 And the proposition reads the right way to persuade people of libertarianism is by showing them that its outcomes are superior without any resort to the flawed, non-aggression principle. You'll read the one way, the right way to persuade people of libertarianism is by showing them that it's outcomes are superior without any resort to the flawed, non-aggression principle, the flawed principle. You see how that adjective is underlined, and a 278-year-old libertarian is discussing it, double that you get 156 years of libertarian wisdom grappling with that issue, so this could be your lucky day. I now give the podium over to Dennis Pratt, moderator. Thanks, Lai Jean. In Yiddish, there are twice the number of words for argument than for happy. And so therefore, here on the great porcupine freedom stage, for your entertainment, we bring to you together two great Jewish menches, convection for your entertainment. The resolution, the right way to persuade people of libertarianism is by showing them that its outcomes are superior by their standards without any resort to the flawed non-aggression principle. In this corner, for the affirmative, a mixed economy, practice, oops, sorry, a mixed economist, legal scholar, and anarcho-capitalist, hailing from the authoritarian 49th state of California, waning at 78 years of age, David, no, my father wasn't a communist, freedman. How you doing? Let's take a seat. And in this corner, for the negative, a mixed economist practitioner running the world-renowned debate series, the Soho Forum, hailing from the authoritarian 49th state of New York City, waning also at 78 years of age, Jean, no, my brother's not Jeffrey Epstein. We will start with 17 and a half minutes to establish the case of the resolution with David Friedman. I am going to be making two different arguments. The, sorry, is this turned on? I don't really need a mic in a room this small. There are two different arguments I have to make. The first is to show what is wrong with the NAP. The second is to show why you do not need the NAP to argue for libertarianism. The NAP, as I understand it, and as it's usually presented, is an absolute rule. What it says is you should never initiate coercion. As best I can tell, nobody, including no libertarian, actually believes in it. And my standard example of that, which was invented by the late Bill Bradford, who was the founder and editor of Libertary Magazine, is to imagine that you managed to fall off your 10th floor balcony. By good luck, catch hold of the flagpole of the 9th floor balcony and are working your way hand over hand on back to the balcony when the owner of the apartment comes out and says you do not have my permission to use my flagpole. How many people here raise your hand if you would let go? All right, I think that confirms my claim that nobody actually believes in the NAP as it is normally stated. A less extreme example that I have sometimes used is to imagine that there is a madman with a rifle shooting at a crowd of people. It just happens there is a rifle close to you that you could use to kill him. Unfortunately, it belongs to somebody who has publicly announced that he never wants anybody else to use his rifle. Using his rifle to kill the killer is a violation of his property rights. It is forbidden by the NAP. I won't pull people this time, but my guess is that most of you would be in favor of grabbing the rifle. There are two ways I've seen of trying to evade the conclusion that the NAP, although a very useful rule of thumb, is not the kind of absolute principle that libertarians routinely claim it is. One of them is to say that the real objective is not to never violate rights or to never initiate coercion, but to minimize the violation of rights. So you could then say that in the case of the mass killer, when you seize a rifle, that's a much smaller violation of rights than what you're stopping, and therefore you're entitled to do it. The problem with that is that if that's your position, you no longer have an adequate argument for libertarian conclusions, because now the people who disagree with you will say, well, yes, indeed, taxation is the violation of your property rights, but we need the money in order to pay police and soldiers to prevent people from being coerced by criminals in foreign countries. So you are then thrown back on an essentially consequentialist argument on trying to argue that you can successfully protect rights without government taxation. The NAP no longer buys you anything once you turn it from a statement of what you may do to what you want to minimize. A different way in which I've seen people try to deal with this problem is to say that it's all right to violate rights as long as you compensate the victim. Now to begin with, that means that you now approve of eminent domain as is currently used by the government because eminent domain consists of seizing property and then paying what is claimed to be a fair compensation for it. More generally, how do you decide what a fair compensation is? And I think the instinct of most libertarians would be what the owner of the property is willing to accept, but the owner of the property might not be willing to accept any payment that you can make. He might not be willing to accept any payment at all. So I think neither of those solves the fundamental problem which is that the NAP itself is a position that nobody really believes in. It's good for rhetoric, it lets you feel yummy. You can say look at those evil people who want to initiate coercion, but in fact you would yourself be in favor of initiating coercion under some imaginable circumstances. So your fundamental disagreement is that you don't think those circumstances exist, that you believe we are in a world where we can prevent horrible things from happening without initiating coercion. That's a consequentialist argument, not a moral argument. The second problem with the NAP is that it is a moral argument and unfortunately we have no way of deriving moral arguments. Ayn Rand thought she did. You can find a chapter in the third edition of my book, Machinery of Freedom, which is dedicated to taking apart her claimed argument, which I believe does not hold up. One of the striking things about Rand is that whenever there's a hole in her argument, she covers it up with beautiful rhetoric. Very good writer, very brave woman I should say, and an original woman, she's just wrong about quite a lot of things. Probably I'm wrong about quite a lot of things too, but I don't know which ones. So as far as I can tell, David Hume was correct when he argued in the 18th century that there is no way of proving moral conclusions from the facts of reality, no way of getting from is to ought. And if there's no way of getting from is to ought, then even if you were happy, even if you believed in the NAP, you have no response to the person who says, why should I believe that? You have no way of showing him that the NAP is in fact a correct moral rule, which is what you need to do. So that's the basis of my claim that the NAP is not in fact a satisfactory basis for defending libertarianism, nor is it even a principle that people really believe in. So the next step, somebody who's thinking very quickly might say, but if you cannot derive any normative conclusions, if you have no way of showing what's morally right, how can you make any arguments at all for what should happen? And the answer to that is that I don't have to derive moral arguments. I don't have to derive values because all of the people I want to convince already have moral beliefs. So I don't have to show what moral beliefs are true. I only have to show that in terms of their beliefs, not the stated principles that they say, but what ends they want, my system is better than the alternatives. If you observe people, you find that in fact, most people agree mostly on what outcomes are desirable. Their beliefs aren't identical, they give different weights to different things, but as far as I can tell, I've never yet heard anybody argue that the reason his economic system is better is that it produces more poverty, or more disease, or more ignorance, or worse novels, that as far as I can tell, pretty much everybody, if you look at the arguments they actually make, believes in about the same set of values, not identical values, and the reason that they proclaim different principles is that they disagree about what principles lead to what values. I was struck quite a long time ago by the fact that if you look at the arguments that Marxists make, they seem to agree with our principles, because in theory Marxism says, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. And it would follow from that that if workers are good at working, they should do the working, and if billionaires need Rolls Royces, they should get Rolls Royces. But in fact the Marxist argument on exploitation is the claim that everything is produced by the workers, some of it is consumed by the capitalists, and that's wrong. Well, that's a libertarian argument. They've got the economics wrong, but the underlying principle is that you get ownership of something by producing it, which is our principle. The reason that this is enough, the reason that the imperfect agreement on ends is sufficient is that a libertarian society is not just a little bit better than the alternatives. All right, if it were the case that we really faced the choice, do we have a welfare state or a complete laissez-faire system? And if the answer were with the welfare state, there will be fewer poor people, but the society as a whole will be a little bit poorer. The total income of everybody will be a little lower than somebody who puts a high weight on helping the poor might say, I prefer the welfare state. But I don't think anybody in this room believes that, that if you actually look at the outcomes of various things ranging from welfare states to fully socialist systems, they are not just a little bit worse, not even a little bit worse than the outcomes of relatively laissez-faire societies that have existed, let alone then at least we believe the outcome would be of a more fully laissez-faire society. Most of us believe, probably all of us believe, that a laissez-faire society would have less poverty. Interesting factoid, not a proof because correlation is not causation. If you look at poverty rates in the US over the period since World War II, you observe that they fell steeply. The percentage of the population that was poor by a fixed definition fell steeply until roughly the point at which the war on poverty got fully funded. It has been roughly constant since then. That the actual, the intended effect of the world at war on poverty, Charles Murray's book, first book, discusses this, was to get people out of poverty, to make people self-supporting. The actual effect was to make poverty somewhat less unpleasant and leave people poor. I was struck some years ago when I visited India by the fact that India, observed by a foreigner, looked like the picture of a capitalist society held by a loyal communist who had never been outside of the Soviet Union. It was a mass of miserably poor people, but then there was the business school I spoke at, which was in a lovely campus, trees, grass, surrounded by a high wall with barbed wire on top of it. India, at that time, had had a socialist government since it was founded. When I read a novel set in the Soviet Union, what struck me was that the obvious difference in status and income between the physician and that woman who cleaned his house was enormously greater than the difference I observed between me and people I hired to clean my house, one of whom is a UC Irvine student, or at least was a little while ago, nice people. So that if you actually look at the results, if you say what we want is a society where you don't have massive inequality, in particular if you don't have people who are very poor, most of us believe and would argue that libertarian society is more likely to give that result, not less. People who disagree about politics quite often put the arguments, or at least imagine them, as you are evil people. You don't care if the poor starve, or if we're doing it, you don't care if people's rights are violated. Putting your argument in terms of the NAP makes it easier for them to believe that, because it sounds as though you're saying, well, I can't really show that you're wrong about the consequences of my policies, but I've got this principle which says that even if the poor starve, we still shouldn't violate property rights. Rhetorically speaking, in terms of persuading people, that's a very stupid argument to make, whether you believe in the NAP or not, because in fact we do have good arguments, we do have good reasons to believe that the system that we support produces better outcomes than the systems that they support. I like to, in an odd way, this is a rerun of a debate that I had in 1982. That was with George Smith, unfortunately no longer alive, very bright and interesting guy, and the title of that one was Economics versus Philosophy, which is the better foundation for libertarianism. And as I like to point out, philosophers still read Aristotle and economists don't. That is to say, there has actually been quite substantial progress in economics over the last few centuries. I'm not sure there's been regress in philosophy. I would have said that Rawls is probably a step down, but there has not been the kind of progress that lets you say we actually know stuff. So it makes much more sense to base our argument on economics than our argument on philosophy. And in fact, if you look at the people who do it, you find that although not all economists are libertarian and quite a lot of them are not anarchists oddly enough, nonetheless among academics, the economists are the ones who are most likely to be sympathetic to our views, and the philosophers with the exception of Michael Humer, those who are least likely to. So I think there is some evidence that economics is a better way of persuading people than philosophy is. So to summarize my argument, it is that the NAP as usually understood has implications that nobody agrees with. It is that if you take a weaker form of the NAP, such as minimizing coercion or compensating people when you violate their rights, it does not solve the problems, and in particular no longer makes good arguments for libertarianism because you're now thrown back on consequentialist arguments about what policies will or will not violate more rights than others. And furthermore that there is no way to derive the NAP just as there is no way to derive anybody else's moral principles that I can see. That furthermore we do not need the NAP because libertarianism is enough better than the alternatives so that it is better in terms of the values that most people already have. And that if you wanna persuade people, showing them that a minimum wage will hurt poor people by pricing them out of the market with the result that many of them are unemployed and never take the first step up the ladder that leads to a better life is a whole lot better tactic than saying well you can't impose the minimum wage law because imposing a minimum wage law will violate the rights of the employee and the employer to make whatever contract they want. So that's my basic argument and I will give my opponent the 55 seconds that are still left, thank you. Thank you. Now to establish the case for the negative of the resolution is Gene Epstein. Thanks, everybody can hear me? Yeah, okay. In a forthcoming biography of the brilliant economist Milton Friedman we learn about the daily debates Milton conducted with his wife and kids. According to the book, Milton's son, David, recalls that he was quote a senior in high school before he realized that they were forms of conversation other than argument. Well, while debates usually persisted across dinners, the book continues, the family relied on a numerical code to establish clear victories. A declaration of two stood for you are right, I was wrong, close quote. Needless to say, David will make my day if he flashes me a two once we conclude our debate. But I certainly don't expect such an outcome against an opponent with that kind of training. But I do wonder if the Friedman family ever debated today's topic. So if so, I'm going to guess that Milton took my position. Consider what Milton once said about the war on drugs. Quote, the major basis for my opposition to the war on drugs has not been that it's produced a lot more harm than good. It's been primarily a moral view. I do not believe the state has any more right to tell me what can come out of my, what I can, what to put in my mouth than it has to tell me what can come out of my mouth. These two are essentially the same thing and they are both essential elements of freedom. Close quote. So in making his case against the government's war on drugs, Milton was forthrightly stating his belief in the centrality of the non-aggression principle or what I prefer to call the zero-aggression principle or ZAP after libertarian philosopher Gerard Casey. As Casey puts it, no one, whether individually or as a member of a group may initiate or threaten to initiate the use of physical violence or aggression against the person or property of another. Close quote. The war on drugs is the state threatening aggression against us if we dare to exercise our right to put certain chemicals in our bodies. By viewing the freedom argument as central, Milton wasn't ignoring the arguments that the war on drugs also does far more harm than good. Rather, he was placing the burden of proof where it belongs on those who would defend the idea of putting people in a cage for doing something that could harm nobody but themselves. Now take the consequentialist case that David would make. Defenders of the government's war on drugs have a much easier time responding to it. They can logically object that a world in which all drugs are completely legal is a world that does not as yet exist. And since it doesn't exist, we libertarians can't rule out the danger that drug addiction will become so common it will tear at the fabric of society. The only effective way to respond to that point is to invoke Milton's moral argument. The burden of proof is not on us libertarians to argue that our society could survive full legalization of drugs. The burden is on them to prove that it will lead to horrific outcomes. And since they're talking about a world that does not as yet exist, it's a burden they can't sustain. In this case, then, David would have us believe that the right way to persuade people of the libertarian solution to the government's war on drugs is by showing them that the outcomes of full legalization are superior without any resort to the flawed non-aggression principle. My point, by contrast, is that not only does it greatly help to cite the zero-aggression principle when making this argument, it's often essential. Another example, the libertarian case for free trade. No one has done a better job than David in explaining the economic gains from trade. He asked us to consider two ways to make cars. Build them in a domestic factory or grow them in the form of wheat. Do it the second way, ship the wheat to Japan, and a few months later, ships appear loaded with Toyotas. That's a way of convincing people about the benefits of trade by pointing to a positive outcome. But it doesn't address a key objection raised by economist Russ Roberts. You start to make the case for free trade, Russ Roberts observed in a recent interview, and people are saying right, but the folks who are left behind, their lives aren't meaningful anymore. And you respond, oh, but look at the gains from trade. That's the way the economist deals with the fact that sometimes imports are hard for people. I think the economist view is really bad, close quote. The problem then is that David's argument doesn't directly address Russ Roberts' objection. When you allow imports of Toyotas to destroy jobs along with the communities in which those job holders live, the lives of those affected aren't meaningful anymore. The only way to respond is by asking, what right does the government have to penalize me for using my money to buy imported goods or services that I freely choose to buy? If domestic workers want to keep my business, they are perfectly free to lower their prices, to lower their wages while getting their firms to lower their prices. And domestic workers and their supporters are quite free to create a buy American shopping website that patronizes only domestic firms on the grounds that many Americans' lives will otherwise lose their meaning. That domestic shopping website might attract a lot of followers. For many years after World War II, Jews boycotted German cars even though the cars offered great value. My own father participated in that silent boycott and then later he would buy only US-made cars for patriotic reasons. My father did all this voluntarily. The government had no right to coerce him into buying American-made cars if he preferred to buy cars from abroad. So in making the case for free trade, not only does it greatly help to cite the zero aggression principle, it's often essential. That's because no consequentialist case for radical reform made by a libertarian can ever be completely sufficient. The consequentialist case is usually important, but we also need to invoke the zero aggression principle to establish the point that our default position is always in favor of freedom and free choice, and the burden of proof is always on those who would restrict our freedom and free choice. I could apply this same argument to many other aspects of the libertarian case, from gun rights to legalizing sex work to preventing the waging of war. But in the time remaining, I want to focus on the other key point in David's argument, that the zero aggression principle or ZAP is in some crucial way a flawed principle. David makes several key points against the ZAP in his book, The Machinery of Freedom. One is that, quote, libertarians have not yet produced any proof that our moral position is correct, since, quote, lots of people are in favor of initiating coercion. One possible response to such people, as proposed by philosopher Gerard Casey, is that if they reject the zero aggression principle, they logically open themselves up to the risk that someone else will initiate aggression against them. And then they'll have no principled grounds on which to reject such aggression. And while many authoritarians won't be impressed by this argument, I don't see why we should be the least bit impressed in return. Some might reject the idea that murder is a crime, but that doesn't mean we have to agree with them. Here's another of David's arguments. When it comes to aggression against someone's property, it's impossible to draw the line at what does and does not constitute such aggression, quote, if I fire a thousand megawatt laser beam at your front door, I am surely violating your property, David writes. But what if I reduce the intensity of the brightness to a flashlight or to turn on my light in a house or strike a match? David then comments, the obvious response is that only significant violations of my property rights count, but then he clinches the argument with the challenge, but who decides what is significant? But doesn't David's challenge of where to draw the line apply to a whole range of cases most of us subscribe to, including David himself? Take the law against assault and battery. If someone extends his hand to you for a handshake and then breaks the bones of your hand, that painful injury would surely justify an actionable claim. But what if someone merely gives you a firm handshake? If people with merely firm handshakes were getting indicted for assault and battery, would David argue that we have to regard the assault and battery as potentially discardable and flawed and full of holes? There are those who claim to feel battered if someone makes an innocuous remark that they decide to take personally. And there have been co-op buildings in Manhattan with smoking tobacco in your apartment was forbidden even with your doors and windows closed on the bizarre grounds that you might seriously infect your neighbors in other apartments with secondhand smoke. So maybe we'll soon have neighbors charging you with aggression if you turn on the lights in your house. The very danger David warns against. Okay, all right, okay. But we can only hope to live in a sane society where reasonable people adjudicate such matters reasonably and sanely. It doesn't mean we discard the zero aggression principle. David's other objection involves cases in which someone commits aggression in extenuating circumstances. One of David's favorite cases involves your neighbor falling from his balcony and grabbing a flagpole on your balcony in order to break his fall. That person has clearly trespassed on your property. If my balcony had been invaded in this way, I would only be happy that my neighbor wasn't injured while marveling at his physical dexterity. But if others did bring charges of trespass, the intruder would have to plead guilty because the zero aggression principle is an absolute principle that is always actionable. Always actionable, always absolute. But then there's the question of punishment. The intruder would be well advised to plead for mercy on the ground that he meant no harm and was only trying to save his own life. Or suppose, quote, suppose you happen to know that everyone in the world is going to die tomorrow by some natural catastrophe, writes David. Further, suppose that the only way to prevent it involves stealing a piece of equipment worth $100 from someone who rightfully owns it, close quote. Do you steal the equipment and save the world? I certainly would. After my crime was committed, I would explain to the owner of the equipment the reason for my theft. If he still bought charges against me, I would be forced to admit my guilt. So there is never any question that in all of these cases, aggression against property has occurred and is therefore an actionable offense. It is an absolute principle, always applied absolutely. The separate question is the penalty imposed. At my trial, I would ask that in an imposing punishment, those who judge me take into account that I was saving everyone in the world from extinction. Another example from David, quote, suppose we are threatened with military conquest by a particularly vicious totalitarian government. If the conquest is successful, we will lose most of our freedom and many of us will lose our lives, close quote. Under these circumstances, David, wouldn't we favor forced conscription to raise an army, even though conscription is slavery and therefore never justified? As David writes, isn't temporary slavery better than the permanent slavery of totalitarian rule? I would still be against conscription. First of course, conscription would only be necessary if we couldn't get enough volunteers to resist the invader and enough folks voluntarily offering the money to back these volunteers. But who was to say before the fact that an army of possibly reluctant conscripts would be victorious against the invader? We'd then be choosing temporary slavery without necessarily avoiding the permanent slavery that David warns against. But then who's to say that the slavery would be permanent? As Murray Rothbard has pointed out, the main reason a conquering country can rule a defeated country is that the latter has an existing state apparatus to transmit and enforce the victor's orders onto a subject population, close quote. No such apparatus would exist in a libertarian society. Instead, as Rothbard also points out, the occupiers would likely be confronted by resistance fighters whose persistence could eventually drive the victors out. Such things have happened in the past. In his 1973 book, The Machine of Freedom, David wrote, I believe that everyone has a right to run his own life, to go to hell in his own fashion, close quote. The right to go to hell in one's own fashion without interference from the state or from others is in fact the essence of the zero-aggression principle stated in audacious terms. Getting back to those legendary debates at Friedman family dinners, did David think of that great line in the heat of debate and save it for the book he would eventually write? I like to imagine he did. Thanks. Seven and a half minutes. Seven and a half minutes. So David now has seven and a half minutes to rebut. I was hoping that when Gene started out by telling you about our family code, number two, the next thing he was going to say was number two. And that would then end the debate, but apparently not. He's mistaken about our debates in a number of ways. To begin with, while my father certainly made moral arguments, as I did and do, he did not put them in terms of the absolute NAP for presumably the sort of reasons that I've discussed. He, in fact, was in favor of taxation. He was, one of the things we ended up disagreeing about was whether or not you should have an anarchist society. And his position was that the system I described might work but probably wouldn't. My position was that it might not work but probably would. I devoted chapter of the third edition of Machinery to discussing ways in which it might break down. That was the consequentialist disagreement. He did not at any point say, but in order to have my limited, or did I say, in order to have this limited state, you've got to have taxation, and taxation is immoral. So in fact, my father was not an anarchist and I was. And in fact, as Gene might have deduced from looking at the first edition of the Machinery of Freedom, which was written in about 1970. I think it was published in 72, as I remember. I was indeed more fond of moral arguments then than now. So that my guess is that in our arguments, I probably often used moral arguments, though not put as explicitly as the NAP back then. I should say, lest you overestimate just how retarded I was in understanding a conversation, I did enter my senior year in high school when I was 15. But with regard to Gene's response with regard to the war on drugs, it is certainly true that we cannot prove that abolishing the war on drugs would have good effects. You cannot prove that continuing the war on drugs has good effects. You can't even say it has observable effects now, but next year is going to be different. Every year is different. Unfortunately, there are very few things one can prove in this world. One has to be satisfied with the best arguments one can offer, reasons to believe something is true, not proofs that something is true. With regard to Russ Roberts' argument, which I haven't read, but I've just gotten from Gene, I do not claim that my story about growing Hondas proves that tariffs are bad. What it does is to prove that some arguments for tariffs are bad. It shows that the trade-off is not between the welfare of American auto workers and Japanese auto workers, which is the way most people who support tariffs imagine it, but rather between the welfare of American auto workers and American farmers. Well, American farmers can also have their way of life destroyed by an insufficient demand for what they are doing. But in general, I don't think one can prove, in a sense of establishing 100% probability that libertarian society is better. All one can do is to show good reasons to believe it is better. And that's the best that one can ever do. I was sort of puzzled by Gene's argument that you should accept the NAP, because if you don't accept the NAP, then you might be at risk of having people coerce you. I presume that lots of you do accept the NAP, and nonetheless, you get coerced, that there seems to be a bizarre logic. And when you suppose if I believe something, that forces everybody who interacts with me to believe it. It isn't true. So that's not, in fact, an argument for believing in the NAP. I notice that Gene on his expressed principles has to approve of eminent domain, because he has told us that it is all right to violate people's property rights, provided you're willing to bear the costs that results. And in eminent domain, we have a legal process. It's not a jury trial, as it happens, but a legal process for determining how much the government owes you for the property that it seized. And that seems to be his view of how you settle such questions. I want to go back to the fact that, as I think I made clear yesterday, my arguments for anarchy are not claimed proofs. My favorite online writer, Scott Alexander, ended his review of machinery of freedom with the comment that he hoped my system would be tried somewhere far from him. He was right. I think it's better. But obviously, better if somebody else tries it. And if it doesn't work, that doesn't affect me. And if it does work, then I can imitate it then. We live in a world of uncertainty, even if we like to pretend we don't, that one of the things that I find irritating here is the number of people who are absolutely 100% certain who are the bad guys, who are the good guys, what's right, what's wrong. We don't live in that world. We live in a world where the best you can do is to look at the arguments, look at the evidence, and reach conclusions. Now, I should say, I am not arguing that you should never make moral arguments. Clearly, rhetorically, moral arguments sometimes persuade people, because sometimes people share some of your moral beliefs, as well as some of your consequential beliefs. But what I don't think people share if they think about it, is the strong form of the libertarian preferred moral belief, which is the NAP, because as I've pointed out, it leads to conclusions that none of us really believe in. And you don't solve the problem by saying, well, it's actually all right to initiate coercion. You just have to pay for it, which, as far as I can tell, is Jane's solution to it. I think that's most of what I wanted to say. Let me point out some evidence that I've observed about people disagreeing less in even their moral beliefs than they think they do. That if you argue with a socialist about whether or not property owners are allowed to own property, it rapidly turns out that your imaginary story for the poor guy and the rich guy is very different from his. That in your imaginary story, the rich guy spent his resources hacking down the jungle to plant a field while the poor guy sat there watching. In the socialist's view, the poor guy hacked out the field and then the rich guy stole it from him. And I think that suggests that there is more common, even in the underlying moral intuitions, let alone the underlying beliefs of what people want. So I think I've made my argument. We're gonna have some time for you people to ask questions and we will see what Jane's rebuttal is. We will very soon be going to question and answer. So I'd like you guys to be thinking of questions for both the affirmative and the negative and I'll be taking those in session. But to rebut for the negative is Jean. I was looking forward to getting a fuller story and getting corrected by David, not my little mention about Milton Friedman. I love that passage in the book that has actually not yet been released, but my son read it in pre-release and showed me that passage, which I really loved. And in fact, as a columnist at Barron's, I interviewed Milton Friedman and two or three times a year I would call him up just for a chat. In fact, I spoke with him about a month before he died and that was one of the great pleasures of my life. And so I wanted to provoke some reminiscence about Milton. Everything Milton's, David said about Milton is true. I can see that completely. He knew him better than I, even though I had the pleasure of getting to know him as a columnist at Barron's. But let me just read to you what David just said, which is essentially what I'm trying to say. There are very few things one can prove in this world. Indeed, obviously the fact that we can prove a few things, you guys are sitting here, very few things one can prove in this world. And that's the reason why David's powerful consequentialist arguments, part of which I enlisted, need the grounding of what I again prefer to call the zero aggression principle. Precisely because there are very few things we can prove in this world. We need to tell people I have met who fantasize that 90% of the country is gonna get drunk on drugs and the other 10% is gonna starve. Again, David mentioned Russ Roberts but didn't speak to his concern. Russ is now an economist. He prefers to talk about human feeling. We do look at communities that got broken up by free trade and all the rest of it. And Russ says, oh, the gains from trade, it's pathetic we can't talk about that. Look at those people who suffered. So my point is to ground it in the zero aggression principle but then also recognize that people in terms of their purchases always often feel compassion for others. The idea that people would buy American for a patriotic reason and their own father did it, the point is that once we ground it in the zero aggression principle then we can understand these things. David mentioned eminent domain but of course I'm not for it. The burden of proof is someone who take your property. By the way, I don't know if David's in love with the Chicago thesis. The Chicago guys have it wrong. If your property, the Austrians teach us that all value is subjective. If for the government to give you the market price for your property, well what if your ancestors are buried on that property? No, I wouldn't accept $10 million for property that you think is worth $100,000. Of course you don't abrogate property rights. So the burden of proof is on someone who can prove to us the unprovable that in this world where eminent domain is permitted that you can somehow bring about such overwhelming and somehow avoid human catastrophe and it's all ridiculous. Of course I'm against eminent domain for precisely the same reason. Grounded and what David feels we can conveniently ignore the zero aggression principle. You don't take people's property and the idea that you can give it to them with JustCom, that's crazy, there is no such thing. They don't wanna sell you that property, period, full stop, do something else with your life rather than take my property forcibly. Let me introduce another example since what else did David mention, the moral argument. Well, no, indeed, I agreed that ultimately I could say to somebody who doesn't care about aggression to say, well, you won't have a logical defense if somebody aggresses against you. But of course, as I conceded and as David pointed out, they can reject my ideal, might mix right, I don't give it, I'll just beat up anybody who tries to agree. Of course, there are people in this world who simply will not be convinced about our belief in the zero aggression principle and I'm certainly not enough of a philosopher to invoke all the fundamental reasons why I believe in it. I just think it's as natural as breathing as some of the rest of you probably think. So indeed, if David wants to say, well, if it's only as natural as breathing, you're just a shallow philosopher, David will be absolutely right. But the next part, war is an important issue because by the way, what do I hear all the time? Well, if we'd only stayed there for another two or three years, we'd finally would have won. We got out of Afghanistan after 20 years, another five years, if we hadn't been so craven, we'd finally would have won. There's never enough war and killing for these people who have this religious faith. I don't know if I can convince them, but I can only tell them, and David apparently can't, that you're gonna kill more people. And don't you think the burden of proof is on you and that it's a burden you cannot sustain because we've had 20 years of killing or 10 years of killing and we haven't gotten anywhere? So again, we can't leave home without it precisely because of David's point. We can only marshal our data. All of it necessary, all of it important. I'm not a philosopher. I was economics, columns of barons for 26 years. I was trained in economics. And in the Austrian school, which I think is more worthwhile, because again, my name's Sege Richard Epstein. We'll talk about, well, the government can always give somebody with eminent domain the right amount of money. I don't know if Milton felt that way, I never asked him about eminent domain, but certainly maybe he would have said that, but that's ridiculous from an Austrian standpoint. All value is subjective. Doesn't wanna sell, he doesn't wanna sell. No price is good enough. I guess I wanna end on my best moment with Milton. Milton was in vain against the war on drugs and indeed he was talking consequentially. He mentioned a point about crime in the quarters of the country because of the war on drugs. And I said, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I said to him, and Milton said to me, if you don't know that, you really are very ignorant. And that was my favorite moment with Milton. We all are very ignorant of the world. We all have to cope with the facts of the world in an ignorant way, just like David has to. We can only marshal our arguments. We can never prove things in this world. We need the zero aggression principle to recognize where the burden of proof lies and as in all of these cases, the other side cannot bear that burden. Thanks. We will now be going over to the question and answer. I'd like people to be having questions for both the affirmative and the negative one at a time and I'll be transferring, but I will take the moderator's prerogative. And I will ask the first questions. The question I have for the affirmative. There is, David, the socialist calculation problem. There's also the consequentialist calculation problem that the number of outcomes of any particular action are actually infinite. They are primary and secondary and tertiary and ad infinitum. And that for each possible action, there would be values that would be placed by each and every individual, each person living and people living in the future that we would have to calculate. And then eventually, once we get infinity by infinity, we would then have to combine these all into a single consequence and say, therefore we go and go, don't go. Don't we need some sort of bedrock if our goal isn't just to employ economics professors? If your argument is that the consequences, sorry, is this on? If your argument is that the consequences of acts are not knowable for certain, that's true. But if you really believe that that prevents reaching conclusions, I don't know how you take any actions at all. You don't even know whether feeding Ron Paw, who I was hoping was actually gonna be moderating because he's much handsomer than Dennis. For all you know, the result of feeding Ron Paw is that he will get sufficient energy to bite somebody and kill them. You can't be sure it isn't true. But in the real world, the way we deal with individual choices and choices among societies we want is by doing our best to figure out what will happen, knowing that we might be wrong. That's the world we live in. You know, I wanna comment on David's answer. I should have told you in advance. Somebody gives an answer to the question. Speaking to the microphone, please. Sorry, yeah. Okay, I just wanna remind you as moderator, as when I moderate, a question is asked that one person, the other person gets to comment. Of course, of course, David is right that clearly, as we libertarians like to emphasize, most of life is not a libertarian problem. In most cases, entrepreneurs act on hunches. Entrepreneurs take risks. They have to deal with the facts as they know, as well as their creative notion about where the future lies. I'm restricting myself to the libertarian arguments, which are narrowly focused on the predations of government or the predations of others. It's a narrow field. That's where the zero aggression principle becomes crucial and important. That's where it applies, but not to most of life, as I imagine most of you already know. So let me ask of the negative. Most people upon hearing the non-aggression principle would say, yes, that's very, very true. I kind of feel that, but there's really not really aggression. There's really not force. Most people will comply. And I am so concerned about this particular outcome for this particular segment that I'm willing to go ahead and ignore the possible theoretical initiation of violence with in order to help this particular segment. Absolutely. It is possible that, even if I tell people who are quite prepared to put you and me in a cage for using certain substances, even if I tell them that you bear a very heavy burden of proof to show that it would be disastrous in this unknown world for there to be 90, for there to be legal and full legalization of drugs, even if I tell them that and I can convince them, then I guess I have to give up. I'm only talking about at least doing my best to offer them the right argument. If I want to tell Russ Roberts that as much as you weep for the people whose lives are meaningless, are you really going to impose government solution to impose penalties on the rest of us, including poor people who want to buy what they want to buy from abroad, are you really still willing to do that? Yes, I am. Well, I can't convince them ultimately, but at least I've given them the best argument possible. Milton, David, do you want to comment on that? No, I want to take questions from the audience. So the first question for the affirmative. Okay. You can ask any question once I'm with anybody. Question is for both, using the guy falling out of the building, revving on to the flagpole, let's say somehow that flag causes serious property damage, let's say $10,000. Would you say that the person who fell then is liable for the repairs? Sure. Yes. Well, if you, certainly if you, again, my point I want to stress is that all of these violations of the zero aggression principle, again as I prefer to call it, zero is better than none, is that they're always and absolutely actionable. And if I own the balcony and this incredible daredevil manages to save his life by grabbing the flagpole, I might just settle at $5,000 and so the rest because I'd just be astonished by the story of what he did. So therefore the penalty in what actually happens in real life is a completely separate question. The violation is there. But indeed, certainly if I were a different kind of person and I might say, well, you know, 10,000 dollars worth plus a fine, you owe me 11,000, you owe me 12,000, very possibly sure that could be imposed. Yeah. Jean, could you push that mic up so it's, yeah, there, that's good. Next question. This question is for the negative and it might touch on what you were just saying a little bit and please do either of you correct me if any of my characterizations here are incorrect. Sure. In response to David's point related to the continuum problem of casting photons at someone without permission. Oh yeah. Whether the megawatt laser or the match, you raise the existence of similar continuum problems such as handshake grip and essentially said that we don't really have a problem resolving that. So this sort of problem is not insurmountable but he's in the question, not whether or not they are insurmountable but insurmountable using the zero aggression principle as a basis. That is, how does the non-aggression principle or zero aggression principle actually tell us what the proper grip is or verify that such a grip was used or communicate that information beforehand to either party? Don't our methods of resolving those questions necessarily reduce to constructing answers on grounds that are at least partially consequentialist or reliant on external principles? Well, that's a good question. And there's no question that and the examples I cited that we face that problem right now in this society. Right now, again, a call up will say, windows closed, doors closed but there's secondhand smoke through some of my imagination. I say something to you that says that whatever I might say that's glancing or whatever it might be, it's actionable. So therefore, there's no question that or take the issue of murder. If you were involved in some causal way with the death of another person, there's always, it's always actionable but society faces judgment calls and difficult cases having to do with were you negligent in driving the truck that hit that person? If your tire went out and that person was accidentally hit, to what extent are you responsible? Well, the jury would have to look at, to what extent, did you have new tires? Society is constantly faced at the margin with difficult cases in establishing and applying every principle including in my example, the example of murder. So therefore, I would say that, and again, in applying the zero aggression principle just as in the case of murder or assault or any of those other cases, the light or the rest of it, that we face these problems all the time but we don't say, well, the absolute rule against murder is absolute. However, we do have to recognize the problems and applying it in difficult cases. Intent, first degree murder, all of those problems come up all the time but we don't repudiate the absolute rule against so many of these cases as in the case of assault, murder or in the case of the light or the beam. You have to apply your reasonable standards of society to these principles. So if your point is, does the zero aggression principle inform your judgment? Well, it does inform your judgment in that clearly you recognize that there's a potential for aggression here but admittedly, as in the case of murder or all the rest of it, your judgment has to be informed by the norms of society and by what people regard as sane and sensible. That's the best answer I can get. I don't see that we repudiate the zero aggression principle because of these difficult cases any more than we repudiate all the other cases that arrive in society that arise in society today. Let me comment on that because in fact, in machinery of freedom, I follow that point with a chapter on economic analysis of law and the economic analysis of law, which is the central part of economics that I've been doing in recent decades, is an attempt to figure out what the rules ought to be if what you want to do is to maximize economic efficiency. I don't think we have a good way of knowing how to maximize individual liberty. That'd be a good thing if you could but economic efficiency, which is some sort of a way, an imperfect way of adding up how well everybody else is, everybody is, is the best we've got at this point and one can in fact use economics to analyze questions such as what should the penalty for a crime be, what counts as a crime and so forth. You can't do anything like a perfect job of it because we don't have enough information but if people are actually curious about how you would approach that problem, one of my other books is called Laws Order. You can read that on my webpage like most of my things you can read on my webpage and that sketches out how you would approach questions such as light bulb versus laser beam from the standpoint of economics. Hello. The examples so far have focused on the consequence for the violation of the aggression principle and I don't think we're looking for an abdication of responsibility but I wondered about an example that looked more at the efficacy of the non-aggression principle in the argument. For example, I teach school and there has certainly been a lot of coercion to get a vaccine lately for which I will not comply nor has my administration made me feel like I needed to thankfully though I was never in a position where I would have but for many people I've said to them what are you willing to do to vaccinate me because you would have to pin me down and give it to me forcibly with me fighting the entire time. So what are you willing to do to force my compliance? And I wondered what would be your argument absinthe non-aggression principle that would be as effective in that realm. Thank you. I guess my basic argument would be that having institutions that let people coerce other people is much more likely to result in coercing them in ways that make the world worse than in ways that make the world better. That if we could have a government that is a dictatorship by a perfectly wise benevolent despot what I like to refer to as a bureaucrat god who knew everything. I would live in your utopia but how do we convince them? That in that world, indeed you could improve on the outcomes of freedom that in that world the perfectly wise benevolent despot could realize that you would be better off with getting vaccinated and would take some convenient occasion to put you unconscious and vaccinate you and maybe not even tell you because why upset you about it? But we don't live in that world. We live in a world where all of the decisions are being made by human beings. The human beings are making them not only with imperfect information but with the wrong incentives that each human being has an incentive to serve his own interests and those of people he cares about. The nice thing about the market is that it's a way of getting socially desirable outcomes out of individual selfishness. The political market doesn't do that. If you work out what public choice theory is the branch of economics that deals with it. If you work out what the implications of public choice theory are you end up with a whole bunch of cases where people are forced to do things that make the world worse. That the US is currently turning into alcohol 10% of the world's supply of the largest source of food in the world namely maize. We are doing it on the claim that that will reduce CO2 output despite the fact that everybody involved including Al Gore conceded years ago that it doesn't reduce CO2 output. It does however raise the income of farmers and farmers vote. So the basic argument that I would make is not that there is nothing one can imagine a government doing or an individual doing that violates rights that would be a good thing but only that institutions that allow you to violate rights will usually have bad consequences. I was hoping that that was the moderator I was expecting to have but unfortunately Ron Paul doesn't seem to be doing here. My only comment is that every once in a while when I talk to people about the idea of vaccines I just begin by pointing out to them and every once in a while they find it somewhat compelling to contemplate to contemplate the point that if the government is forcing you to put a chemical in your body that you don't want to put in your body that's the defense of the zero aggression principle. That's an act of very, very serious aggression and the default position is no such thing should happen and if you want to voluntarily use the vaccine fine and usually amazingly some people are convinced by that argument want to voluntarily use the vaccine fine nobody has a right to force you into doing it and that's once again the zero aggression principle hopefully simplifying the issue. Unfortunately that argument doesn't really work because the people on the other side will tell you that by getting the disease you are going to be aggressing against the people who catch it from you and therefore they are entitled to force you to do what will keep you from getting the disease. Since David responded to my response let me respond to his response. Of course that's going to be the argument and of course that argument is also ridiculous as David probably knows himself. The only point is to say again that indeed if you are going to kill 50 people by not taking the vaccine maybe there's some kind of argument for that because the aggression is going to be far greater. The burden of proof is on you. Give us the evidence for that ridiculous claim and we know of course that it was ridiculous in the case of this vaccine. That's the whole point. And people did make that. I'm sorry? What? People did make that argument. Of course they did. Of course they, of course, of course they did. And that is a consequentialist question not a moral question. But the burden morally is on you to make your argument. The default position is leave me alone. That's the whole point. Yeah, yeah. Next. This question is for the affirmative and it builds off the previous question. Suppose that there was some hypothetical virus where the evidence was bearing out if you locked down the population fewer people would die from it. Obviously not COVID as we all know but for the sake of the question suppose it's hypothetical. And suppose you were discussing a lockdown policy with somebody who stated objective was to minimize deaths from the virus which a lot of people who were advocating for lockdowns during COVID that's what they were saying that they wanted. How would you go about demonstrating that they should not want lockdowns by their own standards? I would point out to them that life is that minimizing deaths is not in fact the only thing they care about that it would be pretty easy to point out to somebody that if you could reduce deaths by one by putting everybody in prison for 50 years it would not be desirable to do that. And they will then presumably realize that there are a whole lot of costs and benefits to trade off and not just one. A, going back a step you would want if you are making the argument today you would want to say look in giving the government the power to do lockdowns you are taking it for granted the government will only do it when it's a good idea but we happen to have some evidence on this subject. Sweden did no lockdowns at all ended up doing probably a little bit better on excess mortality than most of the other countries though not all of the countries. There is very little evidence that the lockdowns did any good and that ought to make you conclude too late to change that one but you ought to make you very suspicious of the government having the power to do something because you can observe that the government will not in fact restrict itself to doing that something only when it's a good idea. Well let me comment also in this way which part of the response of what David said earlier you might say that this is kind of unfortunate like blend between my view and David's I think David's consequentialist arguments are basically very sound and I look to him to help us out with the consequentialist issues and that's been my focus as an economist. So indeed I grant in principle that if there's just some overwhelming disaster which would be aggression against others there's gonna be massive deaths that could conceivably be some kind of argument for lockdowns but of course as David pointed out and as I would say take the states and nations that have strict lockdowns those that have very relatively loose the outcomes are virtually indistinguishable the lockdowns achieve nothing the lockdowns however did a lot of harm but my only point then is that if David wants to point out to me but when you start talking consequentially yourself I'm going to agree with that I'm going to agree that there's some argument in principle between heaven and earth that you could make that if 90% of the population is gonna die and the rest of us are probably gonna die for starvation if we don't do something or other then that's immense aggression against others that we might need to avoid to choose the other favorite example in keeping with what David was saying we should impose a five mile an hour speed limit on drivers that would probably cause a lot of deaths anyway but obviously that would reduce deaths on the highway so indeed we have the bias in favor of freedom and that's my only point that consequentialism matters but the zero aggression principle is a central indispensable part of it I have a question for Gene okay and that is you said that if a violent apparent violation of rights prevented massive violation of rights then it's all right what if it prevents massive costs that are not violations of rights the point of my asteroid example originally is that an asteroid hitting earth and killing everybody is not a rights violation it's a catastrophe but a non-rights violation catastrophe my own view in terms of my moral position is that violating rights is a bad thing but not the only bad thing and therefore it is legitimate to violate rights if you get very large benefits in terms of other values and so the question is if the only way of preventing a catastrophe which is not a rights violation merely kills millions of people is to violate somebody's rights are you in favor of doing it? yeah well I thought I addressed that in that your example about the totalitarian governments attacking I simply cannot believe that in a libertarian society that people would be so stupid as not to organize in some hectic way to quell the asteroid I would not be bothered about the lack of authority but that's a consequentialist claim if you're making an argument of principle you ought to be able to apply the argument under any circumstances not just under the circumstances you've chosen well, okay, I guess I know, I guess I think you certainly make the point in the extreme that it's conceivable but I don't think in this world it could ever happen I guess that's my when you talked about the totalitarian government attacking the asteroid you mean people are so damn stupid that they don't know the asteroids coming won't do anything we need the wise government to impose some kind of standard but in your anarchist society there won't be such a government, right? so why, what, how would you... that wasn't an argument for a wise government that was an argument for an individual stealing something in order to stop the asteroid oh, okay stealing something oh, yeah, no, no that's a crime no, no, that's actionable no, no, no in that particular case that particular I steal something to avoid the asteroid indeed I should be indicted absolutely but you should do it yes therefore you should violate co- violate somebody's rights you should initiate coercion which violates the NAP that's the point I've been making well, supersoup I'm sorry I would be guilty of the crime yeah, sure and I should it, excuse me I, I, if I guess now we get into a brilliant moment of, of so-so I committed a crime and I'm a criminal and I'm absolutely reliable for the crime it, it, it absolutely applies to me I'm a criminal and I should stand trial for, for that criminal crime so it's always an absolutely a crime that's all and that, that but, but sometimes you should commit crime so sometimes you should violate rights sometimes I will commit crimes that's all because I, because I'm a moral person, I guess okay, I'm, I'm gonna actually exercise a little bit of moderation yeah, enough, enough take another question from the audience hold on, uh, uh, uh you ask the question of Gene Gene, do you have a question of Milton of tic I'm so sorry right, all right Milton would be 111 years old if he were here today he was born in 1912 I, no I don't have any questions for David what's the next question? yeah yeah hi um you cover this a little bit but I'll put a little finer point on it I'm wondering if the resolution itself has a little bit of circularity to it yeah if we're saying that we don't need the NAP to defend libertarianism, most of us define libertarianism as no one gets a special pass to take my stuff, which is sort of another way to say the NAP. Like so what is then libertarianism or is it just as I think I've heard merely an infinite array of Consequentially optimal policy choices or decisions anytime two people interact. There's a chance for conflict. So How does that get solved if not? Appealing to some deontological principle Are we just making every judge a Consequentialist calculator, and how do we know that they won't calculate wrong? Well, and I mean in the vet Look again libertarianism is I imagine most of you know, it's not a philosophy of life It's it's simply it's simply a key principle that That tends to inform for the most part our attitudes toward government It's simply the zero aggression principle as I annunciate it It's got very narrow implications except of course when governments start running amok and and and and and while David and I could acknowledge Marginal cases in which the the juries have to decide rather difficult Situations for the most part the laws against theft murder and all the rest of it are very clear and very easy to apply So I don't think but but there's no question that in the jury or in the case that David cited By the way when he talks about the economics of punishment the fact of the matter is that in many societies I think even including this one if you're a murderer and you're your torturer There is a certain attitude on the part of society that economics is not the only issue But retribution is punishment just simple retribution for your heinous crime that can enter into it Well, but if you're saying that that that in any society the application of law is complex having you're absolutely right But the zero question is it full stop nothing else, right? And I guess I was more directly my question to Dr. Friedman as to how then he defines libertarianism Without reference to property rights. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, I don't I Don't think there is a bright line definition by which you can say so-and-so is a libertarian so-and-so isn't I think libertarians are people who in general are in favor of individuals Controlling their own lives having their property respected and so forth They can believe that for any of a variety of different reasons you could imagine and I'm sure there exist Christians who would say look if God wanted us to be forced to be virtuous. He would have done it He gave us free will Therefore you should allow each person as I put it a very long time ago to go to hell in his own fashion You could have an a utilitarian who said you maximize utility by having a society in which there's very little Government and so forth and so on and you can have various other people So it seems to me that what makes somebody's libertarian is not the basis of his arguments It's he reaches a certain pattern of conclusions and as I say, it's not a bright line People will disagree over some conclusions. Some people will say well the best we can get is a 95% free society because anything more than that would collapse Still a libertarian Maybe a little less every libertarian and some of you things you can get a hundred percent So I guess that would be my my answer to your question. We don't have any more time for question and answer Fortunately, you can actually find these men walking around So please save your questions and grab them and ask them as they walk around We do have time though for the conclusions and for your final vote So hold off on your vote not yet, but we will have the five-minute summary by David Friedman Yeah, I wanted first to say that there is at least one thing that Jean and I sorry There is at least one thing that Jean and I clearly agree on and that is that pork Fest is better than Freedom Fest I May have missed it, but I don't think anybody here yet has tried to sell me shares in a goldmine And I can't remember any dogs or small children at Freedom Fest But that's that's a digression I Want to go back to the point that I made briefly in answering a question Which is that the underlying consequentialist argument is not there is nothing a government could conceivably do that would be good Because there are things governments could conceivably do that would be good It is that we have no way of setting up institutions in which the good things governments do will have a larger effect Than the bad things governments do and as I say public choice theory it seems to me is really the basis for those for those arguments So let me take for a moment the argument about tariffs I don't know if it occurred to Russ Roberts But we have a legal system in which the government does impose tariffs and Nonetheless the bad consequences he describes occur So what he requires is not merely a legal system which the government implies tariffs But in which it always imposes the right tariffs and in fact as you may know The old argument for tariffs not the one he's making was the infant industry argument The argument was that a you could get an industry started because of various reasons that couldn't Start itself in the market and once it was there you could drop the tariffs and have a prosperous thing And that's not logically not impossible economically though requires some Additional assumptions, but if you actually think about the politics of it infant in bridge no industries don't have any votes Who has votes senile industries? industries which are declining and need the protection of the government I I don't have the time I could go into the economics of that there are actually reasons why the benefit to a declining industry of having a tariff relative to the costs to people is larger similarly it is Logically possible that climate change is a terrible problem, which will kill all of us But if you actually follow the argument as I've been doing for a long time You will discover that there is very little evidence for that belief indeed the serious people like the IPCC Don't make the catastrophic Claims if you actually look at their numbers They are talking about making the world a little bit poorer because we don't control climate change William Nordhaus who got an Nobel Prize for his work on that Estimates that the effect of climate change by the end of the century will be to make world GNP a few percent lower Nonetheless there are all sorts of Politically profitable things you can do with the claim that climate change is a catastrophe and they do them So in fact I mentioned before the case of of the biofuels program Which was justified for that reason Gore himself is conceded that part of the reason he pushed it was he was running for president and Iowa has early primaries So the basic argument here, it seems to me is that the institutions of government Can't will predictably not with certainty but predictably have net bad effects And you therefore don't want to have government have powers even though there are powers under some circumstances Have good effects so to repeat my basic argument, which is pretty simple It has two parts the first is that the claim that you should never initiate coercion has implications Nobody believes in Jean clearly doesn't believe in them He wants to modify that by saying well Yes, you actually are allowed to initiate coercion, but then you have to pay whatever damages the courts impose Well, if I run the courts that could result in lots of coercion in my favor I don't think there is a good mechanism for for doing that And the second half of the argument is that libertarianism is not only better than socialism or Modern liberalism it's a lot better and that consequently You don't have to persuade people that it is really important that billionaires have billions of dollars All you have to do is to point out that they already think it's important that poor there be fewer poor people And they'd be better off and that's the result you get with a less a fairer society Not the result you get with a welfare estate. Thank you Please be prepared to vote Well, well, I guess I guess the the closest David and I had to With to what maybe you would regard as a semantic issue has to do with his idea about Committing a crime if I commit a crime. It's not a crime That's the way I would put it. I still committed a crime If if I grabbed the flagpole on the way down to save my own life I still committed a crime if I steal the equipment in order to save the world I still committed a crime So I don't see now those examples are rather far-fetched We could we could make the argument that maybe, you know bad cases don't make good law or whatever But I would only submit to you that that those are simply crimes potentially committed in extenuating circumstances potentially whether circumstances Extenuating or not and all for example Applies to cases in which you caused some of these deaths, but was it intentional? Was it a completely avoidable accident? All of those decisions have to be made the death was caused It's an actionable claim. It is a crime And so I guess you have to think is David right to say well if I committed the crime and And say yes, I would commit the crime that makes it not a crime No, it's a crime crime in extenuating circumstances So that's why I would say again the zero aggression principle and the invasion of property rights is indeed absolute but but again as a practical matter for example when When David tried just a moment ago to address Russ Roberts problem and David started to say plausibly well, but Russ the the tariffs that are imposed aren't the right tariffs all the rest of it I still don't understand why David wouldn't also say to Russ That don't you understand as well that you're penalizing everybody's right Including people of a limited means they're right to buy what they want to buy Why don't you just try to appeal to them start a website try to start a buy American website? Try to appeal to them about the idea to target your problem with respect to these particular communities That's all done voluntarily you're violating people's freedom please Recognize that that's why our default position is against you so again David now We're trying to argue something else all of it useful. I suppose but again Why does David want to do without the crucial role of the zero aggression? Principle beyond that I guess I'll climate change once again All of all that David said was right about climate change Although ironically if you actually read up on to the extent to which we even know that carbon dioxide is causing warming If you read Steven Coonan who is the physicist who appointed by Obama who wrote a book called unsettled The truth of the matter is we don't even know To what extent carbon dioxide is causing the warming versus other natural factors especially since the warming trend was was it was very fast from 1910 to 1940 before carbon dioxide even played a role so even it's all a mess But aside from that Can't we try to say and every once in a while as in the case of the vaccines? I said to somebody well, you're forcing people to take a chemical. Yes I know that you're supposedly saving many more lives, but just recognize that's the one fact We know Sage of the warm markers you plan to kill more innocent people in order to achieve some goal That's again the zero aggression principle. It keeps coming up And so my plea to David is harness your brilliant ability To make consequential this arguments harness it and ground it in the zero aggression principle Every once in a while we might convince a few people as indeed I can say personally Some people are convinced of it because there really are a lot of people who have a tendency to believe in freedom Even when they call themselves progressives. Thanks So it's time for you now to vote and on the line is the famous tootsie roll And a welcome to the free state from these people living in the authoritarian 49 Second place will only be a welcome to the loser to the free state So please go to so ho vote comm and register your vote So the results from you people Ah The proposition the right way to persuade people of libertarianism is by showing them that they're that the outcomes are superior By their standards without any resort to the flawed non aggression principle So Starting out with yes that this proposition is right We started with 28 percent and we moved up to 36 percent You're supposed to go For the negative we started with 32 percent, but we moved up to 48 percent So the winner of the tootsie roll is Gene Epstein You