 I'm Walter Block. I'm Jody M. Reeves. This is Adam Kokesh. I'm Jeffrey Tucker. I'm Ben Slom. I'm Tom Wood. I'm Peter Schiff. I'm Eric Voorhees. And you're listening to me. And you're listening to me. And you're listening to me. You're listening to me. You're listening to me. You're listening to me. Ed and Ethan. Soak up the awesomeness. I'm listening to Ed and Ethan, the voice of Liberty in Canada coming to you from Saskatoon in the province of Saskatchewan, my intrepid co-host, Ed joins me of course today. Welcome back. Yeah, it's been a while. Good times. Good times. Well yeah, it's been fun without you though. I get to mess everything up technically. Yeah, it's okay though. Yeah, it was the Bitcoin show before last. I basically just ate up like six and a half minutes of dead end. Yeah, I was at work and I was listening and I was kind of like, oh no. Yeah, the poor producer there, he like freaked out. He was like, what's wrong? What's going on? Anyway, all right. You're listening to us, thankfully, no dead air at the moment. You're listening to us on Liberty Express Radio, LibertyExpressRadio.com, the Liberty Radio Network, Liberty Movement Radio, the Daily Paul Radio Network for this guy. I can't do the once more to the breach, my friends. That's just stupid. Why do I keep doing that? Maybe it's because you know what it is. It's because when you're talking about libertarian philosophy and freedom, it just feels like a constant battle, doesn't it? I mean, especially if you go on Facebook, that's a mistake. Don't go on Facebook. Just leave Facebook behind. You know, you have these ideas and then the mainstream has these ideas and mainstream thinks that you have this idea, but your idea is not. It's like, way out there. We're all racist baby killers. That's what we are. Okay, so hey, listen. And rich snobs too, that. You know, rich white snobs, right, libertarians? Okay. Anyway, so, so we're going to we mentioned at the start of the show, we're going to be talking to Stefan Kinsella. Stefan Kinsella has been on the show a couple times before and it's always been a pleasure to have him. He's a patent attorney and libertarian writer in Houston, Texas. He's the founding and executive director of Libertarian Papers, founder and director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom. That's C4SIF. I'm sure you've seen postings from that around. Founding member of the Property and Freedom Society. I think I've seen him described as a reluctant intellectual property attorney. So he should be connected with us now. Stefan, how's your day going? It's going well and you could describe me also. We lost you. We lost you, Stefan. You have to you have to repeat just how well you're doing and how we could possibly describe you. All right. Sorry. Sorry. Okay. I think my connection is back. I had a Skype burp. Oh, well, you know, Skype burps suck. But okay, let's try that again. Go on. Try it again. Sorry. I'm not even going to edit any of this out, Ed. This is all being left in. It's part of the character of the show. How else could you describe this, you know, this reluctant patent attorney? Well, you know, I am in Houston. I just have negative connotations, I guess, because Texas has this reputation. So I like to say I'm really from Louisiana. So at least it's the worst state in the nation, but at least it's kind of fun and interesting. So I'm one of the libertarians from Louisiana. Put it that way. Okay, explain why Texas has that reputation. Because are you referring to the, what was it, like the Eastern District Texas Court, the one that's very friendly to intellectual patent attorney or intellectual patent plaintiffs? Well, yeah, that's my particular beef with Texas. But yeah, I know that we have a reputation for being guns and yeehaw, immigrant, all this kind of stuff. But yeah, from my point of view, it's bizarre that close to Houston up in Marshall, Texas, up the road a little bit from where I am, is the worst patent court in the nation. It's a federal district court where all the patent plaintiffs go to sue to file their lawsuits. And so there are these little strip centers full of these little empty offices with little placards of companies that have just set up a $110 a month office so they can claim a presence in Texas. So they can have a free text to file their lawsuit here because under federal US federal law, under copyright law, it's a national law, so you can sort of choose which federal district in the US to sue in. If you want to sue someone for copyright or patent, and especially for patent, the district in Marshall, the Eastern District of Texas is known for giving wildly large and pro patent, pro patent plaintiff awards. So this is where everyone comes. It's sort of a big grab bag here. You say the worst in the nation. I would say the worst in the world. Well, that's true. That's true. It's the worst in the nation, so therefore it's the worst in the world because the US is the worst in the world on IP. I've seen studies that argue that the United States industries that lobby for patent and copyright, Hollywood, pharmaceuticals, some software industries, the music industry, they are actually benefited by the copyright and patent law, although the country as a whole is not. But in other countries, Canada, European countries, especially Asian countries in Africa, etc., they're actually harmed by these laws, which is why the US uses treaties and our heft in the world to strong arm these countries into adopting US-style IP law, which basically benefits Hollywood and the music industry and the pharmaceutical industry in America. Yeah, last time we had you on, we were talking about TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I don't know, has there been any more leaked info about that, or are we still pretty hush-hush, I think, because it hasn't went through. Yeah, I haven't heard much about it lately, which worries me. So there's something going on behind the scenes. I suspect we're still strong-arming people. It could be watered down a little bit like Acta was if it passes, but it's going to be another ratcheting up of state power. And the perverse thing is the US says once we adhere to these agreements, which we force everyone to exceed to, we say, well, we can't modify our copyright law. That would be a violation of our international obligations. In fact, I was listening this morning to the oral arguments in the ARIO case, which we can talk about if you guys want to. And one of the concerns one of the justices had was whether a ruling in ARIO's favor would put the United States in breach of the Berne Convention, which is a big copyright treaty that we adhered to in the 1980s, which requires every member state to have certain minimum protections for copyright. So even if the US wanted to reduce our copyright terms to a smaller number closer to what was in place at the founding of the country, 14 years roughly, instead of 150 years. We'll get to that in just a moment, but before we do touch on that, before we get too distant from this Houston or the Eastern District Federal Court thing, whatever, I did want to ask you because the impression I've always gotten, you know, being up here in the frozen wastes my distance, my perspective is distant, right? Is that federal court located in a smaller population center? He said it's just kind of up the road for me. So what's okay? Can you give me a feel for how big the population is around that court? Because you have corporations that serve hundreds of millions of customers going to that court. Is it really, is it in the middle of nowhere? Is it in the middle of somewhere? It is? Yeah, it's about, I think, 120 miles or so from Houston. So it's the middle, it's Marshall, Texas, in the middle of nowhere. It's a little town and they have, you know, that's where the federal court is located for that huge district. And they acquired a reputation in the last few decades for being pro-patent and now that's their claim to fame, right? So they recruit jurors and they are known for being very, quote, strong on patent protection, which means very strong on, you know, clamping down on innovation, in my view. Right. And so that's their claim to fame now and so they're going to want to keep that up. Just like in the US, Delaware has acquired a reputation for having really good predictable corporate law rules, which is why many corporations incorporate in Delaware just for the predictability. Yeah. I used to hear those ads on satellite radio all the time, was incorporate in Delaware. It's the best state to incorporate. Yes. Well, this is hilarious. I'm looking at the population for Marshall under 25,000 people. That's a small place for this, for these big corporations to be going. That's incredible. I mean, if you look up the reporting by, I think his name is Joe Mullen, M-U-L-L-E-N. He's a great sort of copyright reporter and he sort of gets the details of what's going on there. They take pictures. They go down these hallways of these little dinky strip centers and there's just an empty building with dozens of doorways in a darkly lit hallway and they just hang their little sign out and just say we have an office there. Wow. So, you'll see all these patent troll companies have a little shingle on a little office in a strip center just to have a presence there so they have a justification to file their lawsuits there. I guess I shouldn't be laughing. That's actually pretty horrible. It's like, what a better expression of state perversion of the market, hey? Yeah. Like, how can it be any more plain than that? Well, so to put it into context, when we talk about patent reform, one of the things people say is a patent reform measure would be to change the federal rules of venue. In other words, if you're sued in Marshall and the plaintiff and you really have no contact with Texas, you should be able to move it to another court in the country that is not quite as insanely pro-patent. And that is the level of disagreement, that's the level of argument we have about, this is labeled radical patent reform is just giving people the right to be sued in their own backyard instead of being sued in Marshall, Texas. So, if that is the level of discussion about patent reform, you know that they're foreclosing any real debate about real patent reform, which would be like lowering the term from 17 to five years or something like that. It's tough. You recently posted something on our Facebook about copyright and usually it seems like copyright with people, they do not understand this complex issue and they think that people are being harmed and the government is really there to help you. Right. And this is so tough because it's such, it's a complex issue if you don't really kind of know and understand where property rights come from. Right. But the average person completely is like, yeah, copyright is totally legitimate. Well, you look at this case, we can get to this, I think, area or arrow, this case where, so basically what's going on here from my understanding is that this company is taking broadcast signals from, I guess, the likes of, say, CNN or whatever, I don't know, and streaming it over the web. Oh, it's on that website I watch every month. No, no, it charges a fee, a monthly membership. Oh, it charges a fee. Yeah. So, I just do it for free. It's comparable to when people would throw up an antenna or, you know, would subscribe to cable, whatever, right? They're pulling off these signals that are being broadcast by cable companies. So, they're just not asking for permission. Is the whole thing, is that what's going on? Well, it seems like they might be violating some copyright. So, Stefan, give us your expert sort of overview of what this case is about. Okay. So, to put it in simple terms, and CNN is actually a bad example because CNN was the cable news network that was started on purpose as one of the early cable companies. But there has been a practice starting in the 40s, 50s in the U.S. of broadcast TV, NBC, CBS, ABC, and they broadcast their content over the airwaves. Now, nowadays, most people get cable. So, they get even the broadcast channels plus the cable channels over their cable provider. The cable provider has to pay some kind of license fee to broadcast, to transmit to you the CBS, NBC, ABC signals. But if you wanted to, and this is under U.S. federal copyright law since the 1970s, if you wanted to just have an antenna on your roof, you could receive PBS, ABC, NBC, and maybe Fox, some of these broadcast stations. And under Supreme Court decisions in the U.S. under copyright law in the last couple of decades, it's become clear that this sort of private right you have to receive the information being sent over the airwaves, and to record it, and to timeshift it, okay, under the Sony decisions and other decisions, you have these private sort of rights. So what ARIO did was they were very creatively tried to comply precisely with the decisions that had been given out to date. So what they said was, we know that if we just have a big antenna and we just record everything that's broadcast and we send it to people, we're going to be a cable company, or we're going to be subject to licensing and royalties and all that. But so instead, what we're going to do is we're going to provide a service to users to let them do what they could do privately in their own homes remotely. So they basically, instead of having a big antenna, they have thousands of dime-sized antennas, and they lease one to every customer, and then they lease space in their DVR farm basically, up in the cloud. So you can go on to your ARIO account and you can say, I live in Boston, and I would like to record the following broadcast signal that's being broadcast in Boston, which I would have the right to do at home, and record it on my own least space in the memory of ARIO's server farm, and then I can play it on demand. So ARIO's argument is that all they're doing is extending the length of the wire from your DVR and your antenna in your home to a remote antenna and a remote DVR space at ARIO. So ARIO is just renting you the equipment to let you do what you could do legally under the law already. So they're trying to work around the restrictions in copyright law. And in the Supreme Court argument, they use terms like ARIO is circumventing copyright law, which really means ARIO is complying with copyright law. So it's hard to predict what the court will do. The court just heard arguments last week in the U.S. This is going to be a monumental copyright case in the U.S., kind of like the Sony and the Betamax and the cable vision cases in the recent decades. If they decide against ARIO, it could jeopardize the entire industry of cloud-based services and cloud locker storage services like dropbox and companies like that. Because you could characterize what they're doing as a public performance too. And it could be a violation of copyright law. Most of the justices on the court seemed very concerned that a ruling in favor of or against ARIO would jeopardize this high-tech cloud-based industry. So my suspicion is they will either roll against ARIO but in a narrow way and they will carve out an exception for cloud-based locker services. But since that's very difficult to do, I think they're going to rule in favor of ARIO. And whether they make it narrow or not, I don't know. But if they rule in favor of ARIO, it's really good. It will basically start forcing the content providers to get with a 21st century and stop relying upon 20th century distribution models. So it'll be good in this instance. I've never been a fan of courts that are monopolized, but whatever. But if they rule against ARIO, or whatever, however you pronounce that, it's basically ARIO. Okay, I'll just think of ARIO. Not ARIO like the Taco Bar, that's what I was talking about. No, no, ARIO. So you've got to incorporate the cookies. Think ARIO Pajitica. No. Just take the Pajitica. Anyway, if they rule against, you're basically saying that any service like Dropbox that we're familiar with now will essentially have a right of exclusion in regards to competition. So they can basically say, they'll carve out this niche for services like that. And then anybody, any new market entrance that wants to get in on that sort of game. So you look at, for instance, right now, you look at decentralized services that are promising to provide Dropbox-like services through something like the Bitcoin protocol. That could be exposing people everywhere to incredible legal liabilities if this court rules against ARIO. Yes. And so we're seeing little glimmers of this already about what could happen if ARIO loses. Just the other day, some Dropbox user posted a screenshot of what happened when he tried to share a file privately with some other friend of his or whatever. And before he posted, when he sent a link to someone, Dropbox had apparently done a scan of his file, of the hashtag of the file, and they had detected there was copyrighted material in the file, and they sent him a little warning. We can't let you share this file unless you show that it's not a violation of copyright. So it was a private use of his own private space on Dropbox, and he was just trying to privately share it with someone, which is what people use Dropbox for quite often, is to share large files. So obviously, I'm not blaming Dropbox. Dropbox is doing this because of a concern that they're going to be secondarily liable for a possible copyright infringement of their users. And that is because of copyright law in the first place, and because copyright law in the U.S. at least has the safe harbors. If you do certain things, if you act in a certain way, if you respond to DMCA takedown notices, for example, like on YouTube, then you're immune from liability. So that is why these companies overreact and they become overly sensorial just to get the safe harbor. So because of fear of liability of copyright law, companies will become very conservative and so my prediction is that if this continues, what's going to happen is two things. Customers, let's say in the West and the U.S., they will just start using companies in Europe or in Africa or in Asia. They'll just start using fly-by-night companies or companies outside of the West or outside of the U.S. So it's going to kill Dropbox, but Dropbox New Zealand might crop up or whatever, right? Or Dropbox Senegal, I don't know. And then encryption is going to be on the rise, too. So if you start encrypting your files privately, then the hashtag system these companies want to use can't work and they can throw their hands up and say, well, we tried, but we can't see what these customers have. What's that guy, the mega guy? Yeah, Kim.com. Yeah. He's, I think, his new, the government came in. You know, I watched a vice documentary about that. They like stormed his house like full-on choppers and like SWAT raid type thing. And then it was funny, they took everything and then the next day he put something up and it was like 10 times better and all encrypted. It was like just hilarious. I have some reservations about Kim.com and his approach to all of this stuff. The status is going to state. But anyway, when you look at this, I'm concerned a lot more about these legal liabilities that people could be exposed to. I mentioned that people could start using fly-by-night companies in whatever country jurisdiction. I look at the foreign exchange market and foreign exchange brokers. The situation there is that American regulation has basically extended its tentacles across the world to make it so that if any foreign exchange broker wishes to be licensed with their local authorities, they also have to exclude American customers. So the only way that you can accept American customers if you're a company in, say, Finland is to not be registered with Finland's financial services authority, right? So in other words, I'm looking at this as more serious than just using fly-by-night companies. I'm looking at this as maybe potentially constricting that competition globally, like just taking all of that opportunity for using cloud-based storage systems and just completely making it inaccessible to most Americans in particular. Well, I agree completely. The dilemma that we Westerners that our libertarians have is that we recognize, like a lot of libertarians do, that there was something especially libertarian-ish about the early American experiment. So there's this connection between the United States of America and libertarianism. And so we're reluctant to acknowledge or to admit that, in a way, America's become the worst imperialist power on the Earth. It shouldn't really surprise us that the country with the most liberal sort of early heritage and the biggest economy, because we're large, so we became rich because of our libertarian or liberal internal laws. It's no surprise that the country that has that status will have a government that's going to be the richest in the world as well, because it parasitically, you know, survives off of the wealth of the country on the internal. It's going to become externally the most militant and imperialistic country. So it's hard for us to accept that to condemn the country, I think we have to separate out the libertarian heritage of some of our thinkers and our traditions from the state that arises from this wealth and parasites off of this wealth. So let me give one example. The United States in the, I think, 1970s enacted this law which makes it illegal under U.S. law for American companies to bribe foreign governments. It's called the FCPA, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. And they're saying you can go to jail if you're an American company and you bribe a foreign government to get regulations or permits or whatever. Now, in other countries at the time, that was regular practice and you could even deduct it from your taxes at the business expense. And so the U.S. passes this law and it puts American companies at a relative disadvantage to other companies because they're in the practice of bribing when they need to grease the wheels when the project's done in Saudi Arabia or whatever. And so, of course, because of this cost that's being imposed upon American companies, the solution is not to get rid of the law to remove the cost, but it's to spread this cost worldwide. So the United States in the last 15, 20 years has caused the OECD to enact a treaty on anti-bribery which about 40, 42 countries, the biggest ones have signed on to already, which basically imposes on all these countries similar anti-bribery protections. So it's like if we're going to hobble American businessmen, let's hobble everyone else so that Americans are not at a competitive disadvantage. So I suspect Canada is part of this too because you guys do what we say usually. 51st date. That's pretty much it. True. That's true. That's pretty much how it is. So that's an example. Another example would be American tax law, American antitrust law, American environmental law. All these things are applied extra territorially unlike the way other countries do it. I mean, America's incredibly imperialistic and they're in the reach of their tax law, anti-bribery law, and antitrust law, things like that. And IP law, of course too. IP law is another thing we explore. It's sickening how it spreads. Hey, listen, Stefan, we're just at the end of the segment. Can we keep you for kind of an after-show on, you can download it at edneathon.com. Would that be okay, Stefan? Let's do it. Okay, cool. So we'll be back right after the music if you're on our RSS feed, you're watching on the YouTubes, whatever. Stefan Kinsella. You can find writing from Stefan Kinsella at c4sif.org. That's the Center for Study of Innovative Freedom again at c4sif.org. Or you can just go to his personal website. You can also do that to stefankinsella.com. That's S-T-E-P-H-A-N-K-I-N-S-E-L-L-A.com. In the meantime, thank you very much for listening to us here right here on Liberty Express Radio. It's been a pleasure as it is every week. Edneathon.com, if you want to check us out. Yeah, I'm not forgetting anything. This is Edneathon. Okay. All right, so after-show, we are kicking back a bit. We do the after-show thing. All right, so Stefan, there are some other things I want to touch on here too. But yeah, I mean, this is something that I think is really important to understand. It's just, I don't know, why does America have this... In the Constitution. That's where I was going to go with it. Really? Isn't intellectual property or copyright, isn't that in the Constitution? Wasn't it put in there initially, too? I don't know, we have to ask Obama. He's the constitutional scholar. We don't have him on the line, though. So, Stefan... Yeah, I'm not sure a scholar of which constitution I'm not sure. So, Stefan... 1984 book, maybe. Is intellectual property in the Constitution? I don't know if we've asked you this before. Is there a provision in the Constitution anywhere for intellectual property rights? Yes, so the U.S. Constitution enacted 17... ratified 1789, there is a provision that permits Congress to enact copyright and patent law. Now, if you read this, the clause, they use the word sciences to promote the sciences and the arts. So, it says the Congress can, doesn't have to, can provide, basically, monopoly protection for the works of science and the arts. The interesting thing is that the wording is reversed to what we would use now. When they said science, they meant the arts. When they said science, they meant copyright, because science was the knowledge of the mind, right, conscience, the word conscience or science. And the arts meant, the arts actually meant practical gizmos, like think of the word artisan. So, it was actually reversed to what most people think of nowadays. So when they said, you can protect the products of science and the arts, they meant copyright and patent. Okay. That's, that's weird, because I don't, yeah, I don't know. I got a phone call way back now. Yeah. Oh, yeah, we didn't even notice. Sorry, my phone just rang. So, yeah, so, so 1789, now I have an argument that in 1791, right, so the Constitution was enacted in 1789 with no Bill of Rights, but there was a promise of a Bill of Rights. In 1791, two years later, the Bill of Rights was finally enacted the first 12, sort of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. There were two others that were tabled, and one, by the way, the first amendment, the first amendment we think of right now is the freedom of speech, was originally a third amendment proposed. The first and the second amendments were not enacted, they were not ratified. So amendments three through 12 were ratified, and they became one through 10. And in 1991, or 1995 or something, like just two decades ago, finally the final state ratified the first original amendment, which had to do with congressional pay during their term in office, and that became the 27th amendment to the Constitution. So the 27th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is the last one that's ever been ratified, probably the last one that ever will be ratified, was the original first amendment to the Constitution. But in any case, my argument is that the Bill of Rights had freedom of speech, it had protection against warrantless searches of homes, it had protection of due process in the fifth amendment, it had a prohibition upon excessive fines in the eighth amendment, cruel and unusual punishment and excessive fines. And I believe that every one of those is violated by copyright and patent law, especially copyright law. So my view is that the Bill of Rights basically overturned the grant of patent and copyright power, especially copyright power in the 1789 Constitution. So I believe that the entire federal patent and copyright law edifice we have is unconstitutional because of the Bill of Rights. But of course, of course, don't see it that way. Well, why would you say specifically, what in the Bill of Rights overturned? Okay, so the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of press, the process of law, and it bans excessive fines. Now the copyright law has like $75,000 or something like that per per copyright breach, which is why you can have some housewife like Jamie Thomas sued for millions of dollars for uploading a dozen songs to the internet. And that's clearly disproportionate punishment and the penalty has nothing to do with the crime or the damages caused. So I think about the 8th Amendment. The courts explicitly recognize that there's a, they call it attention, attention between copyright law and freedom of speech or freedom of the press, because copyright law says you can't publish certain things, you can't say certain things in certain ways. So normally that would be just unconstitutional because of the First Amendment. But what the court says is that we have to balance these things. Well, we have one part of the Constitution that says that we can have a copyright law but we have another part that says that we can, we have freedom of speech and freedom of the press. So we have to balance them out and we have to find the balance. And so they do this balancing act and they allow some copyright law but not other et cetera. But the problem with that reasoning is that the First Amendment was enacted in 1791 and the copyright clause was 1789. So if there's a conflict, the later provision should govern. You shouldn't balance them out. Just like U.S. banned alcohol right in the early 20th 20th century and then we later repealed it. Now the reason alcohol prohibition is repealed is because the repealing amendment came after. So in legislation and in constitutional enactment the later statute, later provision always is the one that governs. I mean that's why you can override a statute by a later provision. So that's the main argument I think that even in the U.S. the copyright law is clearly unconstitutional because it violates the Bill of Rights. Okay, that's actually really interesting. Because I, unlike Obama, I'm not a constitutional scholar so I don't have this perspective. It's actually pretty cool. Because I don't know, when it comes to the Constitution, Ed did mention something about it's also vague and that's true. I mean when I look at all of this stuff it's an interesting sort of, I almost want to say it's mental masturbation in a sense. Right, right, right. And it is so vague. I hear sometimes on Liberty Express I hear what's her name? Chris Ann Hall. She's a constitutional expert and she talks a lot about the Constitution but whenever I hear words like unreasonable search and seizure well, you know, that's not, that's not, to me that's not really a natural law, that is kind of a, you know, advancing the game of guesswork. It's just kind of, we have a law and it might apply and it might not. We'll figure it out. And in the end, we're going to do it in a really uncompetitive fashion because we're going to monopolize the system that figures it out for you. So, you know, it's all very interesting. I guess to me it just boils down quite simply and I would suspect of course it's the same for you, Steph, and it boils down pretty simply, right, to natural rights. I know that you understand even with your legal mind and your understanding of all of these laws and how they interact with one another, I know that you understand certainly that this is all, it's pretty much make-believe, right? So, the way I look at it is this. These traditional protections you're talking about do evolve over time. Legal understanding of rights and the relationship of powers do evolve over time. And I agree that there's a vagueness, there's an ambiguity, there's a lack of precision and rigor in these statements like reasonableness, but to me that's not the main issue. At least it's the idea there that there's a limit to what the sovereign can do. The main problem with today's legal system is not the ambiguity, which is inherent in verbal reasoning and verbal statements of these ideas. The main problem is that law is conceived of as being the emission or the statement of somebody that can just announce what the law is, which is the legislature or the sovereign. It's what we call in law legal positivism. In older times, the idea of law was we are trying to discern a body of normative law that governs human interpersonal relationships. It's not an exact science, like physics is or chemistry, but at least we're trying to find the basic rules that should govern human behavior. It may be imprecise, we may make a mistake, but at least that's what we're trying to do justice. We're trying to find the right way people should live among each other. But the modern conception of law is whatever the government body that is tasked with announcing law announces as law. So if they say here's the law in a written document like the constitution or in a statute, then the job of the courts becomes not to do justice between parties before them. So in the old conception of things and the libertarian idea of some kind of reasonable settlement of disputes, right? You go before a neutral arbitrator or a judge or a court and you say A has this case B has this case and the court or the tribunal tries to do justice between them and they try to find the right result. They're trying to do justice. The job of modern courts is simply to interpret words written down on paper. In other words, if the copyright statute says public performance then royalties are owed and you can't do such and such. So then the job of the court which is the case in the area we discussed earlier, the job of the court is simply to interpret words which may have nothing to do with justice or may be contrary to justice. So their only job is to say what does the word public performance mean. Has nothing to do with justice. So to my mind this is the problem with the modern conception of law and if you ask the regular person on the street I'm afraid that their conception of justice has been corrupted and distorted because of the government domination of this field if you say what is a law in their mind they're thinking of a piece of paper with something written on it like a statute that the government enacted that's what they think law is nowadays. But people didn't used to think of law as that so I'm afraid we become hostile and docile and subservient to the government just telling us what the rules should be. I wonder how that happened. That's one of my concerns. Well yeah but see that's why I look at this as a problem of monopolized centralized structures of law. I just want to, I thought I'm just trying to, I can't remember the name but isn't there like two parts of like I'm not going to screw this up how I do this because yeah. So like law that is specific like the person is being attacked and then law where specific the government is being attacked so like I can't remember the term it's like it's some Latin term they use do you under you kind of were can you help me out? I'm searching my law school Latin memory for this and I'm not following this no although I'm happy to attack the government and not the person. Well in the law there's in rim versus in personum but that's just distinguishes between contractual rights and property rights. So I don't know. It's something like you're harming the government and then which is it I think it's totally it's total nonsense. Well maybe you're thinking of an offense against the state something like that. Something like that yeah. Well I mean that is sort of the distinction right we have in today's law of public crime versus a tort. So yeah that's where it's going from like you have essentially private justice where you have individuals are using what's it called the arbitration and they're not using the courtism they actually use the courtism to threaten people could to take them to court because it cost so much money but you have you have the two sets of different I can't remember this I remember Michael Dean was talking about this and they were talking he was talking about copyright in this specific example and he was saying that copyright is essentially the government law and it doesn't really there's no person that is being harmed is it's the perception of a person because that whole corporation thing too. Right so in private in private law and private law could be both contractual and property rights or it could be a tort based thing but it's always one party one private party versus another so that's private law so in today's law we view a criminal or criminal someone who violates a criminal statute as basically committing a breach of the peace or they're committing a crime against the state which is one reason I've always been confused by all these TV shows and novels that that that show that in a criminal proceeding the government prosecutor goes to the victim and says do you want to press charges or not because it's not like the victim is the is the defendant or the plaintiff in the case or so the plaintiff so I've never quite understood that I think they're mixing together two things because the government can prosecute someone even if the victim doesn't want them to right because they're not the plaintiff in the case so the idea is that a crime is a crime against the peace or the public or the state whereas the libertarian conception is that there's always a victim and in fact if you if you require any trial or any proceeding to always be by a victim who's the plaintiff against a particular named the offender the malfeaser then it would limit the scope of a lot of the law we have now you wouldn't be able to have a drug crime or an anti pornography law or a tax law because there's no identifiable plaintiff who has actually been aggressed against by the defendant which is why the government likes to have this general notion of crime which is a violation of whatever rules the state decrees so they disconnected a victim so they've taken out the requirement that there would be a victim who's been harmed so in a private law system of course there would have to be a victim who's identifiable and they would be the plaintiff and it would basically be a tort case that makes sense you know it's so tough because all these it's such a a mishmash and it's all just thrown together and they just they never repeal any laws they just add new ones really so how do you ever see this being solved other than like that everybody like everything gets bombed just destroy everything I don't know man this is so tough what do you think well okay so I think that that of course is that is of course not at the present time conceivable that we're gonna defeat the government by armed revolution whether it's legitimate or not is another question but it's just not practical right now the government far out arms us well hold on well I guess in a sense that's true but I mean if you just look at gun ownership levels you know the citizenry is in fact in possession of far more firearms you know rifles handguns and the like than government it's just they don't have as many tanks and nukes so there's a bit of an imbalance I'll take that there's tanks and nukes there's that right just that I guess you know that does come out like what I'm thinking of is like what happened in Egypt where the people just rose up and then they just storm into the government buildings and then like took took all the documents from like the secret police and stuff like that if we storm into the copyright buildings and just take all the lost stuff and get rid of all the files then no one's gonna know then you know but I don't know yeah well let me ask you guys a question isn't there some kind of bizarre regulation in Canada about what they call long guns or something don't they call rifles long guns or something long gun registry it's so absurd to own a handgun you have to be actually a member of a range and you have to before you go to the range you have to submit a route from your house to the range to the government and you have to let them know when you're gonna use that if you don't that's illegal and you're a criminal it's incredible yeah everyone thinks America is a weird country because we have this kind of weird mishmash of traditions and ideas but Canada is weird because you sort of have the American free spirit but you go with European socialist controls like in a docile way it's weird like socialized medicine guns it's just bizarre it is more of an English overlord sense that's for sure well yeah we are still attached to the royalty and constitutional monarchy is a that's our government structure we have man that's creepy saying that I mean Canada is kind of built on a history of having this sort of connection to monarchies and having people being granted rights and lordships you know these fiefdoms existed and that's kind of how that all started whereas in the United States you guys you know well similar roots but let's face it things were a lot more I'm gonna say decentralized in the beginning in a sense I'm not gonna say it was all freedom and fantastic but it was certainly different than Canada's roots yeah but apparently I listened to a podcast recently with oh it was on Russ Roberts podcast there was a guy talking about the banking system in Canada and how the banking system I think it was on econ talk in the last two months it was really good and it was about how just serendipitously or for whatever reasons Canada's banking system has escaped all the bizarre American structural features and you know the Canadian banking system has turned out to be a lot better than what the U.S. ended up doing well maybe before 30's where we had like one of the freest banking systems in the world actually yeah we were actually a global banking hub in the early 1900's but I mean in the mid 30's we got the central bank of Canada that came into existence it's kind of funny because it's contrasted really well against the American experience of the Great Depression has this really interesting contrast where in the American experience you guys had thousands of local bank failures and in Canada where we didn't have that lender of last resort you could count them on one hand that's what the guy pointed out so that was quite interesting but I mean today where we are now it's funny we used to have 2009 2010 we used to have this narrative where Canada's got this really strong banking system now so we're really well positioned we never got a bailout either well not a public one we found that there was a lot of secret bailouts going on but anyway but now I mean we don't even have that narrative anymore because it would be laughable our consumer debt levels are ridiculously high we have an overheated housing market you look at a castle you can buy a castle on the eastern side of Canada for as much as it costs for a dilapidated one bedroom bungalow on the western coast of Canada so it's just ridiculous how we're going on it's not a good place now yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I think since the 60s maybe up until the 60s or roughly something like that it was superior but nowadays it's all being dominated by the the US type system and imperialism yeah only six big banks I think yeah we did six big banks and yeah they're all connected by this horrible octopus like sort of central banking system the system that's shared around the world right so yeah I guess I don't know I don't even know where we were going how did we get here I don't know I lost track did you guys want to talk about the net neutrality sort of developed yeah I did want to bring that up with you Stevan so we do have we've talked about on the show here before net neutrality I actually am very much opposed to any regulation that imposes you know this sort of fair internet use doctrine right Stevan right now there's something can you kind of give me like a bit of a primer as to what's going on right now in the United States because I know there's been some deregulation of some re-regulation I guess you want to call it so in the US let's just talk about the main players the main players will be the FCC the Federal Communications Commission which governs radio transmissions and communications but also the FTC the Federal Trade Commission which governs antitrust and competition law ok so here's my understanding there's a case in 2010 which said that the FCC regulations trying to impose some version of net neutrality were not legal because of the way the FCC is mandated now I think the FCC can come back and they can just tailor those rules which are trying to do to comply with the way their their mandate is and they can impose some form of net neutrality which means basically some kind of rule by the US Federal Government against ISPs that says you can't engage in certain forms of what they call discrimination right now apparently what's going on right now is they are proposing rules that say that you can't do outright discrimination you can't if you're an ISP you can't block certain traffic that you don't like like I guess child pornography or terrorism or a competitor signal but you can grant faster access to someone who pays you a fee so they're doing it the reverse way so they're saying that let's say Netflix makes a deal with a given ISP or cable company and says that Netflix traffic is going to get a fast track on your ISP backbone if they pay an extra fee which of course will be passed on partially to the consumers right so it's really discrimination in reverse language as a libertarian we have no problem with price discrimination which means you can pay more for a better service the real problem as a libertarian as I see it is that there are certain entrenched quasi-monopolistic interests that have a status that they wouldn't have without the government involvement in the first place so there is a problem but the solution is not to have the government come in and fix the problem because the government caused the problem in the first place the solution is for the government to get out of it all together and let a free market operate so from what I've seen the back down from the attempt by the FCC to impose net neutrality rules and the kind of deluded version they're proposing now is roughly a good thing although as I said I'm concerned that the FTC the antitrust laws will be starting they will start using those things after the fact so it's almost like a free speech regulation whether it's before the fact or after the fact I think what they're going to do is instead of saying ahead of time what you have to do they're going to just watch the situation and if the FTC says you have a monopolist monopolistic position or you're abusing your monopoly that's an anti-competitive thing to do the FTC will step in so I suspect that what's going to happen is the FCC regulations will be toned down which is kind of a good thing but in the background the government will reserve the right to use antitrust law or competition law as it's called in Europe to come in after the fact and say you guys have to change what you're doing because you're abusing your monopoly status which the government has given them by the way their monopoly so here here's the problem I see with all of this and your right staff to point out that really government is the central focal point of where the hiccups start there are real serious problems here in that if you sort of re-regulate in a more free fashion you're going to have I want to say you're going to get a situation so you get for example Netflix so they get to pay for better traffic from Comcast so Comcast from their perspective because they're in a non-competitive environment say okay so I've got let's just split this into units of 100 I've got 100 whatever units of bandwidth to give away Netflix wants 10 of them the other 90 I use for generalized internet traffic let's say it's the other 80 10 units of overhead so you've got this 10 units of space I'm trying to describe bandwidth but what happens in a non-competitive environment is instead of Comcast saying that's getting a little tight we better actually build out more infrastructure we better do instead of that happening Comcast we don't really have to worry about competition so what we'll do is we're just going to start charging more to keep that small buffer zone and everything's going to get more expensive nothing's going to get built out basically what I'm trying to clumsily explain is that the lack of competition coupled with this deregulation will be harmful to further development of internet traffic it's not going to help in that respect but it's not going to be because of the loss of net neutrality it's going to be because of the remaining imposition of government established monopolies or otherwise constricted competition in the market well I think that's very well said I agree completely with what you just said another way to look at it is that the effect of these government policies is to slow down innovation and dynamic reform of market solutions that would otherwise occur we can see this in copyright law I mean you have these legacy industries like Hollywood and the music industry and they are clinging on for dear life to the outdated models that originated in the 40s 50s 60s 90s in the US and they will milk it as long as they can right so not only in music and creative work but in technology as well like 3D printing and other things pharmaceuticals they will cling to their monopolies as long as they can they will extract every dollar they can until the model becomes unviable yes eventually these government granted monopolies whether it's copyright or patent or other forms of monopolies that are sort of hidden and obscured like the ones we're talking about with net neutrality and the FDA process for pharmaceuticals etc they will finally recede and pass away because of time or because of technological innovation but it does hamper and impede and slow down progress it lets people cling to old models we think we're modern in 2014 we feel like we're modern but there is no telling what kinds of innovations that we're going to have in 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years some of which we may have had already if the government hadn't slowed things down I will agree with you that it does impede but I think it also does it also enforces people to innovate because then they use the decentralization of the internet to get around copyright and open source open source wouldn't exist if we wouldn't have had government copyright I agree, you could argue that Bitcoin for example would not have emerged if the government hadn't cracked down on gold so some Austrians and libertarians think that gold is the ideal money let's say and that in a free society a private law society as Hoppe calls it we would have gold and maybe Bitcoin would never have emerged in the way it has emerged because of a response to the way the government has controlled things so there are some things that have emerged because of government control which only is an indication that the government distorts law and life and society and culture it distorts things, it corrupts things which is similar to the business cycle of Mises the idea that the entire business cycle of the economy is corrupted and distorted by government interventions and has effects I can agree with that I'm not sure if I agree entirely that something like Bitcoin wouldn't have come out of the ether because yes, Bitcoin is primarily right now it's kind of a way to run around the market dysfunction but at the same time there are real fundamental values that are expressed by Bitcoin it solves that old problem that computer programmers had exactly so Bitcoin in the field of computer science solves the Byzantine generals problem it provides a new sort of technology for triple entry accounting an open ledger system so there are other value expressions there I think it's apropos to say that this stuff wouldn't have emerged in the same fashion but would it have emerged probably because this is simply a case of utility is it useful to the human condition or is it not and if it is I think there's a motivation to develop it I totally agree with that I'm probably overstating my case I just think that the anti-state or a way of getting around state interventions is one reason people are going to Bitcoin right now and that would not exist perhaps in the state but the other advantages very well could be maybe Bitcoin would have emerged 30 years ago without the government the state is essentially a violent obstruction if you get rid of that violent obstruction it seems to me that yeah you get rid of a market motivation for overcoming that violent obstruction but in the absence of that violent obstruction it seems like there's just so much better motivation to develop in the marketplace and also much more freedom we can dream so we can dream that's why we talk about this stuff but it just seems like in an open market absence that violence absence the outright murder of a quarter billion people of the last century that kind of thing there seems to be a lot more opportunity for innovation than exist today as a consequence of obstruction that's what I'm trying to lay out yeah well unfortunately I agree with you so I don't think we have a disagreement I'm totally in tune with you guys on this I like it when people say they agree with me I'm open every time so did we flesh out did we flesh out really because essentially net neutrality the cursory overview from the general population is net neutrality that is a good law that is in place and it protects the individual on the internet from the big scary corporations and of course you know that is a like I remember when this debate was happening of the net neutrality bill this was the very first law to regulate the internet and this law was being touted as the law to end all laws to be further for regulating the internet and it's just like wait they bring their hand in the pot and they're saying that this is the only one we're gonna do like I'm gonna believe that one so here's what I think is the best possible spin on it the average person is not that in tune with our libertarian sensibilities and they equate big corporations with the government now they're not completely wrong to do so they do sense some connection and we decry that as libertarians as corporatism or crony capitalism or whatever so they're not completely wrong and they sense that something is wrong and they just want freedom they don't want these companies to do unreasonable outrageous things and they sense I believe that these companies are able to get away with things they couldn't get away with if they weren't connected to the government or the state in the first place so I think the general sensibility is basically right informed by sort of an incomplete political and technological understanding but I can understand the average person's sensibilities here's what I would say I would say the internet is a profound development in human history would it start 15, 17 years ago 1995, 1994 roughly kind of consumer level right yeah I mean in terms of its blossoming and being aware of, everyone being aware of it and any government regulation that threatens to control it is something we should be very concerned about and I would I would include that any net neutrality regulations by the government pro or con I mean if a government is getting evolved at all in it I think we should be concerned so we should just push for a very free internet is free government control and restriction is possible and luckily I think it's gotten the genie out of the bottle I think that with encryption with second and third internet with bitcoin, name coin type technology hopefully the internet has gotten to a point where it cannot be snuffed out I kind of think if the US government and the other governments had realized in 1990 or 1995 what the internet was going to result in plus cell phone technology, video recording all this stuff they would have just outlawed it but it's too late, I think it's too late and so let's hope that by the time they become aware of other things like encryption technology bitcoin it's going to be too late to outlaw it so I think no matter the details of any government regulation of the internet under the guise of net neutrality or censorship or stopping terrorism or pornography, child pornography money laundering whatever, we have to be extremely skeptical of any government attempts to have any authority whatsoever over these kind of communications between people over the distributed network we call the internet I like to think kind of an Ed Stoner corner I like to think that the internet is the brain synapses each individual brain cell is like a little piece of information that's kept there each person is that that brain cell and then the internet is the synapses that connect us all together so the hive mind, this hive mind idea where you have that's what I said you're losing all of your you're losing all of your rush fans and your rush fans I don't know there's a set us free man I really do think that this is going to set us free Getty Lee and Neil Pert are like rolling over in their premature graves right now well I mean there's some there's some merit to the idea that you have this client I think Ed is describing kind of a mutual collaboration structure right you get there's an opportunity here for people to be able to collaborate in a manner that they never would have been able to before in 1995 and that's been so significant there's been so much value in that infrastructure I mean it's just huge you know it was so easily dismissed at the time we had on our bitcoin week day show we had somebody was it TUR I can't remember if it was TUR to me sir or not it was somebody telling us about how this visionary at the time was saying well you know if the internet is so great why does my local mall do more business in a day than the whole internet does in a month right right right right it's like they're now of course is very clearly that huge value expression communication is so valuable and I think that's part of also why you're right Stefan in that it probably has come to a point where it can't be snuffed out anymore especially now when you look at open sourced decentralized technologies that are being developed by people in various hack space communities that kind of thing so I don't know I see this as yes it is a giant collaborative effort that involves anybody who wants to participate and I think I think it's showing that information it's part of that path to freedom it's part of that path to making those centralized structures that we're so used to that people think of you know you mentioned people you asked on the street what is a law it's whatever you know the elected representatives wrote down on paper well I think we're fast approaching that point in time where a law or an idea becomes so much less centralized than that and people start to understand that it's what comes out of the ether I think so too but I do think that there's a growing sense of of illegitimacy among people they know the government is a joke basically they put up with it they think it's necessary but they think it's incompetent and unjust and increasingly a joke which I think is a good thing so if you think about the institutions and the practices in society that are being undermined by technology and free markets I know left libertarians decry globalism and shipping tangerines from New Zealand on a ship to the US and whatever because they think it's subsidized by public roads and shipping lanes protected by the US military etc but globalization and the internet has done something so for example you can hire you can outsource some guy in Chile or India the web services you need for your for your website or for your for your radio show and so there's this commerce that's increased and this interconnection this intercourse between people right and and the government can't stop that they can't regulate you talking to a friend in Bolivia or hiring him to design a logo for you if you need it for your business right so to my mind these things are slowly creeping out of the government's control and if the government cracks down on it then we can use encryption and we can use and we can use a dark net lots of techniques that the government just is going to increasingly be unable to stop so I think that it's like water sort of finding the cracks liberty is like water right it's going to find these cracks and it's going to seep through and it's going to keep going and the government just can't put the fingers on all the dykes I hope I hope I like that note of finality and it's probably a good place to kind of leave off for now and there's more stuff I wanted to talk to you about Stefan but I know we're taking up a lot of your time and I really do appreciate because you came to us today on pretty short notice so it's very kind of you to stick around with us as you have look there's so much out there in respect to how liberty finds that next human mind how it expresses value to people and I think you're absolutely right to talk about it like water going through the cracks it's just it's that inevitable that's the way I see it it's not like Marxist talking about the the inevitable Marxist revolution well well I will I will just say that I I hope along with Marxist that the state will wither away just not in the way not in the way that they that they thought well I don't know to me it seems like Marxist want the state to wither away before they destroy everything exactly all right so Stefan thanks a bunch I want to mention again c4sif.org is where you can find center for study of innovative freedom and there's so much good material you throw up on there so I'm I really do hope people do check that out and also I are you still doing that that podcast with oh every yeah well we were doing a weekly thing called liberty talk and we need to I think next week we may revive that so yes and Jeff and I Jeff and I talk often and we're going to do another podcast well just been pretty busy hey with so so I mean I guess I guess probably been difficult to line that up again and again but yeah all right cool so Stefan Kinsella thank you very much for joining us today I really do appreciate it's always a lot of fun to talk to you and I'm sure we'll have you back again at some point thanks guys good to do it hi cheers always love Stefan coming on man he's a good guy got a good brain on his head there and I love the fact that we like to plug that reluctant path because it really is man it's so tough well you know it would seem contradictory right but I mean here's the thing is that Stefan Kinsella is he is in that world he's got the best understanding of it that I'm aware of and it's very interesting to see somebody kind of that view from the inside it's very cool and just quickly before we move on to the bit torn thing with Netflix and talking about that I brought this up in the show we didn't really touch on it much but people even libertarians it seems have really tough time with the intellectual property oh right yeah yeah it seems it just seems like they they feel they don't feel right when when possibly people are someone is imposing taking their work and passing it off as their own and then selling it and they think that they're really entitled to those consumers which is really tough like it's tough for some people to get to like I know for myself it took me a little bit and honestly but once I understood the principle I was like yeah that makes total sense no it's same for me too right was it was basic and it's all about that consequentialist thinking right is but what about those people who depend upon the current paradigm what about those people who are who are producing art what about those people who are doing so in within the system that exists today how are they served and it's very consequentialist right it doesn't speak to principle it speaks to wants for certain and once you point out though that that you are the aggressor if you want the state to protect your right to your consumers once you point that out man right there you got to feel something that ain't that ain't right like you you are the aggressor you definitely are the aggressor if you get in the state to go and attack people because they're they're copying your work yeah so that's something to think about but in the sense of this whole net neutrality nonsense a solution to netflix well bit torn yay bit torn yeah there's there's this idea there that netflix should defeat internet service providers by by utilizing peer-to-peer technology right because because this is one of the when we talk about net neutrality and we talk about preferential treatment for certain service providers like say netflix then you get into this position where well you know the ISPs are kind of the gatekeepers well what's the answer to the gatekeeper decentralization distribution of networks and that's what peer-to-peer is so so how would this work like like now the technology exists and you can right now download a file like a TV show on utorrent and stream it while it's downloading yeah like that is like it's so incredible so what is stopping netflix from kind of setting up a little similar system where two people are watching the same show why couldn't they just share that traffic like there's yeah all it would be was be a quick little code thing like I don't know how it works maybe it wouldn't be a quick code but it seemed like it would be fairly simple to have that set up so then that that help so then net service providers would be like yay good maybe maybe not the service providers that are throttling torrent traffic might not be so good for those consumers well service providers that want to facilitate that sort of a network traffic that you want to be able to be able to want to be able to help people access distributed internet traffic then sure it would be good for them I just find it hilarious that that the service providers you know they're upset that you know that people are downloading big files or streaming stuff because it hogs up a lot of the network and then the free market the nobody specifically nobody invented this idea of torrenting right right it maybe there was one there's there's a for the idea yeah but it was it was a guy that all I can't remember his name but from Sweden I'm against America but yeah it's interesting because this would solve their problem is this it would solve the problem because the traffic would be distributed throughout the whole network instead of just this big massive hogs of bandwidth that you need to take funny you know the answer to all of the stuff in the technology space seems to be again and again and again I could like I don't know if it just maybe Bitcoin has provided me some context but it's it seems to be decentralization and distribution every time it's about it's about taking away the role of the gatekeeper and finding a solution in the market around what it that is it basically a market dysfunction right mm-hmm so yeah Netflix would probably do well to try to and and I think they are actually I think yes yeah they are looking into researching peer-to-peer architecture yeah so that's cool that is pretty cool there were some other stories I wanted to I wanted to look at real quick there's okay we you're on I can't remember how many episodes it was ago but I was I was kind of moaning and whining about hey you know why shouldn't I be able to put some decals on the side of my truck and scream down the highway with flashing lights in a siren everybody get out of my way because I'm a trucker you know I'm a hero yeah and it's fine because when we were talking about that it was it was kind of like it was all tongue in cheek you know I'm you know I'm doing something for the community I'm providing value and you know police officers get this hero worship but I do a job that I you know I put my neck on the line for truck drivers die in the line of duty so so where's my blind stupid nonsensical no nothing non-minded hero worship where's my where's my hero worship and this is another statistic that kind of actually really bolsters that tongue in cheek argument turns out top 10 most dangerous and most lethal occupations in the United States cops don't even make the list yeah and my job is actually seven it is on the list astonished yeah calm on it's just hilarious you know you think about this stuff that's all humor it's funny it's but turns out you know in humor there's kind of a root of truth and here yeah it's and it's not even it's it's number seven truck driver number seven truck drivers 22.8 fatalities per 100,000 employed logging workers top the list at 127.8 fatalities per 100,000 employed roofers garbage collectors are on there aircraft pilots electrical power lines yeah that one kind of perplexes me on that one I don't know yeah well I don't know they do hang off the side of those trucks for you often maybe they you know maybe they like go at the wrong time I don't know I haven't seen too many of that for the most part for the most part they're like truck drivers and they just drive trucks you think that that would you know what I mean well it depends on the technology used right there's different technology for picking up garbage and it's kind of funny and it's usually union type jobs from the city so there's no innovation in that respect you know it doesn't surprise me that farmers and ranchers make the list at number nine you know my experience when I was hauling grain my experience on some farms is hilarious like I remember there was one situation where the farmer was auguring out I think it was canola into the truck and so when you get into a canola like one of those grain storage bins when you get to the bottom of the bin and all the canola is almost gone basically what you have to do is you have to go into the bin and with a shovel shovel the canola into the auger yeah hot work that's sweaty work but anyway it's funny because usually these augers have a grill over top of them so you know if you brush your foot against it you'll hit the grill rather than get caught in the auger right well this old farmer I remember shoveling you know he's shoveling canola into the auger no grill and he's in this kind of pile of canola so he's slipping towards the auger sometimes he's like oh that was close you could dog it's interesting you talk about this I actually I worked for a farmer in my teen years where he actually had this little contraption setup where it was like the three-piece auger arm where you connect to the auger and you would have to just you just walk around in the bin and they would auger all the grain to it but it was completely exposed you're essentially like walking around with this thing that could like suck you into the machine and you're walking in grain and the grain is like moving and stuff it's like man it's super dangerous well I remember when I was in that situation I was there with another driver who is basically teaching me that you know showing me the ropes and I remember looking at him going that's not really very safe and he's like well well come to the farm you know but you get paid a little bit more too like I remember I got decent wage to do a little bit more dangerous work because you know it was more dangerous and it was getting paid I think it was getting paid more than a minimum wage too because of that and when I was in the oil for it was more dangerous than the awful that's actually where I broke my neck initially yeah initially all the other all the other times too was terrible no I've only done that once thankfully but we you know I got I got a very good premium pay not just because oil is valuable but because also I was doing work that you know was a little bit more demanding more tough and more dangerous so yeah you that's a value judgment you trade off but the cops I'm sorry you know what pretty safe job in respect to lethality because you know you buy into that myth right a police officer goes out to protect the community and protect you from the evil villains that patrol our streets or whatever right like you you fire on the list either no firefighters aren't and that's kind of interesting but you know what firefighters don't aggress against people that's probably you know that probably helps their safety they have a more legitimate function now but I mean it's these emergency services I you know I find a great deal of respect for firefighters for paramedics but police officers it's different police officers we also we come part of the reason that we are told this myth of how they protect the peace of our community never mind the fact that they actually destroy it but you know we we told this myth and it's about how they put their next on the line for us like it's the ultimate sacrifice that's where that hero worship comes from right meanwhile while I whipped down the highway risking my life in fact in a much more real sense than any police officer out there you know I can end up in a slew off a bridge hit a patch of ice and I go flying off the road into a you know gaggle of cows I don't know what could happen to me right and I'm providing real nonviolent value I'm not pulling somebody over for going too fast I'm not beating the crap out of somebody for you know ingesting the wrong drug I'm not out there finding somebody for jaywalking you know judging for their own whether or not it was safe to cross the street I'm not looking at somebody going through a red light whether it was no traffic and then causing them economic damage now I agree with you I agree with you 100% but we also have to they they do perform somewhat of a legitimate function of if you are getting robbed for the most vast minority I know I know but it does happen it does happen and you know they for the most part they come there and they write on a piece of paper and they're like yeah we'll look after this like you're stolen property or whatever but sometimes they do actually are legitimately helping people in a certain sense but it is yeah you know you're right that is their function to protect life and property in the idea of what they believe and we've talked about that too about how insurance companies don't exist in a proper paradigm to provide that real incentive we talked about that guy who had the backhoe stolen and he went to the police and they said basically okay it's sorry it really sucks that your big you know half or quarter million half million dollar piece of equipment is gone but oh well so what did he do? Hired a helicopter I think it was a helicopter to fly around and look for it and found it but the police didn't help them because they didn't have any incentive to help them right this is a non competitive service and they didn't have any incentive to help people on the basis of violent theft that is taxation and I do and I kind of have to backtrack so they do have the idea they have to protect us but we've seen in a couple of court cases in the United States to show that they actually don't have an incentive because remember there was like more than a couple yeah so like we actually have a story in the list there too where they go outright steal oh there it is one yeah it's from Philly.com so okay they're 22 Philadelphia Bodega owners right and these people are you know they're just running their businesses and not really related to one another there might be some connection in a couple of cases but basically 22 separate individuals who all have the identical story okay it's hmm yeah okay hmm I wonder okay so so basically um a Philadelphia plane closed an narcotic squad barreled into the immigrants bodegas guns drawn they cut the wires on the video store on the stores video surveillance systems wow man like they really robbed thousands of dollars from the cash drawers stole food and merchandise and then trashed the shops on their way out the door this sounds like something from like some third world country somewhere well as it says here in the article you'd think that would have been enough to get the cops busted or at least fired but this is Philadelphia where a disgusted veteran officer tells the writer here the only way a cop can lose his job in this city is if he shoots another cop during roll call so yeah basically they these police officers who outright stole and they were in they were in their uniforms too that was playing close there are instances of uniformed officers doing this but basically they're not gonna lose their job they're they're on desk duty for now and they're gonna be back out on the street eventually wow protecting and serving you some more hmm good stuff yeah it's really messed up like it's crazy this is it's about the incentive system and how it's structured right does the incentive system actually provide competitive means for finding why somebody wants a service would you voluntarily give your money to a service that robs people outright or you robs you yeah like what like there's the whole robbing thing through taxes and then there's the whole actual well I wouldn't say because the robbing thing taxes that's actual robbing too but there's like right all blatant theft and robbery from the police you yeah and it's it's so disrespectful it's so like it is it is not that customer service focused interaction right there's this other story too of this an Air Force captain and it's funny you know in this in this article that we pulled up he's it's Nicholas Aquino I think so he's there's a video at the bottom of this article him touting you know join the Air Force I'm an Air Force captain this is about freedom I want to serve my country it's so glorious and great this is what freedom tastes like my parents ran from tyranny comes to the United States he was given two hours to leave the country something like that yeah but so then what is this you know this Air Force captain who engaged in this propagandist video about how great the Air Force is and how wonderful serving your country is and it's funny that he's probably not going to be well for the time being he's not be able to go back to school he's got a military based education that's going on but he's not going to be able to attend school because he's being charged with something now he's being charged with anything it was resisting arrest and obstructing was it yeah something like that which is which is incredible because that doesn't make any sense how can well here's what happened so yeah seven weeks after the ordeal he received a warrant for his arrest from county prosecutors for resisting arrest and obstructing a peace officer so here's what happened he was walking around his home on his own property I think it was outside his home although I don't think it's specific in the story but anyway somebody calls and says you know there's a suspicious person walking around the outside of this house cops show up demand identification from he's on his own property so he says no he asks if he's being detained so then the cop says yes you are being detained so then he shows him his ID and even he even gets a point where he shows them bills that proves he's the resident of that location he gets handcuffed thrown in the back of a cruiser the cops break into his home okay I'm not sure if it was unlocked and they just walked in whatever but they go into his home now he's he's facing basically here's the genesis of his situation he didn't have any illegal drugs in his house no so the fishing expedition I assume they probably went on when they went inside but basically here's what it boils down to he was walking around on his own property cop show up harass him now he's being charged with resisting or like they initiated this problem some busy body too right causing yeah somebody peering over he's this suspicious individual like you know and even if even if that was you know maybe that's not all bad maybe when somebody's walking around your house and they're you know wearing a dark shirt and carrying around like a big red bag or something yeah ski mask or whatever maybe you'd want somebody to call the local protection service to say hey you guys should check this out I mean like you know you know he's suspicious poking a coat hanger into a car I don't know like you know maybe you'd want somebody to call that's not unreasonable but when the cops show up and basically their power tripping right like you know it's a simple inquiry right do you live here yes or no yes anything you might be able to show me to prove that you do because you know your neighbors are kind of worried that your home might be being treated that sounds reasonable yeah you know I mean and even at that point it's basically you know you have to kind of take the word you don't have any information that tells you specifically that this suspicious person is engaged in any nefarious activity you could just say no it's my house and you know should you really need to provide that it's your house do you need to prove that if you're on your own property I don't know I mean well no you shouldn't have to provide more than that if it's come down to the point where you're contracted with a protection service maybe ahead of time you should tell the protection service hey here's a photo of me here's what my name is I have this color skin I talk with an accent I don't know like anything that the protection service might want to know maybe when the protection service contracts you contracts with you they say we request a photo so that when the officers arrive at a location your property they can pull up a photo on the computer to say this is what this guy looks like you know there's so many possibilities but basically what you have to keep in mind at all times is when you're approached as a private individual what are your requirements what what what are your rights and your rights are not to be aggressed against in any case that's it unless you are initiating force yep there's the exception that's it now I like to kind of segue to this anonymous supreme court authorizes warrantless stops and searches based on anonymous tips so this kind of we just came from a story where an anonymous tip essentially cause the guy's rights to be violated now the US supreme court is saying that yeah yay go tyranny go yeah in a very firm five to four split decision by the way because the law is so clear what's interesting here is like if you talk to anybody that lives in East Germany you know 20 years ago right it was maybe 20 25 30 years ago okay I'm getting old I still think we're in the 90s not talking about this in high school anymore man yeah so they would say that the system that people were put into compliance because based upon neighbors snitching and it was a huge network of people that would just snitch and and that's kind of how the system worked where you were aggressed against and you basically before you spoke to your neighbor you would make sure that no one else be looking around and you be maybe even thinking that is my neighbor going to snitch on me now am I going to be put sent away because of what I'm saying this is kind of the similar thing that's happening now and it's being justified by the state to say that they can actually continue to do this hell of a perspective creepy creepy and it comes down again to violation of those natural rights here not to be aggressed against not to have force initiated against you so this is crazy right the idea that this freedom loving land that the united states could could now through its court system basically say anonymous tips that's okay and what's really bad about that is you get an abusive bureaucracy right maybe maybe you've got and you know oh this is so crazy isn't it even if you get a system where okay look if you're a cop you have to at least say that you got a phone call it's got to be provable like there's got to be a phone record or something fine then you're a power tripping copy by a burner cell phone I was just gonna call yourself done you can you can essentially violate anybody's rights alright no matter what and it's not an argument about an argument about whether or not you think bureaucrats and government agents are good people it's just look is there an opportunity for rife abuse being monopolized and not market market accountable if the answer is yes then it's gonna crop up and yeah in this case anonymous tipsters being able to be the justification for why you're being stopped on the road that means look in a realistic sense that means anybody in the united states can be stopped on the road at any time yeah and have a fishing expedition go on just because anonymous cop with a burner phone I mean anonymous tipster phoned the cops and said I think that person has drugs in their car you should search it not even their car you could talk about the New York City stop and frisk right like incredibly racist incredibly anti-freedom in its application yeah it's incredibly racist but on its fundamental court of course systems just you gotta go out and violate people's rights you're going to be internally reprimanded for it that cop that was speaking anonymously said that was it his captain or something said maybe it was a sergeant that said something about we're going to go out and violate people's rights today and the big speech in the room yeah before they get get all riled up like it's just it's amazing because that's how this stuff devolves right and it's about that monopolization of power yeah stuff and mentioned right maybe all of this stuff is a market incentive and you know yeah it's just obstruction it slows down progress and freedom it snuffs it out in some cases there's no when you're looking at an end result the path to that result is so very rarely if ever at all a straight line there's lots of different sort of situations that happen individually along that path that are different you know some when I look at how the market works in general right sometimes there's a market failure you know a business closes up shopping goes bankrupt that doesn't mean that a market is unproductive it means there was an instance of failure there are also instances of success where businesses grow and become prosperous and successful so either thing can happen and in the case of when a state impedes growth I think that growth still happens I think the market still wins whether or not you want it to right but it slows it down but it's is it that market incentive is it providing now it is just flatly an impediment right doesn't stop it but it does slow it down I don't know where I got did you want to do one more because we're coming up we're either coming up to it or past the two hour mark I don't know if you wanted to get to one more that you really wanted to get to here I really would like to do that Polygamy one because this this topic always really interests me because it's about culture and personal proclivity is how we project those personal proclivities onto others and groups of other people right so an article from Slate is arguing for the legalization of polygamy and I guess from Slate this shouldn't be well you know from Slate it shouldn't be surprising because Slate is very left wing right so left wing news sources are usually very into the sexual liberation stuff right I'm kind of excited that this is being talked about in more of a mainstream in a sense and not so religious, cultural non you know like even like the show Big Love kind of brought out brought forth the discussion on polygamy and why not to and that reality TV show I think I never actually watched it but there was a reality TV show that was based upon yeah Polygamous family in Utah I didn't know that okay interesting but there's okay so here's what I think of when I see stories like this and it's a very interesting actually there's some really good writing in here I did talk about a lot of different sort of you know the arguments and counter arguments to legalization of polygamy but what this says to me is about it talks about cultural I want to say hang ups in a way because okay I'm not even really an advocate of polygamy per se I'm just an advocate of letting people live as they choose to live right so I don't care if it's family with a patriarch at the head you know one man and several women and then the children or if it's one woman and several men and the children I'd be interesting I don't know it's possible yes or if it's you know like for men and for women or two men and 12 women there we go that's that's the configuration but like what I'm saying is I don't really care what the configuration is I don't care about polygamy or polyamory or whatever right? polyamory is those multiple configurations you've got people who can love more than one polygamy is specifically male one male multiple wives or one wife and multiple husbands okay right it's basically a patriarch or matriarch so there is a head of the family I guess polyamory would be more of an informalized generalized relationship that'd be like the hippie communes dude this is my first wife star flower and my second husband um I don't know what's a hippie guy name I don't know I kind of grew up in hippie yeah man what the heck autumn harvest anyway okay so but the point is you have these potentials for very different relationship configurations and I think that the reason that people don't like certain configurations for example polyamory is basically because if you get okay if you get yourself into a relationship and you look at your partner and you say I don't want my partner to go and have sex with somebody else right and that's not unreasonable in some cases like if that's your preference and if that's your partner's preference then that's great that's basically that's kind of your guys' contract between each other right you set these boundaries and it's up to each one of you to either maintain those boundaries or adjust those boundaries in the future consensually right if you go outside of those boundaries in a deceptive fashion then you basically you're kind of a jerk the YAD principle yeah you're a dick principle right so it's interesting to look at I'm not saying that everybody should you know have this polyamorous lifestyle or whatever I don't really care what I care about is your ability to determine that for yourself so where I was going with this cultural proclivity is that I look at a case where somebody might want to be in a relationship where their partner is allowed to engage sexually with others and why okay if you if you haven't established that voluntary contract of being exclusive to one another then what is the problem like I don't understand the logical root of why that would be a problem okay let me let me be the cultural person here so sex is intimate you're being intimate and you're sharing this connection of love so that is that's where you draw the line with regards to how you can have relationships okay yeah yeah yeah so basically it's this idea that having a coffee is one thing having a coffee with somebody is one thing having sex with them is something else and you know to a point that's true right there are certainly different chemical reactions in the body that take place in respect to sex it's very unique it's not having a cup of coffee but in an ethical sense there actually doesn't seem to be a difference like you're drawing this arbitrary line at fun with somebody else but not too much right I guess I'm just kind of just thinking off the top of my head maybe it could be because there's another life might be the result of that sexual encounter yeah there are different consequences right and if you if you drink alcohol with somebody as opposed to coffee then your health is going to be affected differently so like here's the thing right it's again I want to make sure that people don't get the wrong impression like I'm not saying that relationships that are founded on you know exclusive sexual pairings like I'm not saying that that's bad I'm not I'm what I'm saying is that you have to you have to have the freedom to determine that for yourself like it's it's just part of living the human condition like there now when it comes to this polygamy thing some people would object to the fact that you know lots of the polygamist families are they're closed off away from society and you have like sexual molestation of children like an 80 year old marrying a 14 year old that's really creepy we're not saying that that's cool but that's a cultural thing that is unique to these societies that are closed off and they don't allow these women to be independent it's partly that and I come back to the challenge issued by friends of mine you can't blame everything on the government it's just give me a chance right and in this case look a lot of those communities are closed off because culture is dictated that monopolized police forces basically abuse these people right so if you are let's say actually in the slate article come to think of it they point this out right so let's say you're a child in a polygamous family and you see a neighbor being abused maybe you don't want to call the police specifically because you know if the police come to your home and they do by happenstance figure out hey wait a second this looks like a polygamous family so not now not only are they dealing with whatever you reported maybe quite justly but also now you've embroiled yourself in the legal system that does not approve of your family structure and so now you might have just caused a huge problem for your family better just not to get involved and not only not only when you see a victim somewhere else but maybe even when you're victimized yourself yeah okay so you are you're you're being you're being beaten you're being raped whatever right like there's some some really serious stuff going on and you are a massive you're massively a victim but you know if you call the police if you call the agents of protection you know so called then your whole family might become victimized by the state isolating people like that causes some massive cultural distortion I think that it's a lot easier for those communities to basically embrace what I'm gonna call cultural nonsense and idiocy in doing things like marrying 80 year olds and 14 year olds together you make this den of of really unethical behavior possible because I don't think a 14 year old is going to voluntarily enter into that sort of a relationship right I think that that brain is quite developed enough to not only that not not not not even that I think there is just it's easier to coerce and there is somebody into that when that community is closed off when there are so many options that are being not presented not presented exactly and everyone around you is saying that it's all normal and completely fine and the authorities in your life are saying that you have to do this this is what you do and everything right so I don't know it's tough and I guess on that subject of I guess we're kind of going away from from Pligamy but the the when do you like when do you get to choose being a kid when do you get to choose like your own path because like the idea that 21 or 18 yeah that's I think that's total nonsense well yeah it's arbitrary all of a sudden one an age and then you get these special right you are a full adult I think that's total nonsense but like there is there some science to support that brain like how do you say like you are a full adult because your brain is now developed enough and you can make all these decisions on your own type of thing like obviously like when it comes to circumcision of males in Muslim cultures they make that decision when they're 13 or 14 and that's when they become a male that's when they become an adult and what not I honestly don't think that like could a 13 year old boy get that decision for themselves I don't know if that if that's the right age to make that decision and of course you have that same cultural thing where people just that's what you do and authorities telling you that's what you do and if you don't you're not a man or whatever so I don't know you're asking about where that arbitrary line is there a place to draw and I think the answer is no here consider this I need to preface this carefully I've become interested recently in social Darwinism and social Darwinism the reason I have to preface this carefully is because when people hear that you're very negative well yeah because social Darwinism has been used to justify things like eugenics that kind of stuff because social Darwinism in the hands in the hands of a status is basically a way to well how do you control the outcome of a popular how do you evolve it favorably how do you use force to evolve a society so social Darwinism as a concept though seems actually rather rational to me right so here's how this works for me in respect to where where you draw the arbitrary line okay I should say it seems rational because it seems just as rational to me as evolution you know survival of the fittest and that doesn't mean by the way survival is the strongest it means survival of those that fit best the ones that can adapt most quickly to their environment I think that's the definition so in in respect to social Darwinism let's say let's say you have two societies one society has no respect for children children are essentially treated as garbage hmm run with run with people I'm just thinking like now hahahaha don't you posted there the other day yeah so one one society treats their children badly children as a result are dysfunctional violent unable to make good judgment calls children basically are dysfunctional creatures in that society you have another society that treats children with deep respect that treats children very well that offers them support love and encouragement these children are able to make good judgment calls these children are able to grow up to be successful people you treat them equally is I guess possibly I'm just I'm just trying to look good like that could be totally subjective that could be totally subjective what I'm looking for is a comparison between the two societies to to demonstrate what I think is a rational social Darwinist sort of approach okay so obviously the society that treats their children badly is going to have massive disadvantages as compared to the society that treats their children positive yeah right yeah so the reason that I'm that I'm saying all of this is because I need to say something else that I think might be quite shocking and that is that I think you have the right of self ownership immediately when you are born you have no concept of it you have no way to understand it but I do believe that you possess the right of self ownership even as an infant who cannot fend for themselves okay okay I also believe that nobody has a positive obligation to care for an infant not even the mother I don't think there's an ethical foundation for that I think there's a cultural foundation for that and that's why I talk about social Darwinism the maternity instinct not even that I think that develops but I'm not even talking about that well if you want to talk about evolution and social Darwinism evolution of a human being to care for your child to go to your child when they're screaming that is something that's built into our DNA that in a sense I'm not saying that you are obligated socially I'm not saying that in that sense but I'm saying that there's something inside you that is you need to I don't know being a dad and caring for my kid I will sacrifice sleep I will sacrifice my free time I will sacrifice everything to make it so he is comfortable and needs are met and I'm doing that because I love him he's half of me in a sense in a DNA sense and that's my own personal belief and that's the drive and the reasoning that I do that now other people I don't want to put guns in people's faces to say that they have to do that same thing because that's not cool and it's important to understand I think that one society that fosters the sort of attitude and approach will be far more successful than a society that does not it's showing more value and just by the very fact that when you raise kids who peacefully they're better attuned to the world they make better choices so the point is where should that arbitrary line be drawn I think the answer is nowhere and I think the answer is more in respect to how society evolves to create children to give children the support that they need to develop successfully in life I think yeah when you're four years old you should be able to say yes I consent to marry an 80 year old I think you have that right but I think also that a society that allows you to do that without really trying to guide you in a more valuable life path without trying to tell you look that's a really bad idea that's a terrible decision I think that that society provides for less value expression or rather that society provides for more value expression than a society I've worded this wrong but anyway a society that you understand right a society that doesn't provide that support provides less value expression in its social evolution so in a situation where you have old people marrying young people people would just see a reputation based maybe they're not the most, they're kind of a sleazy-ish type person if they're going to be marrying a younger person maybe the family that is married I don't want to say allowing the person, the young person to there's obviously something screwed up psychologically if you like a 20 year old wants to marry an 8 year old there might be some issues that have been caused possibly by you being being raised as a kid it's dysfunctional and that's again what market dysfunctions come from is they what they result in rather is a lack of value it's simple, it's really simple so that's why I've been finding social Darwinism to be kind of fascinating lately because it really helps to conceptualize how society is developing an open market and again remember I point out again the path to an end is never a straight one there are always good and bad scenarios and situations that crop up but I don't think the answer to those bad scenarios is to centralize how we approach them I think the answer is to provide as much freedom as possible so that people can take advantage of positive value opportunities and one possibility would be the insurance company if your insurance company is going to give your children full adult rights in a sense at a certain age that age would be determined by multiple companies figuring out what the best way to ensure you is at a certain the market's going to figure these things out there might be an arbitrary age that the market kind of determines possibly but if that does happen then it's going to be based upon the market principles of why that is happening right now it's just 18 or 19 or 21 or 16 or 14 depending on where you are for different reasons too it's just ridiculous it's so arbitrary and also so inconsistent around the world that's true too nonsense I don't know do you want to make this a full two and a half on the money because we've got a couple minutes before to make it to that we should have ended quite a while ago I'm just thinking of syndication in the show being a full two and a half hour mark oh how many other shows how many other shows adhere to the formatting standards that we do for Liberty Express because it's kind of funny right like our show for the first hour well I guess if you're listening to this on the RSS stream it's like 56 minutes ish or no it's 54 yeah it's 54 I think it should be 56 and 3 was it 3 minutes I thought it was 4 minutes or maybe it is 4 anyway I hope I have the right amount anyway okay but the we adhere to some pretty strict formatting apparently strict I don't know maybe I'd adhere to strict formatting anyway but so many other podcasts out there on hour and 20 minutes or an hour and 8 minutes and 2 hours and 23 minutes I was just trying to get one more story out of you but no not happening alright so I think that's good enough we're going to end off there so thank you so much for listening and yeah I guess I don't know let us know about that feedback for your story oh yeah the Bitcoin thing I really do want to know about the Bitcoin ATMs thing I would really appreciate feedback on that visit edneathon.com where you can send that I will keep my eye out for it and I really do appreciate it if you want to visit edneathon.com and get the latest updates including that Bitcoin ATM article Twitter is Ed and Ethan Facebook, Ed and Ethan all that good stuff visit, comment why don't you call more often visit really come on we're baloney and bored and we will read your stuff thank you by the way too for everyone who's been sending us some Bitcoin, we've got some Bitcoin recently after announcing we're ending the show and all the good positive comments and stuff like that we're going to talk Bitcoin here so we're not going to not talk Bitcoin that's right we will talk Bitcoin from time to time and all that good stuff alright thanks so much for listening this is Ed and Ethan