 All right, we are live. Thank you very much for hanging around everybody. Thank you for tuning in. This should be a very fruitful discussion I'm joined by if you are involved in the twittersphere, which it's not something I wish upon my worst of enemies But if you are you very likely know of Andrew Pierce host of popular Liberty Andrew. Thank you for joining me Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself? Glad to be here. Yeah About what you said I'm the yeah, I'm a good Roman Catholic and I you know looking forward to this discussion Good. All right, so I wanted to bring you on today because a few months ago late last year There was a lot of upheaval going on from people who consider themselves libertarian calling themselves post libertarian a Movement that I gather you were sort of the head of however, it's not also the name you would use for the movement Would you like to go ahead and explain that first of all? Yeah, well all post libertarian means is that you've recognized that this thing doesn't quite work the way it's cut that libertarianism that is doesn't quite work though, you know as You know as it's described and it actually needs quite a lot more in order to in order to make it work like you're actually probably going to have to use force in order to get to you know a more libertarian society and That's the you know main. That's the main difference Yeah, but and so there isn't really like a post libertarian ism, you know, but It's just it's a moment not a movement and so I you know what we what you would call a Someone who's a you know post libertarian like me is you would call us the Praxian and that's that that's the actual name That's the actual movement. Okay. That's so Yeah, I was involved in these like sort of hostilities that were kicking off a few months ago and I think the reason why is I viewed it as sort of a fundamental change from Libertarianism itself, but with libertarianism often being understood as a legal theory and not a moral theory Would you say it's more of a building on this foundation rather than a or of an actual switch? Uh, it's that it's a little bit of if you'd asked me six months ago I would have told you I wasn't quite sure But having had a lot like six four months of reading particularly in Thomistic philosophy and the origins of liberalism I kind of have to say this is a fundamental shift and The but if you if you'd asked me a year ago, I would have said no six months ago I was not sure nowadays I kind of have to say yes that it is a little bit of a fundamental shift because you know Even as a legal theory, which I I mostly I don't buy it because the people who say that are generally lying You know, they I mean they will immediately switch and say well It's a moral to you know when they when they tell you what the nap is it's like it's a moral to initiate aggression well, okay moral theory right there and You know, it's like and you're telling me this is a legal theory that has no basis in morality or ethics really No, I understand that it's a very very weak argument to make and You know, so and I think if you're going to found libertarianism in any sort of You know philosophy it has to be found in an in a Thomistic philosophy, which instead of a liberal philosophy And that's the fund that's the main fundamental shift right there is that You know, is that what I would consider to be praxe and is founded in a very different school of Philosophical thought and that would be the Thomistic philosophy rather than the liberal philosophy, which is very Protestant in nature No, okay I can I can understand a lot more of that right now because I've been struggling with The idea of how so much of it is set up as value-free like value-free economic analysis when you've got People acting in an economy according to morals people and analyzing them who are moral actors in all facets There is moral action occurring here. And so how can you then categorically? Analyze it without morals. That's something I've been coming to question a lot and it is as I've been reading a lot more You know, if you I mean if you're going to be a good thomas you have to recognize that you know That the axiology that is, you know, how we determine value when it comes to moral value That's objective. It's not subjective. You know, that says, you know, we don't get to make the rules of morality. That's God's value that that's a That's a distinction that belongs to God and so from his point of view, whatever he decides that is what it is and that's what that you know, it's a it's a very objective Value for when it comes to morality when you know, when it when it comes to economic value That's still subjective, which is why you know, I can still say credibly that I you know Believe in the Austrian school of economics wholeheartedly is because that's That's definitely correct that that value is subjective in nature and Moral value is not though and you can't really separate the two It's like how can you have a human who's a moral actor and also not a You know, but also not an economic actor, you know, they're you can't separate those Yeah, that's that's something I've been thinking about a lot and just to let you know where I'm coming from and why I've wanted to Have this discussion now a couple days ago I released a video talking about how I have become a near reactionary And I felt a lot of this happening as I've taken a moral realist stance when I always thought There are objective morals and they're probably something like stoicism and just be virtuous, but I've it's it's hard not to see a lot of moral subjectivism actually in a lot of these principles in the way they're put across No, you are allowed to talk about morality in a in a real way You don't have to just live and let live and all of these To be honest, I I see now as being very annoying sorts of slogans Yeah, that's about right. I mean it I mean it's a It's an as it's founded. It's an ideology. That's you know, mostly consists of bumper sticker sayings and You know, I mean that doesn't cut it that really does I mean when you start seeing that like You know, it's like drag queen story time or them trying to like sexualize kids and stuff like that And you're just like, oh, yeah, you know private company can do whatever it wants. Yeah I don't see how you could do that and not be a moral relativist even if you think you're not Yeah, I mean you well, you're really saying when you say that there's no, you know But like these are the I call them the they neither right nor left libertarians because that's kind of what they call themselves And when you're saying you're neither left or right, you're saying you're left because you're because you're equivocating that You know, there's no real difference between there the left and the right I mean, you're saying I have no preference between Equality and hierarchy. So which means that they're equal to you So you're so you're a lefty and you're saying that you have no no preference between a or an orderly society and a chaotic society and So, okay, that's chaotic, you know, that's egalitarian. That's right There's there's an assumption of symmetry that just isn't there and again It comes down to a moral realist theory where you could I've come to understand There's no such thing as a morality a morality permits and allows immorality And is there for immoral? Exactly, there's you're right and neither left nor right There is an a moral position and in all honesty left is immoral right is moral Yeah, I mean, I mean definitely goes back to like the bible and the church fathers that You know, like with the, you know, Oregon who's a catholic your catholic, right? Oh hell, yeah, absolutely. Oh, yeah. Sorry. So, yeah You have the church father Oregon who's like, yeah, the uh, there's a I mean, there's a uh, you know Passage in the bible and first transsexual wasn't it? I don't know. I don't think so. I heard a story that he castrated himself. I feel like that's a myth. It was made up maybe I mean it's possible but uh Anyway, the in the bible, you know, there was like the book of second kings and there's you know One really really bad king in there named king ahab and eventually god gets to the point with ahab where he's like I've had it. I've got you know, I'm gonna take ahab down at remote Gilead And he calls the the council of heaven to sit together and he starts crowdsourcing ideas from the angels And and these and he's like, all right, I'm gonna take ahab down Do I have any volunteers and the angels are getting together They're coming up with all these different ideas about how they're going to get ahab to go to remote Gilead And fight a battle. He really shouldn't fight and die and The one of them comes forward and you know, is you know, it you know is actually well Back up the story the prophet Micaiah is prophesying here that of what he sees and he sees, you know You know god with angels on his left and angels on his right One of the left angels comes forward and is like, I'm going to go to all of it ahab's prophets false prophets and put lies in their mouths so that everything they just say is complete crap And you know, and they're going to tell him it's a great idea to go, you know, fight this battle where he's going to die And you know, he can't possibly win And and so god's like that's a great idea. I like it. Go get go get it done and so the Anyway, you know what organ takes from this is that What organ takes from this is that okay? Well god is in everything. He's in all things So how can it be that he has left angels and right angel angels? I mean, that just doesn't make sense So what you know, what the conclusion he comes to is that these these angels on the left Are actually the dark angels. These are demons and and he's specifically setting up this idea that that The you know the angels on god's left, you know, who both serve him He says the right and the left hand of god both serve him The right hand of god serves serves him willingly and serves it their purpose that that he intended them for The left angels serve god in spite of themselves where you know, the system's basically rigged Even when they're, you know, trying to disobey god and trying to do bad things and get humans to sin and cause chaos All they're all they end up doing is because god is able to turn all things to to his great To his greater glory and he's able to turn things to the good He's able to turn bad things Towards the good of people who love him because of this all they end up doing is serving Serving god, you know indirectly so the right and left hand of god both serve him And the and the left hand right here is, you know, it is necessarily equivocated to You know the devil and because why why the devil because he was the one who saw equality with god He's like he was a usurper. He was a revolutionary hierarchy. He got us there again He's like he says I will not serve, you know, those were his famous words non-servium and so when you have this uh You know, basically, I mean this idea of left and right and the left being satanic and immoral Like it goes all the way back to like a very beginning of time That the left is the immoral way So so in in the modern day, what do you find prophetic about that? Do you think there's something about the left that is working towards the good even if they don't know it? Ah, man, this is like my my theory of archotropism that uh, you know, they without you know, archotropism is the process by which a state can extract extract power for itself By extracting order from chaos. So this is the this is why the state has an incentive to seed chaos in order to power grab Well, this is perfect because I've got a list of questions here And the first one was going to be can you explain archotropism because there's um I don't know if you'll be sick to death about talking about this, but it's pretty new to me. So I hope um You'd be Yeah, you can think of this is like the sociopathic version of economics that that uh Libertarians don't really want to tell you about because they like to pretend it doesn't exist So okay, so I'll just like my understanding of archotropism of what I've heard you're talking about so far It's would you say it's the mechanism of how the state Sort of creates its own demand and then steps into fulfil it Uh, yeah pretty much and they you know the whole as a whole It's really all about how the state egg, you know gets itself to exist and why And the and it all starts with this, you know, kind of zero-sum value of power so, you know this so uh Right here, like you you know, you would have to say, you know This is where libertarians start to get a little antsy because they always want to say that all value is positive sum In other words, it's additive and You know and and unfortunately even their own, uh, you know economists like mesis and rothbard will say Oh, that that's not true when it comes to power that everywhere else. It's additive It's positive some but when it comes to the value of power, it's actually zero sum right And you can kind of just think of that just logically that If you you know if i'm attacking you and trying to take your stuff You know you having your stuff taking away is a negative value to you Yep, that's a positive value to me therefore zero sum that a lot of people don't understand what zero sum means And it means that like after the transaction is completed The loss from one person in the game from another add up to zero nobody there's no greater benefit overall Um, exactly. You're absolutely right. A lot of people don't understand that and they think they hear um Economic terms are not zero sum and so The idea that something can be zero sum also is almost foreign Very dangerous. It's crossing wires and it's using economic principles on things that aren't economic Well, I mean that that's almost the uh, I would say that this is actually is economic This is a branch of economics. I mean, this is praxeology that we're talking about and it's a I mean, this was one of my first realizations of oh, you know libertarianism really isn't going to work Because it seems to deny that this is even within the realm of economics And right like I mean that the human action axiom still holds true I mean, that's how you get to arcotropism is that you know, hey It's like if you say that yeah humans use means across time in order to achieve ends Well, what if some of those ends are power? well, it's so mentioning praxeology there then so let's go to Manicolamine state the first few chapters crusoe economics holiday and crusoe on an island the coconuts the stick and everything like that where do you think in praxeology and a uh Crusoe economic setting would the demand for power come in when Rothbard? I think correctly using praxeology shows us that cooperation between two people is always better than domination well, if you uh that that depends on how uh Okay, I answered this a while back on one on one of my debates the if a You know the reason that like when you have a really really small society the reason why You you usually did like virtually zero crime And it is because you physically can't afford crime that the marginal incentives towards productivity are higher than the uh a marginal incentives towards predation and you can actually also see this in like psychology Where we have uh, you know maslow's hierarchy of needs at the very bottom of those needs Are you know like food and yeah like like food and shelter and stuff like that in water And so if you're robin sin crusoe and you have literally zero Uh division of labor even if you add like five to ten people You know, you're still on a desert desert island You know, you are still really really brushing up with death against death every single day from you know resource deprivation so you need so you need those people in order to Make sure in order to make sure that you can survive like if you start predating upon them If you if you stop being productive You're all gonna die and So like but once you get into like you have a lot more people and you know humans are not scarce anymore Well at that point, you know the marginal incentives change because now we have what's called diminishing returns and diminishing marginal utility And so the diminishing marginal utility of how much I need each individual human Uh diminishes with every additional human to the point where you know, maybe I really don't need you at all and Beach can lose one grain of sand, right? Exactly and the uh And so that's where this ends up ends up coming from it. No like yeah when you're at a you know Like mere subsistence level Obviously predation does not make sense because you're gonna die Yeah, but once you get to a a much larger population side all all of a sudden, you know, you've got and maybe once things start to get Uh like let's say, I mean you just have enough people start farming And you had now you have a reliable source of like food and water and all of that stuff and so Now all of a sudden because you have the certainty across time How much do you really need all of the other humans? A little bit less You know, and it makes you know conflict with them that much less problematic That much less threatening to you So the cost of being in conflict with other people goes down And you can even just see like just logically that you know, okay If you're said, you know, even if you take like kind of Rothbard and his crusoe economics at you know as at face value You would say okay because uh, you know, the the incentives are always to be productive Okay, so then why do we have predators? Like it's like clearly you missed something if you if you assume that the incentives is always towards production And yet we have very obviously predators living with us all over the place You know, you must have done something wrong. Well, the the incentive is towards individual gain And the point is that with production you you and everyone else go around you can gain But if you simply stop caring about everyone else around you You can still gain even if you don't produce and that is where predation would come in if you're a scumbag But that's like why why you can't look at this stuff completely value-free You can't um, so But then where does the state come in with that? It does do is with archetypism you you would you say There are people who would rather predate than produce They come to exist people will go at any will like give anything to stop these predators from predating And so we'll accept the state to put a stop to it Well because it's like a you can think of it as like a permissionless protocol to where I don't need you know, I you know, I can be a You know, I can gain by you losing and I if I just don't care about you losing and because and therefore I don't really require your permission so I don't really care and So where the state kind of comes in is that you know because there is this you know permissionless protocol of predation that exists You know that you can uh, yeah You have to pay for security so that you don't get taken advantage of by this permissionless protocol And and even if you choose not to pay for security You still pay for it in the form of losing your stuff So there's no there's no opting out of this uh of this permissionless protocol So I I I think in like computer science terms. I'm a I'm a techie and So there you know, and you can go all the way back to like the you know, like the akkadian empire like 6 000 years ago And to where you know, you have all of these uh, you know agriculture is really really uh coming back You know, we we law we get it 12,900 years ago We lose it for a little while and then it starts coming back, you know It really enforced around 6 000 years ago and then you start to see the uh Like all of the you know, you see all these agricultural communities start coming up and none of them have any security And so you get the first guy who notices that no but not the first real economist You could say is like sargon of akkad because he notices that oh So all of these people are producing stuff and none of them have security. What if I just took it all? And this cycle just repeated for like 2000 years, didn't it of Having land and farms and then nomadic people who didn't have that go. Oh, I want that I'm gonna take it They get soft and then more nomadic people come in and take them out because they were soft pretty much That's exactly how it happens and that that uh, you know this because this thing exists And there's no opting out of it. You have to pay for security or you or you pay or you still pay for it one way or the other And though you might as well have a state and you might as well have a fixed state that is, you know that yeah, because there's no opting out of it no matter what you do and The uh, and so this is where basically the state ends up coming from is that There's no way, you know, it's marginal incentives are always positive You know, there's no way to get around Uh power not having value to people. That's why you know in my first law of arco tropism This is kind of the point of it is that hey, it's it's not that power itself is always Conserved is that it's value the value of an act of power an act of coercion is always basically positive and The unless you're the one, you know on the receiving end of it so right, okay, well You might well just think that it's not realistic But then what are your thoughts on ideas like rights enforcement agencies as you know people Demand protection they're willing to pay for it. Can they not? um Have competition in this payment or I don't know where you stand Well, yeah, I mean yeah, yeah, you could you theoretically could have competition Here's the issue is that because of that zero-sum value structure How do you maximize value because remember? The human axiom is still holding and that we will always prefer more ends for less means and time So we're always going to be value maximizers. Well, what does value maximization look like in a zero-sum system? Well, it looks like What you know it tends toward monopoly for exactly that reason that you know, I can either you know What does competition look like in you know in a zero-sum system? Well, I mean, that's the nature of you know Fighting and war and stuff like that. And if you know anything about war, you know, how hideously unprofitable it is And so, you know, it's I mean, it's a very very Yeah, I mean it's it's like the most anti-value action you can kind of do Is that because you end up just kind of ruling over ashes of whatever you were trying to conquer and so if you want so uh, you actually really want to avoid competition As much as possible and you would prefer cooperation to to competition for exactly that reason because The upside is rather limited to you know, competition in the you know sphere of violence And the downside the downside is tremendous and the upside is small So how about we just work together and to screw over the little guy who can't defend themselves that's it and so think of it like okay, you're like the one criminal on the block and No, and there's no other criminals and and all that everybody else is like basically defenseless and it's basically you have free reign of a Territory and then all of a sudden, you know a few extra criminals move in on the block And your choice and basically like you could have it as okay. Well, this just divided all my market share And because you're in the market for predation basically And you could you could you could view it that way but you could also look at it as You know, there really is more than enough to go around and I wasn't able to really capitalize on all of the predation Anyway, so how about I just join up with these people We're going to pool our resources and pool our ability to apply force and we're going to Uh, you know, you know use some maybe generate some economies of scale doing this And you know, we might you know, not we're all criminals So like none of us are really all that good with numbers So maybe we can hire an accountant to uh, you know do our numbers for us and make sure everyone's paid us their protection money And you know, or you could maybe hire a journalist to say that what you know, you're That when you're robbing these people you're actually doing them a favor because you're increasing the aggregate demand and you could make some your references to a multiplier effect in Keynesian economics and You know exactly how that works and you could you could basically just hire Paul Krugman is what I'm saying and the Uh, so like Like and now you're eight because you're able to uh, you know pool your resources and have You know division of labor with the accountant and the journalist And now you're able to actually be a much more effective Group and much more, you know profitable group. You know when it comes to your predatory predatory activities And so that you know the the point of yeah, like theoretically you can have competition in the space But the problem is that because this is a zero-sum value system, you know The marginal incentives for value maximization are always going to point towards cooperation Rather than competition and the only reason we get uh, you know wars at all is because you know Is when the criminals can't decide who's in charge That's that's the main reasons they you know because if you think of uh, you know leadership as a scarce by nature, uh Yeah, you know those leadership roles are scarce by nature You can't have two or three people in charge. It's really just got to be one And you know, so what so what's gonna happen is that you know, if there's you know, two people who can't agree on who's in charge One of them's gonna have to you know be subsumed Well, what i'm picking up on here is that um, it's this is all being viewed as entirely zero-sum But it wouldn't be if the people that sorry if the reason that people want Predation to be stopped is the fact that it is reducing their total value profits, but There there is a point with the predation How should I say it People when it becomes profitable to predate people try to stop predation when it starts becoming unprofitable So I don't see why this is all entirely zero-sum and would all entirely Centering you're getting into you're basically getting into time preference right now The the whole reason why that's that's the main reason is that is that you know It depends on what time frame you're looking at it in is you know And what that value is worth to you like if I you know if i'm being invaded I'm not caring too much about the future what my future value prospects look like i'm worried about not dying right now And you know Whereas like if there's no enemies on the horizon like i'm on an island And i'm the i'm really the only predatory game in town by nature and there's no like i'm not worried about Someone sailing in with the navy or something like that You know, it's like you know, I can afford to take a much longer view of things because you know Who's threatening me no one and i'm not under any real pressure and so yet so yeah the uh The there it because this is a you know productive, you know You are predating upon production production must necessarily proceed Predation even if it's just like another human that human still has to be produced, you know in the typical nine month way and you know so far and You know because of that, you know, like yes, uh, they're you know the power the system of power itself can increase in size But its value cannot Because it's always going to be percents of a whole And it you know the only thing that really matters in a conflict situation is that I have more than you and I can beat you And if I have more power that I'm able to bring to bear against you at any at a particular point in time Then I win If we admit that war is unprofitable so Well, you've already said that yeah, there can there can be competition But if you admit war is unprofitable, wouldn't you agree then that right rights enforcement agencies It would be unprofitable for them to go to war. So why would a state be more necessary than they would? Or would it not is it kind of 5050? I you're saying like okay Let's say that you know what let's call it a private state because that makes it a little bit easier maybe the Yeah, as opposed to a public state the difference with a private state is that yeah, you do have a real profit incentive And so yeah, you're not really going to want to go to war And if someone invades you you're kind of you kind of have to but The you know, let's say you're in a world of just private states You probably would not get war and as we know it You would get hostile takeovers instead because that's a lot easier to do You know, it's a lot easier just buy out your competition, you know in the stock market You know or just make them an offer Than to like fight them, you know, are you a big fan of mold bugs corporate monarchy? Very much very much. Okay. That's fine. I'm more than happy to Dumb all of that Um, so I think we've pretty much we've covered something and talked about how power is a zero sum value Pursuit but the the big phrase that was going around a few months ago is libertarians don't understand power Can you tell us what we don't understand? Uh, they think they think it's a moral issue It's not it's an engineering issue That was the that was the big big thing is that, you know, you were treating Power the same way, uh commies treat economics, you know, you're treating this as a moral issue it's really not it's an engineering issue and The uh, you know that you know because these are two systems that are necessarily in conflict And neither of them is going away. There's no possible way to get people to stop being productive There's no possible way to get people to stop being predatory We're going to have to live with them. So what we really need is a social engineering system that, you know, uh Kind of gets us around the this problem to where we can minimize conflict And while still letting it go on in, you know, healthier ways Okay And it's and you know, if you try to treat it like oh, this is a you know, such a horrible Immoral thing that, you know, like the state exists you might be correct You know, but like it's it's not helpful So it doesn't believe that the state necessarily has to exist Or it necessarily does have to be have to exist whether it's private or public Is you know, is the difference right so you can have a private state, you know, like a corporate monarchy Like what jarvin talks about and you know, it really is that meets the definition of a state That is to say of some monopoly on violence. Yeah, and you know, it definitely meets that decision that that description It's just that it's private and legitimate and based out of private property You know as hey, I'm the private property owner and I can use violence to exclude you if I really need to and if And if you Uh start violating my property rights if you violate your terms of service agreement Yeah, I can use violence against you to either remove you or to you know, bring you really bring you into line Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot of people in my sort of series and completely agree with that I I'm of the camp that like if galt scotch is Is it basically an anarchist society a private state is voluntary and so that's the only requirement That's also really really small galt scotch is also really fucking small. So again, you know, like With a with even a state you need economies of scale like yeah, if you're robinson crusoe, you can't afford to have a state You know, you say and that's just a factor of being a fact of being poor Yes, not a fact of being moral is the fact of being poor that uh Nothing's really changed on a more on a moral level. So like theoretically if you wanted to be you know living like robinson crusoe No, okay, you're not going to have a state, but who wants to live that way? No one We're all value maximizers. That's the point of the human action axiom is that humans maximize value even if that value is perverse okay, um so We've already said this which will be the most substantial difference in our views but that um the initiation of force can be justified Could you explain that when it it can be justified? Why to what ends things like that? and that's you know from just a property rights point of view You could uh, I mean you could justify it as hey you are bring, you know, uh You know in order to be on my property, you have to sign my lease agreement or something like that Or you have to sign my terms of service And you know in those terms of service. I told you, you know x y and z you cannot be doing and if you're doing them That's a violation of my contract and I'm theoretically within my rights to use force to remove you You would because uh, technically you would not be the initiator of that force someone who is trespassing by being on your property Against the terms and conditions You you are you are only retaliating. You're not initiating that force uh Yeah, and but the Thing I would say right here is this is where I actually will kind of have to agree with the commies Is that even you know saying this was property is mine at all Even if I'm saying that rightfully that is a declaration of force that I'm willing to use my force to uh You know to you say this is mine and you can't have it and you know, like yeah, that is an initiation of force It's just it's just that it's legitimate and the the the question isn't really whether it's a uh You know if it's an initiation of force is whether it's a legitimate initiation of force or not And that's where I say that yeah, it can be quite legitimate Especially in a yo and this is what I call private property is that this is initiation of force That's a line you can't cross it without my permission And you know, it's it's just that that's legitimate because I have natural rights I have you know that are given to me by god almighty But I still don't see how this is initiation That's if someone is threatening your right for a property you would be using retaliatory force not initiating it Well, no, I mean that that's no that is still initiating it that because I have said this is mine And even and that you can't have it it's that the declaration of private property itself Is an initiation of force. It's simply that this is a legitimate initiation of force And the and what and what they're initiating against me is not it's not legitimate, right? Okay, I wouldn't agree, but I can certainly see where you're coming from and it really is This is more of a semantic thing than anything else that seems um okay, so I would like to then ask you about the anti tax your other I would say big idea that this one certainly interests me because I think it's been massively misunderstood, uh, which I mean it's par for the course like all of these disagreements of like you said to me been in group preference virtue signaling basically um so From what I gather with the anti tax you are trying to figure out a way for The states to be able to make money not coercively. Is that correct? Uh, yeah, you're basically creating a pension system for the state that it can retire on And would you say this is comparable to how european monarchs for example would have their own estates And they would earn money from that rather than directly through taxation. Is that the sort of thing you're trying to set up? You're kind of the the difference is You know because I tried to make it a little bit more decentralized than that to where You know, all I've done is is said that okay The king is still going to be there, but he's willing to accept a different form of payment And so it's not so much that he has his own Uh estate and he's making money off of that and now he uh, you know, he and you know Because right there his incentive is to just continue focusing on You know making his own money from his own estate. He you know when he now in in exchange for that he has to go Make you know, he now has to go and fight wars and stuff like that Now that's an additional cost to him and he doesn't really like that Whereas if he's like this is all my property and I want payment for you to even live here at all And that's and that's my the value. I'm maximizing Oh, and by the way, I'm willing to take a different form of payment if you want to do it this way versus that way Uh, that you know, that's a much better incentive system to where he's still like uh incentivized to You know fight for a domain that is his you know the difference with with the first system if he has his own estate You know, that's that uh, and everything else is not his estate. He's only incentivized to defend his own estate He's not incentivized to defend everywhere else Um So by making this thing down at the local level Hey, you know, because again in america, we have a federalized system, you know, so we uh, you know I can say that hey, how about the high, you know, the lower levels of government will pay the higher levels of government Basically the protection your protection money for you So you don't have to pay it and that's a service that they give to you as their, you know customer, you know, you know quote unquote and and so if uh Like you or some, you know, maybe a big employer company wants to go into an area Usually this is a they have something similar to this Like if you're like a like where uh, you know, local municipalities and states will try to compete In order to get businesses to move their production and their jobs and their means And all of their means to uh, your state to create jobs in your state And you see is like with like texas in florida a lot where that, you know, they will actually go to uh big companies in other states And you know with like the governors the the mayor and you know a bunch of state reps all together to say that hey If you move your company here, we will give you x y and z tax credits and save you money for a real long time So this practice is already basically in in existence It's just that it doesn't use a sovereign wealth fund to do it And I think this is a much more efficient way of doing it All i'm doing is is really offering the state a better way of of doing what it's already doing And or at least I should say right wing republican states that You know care about individual liberty and stuff like that because that's that's what you're seeing in texas in florida Is that they're trying to compete for You know to be who's the better Provider of you know liberty to the people that's what that's what the competition is Whereas like if you're a democrat who doesn't give a shit It's like I mean you're the you know like like you're the reason that the big companies want to leave Um, so well just tell me then how would these wealth funds acquire this wealth because like this this whole system Like that federal system you're describing is pretty foreign to me How will the state make its money and do is doing like you said in a better way Well in america because we have three levels of government which are pretty independent Uh, you know that which is very different than the uk is very different than france very different than You know, basically all of europe this federal the way that our federalized system works is that you know the You know at your you can have a lower lower level of government. That's You know vert that's pretty independent. You know if they don't want to follow, uh, you know a higher level law It's rather expensive And they you know for the higher levels of government to really enforce that on them they they can still do it But it's expensive particularly because you know america is huge And so if you're all the way in washington dc It's a little expensive to really start projecting power all the way over to you know the middle of nowhere in texas It's just yes, it's just not cost efficient So it's not they still do it They can they can like you do get like ruby ridge and you know waco and stuff like that It's not fbi headquarters all over the place not just in washington Yeah, and but if you're going to be looking at like, you know, these uh government agencies like like let's take the dea you know, which is you know, that that's the department of uh Like drug enforcement and stuff. I forget what the the acronym is for but Basically, you know, they're the drug enforcers for the federal government They don't have their budget is like half a billion And they let that literally is not enough to you know in a single year to bust Just the pot dispensaries in la much less the whole country. That's the legitimate, uh, you know You know, we're operating in broad daylight pot dispensaries in la. They don't have the budget to bust all of them And so it's like you're like so like yeah, theoretically they could and it would be Like really bad, you know bad pr for them But there's also just going to like completely bankrupt them Then they have to give up on literally everything else in order to do that So, you know, it's like that you're talking about very very limited Uh ability to enforce this and like yeah, they could do it on a one-off basis here and there But you know as a broad policy. No, they they don't they simply do not have the budget to enforce and enforce the law everywhere and so Like, you know, what I would be saying like here with the anti-tax like how would they get that money? Well, basically they can have their own taxes and But you know, they kind of already do that's the point So who can have their own taxes individual states? Uh, you know individual states they collect their own taxes for themselves They do not need to go through the federal government for that So it's not like the you know, there's one tax collector that comes and everything comes into a big pool And the federal government and then it gets distributed down to the state and local governments As I know it's like these governments can collect taxes for themselves. And so they don't really need each other and The but you know, so like where would like it like at the local level You know, there's usually like eight to 14 months of taxes just sitting in the bank That's like sitting there year after year that they've already collected That would be like the first place I would go because you know to get the money for these For these anti-tax funds is that hey, they've you know, this money has already been collected. You're never going to get it back And it's just not going to happen even in America and You know and right now it's kind of just sitting there gathering inflation instead of interest because it's in some You know glorified savings account basically And you know, you may it like if you're lucky it might be invested in t-bills or something like that And it was just like still getting like zero interest so Why I mean, this is a terrible situation You are guaranteeing a loss in purchasing power to the to the american people That's right. There's just big pools of money literally doing fucking nothing but decay Pretty much It's like and like usually there's 19,500 municipalities in the united states Nearly all of them, you know, unless you're like in a really really poor area You know, they usually all have some sort of savings in the bank, you know And that's kind of just sitting there and I think like well, why don't we just turn that into a a you know, a you know, like an anti-tax fund that can actually Invest in these, you know, like appreciating assets Yeah, definitely like if if a financial advice if that was someone's personal bank account a financial advisor They say what the fuck are you doing put this in something that's going to make you money Exactly and I mean it's like when these laws that the laws that are on the books right now that prevent them from doing That they were written like, you know, like a hundred years ago when interest rates were were way higher And so the law itself actually made sense is that no, you're only allowed to invest in these You know certificates of deposit and these interest bearing accounts and stuff like that because they're like ultra low risk And we don't want you Taking risk with the taxpayer money when there's this other option over here That actually makes you good money above inflation and since the like particularly like the last like You know, basically basically since 10 since uh, you know the turn of the century We've had basically zero interest rates to where these, you know, accounts really didn't make sense anymore And like these laws just haven't made sense for 20 years and I'm saying well, well, hey Yeah, we still don't really like the idea of letting uh You know governments take risks with taxpayer money. How about we have this system with you know, a bunch of anti-corruption? rules a bunch of anti-conflict Yeah, anti-conflict of interest rules and you're gonna we're gonna be investing in real assets that are not inside of your own district And you know, like, you know, I mean, there's all these ways you can you can do it that basic, you know, a pretty normal Uh, you know pension fund basically for the state and if this thing's going to be gaining Interest, you know above and beyond and you know, that's generating return for the taxpayers We could use you know some of that to just, you know cut taxes for the people and so Really saying like things like anti-nepotism laws would be absolutely necessary, right? Yeah, exactly and you know, and those are pretty pretty simple and easy to do And particularly if you're doing it at the state level for somebody else See politicians generally don't like to give away their own power they usually like to give away other people's power and So that's kind of why I'm doing I'm doing it this way is that hey, it's regulated at the state and federal level because at every level They're giving away, you know power that doesn't belong to them. They're giving away power for the other guy And so the you know at the lower end of this at the at our local government level They can just uh say, uh, you know, it's like, all right. Well, we've got rules we have to follow because the guy's up top said so and I'm sure they'll they'll still try to find ways to corrupt the system But even if they were to try to corrupt the system because there's like 19,500 of them and there's really really stiff competition between them Like the uh, you know, if if one of them or a few of them go bad You know, they're going to lose all of their people to the next to the next door neighbor because You're in the United States is really really big It's it's it is a pretty big deal for you to move your family from one state to the next because it's kind of far away Yeah, but if you know if you can just move like four or five miles next door to the next municipality That's not going to screw you over and it's going to you know, do a better job That's really easy to do that's that's very doable And so that you know, would you look at like the uh, you know, what's the local tax rate? You know on a municipality by municipality basis or even like a county by county basis They generally don't vary that much from one from one, uh, neighbor to another And you know if you want you when you get farther away is when you get variation But you know just on a on a per you know and on a one to two to three to four, you know basis You know, they just they don't vary that that much there is variation But it's just it's not huge and so the reason for this is again There's intense competition here that you know, it's very easy to move your family You know five or ten miles much more difficult to make it like a hundred miles But you know, most people can manage a five or ten mile move You know if they're going to get like a 25 percent tax cut tax cut or something like that, you know, I mean and so and if you wanted to what And there are other ways of funding this thing too like hey if you want to uh say that that how about uh, You know instead of paying this money to the federal government, uh, you know as as like your federal taxes What if we put it into it, you know as kind of a pass through We were going to put this thing in the uh You know, you're going to give this thing to the local government first They're going to invest it for like three to five years in a you know In a pretty in a very safe portfolio to where it's making above inflation and stuff like that And you know and whatever returns it generates, you know The local government gets to keep and maybe the federal government gets to keep a portion of that too as a compensation for the time payment And then the federal government still gets that principle at the end of like the five years So they still get their money and they get a little bit of interest with it And is that just for the sake of basically conflict avoidance? Uh, yeah kind of but it's also like you could fund you could literally fund it this way to where they're still getting all of their Tax money, they're even getting a little bit extra tax money But they're just having to wait a little bit longer for it and by waiting a little longer for it You know, they uh end up helping maybe some poorer districts You know get you know fund their federal fund their local government activity is a little better And so that's a less of a burden for the people That's that are poor and they're able to maybe get a little extra leg up and so like you know and with uh Like the poorer districts you're kind of assuming it's already going to be They're not they're probably not taxpayers. They're probably net tax takers anyway So whatever money they're giving you really is kind of trivial compared to what you're giving You were already giving them So you might as well, uh, you know, let them try to pay their fair share a little bit more You know, and this is a way of doing that. So, I mean, it's this is a way of turning, uh, Dis you know poor districts, which are like net tax takers into Maybe a little bit less net tax takers and possibly even taxpayers And so at us the federal government or as a state level government You have you pretty have a pretty decent incentive to want that Like you you want to be taking in more than you're giving out because again, that's still the incentive of of a statecraft So I think what I can really see here is That's so there's an objection in the chat, which I can answer I think for you is so give money back give that money back to the taxpayers if Sometimes you I've come to accept you will have to accept the lesser of two evils That money sat there. You're never going to get it back So would you rather it just rot there or would you rather it be put to use and you get tax less going forward? I think that's such an easy question to answer Very easy question to answer and like it it really is kind of just looking at it Uh in a kind of clear-eyed engineering lens and understanding that Yeah, this is an immoral institution. They're going to screw me over and You know, do I have any say in how I'm going to get screwed over and can I get screwed over less? Are there ways of you know working at working this out that you know, I can You know, they can get their money and I can keep mine. Is there any way of working that out? I say yes, and I think this anti-tax is a pretty good way of doing that to where You know, they still get their money and you know, we get to keep our money So what exactly do you think would happen if the anti-tax had rolled out like all across the country? What would what would be the knock-on effects from this? uh, the first thing is that Because it's you're basically flipping the order of the way a normal tax cut works The way a normal tax cut works in america is that you the government gets a drop in revenue up front And you know and then they pay for it on the back end through economic growth The way that and this kind of flips that order because it sort of that that that is a time preference thing right there The state has an extremely high time preference Yeah, but they still will cut taxes every now and then so it's like they they they do have this You know justification that they will use every now and then for low time preference And the and the way that the anti-tax is a little bit better is that you you're putting the growth up front Like they don't get the cut until the growth has already happened And then after the you know the cut happens then they get further economic growth So they're actually getting growth on both sides And so yeah, not only do you get a a real tax cut? You know kind of up front and they don't have actually have to have a drop in revenue You know they also get an increase in revenue on the back end as well through the economic growth generated by the tax cut So like this is actually a much better way of doing tax cuts You know, you know particularly from their point of view as you know having a time preference for power In a sustainable way like a tax cut they can actually last more than just trying to buy your vote for this coming election Exactly And yeah, and because you know my local government is the one, you know, who's highly in charge of it and they're high And they have a high incentive To you know, because it's really easy to unelect them as much more. You know when the at the federal level is very difficult to Uh unelect your politician Yeah, and whereas at the local level at the mayor is a real fucking easy and It's really really stupid simple. And so the first consequence would really be you actually have some sort of influence on Your tax rate and where your money goes and some actual political autonomy Yeah, and like better than nothing Yeah, like I mean you could know and I mean it's to the point that the competition is so stiff that it it is to the point that this would literally be a race to the bottom In terms of of local governments trying their hardest to pay your taxes for you And so if you move there, right, that's the whole principle Exactly, and it's real easy to move from one place to another I mean even look now at the exodus from california to texas and they're like texas doesn't fucking done anything They just continue doing what they've been doing forever Yeah, pretty much. I while they were already a really really competitive state that again They have they have this business this practice as part of their part of their state The way their their state runs its affairs is that they will literally get the governor the mayor the county official They will get all of the decision makers in one room and fly them over to the You know to another state's a big corporation with a big employer with like five or ten thousand jobs And say hey if you move your state your business to our place, we're all going to give you a like a huge tax cut So like texas is like that, you know texas in florida the two big states that really really do that well And so and you know by installing this anti tax i'm literally giving them the ability to do that kind of on steroids And so it's like this is something they've already been doing and i'm just giving them a much better way of doing it Yeah, and well Yeah, but given the cut now there will be actual More competition from this and you can expect this sort of political strategy to be done much more widespread I can see all of that. That's super interesting Of course because this is a permissionless protocol that we're still getting into the You know, hey the left is kind of gonna have to adopt it too or else So it's like they're they're you know, I you've basically invented a way You know or at least what i've what i've invented is a way of paying people To behave more like right wingers behave a little bit more libertarian and they're just paid to do it They don't have to understand they don't have to read Rothbard. They don't have to understand anything They just have to be willing to accept the paycheck So in in the current state of affairs like uh when it comes to controlling the speed of time preference There's only an accelerator pedal at the moment. This is at least a brake pedal I mean, this is like the full steering wheel that you could physically reverse this thing No, seriously because like what the the reward condition is low time preference for power That means that i'm well that that's always the natural outcome of competition And that's just what you're trying to create Exactly. I mean, this is a a a very strong incentive to have a to you know pay governments To behave a little bit more like libertarians and it's really only works in america because of our federalized system Like this would be very difficult to implement in europe simply because you know, they don't have that Their government structure is very different. Yeah, wow I was gonna say i'll try and get thinking if there's anything I can do here But i'll i'll reach out to a bunch of people because this is super interesting. Um Yeah, it definitely seemed well, I was gonna I was about to say it definitely seems feasible But that is different than what I was going to say. It definitely seems like a good idea in terms of feasibility I was going to ask so one of these questions I got right here. I feel like I've already answered it in my own head. Um It's to do with the the fealty to the gop now. I can see that more because you've given a very Very reasonable Well, I don't know support or Infiltration whatever you'd like to call it. So I was going to ask In regards to the gop fealty, why would you not make the b line to To secession and support something like the free state projects I've I'm just throwing that out there for a conversation piece because I can already imagine plenty of the answers, but I have a lot of issue then so the whole reason that uh secession won't work is the reason you have to do it in the first place You know because there's a this is a permissionless protocol and they're not asking your permission to like predate on you and When you try to secede It's like you're kind of call it you're kind of like forcing them to to take the mask off and say Okay, we really weren't going to give you the permission here We kind of said you had it but we were lying and now you've like you've called our bluff and yeah We were lying and we're coming after you now and the south tried this already and You know where they you know where they said oh, it's like I mean this is a confet that you know the Uh constitution allows us to secede. It's like Really And yeah the uh you know like literally that you have like uh That one quote that you know Men have that you know from our Declaration of Independence written by thomas jefferson It's like you there's a really funny meme out there that has that exact quote You know with uh jefferson davis who is you know who was the president of the uh american confederacy Because like literally something he was saying all the times that yeah, of course we have this right look it's in our Declaration of Independence and Like literally after the war jefferson davis what you know like he was offered a pardon by uh You know both president link and i'm president uh Andrew johnson after him and he refused to take the pardon because he said i haven't done anything wrong I want my day in court because he what you know, he you know He wanted to uh have his trial because he knew he was completely right within the law and they and they literally kept him in jail without trial for over a year until they until the uh, they finally gave it to him and they and the judge just like dismissed it Like do you think that was like a naive optimism or like putting your foot down and trying to make a point Oh, he was trying to make a point Right. Yeah, I was like literally they like slaughtered half a million of his people That's like he's kind of upset about that Yeah, it's a it was a big deal to him There's a big deal to the south when the north like kind of gang raped and pillaged their way across the south We were really upset about that. It's a big deal for us and so the uh Yeah, so like he like was like literally like trying to make a point of like you just mass murdered and raped and killed all of my people and so Yeah, I want my day in court And you know, it's like I'd rather go down. I'd rather go down with them Even if you give me a sham trial, I'd still rather have that. I'm not touching your pardon. I did nothing wrong right and so like uh, yeah, you can't we could make like a beat like today We could make a beeline first succession, but we've already tried that. We know how this is going to work and So, you know like I we we know this is this not really a choice. Well, you know, there was the whole Yankee and southern identity and I think that was a large proportion of getting either side to fight It seems to me I can only you know gauge this from afar American identity seems to me to be just like purely What is the shared American identity? It's like fourth of july fireworks Who will actually go around killing other people for the name of this is for the union I don't see that happening these days They said the same exact thing back then the way that Well, I mean the way it ended up happening was that uh, uh, uh, Lincoln had to staff his army with immigrants They did he could he could not get northern americans to fight Yeah, and so what he did was we were having a whole bunch of irish and german immigrants who were coming That would have been my guess. Yep. That was exactly how he did it is he went and got the the irish and german immigrants to Fight the battle for him in exchange for citizenship and all of that other, you know perks And so literally it's like americans did not want to fight, you know, even like And uh, you know and the civil war was not about it was it was a tax rebellion You know, that's that's all it was is that the uh, you know, the southerners were tired Yeah, basically what what had been passed was called the terror from abominations where You know the 85 percent of all the tariffs would be paid by the south and like like five percent of the revenue would go to the south The other 95 percent of that revenue would go to the north And so it's literally just like you could not be more blatant in how they were just robbing the south of like massive amounts of money and so And this has been going on for like, you know for decades at this point So I was like this but this wasn't new This is like they've been doing this for a really long time and we're just like sick and tired of it And it was only after the war that they said, oh, this is actually about slavery and this is kind of Vision is a revisionist history of it of it And literally like you have during the war where like that, you know, if you were to say that You know that that they're trying to end that this war is about ending slavery You would be arrested by abraham lincoln for you know as a as a as a southern subversive propaganda And well, so isn't it right that the emancipation is he he owned the emancipation only freed the slaves in the confederacy not in the north Yep, correct That's 100 correct So it's like both sides had slavery and only one and so I mean it was all about the war and like lincoln would If you had said this this war is about Ending slavery lincoln would be like that is southern propaganda. It's 100% not true And The confederacy had already declared independence at this point, right? So if if it would have not be like today Joe biden signing a law that says mexico will Will completely outlaw this or that and then mexico's to goes what no no, thank you. It's good. No, fuck you invading How dare you? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah It's exactly how it is and so I mean it's it's you know such like bullshit the way we're taught about that but You know, it's a uh crazy how the good guys always win, isn't it? Yeah Yeah, right Actually, they're both bad guys It's like this is the state they're they're a mafia pretending to be a human rights group and You know, it's like they're just evil. It's game of thrones. They're you know That's a wonderful show because all of the people are bad It's like there are no good guys here. There's no one Actual show about politics There's like and if there's anyone that you kind of want to root for and game of thrones are they're dying real early Yeah, or they can't do anything And yeah, isn't that the op? pretty much so the uh But yeah, it's like so like with my like, I don't know feel tea to the gop It's like I I'm a very very different understanding of that I think they do Because the way I see it is like they're a tool and I'm gonna use them as such and I will spit them out the moment I'm done with them and The uh, it's like there's really no loyalty here At all is it's literally there a means to an end and whereas like the uh, you know the lp It's not any sort of means to any end. I'm looking for And and so like they have far more loyalty to the lp than I do to the gop and Like it's like they just have a completely different world view About do you do you think there are means to any end because the justifications always right? We'll we'll get libertarianism on the main stage. No, you won't they're not gonna let you are lying. What makes you think that? I mean, they're lying or delusional It's like, well, I mean what what it achieves is that you get to be as a good event glory Yeah, it's it's personal vanglory is what they're what they're seeking like they want to be the head of the The third largest, uh, you know put national party, which is virtually powerless I mean you get to be the big fish in a small pond And whatever, you know superficial trivial glory goes along with that and that's that's all it is I mean, I like they there's zero good This is going to do zero good for liberty Like if anything is probably negative because you're wasting resources and but I mean there's personal ends you can achieve with this There's just no good You know, just there's no libertarian justification for this, you know for the Whereas like whereas like, you know, I'm at least saying here's a tax cut You know, I'm gonna use the I'm gonna use the GOP to get a tax because like one of two things are actually reliable on the other being abortion It's like it's like it's like this is like one of two things. You're actually good at and You know, it's like and they're they're decent when it comes to like rolling back regulation, too It's like they're not great but decent and they're really good at abortion at uh, you know countering abortion You got to give them that one And they're also good at giving businesses tax cuts, you know and sometimes to the people, too And like this is like one of two things they're reliably good at so it's like I feel like I'm on solid ground here Saying that here's a better way of doing what you were already doing and this is why you know, we should Be using the GOP as a means to this particular end, which it's it's fairly reliable like giving us so Fair enough All right, how are you doing on time? If you've got about another 20 minutes or so sure Okay, well, uh, I thought we've covered a lot here. I think it's been a very fruitful hour um There are still some things that I would disagree with you on but I'm sure we're grown ups and can live with that so I would wonder if the last 20 minutes uh, everyone watching could probably get bored out of their mind But if you would like to talk about Catholicism, I'm sure this is like right up both of our alleys and probably interest us To talk about more than anything else. So what's your story? Are you cradle convert or what? uh, yeah, cradle convert or I should say cradle catholic and I was you know, I'm a little bit of a hybrid and that I was you know raised as like really hardcore catholic In my private life in my school life, you know from time. I was in like three years old until I was 18 I was at a Protestant evangelical school. Oh, right. Okay. And so it's like I really got like a hardcore understanding of what the scriptures actually say and they were You know, yeah, I was like, yeah, there's a uh, you know some Protestant interpretation that goes along with that But I kind of just dismissed that but here's the exact words of the scriptures And it's like I really really got a good understanding of that and I started teaching myself catholic apologetics When I was like 11 or 12. So I really understood Okay, here's here's what the pots are all getting wrong Early on in life because like like even just not knowing apologetics a lot of this stuff just was not adding up And right when you put a catholic understanding on these uh on these ideas It uh, it makes a much bigger difference as I mean you you really start to see the world the way it really is and so Like uh, like that's kind of where I came from as a you know, cradle catholic raised You know pretty evangelical With you know, who was really good at teaching himself the catholic point of view. So I find there's a quite a lot of like sort of syncretism between Catholics and evangelicals in america in the fact you've got catholics who are quite evangelical personally and like by that I mean probably recite the entire bible off by heart But realize that oh no, this is actually it's our book We don't have to let them just Completely run everywhere with it and also I can trust the church father's Interpretation on what this first means rather than pass the gym And I think that's just it's just a good thing I think there's a lot of strings it can add to the bow Yeah, I mean, I think the the biggest uh You know contribution that you know roman catholicism has to make is that tomistic philosophy to If you if you really want to have a logical and consistent theory of property rights You know, you really do need to found that in tomistic philosophy. You can't do that with a You know with you know naturalism you can't do that with nominalism. It just it doesn't definitely not nominalism No, no, but and that's the problem. That's a one a big problem with uh libertarianism. It's it presumes nominalism to be true It's it's something I've seriously noticed so I was like, oh, you know, there's actually no such thing as society Oh, fuck. No, that's not true. Yeah. It's like there's no such thing as real morality It's like, oh, that one doesn't work at all. And uh, like that. Yeah, it's like, oh, there's no such thing as like your reputation Uh, actually there is it's a virtual object and if you like if you start slandering people They're gonna punch you in the nose and you're gonna deserve it because this is a real part of who they are It's like there's also like that. I mean your your own theory of property Doesn't work if you don't presume the the existence of like virtual objects, which nominalism and naturalism reject Yeah, because like uh, you know, like who is like you say you own your own body like what's you? Like, oh, I'm the self. I'm a soul. Well, does that soul exist anywhere besides your own mind? Just like your reputation Exactly. Well, of course it does. It doesn't yeah immaterial things exist That's something you have to contend with and then that you know muddies the waters a hell of a lot Well, it's like you're saying that the the thing that is the owner itself doesn't exist So therefore how can you have how can you have self ownership without a self? Because like with how can you have you can't have you have a self with materialism Yeah, you can't oh my my brain owns my body. Well, your brain is your body. So there's circular reasoning Yeah, exactly. And so it's like it doesn't even work with it. It's not even consistent with itself So I mean, it's an incoherent philosophy, you know As it's constructed. So it's like when I'm saying, hey, I don't like libertarianism the way it's constructed at all It's like it literally it's like not even consistent with itself You know for you know, so it's like it was like, yeah, it does need to be It's like you can have libertarian ideas and libertarian philosophy. You just can't be consistent about it And unless you're going to be grounding it in a more Thomistic philosophy, which you get from the catholic church Yeah, I think you're right. So I there's just no way to do it if you're uh, Well, no way to do it consistently and supposedly these people care about that sort of thing. So I thought I um I thought I I was understood philosophy like uh before I became catholic I said no, I really fucking didn't I didn't know what metaphysics was And that's the big problem. This is the enlightenment and Protestantism coming through in a lot of libertarian presuppositions Metaphysics has never touched and that's just because rene day car one day said, oh, yeah, it's not true And everyone's just ran with that and built a fucking house on sand Yeah, oh, I love the comments here that oh, it is consistent. You don't understand it. Well, okay, tell me Where is yourself? It's like does that exist anywhere besides your own head? Yes or no, it's like, you know, hoppy an argumentation as this. I love that argument. I use it all the time You know, but you know gods You know, you know God owns himself that is untransferable. His rights are where all of our rights come from So you can argue against God's rights and you can argue even against God that exists The problem is that uh, you know, you're the But in the act of argument self presumes, you know presumes that your own fault that your argument is false So, yeah, I love hoppy an argumentation ethics. See how see try that one on for size It's like it's like, yeah, it's like you're if you want to argue against that you're arguing against God's rights and you know, you're wrong. So So something I want to ask you then your Twitter name is uh, Andrew Pierce politically catholic. So Politically catholic, I tend to think normally means feudalists and distributists as those are the uh, the systems that have most been endorsed In the history of the church. What do you take politically catholic to me? Um, a lot more monarchist And the uh, I say, you know, like which ones were which one was the actual catholic system that built western civilization from the ground up It was monarchy and you know, if you really want to say, okay Well, what was the biggest debate for the first thousand years the trinity? And how does that one work? It's like, well, okay, we say, you know, christ is king and we also say that there's one god so it's like, uh, so What you actually see in like in a like a corporate, you know, what monarchy really means to the trinity is that actually you have three Three parts one god Three parts one king or three persons one king and so You know, what you end up get with is like, well, what does what should a monarchy actually look like? It should look like a corporation because you have three groups customers management and shareholders Those are three groups that you get and they where you have all of their incentives perfectly aligned and therefore you You know, like you have they're effectively one. They're unified So because so like, you know, if you had a catholic monarchy that was shaped like christ the king You would have to say it has to be a tripersonal group And that that has its incentives completely unified. That's why I would say i'm a corporate monarchist I'm a catholic monarchist and Like, you know, like the name popular liberty is kind of an ironic name It's like if they haven't figured that out by now, like you really should By the way, I've read human action. I've read man economy and state. I read all of hop up basically I've read way more than you, you know, mr lull burden in the comments And as I I've read all of that stuff and I and I can tell you that if you had read it Then you would know that, uh, you know, all those stuff I'm I've been saying for the last hour and all that is not in it because this is what libertarianism is an incomplete philosophy I mean even at its base core it is incomplete There is no use in denying that, uh Like we said like we've said at the beginning, uh, how it's seen as a legal theory and not a moral one Whether it's an incomplete philosophy as that being a bad thing is a different question, but you can't deny that's what it is Yeah, and you like even rothbard and and uh hop it would say this so the I So like that, you know that this is an this is never meant to be a complete thing And of course there's a bunch of law birds who want to turn this into a secular religion So that's like, yeah, maybe you should just like go read the bible or something like that. I don't know But it's still true. Like we said earlier a neither left nor right libertarian is left And if you take this incomplete philosophy as a as a complete one You just you just turn into secular materialism and Yeah, I mean, that's why they're called the moral materialists, you know, and they're not even all that moral So and they're much less consistent so the uh and like oh utilitarianism is a philosophy well that You're presumed. I mean that kind of presumes liberalism. You know, he's he's saying utilitarianism is a is a is a Philosophy like okay, you're you're assuming that morality is not causal right there. That's nominalism. That's naturalism See, you know, ito mist ito mist would say that yes morality actually has a causal existence Which, you know, libertarians must deny if they're going to be real libertarians and if the So but even let's let's just take that presupposition that okay morality does not have a real causal existence So let's you know So now we're left with you must either be a utilitarian or you must be a first principles guy Well, the problem with denying utilitarianism denying consequentialism is that your bio is that it's presumed in your biology Which is like evolution by natural selection So it's like yeah by even denying utilitarianism denying that you know, this cut this consequentialism You are you are literally presuming your own falseness So you could not possibly have a first principles ideology that does not have you know god as its roots Because this is The only way seems to be some wires crossed here So I think it's true that libertarians do not need to deny moral realism when you say libertarians Are you assuming sort of like libertarians full stop who take this to be a complete philosophy? Or do you mean anyone who's a libertarian? Has to assume a materialism naturalism is that they're presuming a false dichotomy That's the argument i'm making right there is that that is that the utilitarianism First principles dichotomy is a false dichotomy If you assume that morality is causal if it has a real causal existence Causal existence, then it's a false dichotomy, but they deny that they must explicitly deny that if they're going to be a True libertarian Libertarianism must necessarily presume naturalism and nominalism as it Yeah, because otherwise you start getting a whole bunch of of very very different Rules about civilization like okay if morality has a causal existence and like That start saying then it doesn't become the non-aggression principle anymore. It becomes the non-sin principle That's where it comes from. It's like this is why the catholics will say for a thousand year I should like 2000 years error has no rights because error has no real existence Well, yeah, something which is uh false is not real and it just simply doesn't exist Yeah, I mean it has it's not real so And that an act of sin has no real existence therefore it cannot possibly have a right to sin It's it's it's logically impossible and you know and so You so as libertarians, this is why you get to like the value-free, you know economics, you know quote quote Is that the uh, you know, they have to deny You know a any the They have to deny platonic realism. They have to deny the existence of god They have to deny the existence of virtual objects And so and because that's the only way you can start justifying things like oh, yeah I totally have a right to tell lies about, you know another person. I have a right to You know like, uh, you know blaspheme. I have a right to Uh, you know fornicate. I have a right to you know take whatever, you know narcotic drugs You know I want and whereas in a more Thomistic philosophy It's like no your parents would actually have like a veto right over most of that stuff And like it's not not only be a violation of their rights to be also a violation of god's rights because in the natural order You know, you are basically your parents, uh, you know retirement policy. This is why they're insane This is why they're incentivized to have 10 of you is that if one of you is a bad investment The other nine can kind of make up for it. It's a diversification of your assets And you as and and then if you were to say that oh, well, I you know by assuming naturalism and nominalism Therefore I can deny all of that that family's kind of just a a name. I give to something I don't actually have a real connection to you and I don't have to You know be the uh, I don't have to be your retiring policy Even though you are my survival policy for like the first like 18 to 18 to 20 years of my life And the uh And so like uh, you know, I don't have to pay you back for that at all And whereas in a natural order you would and if in a Thomistic order, particularly you would and they would have a real right To enforce that against you Yeah, and it has to come from the assumption that there's no such thing as responsibilities or duties and again Not one of them Yeah, I have come to see how many presuppositions have to exist that I just cannot find to be Feasible and that they are normally nominalism and naturalism, but I don't think that any of this Has to be intrinsically libertarian. I think this is true of a specific kind of libertarian But it's it's like the ones of the comments section I don't know. Casimir is a very interesting guy. He loves near reactionary stuff And I think that there's just too many wires getting crossed when you're using text versus voice Not the time there's The internet and especially text-based forms of it. I never replace to reach any sort of real consensus But I think that there is more to this I think I'm agreeing with most of what you're saying. I just don't think it applies to every libertarian for there I mean, you can who will never address these presumptions and That they're just if of course if you start walking down the wrong road, you're going to keep going in the wrong direction Yeah, I think if if you're just like you just can't be consistently A both like if you want to be a christian and you want to be a libertarian, you just can't be both You know, like you have to be more one than the other and you can you can totally be an inconsistent libertarian and that's fine And that and you know, we have plenty of them so the yeah, the uh Like yeah, a lot of these critiques. They don't apply to all libertarians This is why I have a following You know It's like, yeah, it really doesn't and a lot of and the more, you know, they hear my ideas The more they hear my points and like, oh, yeah Yeah, I really have to go, you know be the one and not the and not the other And but if I be the one, you know that I can still get all of the the things I really sought out libertarianism for because the people who really care about Morality and they you know Like even if you're going to say hey libertarianism has anything to do with morality at all Well, okay, that puts it onto a moral playing field and you know, who are the other Contenders in that field is like, okay, Roman Catholicism orthodoxy even Protestantism is a are much more more competitive moral philosophies than libertarianism so the The moment you say this is anything besides a better system of law, you know, then You know, that's just functionally better for you know for humans and functionally better for property and whatever the moment You say it's anything more than that Then the a whole bunch of these people are trying to do is they're talking about a hapa and argumentation ethics That is a moral ethical argument. You're talking about right there ethic, you know, it's in the word It's in the name So it's like the the moment you try to make it anything more than a legal philosophy You're like you have to take on the 800 pound gorillas of like the catholic church You know, it's like this is the trouble how it is only libertarians who think there's a difference between morals and ethics That's a problem. That's a big problem. But then so Even leftists don't do that No, but I imagine you don't know a whole lot about my positions But I am a catholic and a libertarian and a moral realist and a thomist What do you think I would have to what positions of mine would be inconsistent? I think if you're exploring nrx philosophy, you're probably on the other side of liberalism already you're probably uh, it's like because I I do think that the nrx philosophy is quite a lot more consistent with uh, you know, roman Catholicism and the uh Because I think you've moved once you get hit in rx you've moved out of the liberal tradition I still don't see what's contradictory But a whole lot because nrx is a bunch of different people with a bunch of different positions But I don't see with a broad brush What is inconsistent with libertarian legal theory or reactionary philosophies? Well, I what you're kind of presuming is that humans really do need leadership And when you start presuming that uh, like hey, that that you know It's really not this simple. There's actually a lot more to this that they really want You're going to like you've kind of opened the door to okay. What else is there? What is that then? Uh, you know, there's uh, you know, the things you need like, you know, family religion god culture all that stuff as I you said that you know, there's all of these other characteristics that You're actually a liberty a pure libertarian ethic really can't account for very well And that you know the first and now when you say, okay, they need some sort of human leadership They need a provider of order and you know, we just want to have that as a you know as basing itself from private property It's like You've kind of you've kind of given away the you've given away the game You've you've shown that oh, they really uh, they can't provide this liberty for themselves And maybe they should have it, you know, but they they can't you know They're they need someone to supply their natural rights for them I don't see what like so where initiation of force as I would Um understand it would have to come in there because I am at the point that every near reactionary gets to you We realize are the ordinary person just doesn't actually fucking care And we have to go around them rather than thinking that there are ticket to the top Kinda well, you know where I would put one thing in is you know the question Because it eventually it gets to okay. Well, what do you do if uh, you know Like someone breaks their contract and you want to physically remove then where are you physically removing them to? Assuming that nobody else wants to take them now They're just you can't push that you know that person onto somebody else's property Because then that's the you know, that's an aggression. That's the problem. What do you do with that? It's like eventually There's gonna you know You have to get to a point where you you say, okay There is going to be quite a number of people that can't be physically removed. What do you do with them? And at that point you're going to have to accept that You know imprisonment at that point, isn't it? Uh, I mean, is that not an aggression? Is that not an And in a illegitimate initiation of force under libertarian philosophy? Um, I don't know. I I'll have to go back. I know for a start. You're a fan of uh, algorithm Is that right? No, no, no, at least well and they can see some usefulness in it Yeah, I mean I see a lot of utility That's all right, but I know the conch in the head of that had a whole like theory about Imprisonment and how that could be justified. I'll have to review that But I don't think it's a death blow by any means Yeah, a lot of you know, someone like Rothbard and you know hopper They're they're gonna disagree with you like say if you take like a bob murphy or a You know steven stefan cancella that what they would usually say is well there's going to be someone who's willing to take them and say that You know, hey, I have a private work camp way over here. You can send them over here and Well, what I mean like what do you get with the you know if they if they don't want to take them? What do you do? And and so they can say that oh, well the market will supply somehow and there's just like they kind of wave it Like a magic wand like oh as the market will supply and it's magic and Not good enough It's like if you know this there's people out here who are complete You're talking about people who are completely unproductive And you cannot make a profit on them. They are going to be a pure cost Like even it's just like a homeless person with you know, who's like a crazy Maybe they'll get charity and maybe that charity is not enough. What do you do? And eventually you're going to be running into the need for force no matter what what if there's no one Yeah, a person in the chat asked hey, what if there's no Unclaimed land you mean like a desert so I can just physically remove them to a desert where they're going to die How is that not an aggression? It's like how is that not is like you literally put a yo, maybe I can you know, why is it have to be land? Why not some unclaimed ocean? Why don't I just like drop them in the ocean? What's the problem there is like they're going to drown Yeah, I can I've heard the cases that things like that aren't aggression, but you can't You know, I think it's like a situation without a difference Yeah, that's true that eventually You're gonna like you're because you're doing something that's like necessarily going to kill them and I was like I think that's just Ridiculous to say that this is not a that you haven't done something really wrong or that And you're going to have to confront this problem that That some amount of force is probably always going to be necessary because again evil cannot have rights If you're saying that that uh evil has rights at all You're you know, like you're going to be wrong and this is where an initiation of force might actually be warranted It might actually be a good thing, you know to where like You know like it's saying hey if a if a kid doesn't want to uh, you know, take care of his aging parents And the parents you know say like hey that you're my retirement policy is the whole reason I had you And this is the natural order and hey, mr. State You need to come enforce my rights for me because we have a context and you're going to do that And evil has no rights what he's what my kid is doing is evil and you need come enforce these rights and I would be like Yeah, all right. I'm going to come enforce those rights And because I'm the private state that's what I signed a contract I was going to do and so The and so evil can't but biased nature does not have rights So an initiation of force against them is legitimate by nature And yeah, I think if anyone is confused about this concept of evil not having rights a Fantastic person who really would be saint augustin his And this is probably a good way to get people to start thinking about moral realism like what is good. What is evil? Is evil? its own thing in and of itself or is it a corruption of the good and A privation of it something that takes away from the good I think he must have come in like this guy cast me or must have come in like halfway through because we already took You know, I took apart the island analogy, you know with ropens and crusso and all that Yeah, I've again. I've read rothbard. I know all about this. Yeah about what you know his island ideology and all that We already took that apart the at the front end of this podcast And I think this guy just hasn't read it. I he's just like started listening halfway through so And like this guy he's you know in the in the chat is also like, oh, yeah, good and evil are subjective That's our answer. It's like, okay. Yeah, then you're you're an idiot and you're wrong And so that is just wrong. Yeah, you're just a fucking idiot and so the uh Yeah, this is like, yeah, you're eventually going to like I was saying before You're going to get to a point where you have to use force and you have and in order to Say that this is moral because you have to say that evil has no rights And that evil is a real thing. Good is a real thing. These both have a real moral causal existence And it is I'm sorry. You you finish what I was saying. I just thought of something good to think of Yeah, but go ahead. Yeah, they both have a real causal existence And if you deny that you're just not being realistic Again, you have to accept moral realism not moral relativism or subjectivism like the guys in the chest do So, okay, so so where we disagree on force is what you some things which you would call a legitimate initiation of force I would say are just only retaliations But then if evil has no rights to it retaliation is still force. It's just legitimate But if you if you use force in retaliation, you aren't the initiator And it's the initiation that isn't permissible No, I don't know about that. It's the uh, I wouldn't say it's the initiation You know, it's like I you know, like if uh, like if a kid doesn't want to, you know, be his parents Philosophy, I mean, sorry if he doesn't want to be their retirement policy You know, it's like has he really initiated any force? I would say no But I'd say what he's done is it's morally wrong and he doesn't have the right to do that And therefore an initiation of force against him is actually a a legitimate, uh, you know a legitimate act Well, it's just to keep just to the terms for the moment though, um If evil doesn't have a right to exist if you used force against evil You would be retaliating against it because it is something inherently aggressive You would not you can't you couldn't say you are initiating force against evil if it is something Which is evil I kind of feel like you're stretching that definition and you you might you be better off using the word sin That sin has no rights error has no rights and you know, that's you know, aggression really has a Limited scope, you know, where it really is force, you know That's being initiated and there's a lot of things that are wrong that are not necessarily forceful Which do not have rights and and force is legitimate to be used against them to a you know, a minimal degree and so like Yes, I like it back in the bible like one of the things they do is like, okay, if you formicated with a girl You know that by law she could force you to marry her Even if it was consensual act of sex, you know, she could couldn't force, you know Force you as a guy to marry her and so could her parents Which is like they're really going to force you and by that was like that was like the law of the punt That was the punishment was that you know, okay You don't have a right to be to like fornicate with my daughter You know that merit that sex must be done within a merit a marital context And if it's done outside of one then force may be legitimately used to force you to marry my daughter and And so like, uh, you know, you could say like, okay, this not only is there really no force here at all They're you know, this was like completely consensual and The thing to tackle this is uh, you see this dichotomy again. I think of um Nominalism and moral realism You can argue this most libertarians would argue against this on the ground that oh, no, there is actually no responsibility You can have sex with someone and then you have no responsibilities towards them Or you can tackle it from the moral realist angle, which will be difficult, but I don't know if it could be Well, it's like I just I have a trouble calling that aggression I mean, it really should be like I mean, I have to agree with cancer me here It's like initiation of violence is really like the definition of aggression I would say and you know, there's no real way around that and I would and I would say hey It's still sin has no rights and at this point, you know, hey initiating force or you know, maybe aggression against uh You know someone who you know sleep through their daughter in order to force them to marry your daughter I have a trouble. I have trouble saying that that's wrong. I would not say that's wrong most libertarians would say that's monstrous and evil and you know, they're just wrong and the You know and like this ideology really is just I don't know if you guys know this but Ideology and idolatry actually they share the same root word Idos, you know for in greek and so when I say that uh, you know When I respond to a man in the chat saying religion is a primitive people's code of uh, law Yeah, I would say ideology is literally pagan idolatry And that's far more primitive than the civilized christian idea idea, which is a comprehensive worldview of how the world works So the uh and to answer the next question in the chat Why is this relevant? Because libertarianism as it's currently constructed. It's not even consistent with itself And again, we talked about this at the beginning of the uh of the conversation of why it doesn't Why I was like, okay, let's say you have self-ownership. Where's the self come from? Does that only exist inside of your head? Just like your reputation which you which you said had no rights So it's like this thing. It's like you you said the thing that owns itself You know is definition, you know, definitely doesn't exist according to you. Yeah, it just exists in your head this is only It contradicts itself if you have a presumption of well just a thoroughly Kantian one which so much Libertarian theory sadly does I just don't think that's necessary. I don't think it's necessary those things contradict Yeah, I I think that you get you end up getting if you Exchange either one of those two positions naturalism or nominalism for their opposites You end up with a very very different Uh ideology, uh, I should say a very different legal theory of how the world should work It's like you have to immediately get rid of blasphemy. You have to get rid of You know saying that that that's not real. You have to get rid of saying slander and libel aren't real Those are real crimes now. Those have to be taken into account Intellectual property might even be a thing because you say hey my reputation. You're not allowed to steal that That's a real part of me And if you say that you are me you're wrong. You're committing fraud And I mean there's all these different things that you have to change Like all you have to throw out basically all of libertinism And you know, which libertarianism implicitly accepts as legitimate again It is a moral relativist ideology is more of a quality of moral equality between good and evil and The moment you say any sort of platonism is Is true then you're going to be uh Yeah, you're going then you're in a uh like you are in a very very ill libertarian space and it's like I I I have trouble saying that this is still libertarianism. It's still very much a theory of property rights You know, like, you know, you could you can easily have like austro-tomism that works very well But you know, and you can have you know, something that is very very libertarian looking But when you really start drilling down and looking at the details It's like this is you know Something, you know, this is a very very different That you know, then normal libertarianism So, okay, I can certainly agree that it it has pricklyvities towards all those sorts of problems Um, whether it's well, it starts at its philosophical roots. I mean, there's you know, wherever, you know And and all of these things have have large knock on effects downstream So it's like you you will I mean like if you would say that okay I have a libertarianism that that basically criminalizes libertinism Is it really still libertarianism? It's like I just like Have a really different difficult time saying that I think that these are now two different two very different things Okay, all right. Well, I can certainly see where you're coming from and I think this has been a fantastic conversation Uh, I'm happy with where we are now an hour and 40. Do you have any sort of closing thoughts or anything? Uh, no, that's about it. Thank you Okay. Well, thank you people for watching. Thank you again very much Andrew for coming on I'm glad we've been able to cover lots of topics and got a lot of fruit out of this at least certainly for me Glad to be here, man Where can people find you? You can find me at popular liberty underscore on you on uh twitter You can find me at popular liberty on youtube. I'm probably going to change the name to politically catholic Yeah, because yeah, but popular liberty again It was always an ironic name because liberty is not popular You know people will trade this thing away real quick For security is like that security is way security and cover way more popular than liberty So it's always kind of a name of that was meant to be a joke But apparently people take it seriously. I'm going to change the name politically politically catholic Uh, probably soon. Okay. Uh, well something Andrew mentioned here is osteotomism I want to give a shout out to calib this this osteotomism thing is a thing that but you and I are kind of like Orbiting and then involve with definitely check that out. It's a I'm looking forward to contributing more to that and Definitely around some ideas But uh, thank you again everyone for watching and thank you again, Andrew. Everyone take it easy