 Plot-toe radio. Close all university departments for black, Latino, women, gender, queer studies and so forth as incompatible with science and dismiss its faculties as intellectual imposters or scoundrels. As well, demand that all affirmative action commissars, diversity and human resource officers from universities on down to schools and kindergartens be thrown out onto the street and be forced to learn some useful trade. Six, crush the anti-fascist mob. The transvaluation of all values throughout the West. The invention of ever more victim groups. The spread of affirmative action programs. The relentless promotion of political correctness has led to the rise of an anti-fascist mob. Tacities supported and indirectly funded by the ruling elites. This self-described mob of social justice warriors has taken upon themselves the task of escalating the fight against white privilege through deliberate acts of terror directed against anyone and anything deemed racist, right-wing, racist, reactionary, incorrigible or under-constitutional. Good evening, this is Clifton Knox back with Punching In and I'm joined by my co-host David German and a very special, honored guest, Stephen Cansella. How are you doing, Stephen? I'm doing wonderful. How are you doing? Doing great. David, you're doing well, I assume. We were just talking and you jumped off, jumped back on. And I'll have to excuse us out there if you're experiencing any, you know, we're having any sound issues or anything that you're noticing. It is blog talk radio. But, Stephen, you are currently the director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom. Is that correct? That's right. Okay, and can you tell us a little bit about what the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom does? Well, I'm a patent attorney in Houston by trade and I've been a longtime libertarian writer and aficionado of the Austrian School of Economics, a follower of Rothbard and Hoppe and Mises. I'm an anarcho-capitalist and, yeah, I've been doing that for quite a while. I edit libertarian papers, a journal which I founded, sort of a successor to the Journal of Libertarian Studies. And, yeah, I think we're going to talk about argumentation, ethics and related rights type theories, which has been one of my main interests for about 20-plus years. So, yeah, I'm happy to talk about this stuff. Fantastic. Yeah, we're very excited to have you on to speak with us about this tonight. I guess one of the things I'm very interested in is your explanation to hear your take on argumentation, ethics. I think that you probably have one of the best interpretations out there. And, obviously, you know and speak to Hoppe quite a bit. So, maybe you could sort of lay down the basics of what it is for us. Sure. For different libertarian audiences, you know, you would approach this different ways, but most libertarians at least implicitly believe in rights, right? We talk about property rights and our individual rights and our constitutional rights. And rights is really a legal term. It just, it basically means the legally justified or sanctioned right or ability to control a resource. So, this arises from the fact that people in acting in the world when there's more than one person in the world could potentially have a conflict with each other for the use of their standing room or the land or their bodies or the scarce resources that they want to use. So, the very phenomena of conflict is what gives right to the need of people a rightful owner of a resource. All right. And so, how do you feel that, or do you feel that it does even relate to, for instance, the non-aggression principle in any way? Do you think they play into each other at all? Absolutely. So, I'm just explaining where the term rights itself comes from and why people use this kind of concept. So, they use it when they're trying to have a significant or peace resolution of a possible dispute or conflict among people. Now, the primary way that this could happen would be a naked or a transparent or a clear act of aggression. Aggression would be basically when one person attacks another person. So, physically, I'm using my body to attack your body. In this case, we're having a dispute over something that's motivating us, but we're fighting physically over our bodies. Like, I want you to do something that you're not doing, and I'm going to take control of your body and stab objects into it or try to kill it without your consent. Right? That's what aggression is. So, aggression is the violent clashing of two human actors over something that can be clashed over, which is their bodies in the primal case. So, when we say non-aggression, we mean that because we're humans and we've developed certain civilized tendencies and we have society, we live among each other and we have values outside of our naked self-interest. We care for other people, we care for the human race, we care for our tribe, we care for our community, we have empathy for other people, we care about things other than ourselves, and we care about justifying our actions. And all this results in this complicated interplay between people and society where they have rules among each other, rules that everyone understands are the rules that we've agreed to, in some sense, to allow us to live with each other in peace and harmony and cooperation rather than always fighting each other like naked self-interest brute beasts. So, non-aggression principle by itself just means the idea that you don't have the justified right to hit someone or attack their body unless they started it. You don't have the right to initiate force. But that is really just a shorthand for the entire body of rules that libertarians believe in. That's just one part of it because we also believe in the right to property rights and that you shouldn't trespass and that you should return someone's property. If you take it, you should be forced to do so if necessary, that there's a right to self-defense, that threats are justified, etc. All these things are working out of the basic core idea that most of us prefer to live in peace and prosperity with each other and to find rules that allow us to live together in peace and harmony and the core rule would be the non-aggression principle. But in a sense, the non-aggression principle is just a shorthand for a more complicated set of property rights rules. Okay, and that makes a lot of sense to me. And so, I guess, argumentation ethics. In some regards, I mean, some libertarians, even some anarcho-capitalists are consequentialists. They're not really a natural rights, natural law type libertarians. Of course, I've always been under the impression that you are a natural law libertarian, at least mostly. And would that be a correct assumption? Well, I would explain it a little bit. It would take a little while to explain it differently, and we could do so if you like. I think you first have to understand what it means to have rules and then we have to understand what the libertarian rules are, just what they are, like what we believe in. And then the question arises as to which rules are justified. When we say justified, we mean which bits of arguments can be adduced or presented that favor the rules we prefer rather than those other people prefer. Why we prefer them may be a question of sociology or psychology or human history or anthropology or evolution, but the question is how do we justify these rules? In libertarian theory and in human history and proto-libertarian thinking, classical liberalism, there have been different strands of thought. The traditional thinking right now is that you could separate people into two different camps. One approach would be the natural law approach or the natural rights approach or some call it the natural right approach. And then others think in terms of consequences or utilitarianism. And there's a presumption sometimes that these things are in conflict with each other, like these types of arguments contradict each other. You have to choose one or the other. And then there are people that have a third or even a fourth option, right? Like JC Lester, Jan Lester, who's an anarchist libertarian thinker, rejects these things. He rejects both approaches and has something based upon like Popper's theory of, like he rejects justifications in general. But I'd say the general approach would be we want to have rules that do the greatest good for the greatest number. That's utilitarianism. Or you could put it more generally that have the best consequences for people in terms that we all agree with in general terms like welfare, prosperity, food, shelter, and space prosperity. And then the second approach would be more of a Kantian deontological approach, which is the idea that there are certain things that you just cannot do no matter what, right? And you should respect these principles. I'm not of the view that these views are in conflict with each other. I'm a great deal leader in the first verse. So I think that the general types of rules that we ought to adopt as human beings to live among each other to produce these general, right? So this consequentialism would be the types of rights that natural thinkers also argue for. Now, the argumentation ethics approach is an approach advanced by Hans Hermann Hoppe, who's an Austrian, well, he's German himself. He's an Austrian thinker in the mold of Rothbard and Mises and an anarcho-capitalist. And he's a radical anarchist, but his view of rights is not the same as the traditional Lockeans or natural rights people. In fact, he has some criticisms of those types of arguments. He has ought gaps that you can't deduce a norm or an ought or a should statement. Like you can't deduce a moral statement from an is or a factual statement. You can't say that just because the thing is the way it is, therefore we should treat it this way. That there's a logical gap when you go from an is to an ought. That was sort of the criticism of Hume, David Hume. And Hoppe said, okay, that might be a fair criticism. Let's find another way to justify these norms without falling afoul of the is or a gap. And what Hans Hermann Hoppe did was he studied under some German philosophers like Jürgen Habermas and Karl Otto Appel were socialists, but their theory inspired him. And he combined that with insights of Mises. That's the Austrian economics economist and Mises' human action and praxeology ideas and Rothbard's radical libertarianism. And Hans argues that the best way to justify the libertarian norm, right, is to use an approach similar to Habermas and Appel, which is argumentation ethics. Which is not to say that we have a nature and it's this and therefore we should do that. But instead it's to say that when every norm you would ever seek to justify would have to be justified in the course of some kind of discourse or interplay between people and argumentation. And to recognize that that activity itself is a practical activity which has certain normative presuppositions. That's sort of the core of his argumentation. What he's saying is that it's impossible to have a civilized discussion with someone to try to argue that you have the right to kill them, basically, or to enslave them. Because when you're having a civilized argument with someone, yeah, well there's presupposition. So it's a complicated or nuanced way of making that kind of argument. But he's basically saying that you could never make an argument, a real sincere argument. That you should dominate someone else. Because if you're going to dominate them, you're not trying to argue with them. You're not trying to persuade them by the force of reason. And this is why it's so important that he emphasizes over and over again, which is lost on a lot of his critics. He says that one of the most profound aspects of this is the recognition that when people enter into a sincere, honest disagreement, they agree to disagree. And what that means is they're agreeing to walk away if they can't persuade each other by the force of reason. Or to put it another way, they're both agreeing to try to persuade each other by the force of reason, not by coercion or by that. What does that mean? They're sort of respecting each other's rights to their bodies because that's the implicit presupposition of saying, I can't accept my position that I'm not going to attack you. Well, why would you say that? Because you have the right to your body. I have the right to my body. But that implicit recognition is the core of the libertarian philosophy. So that's kind of where Hapa is going with his argumentation of things. So in a lot of ways, it really kind of stands outside of some of this stuff and really more or less on its own. I guess it's kind of what I'm taking away from this. Can't really pin it down into any one of the particular camps that you were mentioning earlier. Well, he denies that he's consequentialist and he denies that he's bridging the is-ought gap which David Hume showed in Logically Unbridgeable, which the natural law people try to do. And he also criticizes natural law thinking because, number one, it tries to bridge this gap. It tries to go from an is to an ought. And also because human nature is very vague and very diffuse and you can only get so much from human nature. I mean, humans are very adaptable animals and we're not limited to our instincts like dogs or other animals. So to say that our nature is to do A, B, and C, you can do whatever you want in your life, really. So you can't get too much from the general fact that we have reason and that we want to survive in the world because there's any number of ways to do that. So I think he would set himself apart. Some people call it, there are different names for this. So I guess in my mind I would distinguish maybe four or five strands of arguments for libertarianism. In fact, maybe you could have a sex which is zero. Some libertarians have no argument. They just go by intuition or what they value. They don't really have a good argument for libertarianism. I guess some are religious. They think that it's a result of the edicts of the Bible or God or Jesus or something like that, like James Redford who says that Jesus was an anarchist or whatever. So I guess you could have mystical or religious arguments or authoritative arguments. And then you have the common sense practical like what works, what works, but that presupposes a common set of goals. So that's the utilitarian or consequentialism. And I would view consequentialism as the main type of argument people have, which is a practical type of argument, a pragmatic argument. And utilitarianism, I would view that as a subset of consequentialism. And then you have the natural law or the natural rights arguments, right? Which is that because of the way nature is or the way God commands it, it follows that there are certain ways that we could act. There are certain ways you should act in your life. And actually, personally, I'm not that critical of that from a life perspective. Like I think that our nature does indicate to us the ways that we should live a life, a good life. So the Aristotelian idea, the natural law idea, the classical idea, I think has a lot of wisdom behind it. But it's not like it's opposed in a polar way to consequentialism. All this stuff dovetails with constant. So I think that the rights that we have or the rights that we could justify, I think that's what most people have that engage in these. Right. So are you still there, Stefan? You seem like you're breaking up a little bit, honestly. Yeah. A blog talk right here. No, I'm right here. Okay, fantastic, fantastic. I thought you broke up there for us for a second. Well, David, did you hit? That's okay. That's fine. I mean, it happens on here. It's one of the reasons we talked about, you know, earlier. David, did you have any questions that you would like to lay out there for Stefan to answer? Can you give us the background on Estoppel? I think we lost Stefan. Maybe he'll come back in. I think he dropped off. And we were breaking up pretty bad having some technical difficulties. But to this point, I'm hoping he'll come back. He will go get him back here in just a second. Very interesting stuff that he's been telling us. I mean, a very, very interesting what he had to say so far in some of the background that he's given us on Hoppe's argumentation ethics. When you say, David. Oh, yes. Yes, I was waiting for that question that came to me and then he went away. Were you having any difficulty with him breaking up or was it just me that was? I heard, yes, everything was pretty much up for a minute. Okay. Well, like I said, I hope he comes back on in a minute and that we can get him back in here for the next 30 minutes or so of the show before. But I thought it was extremely interesting. He was talking about the fact that Hoppe studied under Jurgen Habermas. I know that Paul Gottfried also studied under Marcusa. And you think about that. The both of those guys were in the Frankfurt School. So, I mean, it's interesting how much influence you see. There's some influence there, obviously, into libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism and so on from the Frankfurt School, even. But, well, so you were getting ready to ask him about a stop-all and we lost him. There he is, I think he's back on. Hang on a second. Is that you, Stephan? Yes, we can hear you. David, I just asked you for a little bit of background on the stop-all. Sorry, I don't know what happened, but I'm back on my phone now. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, I can hear you. And we're sorry about the sound quality issues. We're going to work on improving this over the next six months. Got it. Yeah, sorry, I don't know when I cut out. Now, a stop-all is kind of the way I frame my approach to rights theory, to rights. And I thought of this when I was in law school, coming across a common law concept called a stop-all, which is a legal doctrine, which is a way that a court can prevent someone from saying something that might be true or might otherwise be a normal claim you could make, but it's inconsistent with something you did earlier that the other side in your dispute relied upon. And so the court says, look, it's just not fair for you to maintain two inconsistent positions. So we're not going to let you say the second position. So you can't say that, like, you can't, let me give you an example. You come home and your neighbor has hired some company to paint their house, okay? And the painting company shows up at the wrong house. They show up at your house on accident. They make a mistake and they start painting your house and you see them doing this. Now you know they're making a mistake and you think, oh, well, I'm not going to say a word. I'm going to let them paint my house. I'll get a free paint job and there's no contract between me and them. And therefore, when they ask me to pay them, I'll deny it, and if they sue me for breach of contract, I can honestly say we didn't have a contract. So I just sit back and I let them paint my house. My mistake, right? So a regular court in law, and this is in England where this evolved, would say that you would win because there's no contract because there was no consideration. There was no meeting of the minds. There was no agreement. It was a mistake by the painter. But then the painter might see you in a court of equity, which has to do with fairness. And it's like a last resort. You go to the king to ask for relief, you know, in the king's courts if there's some manifest injustice being done. That's what equity means, right? Fairness. And in equity, they developed a doctrine of a stop-all and they would say that it is true that you didn't have a contract, but we're not going to prevent you. We're not going to allow you to say that. We're going to stop you or prevent you from... We're going to prevent you from making that defense. So when the guy says you have a contract, you can't have a defense against it because that would be inconsistent with the way you acted. When you showed up and you let him paint in your house, you acted as if you had a contract. So when I heard of this doctrine, which is just a legal doctrine, you could agree with it or disagree. Then, you know, I thought that's similar to the symmetry in the libertarian idea, right? The libertarian non-aggression principle, which is the idea that we're not against force or violence even. We're just against the initiation. So what we say is that you can't start the use of force, but you can use it in response to force. So that's the libertarian idea is that responsive force is permissible. And again, I'm talking about the naked case of one body against another, one person attacking another. Property rights and trespass and things like that are more complicated. But the kernel of our idea is that you can't start the use of force. You have to respect each other's bodily property rights. So it just occurred to me that this is kind of the way that the libertarian principle works, is that what we're saying is you can use force only in response to force. You can't initiate it. So there's a symmetry there. So in other words, in the legal language, you could say that if someone commits an act of aggression, they start force. And then the victim tries to respond or to retaliate. You can't criticize what they're doing because you'd be a stop from doing so, because it would be inconsistent with your own behavior. In other words, if you act as if it's okay for people to stab each other's bodies or to use each other's bodies like means, then you can't be heard to object to that rule being applied to you. So it's a very common sense rule. It's kind of implicit in the biblical rule of eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, lex talionis, and lots of other common sense wisdom over the ages. And I think that's the root of the libertarian idea too, is that it's like the porcupine idea. You know, you leave me alone and I'll leave you alone, but we're not pacifists. We don't believe that you have to be a pacifist. You can respond with violence, but only in response to violence. And that is the essence of the libertarian non-aggression principle. So I saw in this legal intuitive principle of estoppel, this equity principle of estoppel, that there was a way I could spin that and work it into a way to define and defend what human rights are. And so I did that, and I think it borrows and compliments Hoplitz's argumentation ethics approach as well. Okay. That makes a lot of sense to me. I think it's brilliant. David, do you have any other questions that you would like to ask, Stefan? Going back to argumentation ethics, how would argumentation presuppose self-ownership? Well, because the idea is that what a genuine argumentation is a real discussion between two or more people about trying to solve a matter of truth. So we have in front of us a dispute. If everyone agrees, there's no possible dispute and no one ever has a problem. So these things only happen when there's a dispute, a disagreement. And we're trying to come together to find a rule that we can agree to about how to proceed. Normally, in the case of a dispute over a resource, it's a disagreement over who gets to control this resource. So we're looking for a property norm. We're trying to come up with the answer to the question who owns this thing, who has the right to control it, even if it's each other's body. So I want to be your slave, or I want you to be my slave, I'm sorry. If you're just a naked criminal and you just do it without trying to justify it, you don't try to justify it in the first place. Then you have a war of all against all, and we're not engaged in justification, we're just engaged in self-defense. There's Han Tapa says, now we have merely a technical problem. So to the extent other people are willing to sit down with us and try to find a civilized rule or a rational basis for what the rule should be, then they're sitting down with each other and by doing that, they're recognizing each one owns their bodies. So you can't have a real argument with someone else unless there's a recognition of the right to control your body because when you're trying to persuade someone by the force of reason, what you're saying is, if you disagree with me, I'm not going to bash you in the head. I'm not trying to coerce you into agreeing with me. I'm trying to persuade you by the force of reason alone. So implicit in that is the sort of negotiated agreement that I'm not going to force you, I'm not going to harm you if you don't agree with me. And that is a recognition of the property right to any other person. And more importantly, each person in the argument is also assuming he owns his own body, like he wants to keep his own body. He doesn't want to be molested and to be controlled. And he's assuming he has the right to live and the right to engage in this discussion and the right to have gotten there in the first place by somehow surviving off the land and off resources that he's had to control in the world. So if he's assuming he has the right to live, basically, or the right to control his own body, then if you start from the beginning, there's no reason to say that he's treated differently than the other guy. In other words, you can't make what Kopp calls a particularistic argument. They have to be universalized. You have to come up with rules that could be universal to everyone involved. Otherwise, you're not making an argument at all. You're not appealing to reason. So if I say, well, I get to own you as my slave because I'm me and you're you, that's really no different than just saying I'm going to attack you if I can beat you. So it's not really a real argument. If you simply say the rules are different from me than they are from you, then you're not having a real argument. So you have to assume that the arguments have to be general and universalizable. So if I claim that I have rights to my own body, I can't coherently claim that you don't have the rights to your body unless they have a good reason to distinguish us. Because all we know is that we're both human actors. We're both intelligent. We're both having a conversation with each other. We're walking around the earth. We're trying to control our own lives. We're identical in every respect except for the fact that we're I'm me and you're you. And you can't distinguish, you can't make up a rule that treats A and B differently unless there's a reason to treat them differently because that's just not giving a reason and it's not a real argumentation. So the ultimate reason is that argumentation presupposes a type of what's called universalizability. You're presupposing that you're going to give a general reason that appeals to the real facts of the world and that doesn't arbitrarily distinguish people because of who they are. Otherwise, you could simply say, I get to own you because I'm me and you're not me. And of course, you could say the same thing and then we're fighting again. And so it defeats the entire purpose of argument, which is to find a conflict free way for us to get along with each other. And what Hoppe points out is that no one can deny this either. What I just said, they can't deny that without contradiction because if you start denying this, then what are you saying? Are you saying that, well, we're having an argument but it's not a real argument that if I don't like what you're saying at the end of it, I can pull my gun out and just blow you away? So am I really trying to persuade you by the force of reason? So any real argument does take seriously the respect for each other's bodily integrity. It has to, otherwise it's not a real argument. And that's the core of the libertarian idea, each other's bodily integrity. And you can build on that to get the entire corpus of libertarian principles. And I guess, so really, I mean, what we're saying is that we have a performance. It leads to a performative contradiction if you deny those things, correct? Or am I wrong on that? You're right, and here's the thing about that. So you will have people that are skeptical of this type of argument, okay, by Hoppe and others, and they'll say, well, so what? It's a performative contradiction, but that doesn't stop anyone from hurting you. It doesn't force people to respect your rights. And that's all true, but all they're trying to do, to me, is they're trying to prove that rights aren't self-enforcing. Okay, they're trying to show that there's a difference between rights and between causal facts. In other words, it's not possible for you or for me to violate a causal law, like the law of gravity, you just can't do it. But it is possible to violate a moral law or a normative law, like you should not kill someone, you could still do it. And it seems to me that they have gotten so enthralled with the idea of the state coming in as a technocratic agent, which is opposed to solve all of our problems, and it'd be the source of our law that they think that if someone can get away with committing a crime, or they can commit a crime even, that that shows somehow that there was no right in the first place. But if I'm able to murder someone, it just proves that there was no right to life. Because they're equating causal laws, like the laws of physics and the laws of science, they're equating those with normative laws, like they're not satisfied with a law that could be broken. So in a sense they're monist or they're scientific, which is a criticism of Mises and Hayek and some of the Austrians, because they're basically saying, look, I can't violate the law of gravity, so if your moral laws don't prevent criminals from committing crimes, then what good are they? So they're changing the subject a little bit, you see. So what I would say is that what's important to recognize is that when you say that, when you observe that someone has to create an engage in a performative contradiction to deny the coherence of libertarian rights or libertarian principles, what you're doing is you're showing that they can't justify their position. And to people that are used to this nice and neat technocratic solution and everything, that's not good enough for them. They want a guarantee. Well, there are no guarantees because people have free will and they can and they will violate rights on occasion. The question is which laws could be put in practice institutionalized, right? Instituted, that are justified. And that justified means viewed as legitimate by the people who care about that, which is the bulk of society. The bulk of society cares about living in society in a civilized fashion with each other. There will be criminals, there will be outliers, there will be outlaws. The question is not what they think. It really doesn't matter what they think. If they do not agree with us on the basic principles, then they have to be treated as animals or technical problems. And it's just a problem of criminal law. So the question is when you point out that there's a practical contradiction, what you're observing is that this attempted proof, say to justify a socialistic law, fails because it's not coherent. So the entire purpose of the Hoppian view is to show no socialist ethic. And I'm using socialism in the general way Hans does, which is any institutionalized aggression against people's bodies or property. No such law could ever be justified coherently in an argumentation because argumentation is always peaceful and it presupposes the capitalist norms, the libertarian norms. And that is why you could only ever justify rules that comply with what people are actually doing when they're engaged in argument, which is peaceful cooperation with each other. Yeah, and I think you're talking about a stop a few minutes ago. I mean that sort of seems like that plays right into that whole concept because you want to have your cake and eat it too. You want to say you can't say that you own yourself, that you have property rights, but yet you can act and pretend as though you do when you're dealing with me. I know from talking to some different people on social media, Facebook, there's an idea that exactly what you were just now saying, if I can steal your car, well you don't own it because I stole it and now I own it. And while you may have stolen my car, rightfully the car is still mine, and I probably do some remedy. And that's justifiable to anybody that knows what happened in that situation. So I can definitely understand where you're coming from there. It makes a lot of sense. Well actually, so let me make a point there. Even Mises and others, they have some comments where they're more careful about their terminology and their conceptual distinctions. So Mises for example distinguishes between what he calls catalactic ownership and juristic ownership. What he meant by that was catalactic just means the economic way that we control things in the world. And juristic means legal. So ownership is used in different ways and it leads to equivocation and confusion sometimes. So ownership in a legal sense means the legally recognized right to control something, but when we use it in economic terms we just mean controlling something. That's why there's a debate in Bitcoin circles about whether you own a Bitcoin. It might be you can't legally own a Bitcoin because it's not a physical resource. It's just an intramural ledger that's distributed among other people's computers. In a practical sense you have the ability to control it. So if you start using the word ownership, so at least in this car problem you talked about, if someone steals my car the right way to look at it as a libertarian and as an Austrian you still have the legally recognized ownership of the car and the right to control it even though someone else took it. So someone else has the physical possession of the car, but you have the ownership of the car. And then if you make that clear, which is clear, then you will have your opponents they'll resort to a third tactic which is they'll say well then what good is ownership? In other words what good is it? But that's a different claim than the claim that they're the same thing. So they keep changing their grounds, they keep shifting their grounds and they become almost legal positives and they're saying what good are these airy-fairy rights if people can disregard them. And I want to say we'll blame God because people have free will. And you can come up with rules and norms that we tell people what they should and should not do but that's not going to physically prevent them from doing that. Right. Yeah, thank you. That was educational. That helps to break that down into something that is more specific in its language. It definitely helps with understanding some of the things we're talking about too. I guess one question that David and I have thought about. Have you and you probably have, have you heard of a group called the Properitarian Institute? Is that the group associated with Kurt Doolittle in Ukraine or something like that? Yeah. Yes, yeah. Yeah, I've heard of it. I know Kurt, I've met Kurt. I haven't associated with him in some time but I'm vaguely familiar with aspects of that. My vague impression last time I had any contact was that he was a, well, I don't think he's got a clear set of ideas that are even analyzable but I can understand them. They're not libertarian. He's kind of like a, he's a poor man's alt-right figure or something. I don't know. Which is not even a compliment. Well, they sort of have, they hold a similar position where we were discussing the idea that, you know, if you can't enforce your rights, then what good are they? You don't really have rights, you know. Yeah, I told you. And another, sorry, go ahead. What did you say, Stefan? Oh, I just said, yeah, that's exactly what I was saying earlier. I can predict the way these people think. I've heard this so many times. If you can't enforce your rights, what good are they? Yeah. Right. And so another thing that I've heard at times is that Austrian economics and libertarian political philosophy in a lot of ways is, I think the term was a justification philosophy or argument. And so it was a problem because we're trying to justify something. And it is very, very, in a lot of ways, very scientific, like you were talking about, very much like a positivist sort of way, but maybe even legally too, as well. I don't know. Yeah, I think they are like, it's a combination of legal and logical positivism. And Jan Lester, who I mentioned earlier, he has this view that he's opposed to justification of them. So he has this, that he's not anything like the proper Terrians as far as I view, although I think he speaks it anyway. I don't have to say about these guys. I just think that they, look, from a libertarian point of view, I'm a principle libertarian. And I have no apologies for that. That's what I've done for 25, 30 years. And I oppose aggression, and that means something. Now, you can have definitions of it. You can have implications of it. You can have applications. You can have arguments about the best way to justify this stuff. But it means something to be a libertarian. And it means to me to favor the, to oppose aggression. And I define aggression in a certain way, which is basically based upon a kind of locking interior property rights. So aggression to me means using someone's justly owned property without permission. That's what it means. And then how they own it is either, if it's their body, they own it unless they've committed a horrible crime, or if it's an external resource, then you determine it by original acquisition and contract principles. Okay. So that's the core of libertarian philosophy. Now, almost everyone in the world shares these views to some extent because we all agree with the first person who gets something owns it and you shouldn't steal. You shouldn't murder. We agree in property rights. It's just that libertarians are extremely obsessed with being consistent about this. And everyone else makes exception. And they usually do it because of the mythology that surrounds the state, this idea that we have to make an exception for the state. In other words, they agree with private morals that we all agree with, private law. Bostia pointed this out in the 1800s, right? That the idea is that just because a group of people come together doesn't make something right that one person couldn't do by themselves. But most people accept that policy for some reason. They think that because of the public goods problem or the free rider problem or something about the way human nature is, you have to have a state that has extra power than is treated especially and can do certain things that we're not normally permitted to do, right? Which is why taxation is not theft even though it really is. Things like that. But all this just means is that everyone is basically libertarian to the extent that they are and then they make exceptions. And the way they do it, and conservatives and liberals do this or leftists do this and the properitarians do this, which is what I'm getting to. What they say is this. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I agree with the libertarians that liberty is an important value. Or if you force them, they'll say, yes, aggression is normally bad. I'm against aggression in general. And then they come up with their exception, which is but it's not the only value. So this is the cry of the status is that whenever you hear someone say that liberty is not the only value, hold on to your wallet because they're coming after it. Whenever someone says, I'm in favor of property rights, but that's not the only thing that matters. Hold on to your wallet because they're coming after it. And that's what these guys do, like Kurt Doolittle and these so-called properitarians, which is horrible they've corrupted this name because I like the word properitarian as a better name than libertarianism, but they apparently started to ruin it. They say that, well, liberty is not the only value. There's other things. You have to look at history and there's the white race and all this. It's all like bullshit, which is just their excuse for saying at some point in this case, aggression is okay. So in other words, they will concede in a grudging kind of half-hearted way. Yeah, I'm against aggression too. It's not my only value. But when you say being against aggression is not your only value, all you're saying is that in some cases I favor aggression. So in that case, you're a technical problem and you're my enemy because the only thing we really believe in as libertarian is the inviolability of the non-aggression principle. Aggression is never justified and that's the essence of Hoppe's argumentation ethics. It's to show that you cannot justify aggression and the reason is because all justification is argumentative justification. It has to be and no one can disagree with that without falling into contradiction. And because that justification is argumentative, it happens during the course of an actual argumentation, which is a physical situation between people that have control over their own bodies and both parties have to recognize and respect that. So it's just impossible to come up with an argument for anything that justifies aggression without falling into self-contradiction, which means you can never have an argument for aggression. You can't justify it. You can commit it, but you can't justify it. Especially if you want to work together with other people. Say again? Oh, I said it especially. You can try to justify certain things. You think you can justify aggression. You can't justify aggression. If you want to work with other people, then justification is necessary. You need to be able to justify this is why we need to work together and then do it. So some justification, the thing that I keep hearing is that you're just trying to justify this and you're just trying to justify that. Sometimes justification is necessary. The word justification has a little bit of ambiguity in it too because it just means sometimes people think of it as rationalization. That's the argument you get. But what we say, what we mean is it's a good argument. We know by basic laws of philosophy, Aristotle's law of non-contradiction, that anything that's self-inconsistent can't be correct. If you make an argument that says A and says not A at the same time, there's something wrong with your argument. I don't know which one it is, but there's something wrong with it. So if your argument involves a contradiction, it can't be correct. And that's what we're pointing out. And this is why some people are libertarians and some are not because some of us care about consistency to an anal degree, almost OCD fashion, almost autistic fashion, which I raise my hand, I admit to it. And some people don't. They're willing to like, okay, as far as I can think. I haven't gotten over my job today. I'm generally against aggression, but the police need to put down that shooter. You know, I mean, people can only go so far. But the point is that you will notice this fallacy. Any time someone makes a serious, they try to make a serious argument for something that violates the libertarian non-aggression set of rules, they end up saying, liberty is important, but it's not the only value. They will always say that. And what that means is, in this case, I'm in favor of aggression. And then they'll do this other trick, which drives me insane. If you corner them and you use precise terms like I try to do, and instead of saying liberty as a value, you talk about aggression and you define it carefully in terms of property rights, then they will always say this. They'll say something like, well, you're not against aggression either because after all, you believe that you can use force against someone trying to attack you. It's like, that's self-defense, you idiot. That's not aggression. We just have to straight. So they will always play these tricks. And I don't know if they're stupid or dishonest or just what, but I get this all the time. It drives me insane. Right. Yeah, I agree. And the thing that's one of the things, you know, there is a difference between being a pacifist and thinking in terms of, you know, not being an aggressive, violently aggressive towards other people. You just, one does not necessarily lead to the other. It's really more or less a non-sequitur. You know, I've had people actually say that to me, oh, do you use some kind of pacifist? But, you know... Well, and I actually, so I think this is kind of a proof that libertarianism is the strongest moral view. It's because it's compatible with everything else. People could live in a socialist commune if they want, as long as it's voluntary. Right. So our society would not prohibit you from living like a bunch of commies on a kibbutz or whatever. And it also wouldn't prohibit you from being pacifist. You could be pacifist if you want. And even the pacifist has no good argument against libertarianism because we believe in the legitimacy of self-defense and some of us believe in the legitimacy of retaliation as well, retribution. They can't argue against that because they can't do anything about it by their own rules. They have to sit there and just be quiet, right? So they're not going to say that it's legitimate for force to be used to stop me from using force against an aggressor. So they have no teeth in their argument against self-defense. So that can be ignored as just amusing idiots who get to survive off of the fruits of capitalism which rests upon the right to self-defense. That's a good point. So I guess, and then we come down to, I've seen a lot of people that have talked about it, of course, for several years now, see a lot of physical removal stuff going around. Hoppe talked about sometimes it's necessary to physically remove certain individuals. But I think that goes back to the non-aggression principle, people who refuse to adhere to it. And I think that's where we're end up with that. And I don't know. That was my own personal take on it. Maybe you could say something about that before you take off on us. Sure. On the physical removal stuff, first of all, I would say that that's technically not part of his argumentation. I think that was more of a later analysis of a few things. Cultural conservatism and also trying to imagine what a private law society or a free society would look like. And what would be the aftermath of, say, the implosion of democracy. And I think the idea was that you wouldn't have public spaces, so to speak. Everything would be private. And people would voluntarily associate in certain ways. And partly geographically, right? They live among each other. They live in territories. And I think he talked about what he called covenant communities. I think he was saying that there's a certain understanding in a given area of what our private rules are, maybe that are in addition to the basic libertarian norms, like maybe in this area everyone agrees to dress in a certain conservative way or to be Catholic or whatever. And you could have voluntary places like that, and people could ostracize each other, or they could just voluntarily live among people that they like, which people tend to do nowadays anyway. They live among like people in some ways, and they have some mixture. They have trade with each other, but people tend to live among other people. The physical removal part, I think what he was getting at was this. He was saying that in a private law society, which you can think of as an anarchist, libertarian, free society in the future, the predominant ethic among everyone, in that society would be the libertarian ethic, which is that private property rights are good, and the family unit is good because that's a natural outcome of the way people live. Capitalism and free trade are good. Prosperity is good. All these sort of normal western capitalist values taken to their libertarian extremes. So that would be the predominant ethic. And someone who was opposed to that, like who was loudly proclaiming for socialism and saying, we should set up a government and we should let it text people. These people would be close to a threat because they're trying to get started this monster thing called the state that we have now that we have somehow successfully defeated. So these types of people would not be welcome is what he's saying. No one will want to live among them. They tend to be losers and ostracized and forcibly removed, which means people don't want to live near them. So I think that's what he was getting at. He didn't mean that if someone really has a different opinion than you or their heterodox and their cultural perspectives or whatever, that you could physically assault them and eject them from their homes. What he meant was that people tend to want to live among like-minded people. And the same goes for libertarian justice. If you live in an area, you're going to need to associate with people. You're going to need to have contracts with people. You're going to need to respect their property rules and vice versa. You're going to need to have insurance. And to get insurance, you're going to have to comply with the rules of the insurance companies, which are going to be the rules that limit liability and restrict risky behavior. So people that are complete outliers are not going to tend to be able to get insurance. They're not going to have any friends or not going to have any help. They're not going to have a lot of business. They're going to tend to be ostracized by the way they act, which is the way life works now. So it's just pointing at that, I believe. Okay. So in a lot of ways, it kind of points out the fact that people will tend to gravitate towards like-minded people. And there will be occasions where maybe there's some disagreements or so on. Maybe you have somebody, you're in a covenant community that has private property rights, as we've mentioned, more libertarian-minded. And someone comes in under the auspices. I am just like you. And then after they're there for a year or so, they begin to, as more communists or socialistic ideas, then you would be able to probably, it would be a good idea to physically remove them. Simply for one thing, if they knew when they came into the community, these were the standards. And they sort of kept that secret. And then later began to espouse these opposing ideas. Then physically remove them. Well, and again, if they moved into a neighborhood with a certain restrictive covenant which says that we only allow Catholics here or we only allow libertarians here or whatever, then if they violate the contract, they violate the contract. I don't expect that to be the normal way of human life, to be honest in the future. I think it'd be very cosmopolitan and diverse. But I think what he's imagining is not just like people living, like Catholics living by Catholics and maybe Italians living by Italians and Chinese living by Chinese. He's imagining in a future libertarian world where their predominant ethic is libertarian. Then libertarians, which is everyone, people that favor liberty only want to associate with people that also believe in liberty. And when someone starts trying to advocate for the use of force to tear apart this libertarian order and to start setting up a police force that would arrest people for smoking marijuana or for having the wrong religion, these people would start being heavily shunned and hopefully the society would be resilient enough where the libertarian spirit would shout them down. Yes, and they would have to go, the hippies, they were losers. You don't want them to be part of your culture because we want to promote liberty and we want that to be the basic assumed norm. We want everyone to respect private property rights. So the basic idea is that people that, let me give an example. As Hoppe believes and as most people probably come, the predominant order of any successful human society would be the family-based unit, the kind of culturally conservative mother, father, kids, whatever. Yeah, there are going to be some homosexuals, there are going to be some priests like there are going to be some bachelors who never get married. They're all living in the same society with each other. But you don't have a priest. The priest doesn't go to mass every Sunday and bash all the married people for being married and being heterosexual. He doesn't attack the family unit, which is the basis of society which pays the light bills for his church. He's a priest, right? That's his room. He decided to do that. That's fine. He's welcome in society. His role was not to advocate to everyone become a priest and the human race die off, right? So people that are hostile to the very fabric of of libertarian society are people that I guess the ideas would tend to be ostracized. By the way, this is not mine. I'm not the guy that runs around talking cultural conservative, fire-breathing stuff. I get asked questions about this. This part of Hoppe's theory which he developed I think when he was talking about democracy and he was trying to show why democracy is not the leap forward in social progress that everyone takes it for granted to be. Like when we moved from the old world to the monarchist societies to the modern state to the democratic states it's not necessarily an improvement. That was basically his argument. He was trying to show that when you went from monarchies the old world-style monarchies to the democratic systems it's worse in many ways. He held up as a model like imagine what a monarch's incentives would be to maintain the value of his country and to have quality control over who's emigrating and things like that and what democratic politicians have an incentive to do. That's a modern democratic statism by showing that it's even worse than monarchies but he's not in favor of monarchies and part of that went into a cultural critique of the way emigration works now and how it's even worse that it would be under a monarch system but he's in favor of an anarchistic private property system which most of its libertarians are as well. Right. With covenant communities which will give freedom of association disassociation that sort of thing whatever it is that people want to do that based on. It has to be because if you're in favor of private property you have to be in favor of contract law you have to be in favor of the freedom of association and just by empirical observation we can observe that people tend to associate in certain ways nationalistically, ethically, by language by cultural values we have to expect this morning to continue to happen and the main point is that in a future libertarian world one of the main values would be the libertarian ethic itself the private property and so the people that were hostile to that would be the ones that are dangerous. Right. That makes perfect sense that those people if they're hostile to non-aggression they're obviously one aggression so I guess we are coming up at that we're just a little over that hour mark and I know you said that that's where you wanted to be Stefan but I'd like to give David the last question if he has one before we wrap up with the show. What do you think of some libertarians such as Austin Peterson and maybe others criticism of the non-aggression principle? I actually think I've seen some of that stuff I mean look I don't think of that seriously because it's not very good everything I've seen I think there's a distinction in my mind between what it means to be a libertarian to me is to hold a certain set of beliefs or values but other libertarians are more of the activist the political activist mentality and they think being a libertarian means being an activist and trying to go out there and usually through the political process to make change you can have a disagreement among libertarians about or discussion about what the best ways to achieve change are but even to have that discussion you're assuming that part of the purpose of being a libertarian is to try to make change happen in the world not everyone agrees with that some people just want to be left alone they want to contemplate they want to be good people they want to be on the right side of history they want to do the right thing we don't all necessarily believe that it's possible to change things I personally am skeptical of the idea that we're going to achieve a libertarian revolution by handing out pamphlets to our uncles at Thanksgiving dinners okay I think there's a reason why we don't have full liberty right now it's sort of a political choice of reason I think and then the question is can we ever have full liberty in a way we can never have full liberty because people have free will and even if we have a libertarian society there's always a chance of a random criminal who's going to violate someone's rights and they'll get away with it or they'll commit the crime so being a libertarian just means being in favor of maybe hoping for a certain set of conditions that would lead to more liberty I don't think the political process is a way to do it and in fact I think it tends to corrupt people and make them become way more pragmatic and compromise like people like Austin Peterson probably do because they're already buying into the idea of voting and democracy and the legitimacy of the American Constitution and the founding fathers even though they had slayed the whole thing is hard I'm so sick of seeing the Statue of Liberty or the Liberty Bell in American Constitution Declaration documents these guys being held up as if there's some kind of pro-libertarian avatars it's kind of unfortunate that America has become the place where libertarianism sort of started because everyone associates it the original American government with this which makes them menarchists because at best there was a state and once you agree with the state and all these powers that the government does then you're going to compromise your principles and you're not going to want those non-aggression principles basically outlaws the state I think Elnil Smith it was either in the Galatin divergence or the probability broach two of his best novels one of those there are some it's an alternate history and he makes if I recall he makes one change in history and that was that during the drafting of the Declaration Jefferson left the word put the word unanimous in you had to have the unanimous consent of the government so he just inserted one word in that history differently than in ours and because the word unanimous is in there it basically led to anarchy because you have to have unanimous consent you can't have the majority govern the minority who loses an election or whatever and of course that is the libertarian goal and the libertarian implication is that you can't have a state if you really believe in the non-aggression principle and that's probably why quasi-statists some people call them menarchists I like to call menarchists mini-statists because they still believe in the state just a smaller version of the state so I'm not surprised that many statists end up being statists and opposed to the non-aggression principle which would outlaw the state that they favor I've heard good things about Austin I don't know him very well myself he may well be an anarchist in his heart I don't know but the criticisms I've heard from him in the non-aggression principle are usually by people who either want to have some kind of government and they know that the non-aggression principle can't fit with that or it's by people that are these urban the statistics who want this to be a continuing game I don't want to name any names I could name a couple some of these some of these Kato friendly scholars who think they're way too sophisticated for Rothbard and his radicalism they want there to be a conversation always if we don't be radicals the non-aggression principle is just not what people believe in anymore and I'll tell you my view is when anyone tells me they're against the non-aggression principle my trigger finger gets itchy because if you're not against aggression that means you're for aggression that means you're a threat so the only people I really trust are people that pacifists are fine with me and anyone who disavows all aggression but if you're not willing to disavow aggression on some kind of trumped up argument then I think we need to keep our eye on you when you're around the silverware that's an interesting put it because that's right I think if you are not willing to at least try to apply the non-aggression principle in your dealings with other people then you have there are instances in which you will use aggression and therefore we need to be on the lookout for you well this has been really great it's been very informative we really enjoyed having you on the show with this stuff do you have anything up and coming that you'd like to let any of our listeners know about I'm just working on trying to get a book out which is like an edited selection of my essays and articles over the last 20 years so that should be coming out later this year if I can manage to not be too lazy but they'll see that on my website when it comes out fantastic well thank you very much for being on the show and hopefully maybe we can have you back again sometime if you're open to it be glad to thank you very much David you have a good good evening and I guess we're wrapping it up guys good night thanks guys good night