morals and between rights, but one is can be seen as a metanorm and one is a personal norm. So by the same token, if you are a primitist, maybe your goal is to move to a society where we have more primitivity. So in that case, I don't think necessarily hypocritical. It's just like it's not hypocritical of us to use government roads, even though we oppose the roads because when we say we oppose the roads, it doesn't mean we think no one should use government roads. What we mean is there should not be government roads and government roads should be privatized. So using the government road is not inconsistent with claiming these roads should be privatized. May make sense? Yeah, I mean, I mean, with the roads thing, I mean, you know, if people are like, well, then why are you using the roads? I mean, another way of looking at it is it's like, well, my taxpayer dollars are going to it. So I might as well make good use out of my money that's being taken from me by force. Yeah, but even I see even that I would, I think that's a little bit. It's a little bit like conceding too much to make that excuse like it's it's bad making that defense, you're acting like your behavior needs defending. And I think it really doesn't need defending. I mean, if you have a prisoner, someone in jail in federal prison right now for a drug offense, who is a libertarian, right? And they don't like let's say Ross Obert or someone's in prison right now and they think the prison shouldn't exist. Are they hypocritical for being in prison? I mean, they can't do choice. I guess they should they commit suicide? Yeah, you know, I mean, it's just if someone is forced by circumstances that they disagree with to comply with them, they're not the hypocrite, they're the victim. Right, right. Right. All right. That's pretty much everything for this show. So, Stefan, once again, as always, thanks for coming on. It's always fun having you on. Glad to do it. Thank you guys. Yeah. So, oh yeah, and one last thing. You want to let everyone know where they can find any of your works or your writings or Well, I'm in S. Cancella is my sort of my at my social media handle on Twitter and Facebook. And my main website is stephanconcella.com. Not to be confused with Steven with me, because that goes to an artist I just found out about stephanconcella.com. Stevenconcella.com. So, sdephanconcella.com. I know a lot of people, a lot of people refer to you as Stefan or Stephen or yeah, all the time, all the time, or my first name Norman. Yeah, that's okay. So, all right. Well, thanks again for coming on and I want to thank you all for tuning in and please come back soon.