 Welcome back again to the Bad Quaker podcast where Liberty is our mission. Today is Wednesday, July 16th, 2014. This is podcast number 376 and my name is Ben Stone. You may not hear this on Wednesday, July 16th. Just released a podcast today, so it'll probably be a couple days until this one gets released. I don't want to put them right on top of each other, plus I still have some recordings from Pork Fest 2014 to release as well. So I'm going to try to meter these out as best as I can. But with me today on the phone is Stefan Kinsella. Stefan, welcome back to Bad Quaker podcast. It's really great to talk to you again. Thanks very much, Mr. Bad. Or can I just call you Bad? We're on a first name basis, sure. Good to be here. So one of the things I wanted to just hit you right off with this. One of the things I wanted to ask you about was Tesla Motors. Earlier in the year there was an announcement and there was kind of several people like yourself and a couple other people, Jeffrey I think talked about it, but several people mentioned that this is a pretty big deal. What struck me though is that I've watched Tesla Motors now for well over a year and they have, it seems to me like they were a constant target of the media and of the government constantly trying to paint them in a bad light, constantly trying to make them out to be some kind of evil monsters of business or whatever. And I kept thinking, why is this company getting singled out like this? And then they came out earlier this year with the announcement that they were essentially going open source with everything and I thought, oh, that's why the media hates them and that's why the government hates them. We've got some enlightened people in this company. What's your thoughts on what happened with Tesla? Well that's interesting. I've been thinking about it too. There may be a lot of implications that we can't fully see yet and there's a lot of ways to approach this. I hadn't thought about that angle. My first reaction to their announcement was negative because, probably because I was letting perfect be the enemy of the good. I'm such a radical abolitionist of IP and this guy simply announced his policy in a blog post. So I'm thinking like a lawyer, well, this isn't legally enforceable. He can get the credit for acting like he's going to be not litigious but if he changes his mind he can do it anyway. And some of his wording wasn't perfect but the more I thought about it, I like it. I think it's pretty good and we should praise them for what they've done and it probably will have a good effect. As for the reason they're being attacked and criticized, I'm not sure. I mean libertarians sometimes talk about them being on the government dole because of all the subsidies to electric car research and all that. I don't know, you can't really blame people for taking advantage of the way the system set up. We all drive on roads that are essentially subsidized and so forth. But, you know, there was something recent that was similar, I blogged about it. The IRS has announced that some of these open source software companies now aren't going to qualify for non-profit status and the reason is because they have the open source software license which means they're not enforcing copyright which means the code they generate could be used by some commercial for-profit company down the road. And that jeopardizes the non-profit status of the non-profit company itself. So in other words, the federal government is using its tax law, this tax system to literally punish companies that don't use the copyright system the federal government's trying to get us to use. So there could be something to that. If you don't want to use the system, the government is trying to force you to use this for your benefit. They will find a way to punish you. And so maybe Tesla is on the receiving end of something like that in the patent sphere because of their, because of this new policy, I don't know. So let me get this straight. See if I get this straightened out in my mind. Let's say you've got honest Joe's widget company and he decides not to use the patent system and he decides to go open source with everything. But he's not a profit company. He's a not-for-profit company. And he follows all the other rules, makes his widgets and does exactly what he's doing. But then the government is saying because somebody might, a different company, you know, Larry's widget company, might sort of be a free rider on his technology and make money off of it. So is it going to be penalized for what Larry might do later? Yep. This is just a few days ago the IRS announced this ruling. So it's going to be harder for open source. Now that was the case of copyright, not patent. But so, I mean, what they're saying basically is let's say you're a non-profit company and you generate software and you want to do the open source model, which is very prevalent now. If you have an open source model, I guess what the IRS wants you to do is slap a copyright notice on it and threaten to sue people and not let people use it in an open way. You have to force them to come to you for a license and negotiate and threaten them with a lawsuit if they don't pay it. You have to act like Hollywood or the music industry, or profit industry. So it makes no sense. So you have a non-profit trying to generate code that's good for the economy and the world and open it up there for free so that it will be developed and refined and improved and shared. And now you're penalized for that because you're not taking advantage of the copyright system. Imagine if we didn't have a copyright system at all, then the IRS would have no argument. Because you wouldn't be doing anything wrong. You wouldn't have a copyright on your code, no one would. But you wouldn't be giving a gift to people that's an exceptional thing. It would just be the way it would have to be. So here we have copyright law being used by the state to justify taxing people more. Or, personally, you could say they're using the punishment of the tax system to force people to use copyright law in a coercive way. It's totally absurd, obscene and insane. Sometimes I know this is not true, but sometimes my mind wanders and I think silly things. And sometimes I think it's almost like the tyrants that are in charge of these weird policies and these different layers of government that when they come up with things like that, it's almost like they're secret anarchists going, what can we come up with that's so crazy that it's going to be obvious that government is nothing but tyranny? And then they implement some goofy thing like this. Like, I mean, you could pick on anything, Obama's medical thing that he's pushing through through the IRS or the way that they're handling the immigration situation. You look at that and you think it's almost like there's an intelligence behind all this saying, let's make this thing as stupid as possible until people figure it out. But I know that it's just the opposite. It's the tendency of tyranny to end up with unbelievably ridiculous policies. It's not that they particularly want to look dumb. It's just that they're doing something that's horribly aggressive and the end result of it has to be bad. Yeah, you and I can think and see that they're heading for a cliff and surely they're going to turn back at some point or they have some grand, same thing with the federal deficit and with everything. But people are short-sighted. Democracy creates short-sighted so-called leaders. They have a, so I think it's inevitable that stupid decisions will be made. I mean, take the copyright and patent system, which it keeps getting ratcheted up in terms of scope and term length and protective efforts at the behest of the special interests, the lobbyists. And yet there's an increasing backlash by average people when they see the effects of these things like the way that SOPA was killed. And of course, they're going to try to reintroduce SOPA-like protections yet again soon during the process of doing it right now. So in the patent system, you have an increasing number of people going, what the hell is going on? I'm just trying to make a product and then I find out that I'm stopped. There's patent rolls that are extracting money. You have Apple and Samsung and Motorola and Google and all these companies having smartphone battles and getting $400 million awards against each other. It's enriching the lawyers. It's been publishing the consumer, slowing down innovation and trenching these cartilized sort of interests. I think there's a recent patent troll that won a patent lawsuit against Apple. And this is a patent troll you can't really sue them back like they can sue Samsung back as their competitors. A troll is so-called non-practicing entity. So the danger of the troll is you can't counter sue them because they're not practicing anything that you could use your patents against them for defensively. On the other hand, the troll usually doesn't want to shut you down. They just want to suck a little. They want to taste, they want to suck a little blood out of a going business. Anyway, they won this suit against the Apple and it looks like they're probably going to be entitled to 1% of Apple's iPhone and iOS device sale revenues probably for the next 10 years, which is something like $400 million a year. So we're talking $4 billion, $5 billion, maybe more at the patents last longer. And it's just a pure redistribution of wealth and you can't feel too sorry for Apple, but on the other hand, they're playing the system, they're part of the game. But you have an increasing resort by companies, small companies, medium sized companies, tech companies to these systems where they try to pool their patents with each other in a defensive way. There's an increasing proliferation of these networks. So what you have is you have companies getting together and they're saying we're all in the same industry. All we want to do is make our products and compete on the free market. And we just don't want to be sued out of existence. So let's all agree to a detente. Let's all sign this agreement saying none of us will ever sue each other. We're just going to compete with each other on the market. And we're going to pool all of our patents together. And if one of us really needs the patent another company has to defend themselves from some patent competitor, you can use that patent. So you have all this energy, resources, waste, time and effort being spent accumulating patents and then collaborating with others simply to get a shield from the patent system itself. And it just doesn't occur to these people or to the policy makers or to the average person, you know what would be a simpler way to avoid this threat, get rid of the patent system in the first place. They just can't take that final leap. It frustrates me to no end when I hear these quasi-libertarian, tech-libertarian, moderate people and they talk about the patent system is broken. Or it's being abused or the copyright system 120 years of term is just too long. It's not fulfilling the original purposes of the copyright statute. And I want to say, you're coming up to the edge of the pond but you just won't drink, it's like you're halfway there. You're identifying the consequence that's bad. But you just can't have a fundamental strike at the root, principled. They just can't rip the band-aid off. I don't know why people can't just say, wait a second, maybe the copyright and patent system were a big freaking mistake. I don't know, why can't they do that? It's really weird. It's kind of like if you imagine a doughnut shop owner in New York City who is accustomed to dealing with a mafia guy who comes around and wants 5% of his business every single week. And so he just gives the mafia guy 5% of the business week after week after week after week and he just assumes that that's part of business. And if somebody comes to him and says, look, all you got to do is testify against the mafia guy and we'll get him out of your hair, we'll arrest him and haul him away and charge him with crimes and he'll be out of your hair. And the guy says, but if I did that, who would I give the 5% to? Exactly. Yeah, they're used to that. It's that kind of victim mentality where they just say, well, we have to have the system because it's here. And you think, how in the world can you not break your mind out of these chains and just see that a system based on aggression is not a legitimate system, it's just theft. Well, and I think it's also, it's funny, the compartmentalization people will engage in because we live in a modern world. We live in a world where the free market is well known and fairly prevalent and there's a dim understanding on the part of most people that capitalism to some degree, free markets, private property rights, the business, you know, business competition, it generates good things. They kind of know that they know that. And yet they will say in like a Republican, you know, alleged free market supporter, chamber of commerce type guy, who's allegedly in support of say competition, because they use this all the time in their arguments against welfare and public schools or whatever. So they kind of, they understand this, but then they'll say something like, well, if there's no patents and I come up with a new product, then people can compete with me. And, and how am I supposed to make a profit if people can compete with me? They, I mean, this is what they literally say. And you say, you realize that what you're saying is you don't want competition to be too hard and you want the government to make sure that you can make a profit. This is what you're saying. This is not the free market. This is not competition. This is anti competitive by its nature. And they just, they're explicitly admitting it. They're, they're, they're against competition, even though at other walks and at other times they say they're for competition. It's, it's funny. It's cognitive dissonance or something. It's funny because a lot of these same Republican types, pro market types or whatever, they can see the silliness with their children when, you know, the school says, okay, we're going to have a soccer game, but we're not going to keep score. And so the kids get out there and they, you know, they play a soccer game and there's no score. There's no winners and there's no losers. And they can see the absurdity of even, why are you even playing then? Right. But yet they can't take that same logic and apply it into a different thing that is essentially the same situation. If, you know, if business cannot compete, then business cannot improve. Life cannot improve. We can't get better. And, you know, we can't crawl out of caves and down from trees and actually accomplish things in life without competition. I mean, you know, competition is so basic to, to, to life on earth from every level, from the smallest amoeba right up to, you know, whales. Natural selection itself is competition, right? Yeah, exactly. And to go counter to that seems to me to be almost anti-human species. It's almost like, you know, an attempt to go against nature, like the, maybe the, I don't know, I'm trying to, okay. So I'll use the whale eating krill. So instead he decides, no, he wants to eat ham sandwiches. But how many ham sandwiches is he going to get in the middle of the ocean? So he ends up starving to death because he's decided to go against his nature. Well, or just, or just the various communist experience, you know, like, was it Robert Owen, you know, they try these com, so-called voluntary communist experiments that just don't work because there's incentive effects. There's the way that there's a variety of social, you know, societal, sociological, psychological reasons why it just won't, that kind of system won't work outside of a small family unit or something. Right. Um, but by the way, to slightly get on a tangent on something you mentioned about the, the, these, uh, soccer games and things where they don't keep score. Let me give a slight defense, um, of an aspect of that. And this is not really a libertarian topic, but, um, um, and also in, in, in, in school, um, so there's something called the Fun Fair Play Soccer League, um, which is a little bit like what you're talking about. Um, now I would agree with you that if you don't have points and you're not competing, it's just not a game anymore. You need to do that. Right. Um, um, and sometimes the, the, the groups that, that try to emphasize other things and do it a little bit different than, than normal, uh, or criticized, uh, like by saying, Oh, well, you don't, you don't have points and all that. That's not true. They, they do, but what they do is they, they ban the parents that yell at the kids and like get too into it, but, and they do give everyone a turn. Like for six year olds, the idea is that they need to get some experience. And so it's not all about competition. Sorry. Um, so, um, um, the idea is you have all these parents that like live just like their, their, their, their, their former jocks that didn't make it or something. And they want to live by carries through their kids. Yeah. And so just for one example, what, what this Fun Fair Play Soccer thing forbids, and my kids never done it, but, uh, I've looked into it. Um, you can't, you can't yell at the kids like kick it, kick it, kick it. I mean, if the kids running down the field, they know they have to kick the damn ball. They don't need parents berating them. Kick it. You know, um, so I do like, I do like that aspect of for very young children that everyone gets a turn, because they can experience and you, and everyone else learns to deal with, sometimes there's an inferior players that you have to work around or deal with their part of your, the hand is dealt. And in education, um, my kids a Montessori student and they don't have this kind of quantitative ranking grading system, but it's not out of this modern egalitarian sort of impulse or this relativist impulse to not judge kids and all this. Um, like I would agree that you shouldn't give everyone a gold star for their report or give everyone a trophy for participating or whatever, because then it becomes meaningless. Right, right. I would agree with that. But so like the reason Montessori doesn't do grading is because they have almost an intuitive, like Misesian dualist understanding of human nature. They realize that some things are not quantitative, right? And, um, that's one reason why, um, the Montessori system puts a kid in a class for three years. So you're like in lower elementary, which is like first, second and third grade for three years, and you have the same teacher, just one teacher. So that teacher gets to know that child very well. And the reports are meetings with the parents where the teacher who knows the kid almost as well as the parents do explains what's going on in verbal terms. You see them. It's not quantitative. Usually it's in verbal terms. So it's actually, there's a reason for it. It's a little bit of a tangent. I'm getting off on here, but, um, I sometimes sympathize with these, these approaches and, um, think that they're straw manned a little bit and exaggerated by the kind of conservative, uh, tiger mom mentality, you know. Um, but anyway, just a little little tangent there. Sorry. Okay. Well, no, no, that was good. Um, plus it's a little bit of an insight in as to how Montessori schools work too. The Montessori schools are, um, um, I don't think it's a perfect system. I don't think anything is a perfect system. Um, um, but what I like about it is what's been, it's been around for a hundred years. So they carefully developed things and they do it empirically observing children and figuring out what methods work. But there's a system there. And what, what I've told other Montessori teachers, administrators when we have meetings about policies and changes and things like that is what I admire about them is they had a, they have a reason for almost everything they do, a good, solid reason. Um, uh, I don't always agree with them, but at least there's a reason like we do it this way because the child sees this and the child needs this or whatever. Um, and there's a lot of concrete examples and I just find the whole thing fascinating. So for example, they don't have, they don't have desks. They don't have a grid of things where a teacher, you know, broadcast the message and they have to listen, listen for an hour. It's more of an independent thing. To my mind Montessori is like the best of home schooling and unschooling with a systematic foundation and the right environment. Um, pretty much anything that you can get your kids into that's not the Prussian model, which is essentially, you know, what modern American public schools are the Prussian model, right? Pretty much anything that you can do to get your kid out of that is gonna almost be an improvement no matter how good or bad it might be. Yeah, but but if you, if you talk to a regular, uh, conventional school teacher, public or even private that uses this so called Prussian model and you say, why are the children in a grid of desks, you know, laid out in the room and the courses are arranged by specialist teachers just lecturing for 45 minutes. Why do you do it that way? They they usually don't have an answer. They have no idea that they're they're just doing it because they've been told that's how you do it. Right. But if you ask any Montessori teacher that's a professionally trained Montessori teacher, um, why is your classroom arranged this way? Why do you use sandpaper, the sandpaper alphabet? Why do you teach cursive before print? Why do you teach writing before reading? Um, they will have an answer. They can explain to you why they do that. There's a good solid basis for the for the reason and it's always from the focus of the child. And I think that's that's key. You can't have. I don't know. I'm kind of a Montessori cultist is zealous at this point, to be honest. And so I kind of bore people. But I tell you, one thing that annoys me is when I hear, um, people that don't understand Montessori, they'll say they'll say, well, it's probably good for some children, but not for every child. And I actually don't agree with that. I think that I'm not saying it's the best system in the world or perfect, but I think it's basically sound and it was developed for basically half retarded children. And now it's being used for, you know, normal children. Um, uh, I think saying it's like saying nutrition is good for some kids, but some kids just need to eat a lot of nachos. I mean, that makes no sense to me. Or so I say, well, having a calm, loving approach to child rearing is good for some children. Some children just need to get the crap beat. I mean, it's like, what are you talking about? Health is good. You know, understanding is good. Talking to the child from their perspective is good. So I don't actually agree with that with that kind of bizarre criticism. And the other one that drives me nuts is people, which is a human tendency, they like to criticize things they don't know much about, right? And I see this on IP all the time. People are always having the sufferer's opinions about things they really are confused about. Um, so I will hear people will say, well, Montessori is good, but it's not structured enough. It's like everyone can do what they want. So they're, they're imagining some kind of unschooled Lord of the Flies environment. And then other people will say, well, I like Montessori, but it's way too structured that they have to do. It's like, well, which one is it? You know, Jesus, I guess we libertarians get that too, right? We, we, we, uh, yeah, that we're too, we're too rigid and we're too intolerant. And yet we're too tolerant or I don't I just recently saw an episode, well, I didn't watch the whole episode, but I saw a segment of the, oh, the guy's name jumps out of my head for a moment. Anyway, it was on, it's a he's a real popular kind of a leftist TV guy who kind of gave Ron Paul a decent microphone a few times back during the John Stuart. Okay, I was stalling. So I was watching this segment of John Stuart where he had this expert, this libertarian expert on to talk about one of the Koch brothers, and I can't remember which is which, they're all pretty much the same to me. Anyway, and he was talking about how this one Koch brother was most definitely an anarcho capitalist. And he was laying out his argument as to why the guy was an anarcho capitalist. And of course, it was clear from his discussion that he didn't have any clue what an anarcho capitalist was. And he was Stuart was arguing that one of the Koch brothers is it is an anarchist like a secret anarchist? Well, his his expert that had done a biography got it was making that. And so the expert was saying, you know, of course, he's an anarchist and of course, he wants to crush all government. And the reasoning why is because he's so super rich, you know, because if you're and this is the argument they were making, if you're so super rich, then you don't want there to be a government because you don't want people to tell you what to do because you're so super rich. And then I was also looking at a it's like the polar opposite of John Stuart. I was looking at some minor libertarians website where somebody had come on there and was attacking the idea of and cap and they were arguing it back and forth whether there should be minimalist government or or some, you know, no government or whatever. And the person attacking the and cap position said, well, I've never known of anybody who held the and cap position who had in a high school education. And they claim that basically all and caps are, you know, living in their mother's basement broke and half stupid. And yeah, it's just it's just it's just an ad hominem basically. Yeah. And it struck me odd that we have these two opposite images, neither of which is even remotely accurate, that only, you know, the only people who would want there to be no government is the ultra rich, or the only people that would want there to be no government sit around and chew on their own toes for nutrition because they're so dumb. You know, these two things can't exist in the same realm. The you know, the two arguments are both so extreme and silly. And yet we face that kind of stuff all the time from these people. I guess I find that most normal people, you know, people that just live their lives are decent neighbors, they have regular jobs. Most people are not really political or they don't fancy themselves to be political intellectuals, right? They don't they don't come up with these things. I mean, I find I have more luck and a groove sort of with, you know, just you're anyone, a regular person like a neighbor, I have having a wine cocktail with or something. Maybe she's a maybe she's a Democrat, maybe she's a Republican. But they know you're a person, they know you're smart, they know you're well meaning and everyone respects certain things. And if you word things in a certain way, they usually agree with you because they're they're decent, well meaning people. So if you like if they say something pro Obama, and you point out, well, you know, he's done a B and C, which George Bush is done, which your side criticizes, they usually kind of go, well, you're right. But they can't take the next step. But they don't really deny that. And Republicans are the same, you know, if they have a, they're they're pro Bush, and they throw Obama being a communist, and you point out that you do realize Bush and Obama are almost indistinguishable in areas ABC, D&E. They kind of go, yeah, you're kind of right, but they just can't take the next step. Yeah. But but but they're they're honest, because they're not really tendentious. They're they just are stuck in their left, right mentality or something. But you have these other people that are more intellectual opposites. And I think they are, I think they're by and large, just shields. I think they're trying to push some kind of socialistic agenda of some type. Yeah. And so they see that libertarianism is not a unknown unknown word anymore. It's not an unknown phenomena. We I'm not saying we're rising or going to dominate, but it's not the minority position. It was 20 years ago, I don't think I think it's more of a well known third perspective. A lot of people gravitate towards they know this. And I think they're they're trying to tear it down. So they engage in ad hominem and smears and straw man arguments. I think largely on purpose or out of cavalier disregard for honesty and the truth. I agree. I think I think the ones actually doing those attacks are dishonest. And I have a hard time, you know, I mean, I'm stuck either thinking, well, they're either a complete moron or they're not being fully honest with their position. And you know, I'm sure there are some who are just dumb. But but some of these people making these arguments are not stupid people you can tell from other things that they've said or other things that they've written or whatever that they're not stupid. So that leaves you with a conclusion that they're just dishonest that that they don't want to admit that they are indeed a socialist and that they do want to dominate people and they do want to use aggression as the way to make people behave the way they want them to behave. Well, what I think it is, I think I wouldn't say they're dishonest. I would say they are dishonest, but I think they're not dishonesty to them is just a means to an end. They're willing to be dishonest to advance their cause, right? Right. But their cause is not is not ours. Look, I had I had a regular person this morning asked me, who do libertarians hate more the left or the right? And I said, well, it depends on who you ask. Right. Of course. And I said, but but I my per me can sell. I can't deny that I really, really hate the left. And part of the reason is I do think that the right is almost as bad or even worse in some ways, which is one reason, by the way, that I reject this entire left libertarian, right libertarian, thick, thin, all this crap. I look, I am proud and happy to be a libertarian. I'm a libertarian for a reason. And I've rejected the left, right spectrum a long time ago. Yeah. But not only do I reject the left and the right, I reject the idea that the left and right are that different. I mean, you know, they're just different flavors of socialism from my perspective. Yeah. But what really are you which which hand holds the whip that beats you? Yeah, of course. But what really you're testing with the left is this smug condescending superiority that they adopt when they're actually fascist and totalitarians. And, you know, it's it's it's like they're not really in favor of free speech, yet they they carry the banner of free speech. You know, they're not in favor of of liberty at all. I mean, they they're it mystifies me why some even libertarians are bamboozled by this. They'll say, well, the left is better on war and and drugs and immigration. And I'm like, well, World War One and two in the Vietnam War were done under Democrat administrations in the US. Yeah. Okay. I don't hear liberals calling for decriminalization of all drugs. Right. Okay, you could say that the one or two states that have slightly liberalized marijuana have a Democrat leaning population. But the leftists are not in favor of drug legalization. No, if they were, I would give them credit. They're as bad and nanny staters as the right are just. Well, yeah, they're they are they are not out there advocating for elimination of drug laws. And they're not also saying that we should open the borders. Yeah. And so why they get credit for being better on the drug war or immigration than then then the right is mystifying to me. They're all horrible on these issues. So that drives me crazy. It amazes me the same direction when gun rights people try to claim that the right wing or that the Republicans are better in gun rights. When in fact, it's people. I mean, it's been well documented. People like Ronald Reagan were one of the forefront people and in, you know, banning guns in California back in the 60s and the NRA is a very right wing Republican type organization. And they've been, you know, hand in hand with the government in in trying to tie down the ability of people to defend themselves. And they actually their business model for the NRA and other organizations like that requires that there be this constant enemy at the gates telling us that oh, they're going to take your gun rights away unless you give us donations so that we can buy more lobbyists right government. And nobody on the right seems to realize that they are being fiddled, that they're just nothing but you know, a tool that's being fiddled by the right. And the right is not here to protect your gun rights. The right is not here to protect any of those rights that you perceive that the right is doing any more than the left is here, you know, trying to get drugs decriminalized or trying to get it's all a con because they're all socialists. I think it's a con. And I think there's there's basically a money making aspect of this. This is part of what we'll call think tank. But it's part of this, you know, this this world where there's all these groups that they they they try to get funding because they're the standard bearer for your cause. And I could be wrong with this and I'm open to persuasion. My impression is that the rank and file typical so called conservative citizen in America, I mean, person who just identifies a conservative but they go about their business. They I think that their gun position is actually pretty quasi libertarian. They they have an instinctive understanding that there is a right to own guns. And that's why they are appeal that it appeals to them. The NRA, of course, is a political organization. They capitulate, they compromise. But I think that the the basic right position on guns is basically sound. It's pushing in the right direction. And there there's at least a significant portion of those people that want pretty much open gun rights. But the thing is, I literally do not hear Democrat or leftist groups calling for the abolition of the drug war. They just don't say that ever. They don't say we should have open borders. And so I just don't understand why they get credit for being better on immigration and the drug war, for example, then then the right there they're just as bad because they want to tweak it at the edges. It's like a copyright or a patent reformer. They want to, you know, reform and slightly improve the system, but they don't want to get rid of the whole thing. Whereas there are some of my impression is there's a significant number of conservatives who really are strongly, at least in America, strongly for gun rights. So I think there's a difference. I wouldn't I wouldn't place the pro gun conservatives on the same level as the hypocritical elected pro free speech pro civil liberties leftists. I would say that ACLU and those types are sometimes actually they are heroic when it comes to First Amendment type rights, but it's a pretty narrow type of thing to find them really being consistent and they don't go too far, right? They they ignore the Second Amendment, for example, they could claim to be for the Bill of Rights, but they ignore the Second Amendment. I think Nadine Strossen, wasn't there something a few years ago, like 10 years ago, Nadine Strossen was getting wooed by or impressed by libertarians because were there were her allies in some ways and she kind of admitted that we might need to revisit the Second Amendment issue. But of course, they they tabled it for the next 50 years, I guess, you know, so yeah. Now, I would be doing a short short coming from my audience if I didn't take you in the in the direction that I'm that I really want to ask you about also, whenever you and I are talking, I always want whether I accomplish this or not, I always want to take the conversation in the direction of justice and retaliation because you're one of the few voices out there that I read on this topic and and it's like it's like you have you're putting to words my thoughts really, really close to the way I feel them. And maybe a little bit different because I I don't know if I I really emphasize a lot on what is human nature and that whatever human true human nature is is probably correct. And I default to that setting and then and then work out from there. And I don't think that's necessarily your methodology. But you've written about retaliation. I want to read a real quick thing here that you wrote. It says it is retaliation, the right to respond with proportionate force against the aggressor that is the primary right the victim has under libertarian justice. Restitution is then seen not as some utopian unattainable goal of making the victim whole, which is impossible, but simply the random, I'm sorry, but simply the ransom paid by the aggressor pursuant to negotiation backed by the victim's threat of imposing the rightful amount of responsive force that he is entitled to impose. And I think that's really just first off. I hate to say it, but it's written by a lawyer. And it's so it's very concise in what you're saying. And I and I have strongly appreciate that because so many people use the English language in such a gross way that that the English language means almost nothing. So I appreciate when I when I read a well written statement like that. But essentially, you know, the thing that strikes me is that that there is nothing wrong with retaliation and that retaliation is a natural part of justice. And when retaliation is either either quenched, either thrown out of the the the realm of possibility disallowed, then it's impossible to have true justice. And I think that's part of human nature. I think if someone comes up to you, and they just randomly stomp on your toe, then to hand you a dollar and say, here's restitution for stomping on your toe, it's never going to be right. You have to feel like, no, I want that guy, I want him to feel what it feels like for me to stomp on his toe. And I want to look him right in the eye when I do it. And maybe that's not the same, you know, reward that every single person would seek after. But there's somebody who is not going to be satisfied by giving them a dollar or $10 or $100. They want to look at that guy's high, and they want to stomp on his toe. And they want to say, now you know what it's like to have your toe stomped, now we're even. And I think that's lacking in the current method of justice that governments provide. Well, okay, so I appreciate that. Thank you. I have over the years, increasingly become aware of how important it is to be precise in speaking, but for several reasons. And I've tried to do it. I'm not the world's greatest writer. But I do try to speak precisely. I don't know if it's a law background or it's engineering. I try to think analytically and precisely and consist, I try to use consistent terms and define what I mean. I mean, I think Hoppe has a good essay in the introduction to the ethics of liberty, where he, he talks about how Rothbard's style is so clear. I mean, if there's one thing you can't criticize Rothbard for not being clear. He it's pretty if he disagree with him, that's fine. But at least you know what he means, right? Yeah. So it's important to get the ideas out there and to communicate. And when when I find someone writing in an obfuscatory obfuscatory style, you know, like you can't really. I'm always suspect suspicious that. You know, I don't want to say that they're just not a good communicator because usually they're academics or professors who are supposed to be good at that. I suspect that they're covering something up or that the ideas are just so convoluted and confused. That's the only way to present them. So I'm always suspicious, at least to be clear about what you mean. And I've noticed that our opponents and people that are newbies and people that are confused. If you're not really clear, then you will get distracted in the tangents. There will be equivocation going on. There will be debates over semantics and the way terms are done. So I think it's really important to have crisp, precise, clear, you know, definition of what you're talking about. On the retaliation issue, first of all, you might not know about this. Given what you just said, there's a book that you may really like is called Getting Even. It's kind of an academic scholarly book. It's about the benefit of retaliation in a society, personally, morally sick. I mean, we always hear, oh, if you're a victim of a crime, what good does it do if the if the offender is punished? It's just you're just participate you're just as bad as him now because you want a sadistic pleasure of him being punished. That's a little bit too cavalier. I think we all know that's a little bit too cavalier right in a society of people that are trying to get along. You have certain people that are outliers. And when certain things happen, there is a vicious play. I want to say vicious. There's a there's a certain satisfaction at knowing that the guy got his. Yeah, that's a general human. And I don't I don't think we can just dismiss that out of some utopian idea that it should all be restitution based and have a panel of experts appointed by the governor who will decide what dollar amount you're owed and restitution that you'll never get paid anyway because most criminals are low lives who don't have any resources in the first place. So so first of all, I would suggest you take a look at this book called Getting Even. It's on Amazon. My friend Gil Guillory recommended this to me, and this is an interesting book. But my entire approach to this retaliation issue arose from just trying to carefully, incrementally and consistently develop these libertarian principles that make sense with each other. And it really in a way stems from like Rothbard's insight that all rights are property rights, all rights are human rights, all human rights are property rights. It's always about the right to control or resource. And then if we talk about the question of justice, which is tied in with this, we say we're in favor of justice. So I've stepped back and I said, well, what do we mean by that? The word justice, and I'm actually not sure if it relates to the name, the Emperor Justinian seems like it does. A lot of kids are named Justin now after Justinian. But justice means classically giving someone their due. Now that's a vague statement. It's an abstract statement, but it has a certain resonance. What it means is, we have a sense that people are do something in the normative scheme of society we want to live in. And whatever they're due, they should get. So the problem I have with the anti retaliation perspective, and the pro restitution perspective, is that they envision this system where you could have technocrats, typically judges or juries, deciding on a tort, some kind of offense and awarding you the amount of money that would compensate you for the offense. And the idea of restitution means to restore them to the position they were at before. But as you just pointed out, that's usually impossible. Right. And I don't think we should just shrug and ignore that and just proceed with our measurement analysis and try to come up with, well, we know that true justice is impossible, but we're going to get the guy $10 million for having his foot chopped off in an accident or whatever. I think we need to have a more fundamental analysis. And so my view is that all rights are property rights, which implies that all rights are invaded or infringed by border crossings, that is by people invading the space or using the resource that is owned by the property right. So that's an infringement. Right. Now, justice in my sense and my idea would be a world where no border crossings ever happened. So that's what real justice is. Justice means everyone has their due, which means they have their property rights respected. So there's no rape, there's no murder, there's no theft. That would be a world of justice. OK. Now, but in our world, it probably will always be the case that there's at least some small criminal element, even if the state's eliminated, which is the biggest criminal. Right. OK. So when the criminal commits an act of injustice, commits a crime, sorry, commits a trespass or an invasion or an aggression, that is an act of injustice. And to my mind, injustice has been caused. It's there. It cannot be undone. It's a fact of the universe now. So we shouldn't pretend that we can undo it by a monetary payment. We can't. The question shifts now. Here's the state of the universe right now. There has been someone who has invaded someone else's borders. They've committed an act of transgression, an act of aggression. So the question simply becomes, what is the response now? So that's the justice question in a secondary sort of way. Justice is giving someone their due, the right to respond, the way they have the right to respond after injustice has happened in the first place. With no pretense that we can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. Sounds good. Oh, cool. Okay. Sorry about that. No problem. Skype just flaked on us for a moment. I don't know where we were. I was just talking about what I was trying to say is I think justice means giving someone their due. Okay. So to me, it's a background principle that undergirds libertarian rights. We believe in rights because rights tell us what people are due. So rights inform justice. Okay. And so the pursuit of justice has to take into account what has actually happened in the world, what's transpired. And once an act of aggression has occurred, you can't undo it. So the focus should simply shift to the victim. What is the victim entitled to do now? And in my view, in the theoretical framework at least, the right to retaliate has to be primary and key because it defines the sort of parameters or the outer borders of what kind of restitution they could bargain for or what would happen. Now, after having said all this, I will say that my thinking has evolved a little bit over the last couple decades on this issue. And I do believe that in a private law society, what we now call restitution would probably be the dominant mode of justice for several reasons. Number one, I think that physical punishment of people, like capital punishment or even incarceration, is expensive. It doesn't lead to any retell to any kind of a, you know, reparation of the victim. And also, there's a possibility of error. So even though I'm a favor in general of the right to retaliate, or even to vengeance, right? It's hard to imagine an institutionalized system of punishment corporations because it just doesn't produce anything useful. And there's a chance of mistake. We have to admit this chance of mistake. We are fallible creatures. And in some cases, look, I don't know if you're read about this thing in Texas here a couple of days, a week ago, there was some crazy ex-husband who basically executed five children of the family of his ex-wife because they wouldn't, the grandparents wouldn't tell him where his wife was or something like that. It was in spring Texas. It was just absolutely a trip. One of, you know, one of these things you read about, it's like one of the worst things you've ever read. And it, you know, assuming the evidence is so clear, this is a guy who deserves to be executed, I think. And he probably will be. And I won't shed a tear when that happens, even though it's stayed doing and nothing to stay should be involved in that, et cetera. You could imagine cases where someone just deserves to be put away because they're a threat to society, or they just have lost their claim to any respect by anyone else. But in most situations, you want some, you want people to reintegrate the society. And again, also, I think if you have insurance, like an insurance type system, which provides for some kind of monitoring and in handling of these issues, they're not going to want to hand their customer, you know, an execution. They're going to want to give them some kind of, some kind of compensation and maybe an apology from the malfeasor. And maybe he gets reintegrated in society. He learns his lesson. So I think restitution would tend to dominate for economic reasons. That's my point. But it would be based upon the fundamental right of self defense and the right to retaliate. So I do believe there's a right to retaliate and there's a right to vengeance. You know, Walter Block has written about this quite a bit, and I used to read his stuff. And I would think, you know, it doesn't, I don't know how to say this, but it doesn't taste right when I'm reading it. But it makes sense. And he has like this kind of odd formula where he goes, okay, so if you're if you're harmed by $100 and the court can look at this situation and say, well, there's been $100 worth of harm, then you can demand the $100 back from the from the aggressor. And then you have the right to charge him another $100 for all the hassles of the court fees and having to go after him for the $100. And he has this formula, I think it ends up at something like five to one punishment as to restitution. I could be wrong on that, maybe three to one or four to one or something. But it well, I think he's got an essay called two teeth for a tooth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it's two to one. If I'm not mistaken, it could be. And actually that makes sense because that goes back to the biblical reference of an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth, which is actually, of course, much older than the Bible. It goes back to the homerabis code, which was an attempt to not to say, if you get a tooth broken out, you can now go break the other person's tooth. It was a limitation to say, you got one tooth broke out, you can't go break 15 out of the guy's mouth. You know, it's a limitation on on damages, not a proportionality. Yeah, basic requirement of proportionality is this that's the lex talionist ran the law recaliation. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, in that sense, I like Walter Block's take on that. And yet it always kind of left this taste in my mouth. It was like, yeah, you can't have a closed decision making process like that because each case is so individual. And that's where I think the difference between, you know, when we have an institutionalized organization that writes down laws and then the judge is required to go buy exactly what that says. And the attorney has to go by what that says. And and you and you lose a certain amount of the humanity in the process. Whereas, sure, it's not as it's not as graceful if you leave each thing open and you talk about it more in a philosophical way. But I think it's more human to look at it in the more in the in the less structured, you know, less statute by statute type law. Well, and I think I think you're you're hitting on the issue here when you mentioned statute. And of course, Walter is not talking about a statute, nor is Rothbard, but there's that there's a there's an element that's similar there. The disagreement I would have with that sort of approach is, well, there's two fold. Number one, me, Walter and Rothbard and I are Austrian economists, right? I mean, we believe in the subjective nature of value. We believe in dualism. That is, we believe that understanding empirical, causal, natural, scientific laws is one field of human understanding and analyzing human action purposes, teleology is another one's more quantifiable and one is more qualitative. And so when you start getting into this two teeth for a tooth rule, I know he's not talking in monetary terms, but it's a little bit too mechanistic and rigid and quantitative for us an essentially normative teleological endeavor. So I think it brushes up against violating Austrian basic insights into the understanding of different types, different aspects of the world, which is human action and causal laws. They're different. And the other problem I think is when I've talked about is armchair, armchair libertarian theorizing or and look, I'm being critical here. Rothbard, for example, was writing, he was I think Rothbard was the first modern systematic, radical, principled, you know, comprehensive libertarian theorist. I think he was basically the beginning of the movement. Yeah. He had influences that were proto libertarians that were fellow travelers, you know, there's Sam Konkan, there's I'm ran, there's Leonard Reed, there's Mises. But really Rothbard was the beginning of the modern libertarian movement. But that was only 50 years ago or so. And he was being or he was in a more socialistic sounding world. He was being besieged by everyone else on the outside. He was a minority. And I don't just mean him. I'm using his proxy. I'm just saying libertarianism in general. Was, you know, we had these radical ideas, you should only have voluntary acts, aggression is not permitted, the state is bad, blah, blah, blah. So you're going to get the natural questions from serious, sincere thinkers, people asking questions, trying to learn, and from our opponents. And they're just going to attack us mercilessly. And they're going to do things like, well, tell me how the justice system would work. They're going to start demanding, demanding predictions about what a free society would look like. Yeah. And if you can't satisfy their demands for predictions, they're going to reject your ideas out of hand. They're going to say, well, Rothbard's in favor of free society, but he can't tell us what the justice system will look like. He can just say it's going to be the result of market forces. And that's not satisfying to us. So we reject that. And therefore, I think in response, some of the libertarians of the 60s and 70s and 80s, they said, OK, if you want an answer, I'll give you an answer. Here's what I think would happen. Yeah. So they start predicting and I think their predictions are reasonable. But then the prediction gets confused with the theory. Right. So they predict, well, we would have retaliation. We would have punishment for debtors prison. We would have whatever. You know, here's how nuclear weapons would be treated or here's our guns would be treated. So you start venturing into the predictive field. And then you get attacked because your predictions are wrong or because they're speculative, even though you were you were they demanded that you make the predictions in the first place. So it's like you're you're you know, you're caught between Iraq and a hard place. So I think that's what happened. But I do think that and I'm not a skeptic and I'm not calling for overdue humility because I think the libertarians are we shouldn't be skeptics. I think we should believe in reality as possible. And reason is good. And I think that we are far better in almost every area than the traditional political perspectives. So we shouldn't be ashamed of making predictions and giving our opinions. But we do need to distinguish. And I do think we need to sometimes step back and say, Listen, we have general libertarian principles. They come from a certain source, a certain set of common values were against aggression or for peace or cooperation or for society and civilization. We respect our own lives and we respect other people's lives. And we want to find a workable system where we can all live together. And we think that if you are informed by free market economic principles and history and other ideas, you come to an understanding that we need to live in that live and respect private property rights and have a free market. You come to that general understanding. But the particular rules that will dominate in the given culture or society, it's hard to predict. And so I gravitate towards the idea that we should focus on if we're not being activists, if we talk about truth and substance and what's right and wrong, we need to focus on general abstract principles. And if there's ever a dispute, we go back to the fundamental one. So we build our way up that way. And we admit that in the society in the future, we don't know what the outcome of a given dispute between Mr. A and Mr. B will be right. That will have to be decided by their peers, by the court, by the jury, by some dispute process, where they have the opportunity to look at a real life situation and to ask questions. Like, well, A says this and B says this, and people don't know, hmm, who do I side with A or B? And I say, hey, Mr. A, can you tell me, well, what were you doing when the brick fell on Mr. B's head? Yeah. Or who owned the, so you can ask more and more questions and you can flesh out the context as you dynamically need to be able to do in the situation. And at the end, when you've collected all the evidence that you've reasonably been able to do, and you can assess the character's testimony and decide who's telling the truth and all these things, then you apply these more abstract ideas, these more general principles to a concrete situation and you come up with the legal ruling. And then that, if it's persuasive and seems to resonate with the community and makes sense and has the ring of justice about it, will be remembered and repeated and relied upon and cited and over time, a body of more concrete legal rules evolves and develops and you can imagine it developing differently in different cultures, contexts, histories and periods and regions, but they would all be basically ultimately based upon reason and the principles we can derive from reason, but you cannot legislate from your armchair on every situation, which is why getting back to your original comment, I am myself reluctant to agree to the tooth teeth for a tooth rule. I think that's a little bit too philosopher legislating from his armchair. They don't need, they think they need to do that because of the way we were besieged in the 70s, let's say. But nowadays we have a growing movement, we have a large movement, we have a large history to draw upon, we can settle down and relax a little bit and we can focus on abstract principles and just wait and see how the concrete implementations evolve in different cultures or contexts. I think a little bit of it is confidence too. I have such a level of confidence in these principles that we adhere to that in the long run, I don't have to know exactly what the punishment is going to be for a common argument, it is what's the punishment for stealing a paper clip or what's the punishment for how many libertarians can dance on the head of a pen type of nonsense. I don't necessarily have to sit down and spend a lot of time arguing on the extreme details of something like that. If I have a lot of confidence in the process, then I say, that's going to work out and I don't feel the need to go into every aspect of how roads are going to be built in order to say, because I don't even know if there's going to be roads. What would technology be if we take out the silliness of IP? How long would it take us before we all have flying, personal flying vehicles anyway? I don't know. It takes out so much of the burden of trying to decide how many libertarians can dance on the head of a pen if you just have a wider confidence in the philosophy and don't even try to get caught up in these silly, endless arguments about the details that can go into unbelievable what's it called lifeboat scenarios that just have no end? Yes. And I think that also, well, first you'll notice that the people that demand your answer on the lifeboat scenarios or on predicting what a future world is going to look like. Well, it's not like they have their own answer. Right. So I don't know where they get off demanding that we answer this. I don't know if socialism has a better answer to the lifeboat scenario either. I mean, it's a lifeboat scenario. It's by definition a situation where there's tragedy imminent and it's going to happen and we can't live together in peace and harmony. And it's not good. But luckily, we seem to have a world where we can live in peace and harmony. And if we, if most of us respect certain rules, we're all, you know, we're all so much better off. Yeah. So there's a good reason, a good reason to do it. Well, Stefan, I can't, you know, honestly steal any more time from you now. I've taken like an hour and a half of your time already. And I just talked to Randy England yesterday, who is a defense attorney. And at the end of talking to him for a little over an hour, I thought, you know, I just swallowed like six, eight, $900 worth of this guy's time and give him a nickel for it. And now here I am speaking with another attorney who would probably charge me something similar to that. If I was to sit down and say, hey, I need to hire you to work out this, you know, this patent agreement that I'm having with this, with this company over here. And so I just swallowed an hour of time of an attorney that should have cost me close to a thousand dollars. And I'm sitting here going, ah, that was nice. I got that for free. Well, as we as we know, we're we're volunteers and we're libertarians and we're subjectivists in that sense. And so value is subjective. And there's always a reciprocal aspect. So I've stolen some of your time, too, which is which is good. But you don't want to get make the IP mistake of talking about stealing time because you're going to support you're going to support these IP guys. So be careful with that one. But that metaphor, we have to avoid metaphors at all costs because metaphors are like the arrows of time that hit you in the heart. Wait a second, I just I just violated my own prescription. Anyway, no, I enjoyed it. And I love talking to you and I'd be happy to do it again. And keep pressing on, man. Yeah, maybe we'll meet at one of these. I'm sure I'll be at New Hampshire one of these days, one of these libertarian events, maybe next year of the year after that. So I took I took this year off from traveling except for one or two things, but for libertarian events. But in the upcoming years, it will be easier. My son is getting older, you know, so we'll see. So I'm going to run into you one of these days at Las Vegas or New Hampshire or whatever. And I really want to encourage people to as I'll take this opportunity as much as possible. I want to encourage people in Texas and Louisiana and Georgia and Mississippi and California and Oregon and Washington and, you know, Montana that you don't have to go to New Hampshire. You don't have to go to Las Vegas or San Diego to these big things, you know, more and more, we should start doing these things regionally. And you'd be surprised how many people would show up. You know, I use the example of Northern Louisiana is central to like a dozen major figures in the movement that I can think of off the top of my head. I think I heard your I heard your interview the other day with someone talking about exactly like doing a pork vest. Yeah, yeah, type thing in another state. Yeah. Well, about a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, Stephen Molyneux and Jeff Tucker came down and we and I participated in this thing called Liberty and the Pines, which was in Nacogdoches, Texas, which is about an hour and a half, two hours north of Houston at Stephen F. Austin University. It was a great little event. Walter did it. Walter Block did it remotely. It was a great event and it made me think. And now in Houston we have Liberty on the rock. So we have this by semi-weekly meeting where 30, 40, 50 people show up. Yeah. And and I think I actually we thought about putting a conference together here in Houston called something like life and liberty, like trying to focus on the intersection of how you can integrate Liberty principles and ideas into your life on a practical basis. Yeah. And we had the conference planned and it still may happen. We delayed it for a while. But our thinking was Houston, for example, is an untapped market and it's fairly since it's close to a big airport. It's in the south. It's close to Dallas and Austin and Louisiana and even, you know, other parts of the of the south. So I agree with you. There are there are other regional centers that can start blossoming and taking advantage of the growing movement and the the need for people to get together physically on occasion. Yeah. Yeah. Anybody who's listening, who, you know, who thinks, hey, I have a little bit of an organizing tendency, jump on that and organize something locally. And, you know, I'm sure a lot of us would jump on it and give it any advertising that we could. Or, you know, if we're local to it, you know, we'll try to get there and be a part of it. What city were you thinking about Louisiana? I'm just pretty much anywhere we spend the year in our RV moving around. So, you know, we spend the winter down in southern Alabama and in that area. So we're pretty flexible. We can we can pretty much hit anywhere. Yeah, Florida might Florida might not be bad place here. But yeah, Lafayette, I mean, Shreveport, Shreveport, maybe something like that, have a true blood sort of yeah, vampire themed profess that could be fun. That could work. Yeah. Well, Stefan, thanks again for coming on the show with me and let me take your time. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed it. And let's let's give a shout out to your website. It's really easy. You just have to get the spelling right. It's is it's sevenconcella.com. Right. That's it. OK, and that's S T E P H A N K I N S E L L A dot com. And I'll put a link in today's show notes. And also that book you mentioned, you can get that it at Amazon, which is getting even getting even. And then I got the author. But and we should mention a couple of your books, too, because like one of yours that I've that I've pushed pretty heavily against intellectual property. Is that was that the name of it? That's a name. And I've got a I'm working on an edited selection of my essays called Law and the Libertarian World, which hopefully will be coming out later this year. And I think I'll self publish to be honest so I can just avoid all the copyright crap that's annoying me with publishers. And I'm I hope to do an updated version of the IP book, and I'm going to call it copy this book. But that's a cool. That's about a year and a half project, let's say. So that's what I have coming up. I actually have two copies of against intellectual property in the shelf behind my head right now that we have right in our RV we drive around. My bookshelf is over the driving area. And I actually have two copies in there specifically because it's just a neat little handy book that's that's real. It's real concise. It's it doesn't. There's not a lot of fluff and you can hand it to somebody that can read it one evening. And I like to have it handy so that I can just step into the motorhome, grab it and say here, this is for you. Just read it. You find you find most people still read on paper and print or what are you finding? Well, I'm around a lot of old people. In RV parks, you know, in camp grounds and so forth, I encounter a lot of people that are retired and and they they actually enjoy sitting down in the sun with a good book and interesting. Well, well, if you ever run into another cancella, it may be my parents who do some camping. So really? And yeah, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana area, so they have an RV and they they do camping. So if you ever see another cancella that's probably my dad. That's actually very very likely. We we are in that area a lot. So yeah, folks, thanks for listening today. And remember to visit bad quicker.com where Liberty is our mission. And thanks again to Stefan Cancella. Thanks, Ben.