 Well, now for the main event of the evening. Again, the resolution reads, and capitalism would definitely be a complete disaster for humanity, taking the affirmative on that resolution. Yaron Brooke, Yaron, please come to the stage. Taking the negative, opposing the resolution. Brian Kaplan, Brian, please come to the stage. Jane, please close the voting. And Yaron, you can take the podium. You have 15 minutes to defend the resolution. Take it away, arms out. Yeah, there will be a gentleman in front flashing you time cards. Take it away, Yaron. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Jean, and thank you, Brian, for agreeing to do this debate. And I know it's two against one, so. We all know where Jean's sympathies lie. You remember that part of the movie Braveheart where Mel Gibson yells, freedom, what is he yelling? What does that even mean? What's their conception of freedom back then? Is it the kind of idea we have, I think, in this room, of individual liberty, of individual freedom, of individuals using their mind to pursue their values, free or absence of coercion? Or is it the kind of freedom of my gang over your gang, my bloodline over your bloodline? I wanna be ruled by a Scottish king. God forbid I be ruled by a British one. That, of course, is the way the world was for almost ever. Gangs against gangs, there was no, you know, with some exceptions here and there, central authorities that didn't emerge out of civil wars, out of anarchy, out of a situation where people were battling each other for policing authority, for power, security agencies of this tribe or that tribe, battling each other to see who would rule over everyone else. Freedom, as we understand it, is a massive intellectual achievement, intellectual, cultural, political achievement, an achievement of ideas. The idea of individual rights, the idea of individual liberty and individual freedom is a consequence of the thinking of philosophers, of thinkers, economists, for generations. And it's a political manifestation. It's political manifestation was the achievement of a political system that, yes, gave government, created an entity with a monopoly over the use of force, but that limited that use of force, or at least tried to, at least for a period, on some people, it was flawed, granted, of how it used that force. With the idea that this is what was required in order for individuals to have their liberty, to have their freedom, for individuals to be able to be free, because to be free, coercion must be extracted from the equation. Coercion is not something one negotiates. Violence is not something one obitrates. Violence is something that should be avoided. It should be extracted. And what I think the thinkers that brought us the idea of individual rights and that created a country that was based on it, again, with all its flaws, what they realized was you needed a monopoly over the use of force, over the use of retaliatory force, and for force only to be used in retaliation. Now, in my view, to be free, the key concept for freedom is individual rights. It's the idea that every individual has a right to his life. In other words, he has the freedom to act, again, based on his judgment, in pursuit of his values, in the absence of coercion. And the protection of individual rights necessitates a government. It necessitates some kind of institution that actually serves to extract that coercion from society. An institution that subordinates society to this moral idea of rights. That doesn't just happen. That's not something you negotiate. That is just something that is. It is a requirement for human thriving, for human flourishing, for freedom. So individual rights necessitate government. In order to borrow physical force from social relationships, which we seem to, I think, all think that's a worthwhile cause, borrowing physical force from social relationship, well, who's gonna do that? How is it gonna be objectively done? How do we agree what force is in every circumstances? How do we do restitution and retribution? All of those need a mechanism. They need a mechanism, an objective mechanism, a mechanism of the rule of law, and over a particular geographic area that requires a monopoly. So one objective law in one geographic location where the use of force is under the control, guidance of an objective law determined by reason. So a proper government is the means by which we place retaliatory use of force under objective control, under objectively defined laws in order for the purpose of protecting rights. Now notice, we talk about capitalism, we talk about free markets, free markets. But free markets assume something. They assume there's no coercion. They assume there's no force, that's what freedom means. Markets to be free have to be free of coercion. So the absence of coercion, the elimination of coercion comes first. The idea that defense agencies can compete on a quote, free market for retaliatory force is incoherent. For free market is one from which force has effectively already been banished. What defense agencies are actually trading in isn't force, in the lack of freedom, in the use of its negation. So freedom, the ability of the individual to use his judgment for his own life needs to be secured by a government that brings that force under some kind of objective control. Now look, I'm not defending existing governments. Unfortunately, our institutions are being corrupted. They were maybe corrupt from the beginning, or at least had the seeds of that corruption from the beginning. But they certainly have been corrupted and government has gotten worse over the last hundred and something years, certainly in this country and in parts of Europe. But the fact that institution has been corrupted does not mean we erase it. We reject it. University is a corrupt. Our healthcare system is corrupt. We don't reject healthcare and reject universities. We go in and fix them. We identify what's wrong. We identify what the problem is. We identify the source of the corruption and we eradicate the source of the corruption. So government today is corrupt. It's just another gang. But to throw it out completely rather than figure out what's wrong is, in my view, a disaster. The absence of government, the absence of a monopoly over the use of force is chaos. It's violence. It's civil war. Force becomes a tool for human interaction. It's not banished, as government should do, but it is embedded in the system. It is something to be negotiated. It is something to be facilitated between the different agencies competing for your dollar in your defense and to retaliate in your name. Not my name, your name. I have my own. How they resolve disputes has nothing to do with rights and everything to do with the power struggle among them. It becomes war. We are politic. And we can see how different entities negotiate. They negotiate until one party feels strong enough to take over the other party. Anarchy gives a new twist to the term hostile takeover. Is there any doubt that the guys with the bigger guns, the guys who are convinced that they could dominate, would try to dominate? And isn't it better for us if our agency has more people under it than fewer people under it? So even the consumers would be supportive. And whatever might get called as rule of law or objective process adjudication, where does it come from? What kind of process brings it about? It's just a terms for kind of an amor truce, momentary truce between rival gangs, each ready to force concessions on the other. And look, anarchy exists today. In every place that government leaves a little room for competing with it, you have anarchy. Government leaves spaces in things that it bans. That's how we get organized crime, cartels, and mafia. And yes, it's competition between gangs, between the mafia, the cartels, and the government. Government being one of the gangs that is being in competition. Neighborhood gangs compete with one another because the police won't go in there. So the space is being left free for them to provide security services, to collect security funds to protect you, protection money. And they have truces, they get together, there's no question. It's not always violence, there's not a war ongoing. They have a truce until somebody sees a small advantage and leaps and takes over. I mean, just go to the West Bank or the Gaza Strip in Israel, in what is not exactly Israel, where Israel has withdrawn in a sense. And what you get is, yeah, you've got a police force of the PLO and a police force of Hamas, and they sometimes negotiate, and most of the time they shoot at each other. And one party usually wins and dominates a particular geographic area, because that's what happens to Anarchy. It turns into an authoritarian state. And then they control that particular piece of geographic area, and they exclude the other. And in that sense, because we have not created an institution that bars the initiation of force, because we have created a new institution created an institution that banishes force, we legitimize its use. You're competing over it. We're protecting different interests. And you can always imagine a security force that is protecting, I don't know, the interests of minorities. I don't know, those who hate abortions and wanna persecute the doctors who have abortions. I don't know what the position of this audience with regard to copyrights are, but I'm sure there's disagreement. Well, my agency wants to protect copyrights, and Brian's agency doesn't wanna protect copyrights. What do we do? Half of a copyright? We negotiate, sometimes. Sometimes we do it. What about sex with children or any other horrific thing you can think of? What if there's a specific agency protecting the people who are willing to engage in those activities? And what if they have big guns and you don't wanna mess with them? Because it's too expensive and it's too costly. And you think there's adverse selection? Sure, but there are markets for adverse selection type risks. And you pay a higher premium, a significant higher premium, so you get the defense you need for the horrific acts that you engage in. But it's all possible. It's anarchy. There's no objective standard of law. There's no individual rights. There's no absolute protection of those rights. So what is right? What are individual rights is now open to competition, can be now challenged in the so-called marketplace. And there's a sense in which today's political system is more similar to anarchy than it is to proper capitalism. We have pressure groups, gangs, trying to get their way. And yes, some of it's money, some of it's votes, but the point is that our rights are not protected. We as individuals, force is not banished from our society. It's competed over by all these pressure groups in our political system, trying to take stuff away from us, trying to take our liberty away from us. We're much closer to anarchy today than we are to true freedom and to true capitalism. Democracy is you do whatever you want to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his, bigger in terms of size. Anarchy, you do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is stronger, more powerful than his. Same principle. I see I'm almost out of time. All right. Look, I know there's a whole literature that tries to explain how all this could work under anarchy. I get it. I, you know, it's a fascinating, fascinating intellectual endeavor. But to quote, to quote on Rand, it's naive, floating abstractions, or in my vocabulary, rationalistic fantasy. In reality, in this world, anarchy leads to violence, war, civil war. It's a complete disaster. Thank you. 15 minutes for the negative, I take it away, Brian. All right. Anarchal capitalism would be a complete disaster for humanity. It's my opponent, Yaron Brooke, who was the one who requested the strong resolution, not me. Still, if I was debating a normal, economically literate human being before a normal, economically literate audience, I would be worried. Fortunately, my opponent is a proponent of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, and this is the SOHO Forum. So we all agree on some basic principles of how markets work. Most notably, rational self-interest, plus free competition, plus reputation, normally yields excellent results for both consumers and producers. Since Ayn Rand and Yaron Brooke embraced this principle, they are sanguine about what libertarians call monarchy, a society where government provides nothing except, to quote John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged, the police to protect different criminals, the army to protect different foreign invaders, and the courts to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. Now, let's imagine a glorious future where monarchy sweeps the world. Here is my question for Brooke. When monarchy sweeps the world, will it be a complete disaster for humanity if multiple independent countries continue to exist? If you answer yes, you're obviously wrong. Before 1945, you might have argued with some plausibility that world government is the only way to prevent World War III. Now we know better. Having multiple independent countries isn't a complete disaster for humanity, even in the philosophically corrupt, horribly status world of today. Indeed, there is now a long list of adjacent countries where the probability of violent conflict is near zero. The US and Canada, Norway and Sweden, even students of history dropped your jaws. France and Germany. So what? If you don't answer yes to, will it be a complete disaster for humanity if multiple independent countries continue to exist? You're stuck with no. And once you say no, the next obvious question is, under monarchy will it be complete disaster for humanity if the world has a lot of small independent countries? If you say yes, I'll respond, why? If you say no, you've already accepted something that is functionally equivalent to one prominent version of anarcho-capitalism. The version I have in mind. A society where businesses contractually acquire sizable tracts of land, then provide police, courts and so on as part of a package deal. When conflict spills over their borders, they adjudicate their disputes much as the United States and Canada do today. If you object, the stronger business will disforcibly impose its will on the weaker business, you've got to explain why the US doesn't forcibly impose its will on Canada, which it obviously does not, for a great rate many reasons. Most notably, A, both sides morally opposed using military force to resolve marginal disputes. B, peaceful diplomacy works tolerably well. C, the cost of blood should exchange the gain even for the winner. Now, you could definitely argue that having lots of small countries in a menarchist world is somewhat inconvenient. Still, if you think menarchy would be a big improvement over the status quo, the net effect of moving from the world of today to a menarchist world with inconveniently small countries remains a major improvement. And a major improvement over the blatantly non-disaster status quo is no disaster. Can you really say that anarcho-capitalism in menarchy with lots of small countries are equivalent? There's only one notable difference. Unlike governments, businesses under anarcho-capitalism have to acquire all their land through voluntary contracts with individual property owners. No eminent domain, no equivocation between democracy and volunteerism. The difference is, in Nozick's word, historical. Did the system arise in a morally exemplary way? Functionally, however, it doesn't matter. Once established, this version of anarcho-capitalism and menarchy with lots of small countries work the same way. Now, what about regular anarcho-capitalism? Where people get personal subscriptions to police courts and so on instead of buying a package deal from the real estate developer? Once you can see that lots of small, menarchic countries can peacefully resolve their cross-border disputes, we can go further. The borders don't have to be geographical. They can be organizational. Right now, for example, if two customers of the same insurance company get into a car accident, the insurance company handles the dispute internally. If two customers of different insurance companies get into an accident, the two insurance companies handle the dispute contractually. The economically illiterate will insist the companies will never agree. They'll fight it out in court to the bitter end. In the real world, however, the insurance industry has developed intricate systems of adjudication that keep almost all of their disputes out of the dysfunctional government courts. A regular anarcho-capitalism would work the same way. If two parties to dispute subscribe to the same protection agency, the agency handles the dispute internally. Otherwise, the two agencies handle the dispute contractually. The economically illiterate will insist. The agencies will never agree. They'll fight it out in the streets to the bitter end. But in an established anarcho-capitalist society, this makes about as much sense as worrying that Sweden will become a dictatorship and invade Norway. Which brings us to the big question of why Sweden won't become a dictatorship and invade Norway. Because for most of its history, Sweden was a dictatorship and did repeatedly invade Norway. Here's my answer to this big question. Suppose that in the year 1200 AD, a swede gave a speech advocating democracy and calling for perpetual peace with Norway. I submit that all of the other Vikings would have laughed at his naivete. They would have laughed at the idea of democracy. If the strongest agarral doesn't win the election, he'll just murder the winner and take over. And they would have laughed at the idea of perpetual peace with Norway. But never the Norwegians say they'll invade the first assign of a weakness. And in 1200 AD, the laughing Vikings would have been correct. When most people expect dictatorship and war, dictatorship and war are stable. And anyone who expects anything else seems crazy. Today, however, imagine that the prime minister of Sweden gave a speech advocating dictatorship and calling for an invasion of Norway. Not only would the other Swedes laugh at him, they'd assume he was trying to make them laugh. If the prime minister persisted, he would be peacefully removed from power. The lesson, in a society where most people expect democracy and peace, democracy and peace are stable. And anyone who expects anything else seems crazy. So what? If you claim that anarcho-capitalism would be a complete disaster for humanity, if it were tried today, like right now, I fully agree. But the problem isn't that anarcho-capitalism fails to provide good incentives, or the system logically collapses into gang warfare. The problem is expectations. Moving from stable democracy to stable anarcho-capitalism is like moving from stable dictatorship to stable democracy. Shifting expectations is very hard. But the problem is the transition, not the destination. Depressing, kind of. The good news is that once we get to Minarchy, the last step to anarcho-capitalism is minuscule. I'm gonna end by showing you how minuscule. Under Minarchy, government provides dispute resolution, rule formation, and enforcement. Many even claim that some or all these functions must be a government monopoly. Yet none of these functions are monopolies even in the status world of today. And most of what government does could easily be offloaded to the private sector, especially when the private sector flourishes in the glorious light of laissez faire. Dispute resolution. Even today, you don't need government to resolve most disputes. If you allow binding arbitration, binding private arbitration, almost everyone with a contractual relation will eagerly opt out of the court system. If government courts declared, we don't handle disputes between people with contractual relations, you should have included an arbitration clause. Even more people will opt out. You near the final frontier when government judges say, your total strangers find will appoint an arbitrator goodbye. Rule formation. Even today, private arbitrators make their own rules. The main limit, no rule arbitration is truly binding because governments can and will overrule you if displeased. Under Minarchy, binding arbitration would have free reign and government lawmakers would have almost nothing left to do. Enforcement. Even today, private arbitrators enforce their own rulings with the reputation, ostracism and bonding. If you don't pay your bills, the main sanction is just a bad credit rating. Under Minarchy, again, arbitrators and everyone else could use these sanctions freely. The final frontiers when government courts say, you signed a binding arbitration contract that allows them to jail you, I have no jurisdiction. Almost everyone in this room is used to arguing for radical free market policies. Almost everyone in this room knows the standard inventory of status objections. Though I'm eager to answer your objections, I think you can answer most of them yourselves using arguments you've already used a hundred times in other contexts. If you think adults should have the right to inject as much heroin as they want and deny the results will be a disaster for humanity, you shouldn't lose sleep over adults' right to sign fully binding arbitration contracts. In the nature of government, Einren called Anarchy a floating abstraction that then claimed that anarcho-capitalism was even worse. One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms since it is obviously devoid of any understanding of the term's competition and government, nor can one call it a floating abstraction since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. Since you've read Atlas Shrugged, you know Einren is wrong. Why? Because Einren herself concretized anarcho-capitalism with great clarity. Remember Galt's Gulch? Rand's Utopia of Greed? Here's how Superbanker Midas Mulligan explained it. We are not a state here, not a society of any kind. We're just a voluntary association of men held together by nothing but every man's self-interest. I own the valley and I sell the land to others when they want it. Judge Naran Gonset is to act as our arbitrar in case of disagreements. He hasn't had to be called upon as yet. They say that it's hard for men to agree. You'd be surprised how easy it is when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade. Fortunately, Rand asked too much. You don't need enthusiastic support to sustain a political system. Even reluctant fatalism will do. Democracy becomes stable once most people expect it to be stable. Minerkey will be stable once most people expect it to be stable. Anarcho-capitalism will be stable once most people expect it to be stable. If and when they do, there will be no disaster for humanity, just the second renaissance. Thank you. Five minutes to rebuttal, take the way you are. So it's interesting, the examples being used. This idea of nations peacefully dealing with one another when there is expectation of nations seems both ahistorical and weird for the time given what's going on between Russia and Ukraine right now. Who would have thought just very recently that in Europe there would be a major land war in which thousands, thousands of people, soldiers and innocents lay dead. So yes, I believe multiple countries would exist, should exist. Do I believe it will always be stable and always peaceful? No, not necessarily. Why? One of the reasons I believe, one of the reasons why a country should have, a government should have a military force that is able to protect its own citizens from those of other countries that might not share in values or where the values would have shifted. That happens too. A stable Sweden might not be so stable in a few years. Just think of the changes, just to take an issue Brian is very good on, that we share, just think of the shift in Sweden on the issue of immigration and how dramatic it has happened in a fairly short period of time. So countries change, the status quo changes. And one, could one imagine the Swedes and the Norwegians going to war hard today, but not impossible, not impossible at all. So I don't get this illusion to other countries. It is absolutely true that if you have a piece of land and you institute law on the piece of land and you institute security on that piece of land, then you're instituting a government on that piece of land. So yeah, corporations buying large stacks of land and each having their own government is government. It's not anarchy, whether that is a good thing or a bad thing put aside, but it certainly is not anarchy. Let's take the insurance examples and the private security examples and the dispute resolutions examples. I mean, all these, yeah, they happen. People resolve disputes all the time privately in a system of government, in a system where there is a law, where there is an understanding of what that law stands for within the framework provided by a reasonably good system of law that we have today, lots of private things can happen. That's the beauty of setting up an objective system of law. Yes, under such a system, there would be some dispute resolutions, some private arbitrations, but there will also be circumstances where people don't agree, where private resolution is not possible, where private resolution deteriorates into violence and where you need an impartial, objective arbitrator to step in and to be the ultimate authority with regard to these disputes. Justice also requires retribution. It requires going out and finding the murderer. That is a tricky, tricky activity. It's a tricky activity under any circumstances, but when you have multiple police forces, multiple system of governance, multiple agencies, the idea that they all can resolve to not have collateral damage in retribution is, I think, again, more of a fantasy than anything else. But what about gold's gulch? Now, it is true. There is one circumstance where I can imagine, and you know, I might be excommunicated for this, but I can imagine anarchy working, right? And that's where everybody agrees. There are no criminals. Nobody ever has an inclination to do anything wrong. A gold's gulch. Where everybody who is there has been pre-screened a million times by gold himself and by everybody else. Yes, you know, you can create a community with friends. I've had friends that have gone really, really bad, but you know, with people you really, really trust and you're gonna sustain it because it's in a novel after all. So they're gonna stay 100% moral throughout. Then yes, you can imagine such a scenario where you don't need a police, but in any other circumstances, we need a government. We need, I see a blank piece in front of me, with no time. We need an ultimate arbitrator for disputes like this. And an objective applier of retribution. Thank you. So there's a couple of big problems with the argument that Iran is giving. Probably the fundamental one is there's just a pile of tautological thinking. We hear a lot of talk about how you need to have an objective neutral arbiter. Well, where do we find that in the real world? Nowhere and ever. So just repeating that the arbiter is gonna be neutral, objective, so on. It solves nothing. The sensible approach is always comparative in saying which of these two systems is actually more prone to problems. And this is where we actually have to get empirical. We can't just sit here and use words in order to feel good about ourselves and to feel good about our prospects. What is this government that is supposed to be so objective and reliable, the impartial arbiter? What government is the impartial arbiter of what happens on earth right now? Not the United States, right? All right, now, just over there again, there's also a lot of talk things like banishing force. Like force is never banished. It's always possible for it to go wrong. Iran himself is saying you think your best friend in the world's fine and then he goes crazy on you. All right, so you got that problem with the countries too. There is no way of locking in through computer programming a neutral impartial arbiter and saying, all right, we got that problem solved. Rather, you are dealing with flawed human beings all the time. And yes, things can go from being seemingly perfectly fine to being quite bad. That said, I will still say that there is such a thing as social science and there's also more importantly, a thing called betting. And if you don't believe that the peacefulness of Norway and Sweden is super likely to continue for a long time, I will take your money because it is going to continue for a long time. I will do a bet on a century. Right now, I guess it'll have to be collected by our heirs, but either way, it'll be an account. There are some facts in the social world that are so reliable that while, yes, we can imagine them changing, it would be nothing short of a miracle. For the US to invade Canada, can you even imagine what would have to happen for that to occur? It's a crazy idea which shows that just because you have the upper hand in terms of physical force does not mean that you are actually going to use it nor that the other side has no hope but to go and build up a defense. If you're wrong, we're right. Canada would have long ago adopted a secret nuclear program to deter the US because they would say, well, what is all this about? Right, the US could crush us at any second. The only thing that could possibly keep them in order is nuclear weapons, but fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and the Canadians realized, no, I think that's the one thing that might mess it up. The one thing that might mess up relations with the US would be if we tried to defend ourselves. That would make them upset, that would make them worried. We will rather be causing the problem that we're trying to avoid. All right, let's see. Ah, yes, on the point of real politic, this is one where your own makes a great point. Throughout most of human history, this story that whoever is stronger is going to just use their strength and take over is not exactly true, but there seem to be a lot of truth to it. And then we have the two world wars that seem to further confirm this ugly story. And then, after 1945, miracles started happening. We have lasting peace between France and Germany. It's not quite as unlikely to go to war as Norway and Sweden, but again, I will bet you at 101 odds against any kind of a serious war for Virginia and France and Germany, this is the first time this has been imaginable in like a thousand years. Now what's going on? And this is, of course, there are so many other country pairs. Basically, every country in the EU, you can be confident they will not engage in any kind of serious war with any other country in the EU. Maybe some proxy war far away, but that's about it, right? This is something that is historically unprecedented, but is a big fact about the social world, how did it happen? And I say the story is that change in expectations. If any country in the EU said, let's go attack some other country in the EU, they would first be laughed at or laughed with, and then laughed at, and then people would say, this person's a lunatic, let's get him out of power. And it seems hard to believe we could have gotten into such a great equilibrium, but so we did, right? So it is not actually historical. Now if you say there's some bad countries of the world, yeah, there are some. But the fact that we have gotten as far as we have since 1945 means that there is room for immense optimism about what the future of humanity is. You know Stephen Pinker's enlightenment now. Think it is a lot more likely the whole world will be like the EU in 200 years than that we will go back to the world of 1800 or 1900 in terms of our foreign policy works. It is just very difficult in the modern world to get away with using force successfully, and not just because of the egemity of the United States, but for all those reasons that I mentioned, right? So normally diplomacy is just a better way of doing it and is worse even for the aggressor itself. Right now finally, remember, it's Yaron that asks for the really strong resolution. He's the one who said he's gonna argue it's a complete disaster of humanity, and he ends up by saying, how do we know that Norway won't invade Sweden? All right, we don't know with absolute certainty, but that's a far cry from the resolution he's supposed to be defending. Thank you very much. Thank you, yeah. Yeah, we now go to the Q and A portion of the evening. There is a microphone and you can line up to ask your questions. We're gonna pose a rule this evening in terms of time that you each, Yaron and Brian, have the opportunity to ask each other two questions at any time. Perhaps you want to just get the audience, but to ask questions, but Brian, do you wanna exercise that option? Yaron, do you wanna exercise that option? To ask a question at this point. No, no, no. Yes, we can let the audience off for a while and then do it. Yeah, I'm gonna exercise moderators, to ask a particular question of Brian. We do, your argument is that, and I gather it's empirically valid, that despite all the wars we see, warfare has diminished, despite the fact that the U.S. did sponsor an invasion of Cuba, that it's invaded a lot of countries, killed millions of people, our country in particular. You are still pointing to this as optimistic because the U.S. is not about to invade Canada. So you think the trends are on your side, is that basically your argument, despite all the bloodshed that has existed and all the invasions the U.S. has sponsored? Yeah, things have improved tremendously. If you were to tell people in 1945 what Europe is like today, they would have laughed in your face. Think they would have said, France and Germany will have perpetual peace, more likely of World War III in 10 years. And honestly, in 1945, I think I would have agreed with them, but events have shown that's very wrong. You've got Pinker Soul story about the pacification of humanity. Of course, it's not gonna happen uniformly and there are still some bad things that are going on, but I think it is totally reasonable to think that in the next 100, 200 years that the whole world is going to look like the West in terms of the extremely low probability of any kind of actual serious warfare between them. Comment from you, Yaron, on that. Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree here really with Brian. That is, I do think the world is amazingly peaceful and it is an immense achievement of the ideas of freedom that led to kind of the creation of governments that for the most part protect individual rights and as part of the consequence of that has been, you know, a respect for individuals, not only in your own country, but in other countries as well. And as a consequence, yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna bet on the odds of Sweden or way, but to say that it's impossible under circumstances, and again, I don't see the parallel. I'm quite willing to concede that we have multiple countries and those countries, particularly if those countries are countries that respect individual rights are gonna exist in peace. Even when one has overwhelming superiority for us. Even when one has overwhelming superiority of force, but that does not extrapolate to the kind of conflicts that exist in the same geographic area. If you have geography matters, space matters, we live in space and the potential for conflicts, a number of conflicts, a kind of conflicts that are potentially happening within a particular geographic area is multiplied exponentially as compared to what happens between countries. And I think it's an issue of both degree and kind. It's a completely different type of scenario. The smaller the countries, the more police agencies have to interact. Of course, if you get down to really tiny countries, they will be interacting all the time. It's not the case in the US that when you have smaller jurisdictions, you see their police fighting it out more often, it basically doesn't happen. Yeah, well that was a question. I mean, the European countries are in the same geographical area. Canada, North America, Mexico, they're in the same geographical area. They're driven across France, it's a big place. Germany's a big place. Yeah, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, who knows why they exist exactly, but yes, they're very small. But generally, these are big spaces. Countries, governments, you know, I have no problem in multiple, it's good to have multiple because it's important that government reign over a particular geographic area. That's where the law applies uniformly on that area. If in the same geographic area you have multiple systems of law, you're asking for conflict. You're defining conflict into the system. And this is why it has to be a disaster. Let me just do one correction. The topic for this debate was genes, not mine. So it was not my formulation. My formulation was something like an alcocapillism is a contradiction of term. Can't have both of them. I must exercise moderators prerogative to declare that every debate at the sole forum, every word is signed off by each debater. I have it as a matter of record that both debaters, including Yaren, signed off on the wording. We do it and accept the word. And therefore, you must stick to the terms of the contract in order to avoid violent conflict. Okay, so. You need to come to the after party to see how this is resolved. So can I use one of my questions now, Gene? Well, I'm sorry? May I use one of my questions? Yes, you're wrong. So you're wrong. On the one hand, you're saying that it's fine to have multiple countries. But on the other hand, all of these dire predictions of what'll happen if one country with greater force goes and wants to do something, the other one disagrees, that exists when there's multiple countries. The only answer it seems like you really got is, well, there'll be an impartial arbiter of there being a super government, but it doesn't sound like you want that either. So all of these predictions of doom hold. Like, if you think they are likely, they hold anytime there's multiple governments. And if you think they're unlikely, then why are you so confident about integral capitalism being a complete disaster for humanity? Well, I said that earlier. I think that the protection of individual rights resides in a particular geographic area. And while different governments might interpret the protection of individual rights differently, it affects the people in that geographic area. One of the reasons I love open immigration and I'm pro-open immigration is the ability of people to choose what kind of exact regime they want, the protection of individual rights to hold under so they can move from country to country. And, and... Right, but you'll say one kind of, well, you'll arm robbers go from one country to another and steal and come back. And then the first country says, we don't recognize it. What do you do? I missed the question. Sorry, I was thinking about my answer. So like, usual case, some French bank robbers go into Germany, rob it, go back to France and then say, oh, we do not, right? Well, our government will protect us. All right, and maybe... Well, first that happens all the time, right? We do have bank robbers who do good at countries that don't have access. Actually, what normally happens is France says, oh, we will protect, we hand them over to the Germans and they can ride. And that's the way they do business. Yes, and they've got to deals. But again, you're ignoring the idea that there is a one rule under one system. What if Germany decided that it was gonna protect bank robbers? And it had a system that it was gonna protect bank robbers and any bank robbers who left France came to Germany were going to be protected. What if in the same geographic area you had an insurance agency that basically said, we're insuring bank robbers, we'll take your money, we'll take a cut of everything you do and we are going to protect you. And we'll apply force in order to protect you from the consequences. How do you resolve that? Ultimately, one defense agency is gonna have to impose itself on the other. Look, this is the same story with France and Germany. Like if France really didn't like Germany protecting some French bank robbers, do you know what happened? They would make a strongly worded letter and then at first nothing would happen and then conditions would gradually deteriorate. Normally, of course, the other side would say, you know, we really shouldn't be making such a big deal about these stupid bank robbers. Let's hand them back over. And that's how it actually happens. That's how the U.S. and Canada deal with each other. Yes, it is negotiation, but you know, notice this is not tautology. I don't just say that these are rational countries and therefore we'll handle it in a rational way. I say this is what really happens with real places of the real world. And by the way, one other thing is, yes. Real places that are really rational because it doesn't happen in other places, right? These are a bunch of crummy social democracies that you and I both despise, Iran. How can you say such good things about these countries? They're terrible. France and Germany and the United States and Canada, these are crummy social democracies. Oh, no. Yes, they are disgrace. I think it's clear. Relative to history, we still live with the best governments in human history. Relative to their moral obligations, we both know they are criminals. I think we could, these guys could go at it for another couple of hours because they're both- Because they agree too much, Gene. They're both, I'm sorry. They're both very lively minds. But I wanna give the audience a chance to ask a question. Please frame it, lack a question, and don't have to identify yourself. If you're addressing the question to a particular individual, say so. Go ahead. Take it away, sir. Could you- Oh, okay, good. You want to completely shrink government down to nothing, which is a very hard sell, in my view. To make your job easier, could you promote the shrinking of government down to the limited level Dr. Brook is advocating, which you would need to do anyway? And then without mentioning anarchy at all, once that limited government is achieved, let it breathe for five years, and then at the end of that, if you're still dissatisfied, then you can push for anarchy. Totally reasonable. Totally reasonable. Look, I'd be happy if we could shrink government 1%. That would be amazing. People say, what's the point of writing your book saying that you should get rid of all government funding for education? Say, to give a little bit of steel to someone that doesn't wanna increase education funding. Right, so yeah, like I'll take what I can get. Honestly, but conceptually the key point is that if you did get down to Minnerkey, that last step to anarcho-capitalism would be almost nothing, especially when you remember the role of binding arbitration. Important thing about binding arbitration is that if we had it now, that would almost be the end of the regulatory state already. Because guess what? I could run a business and my brother could be the arbitrator. And then no longer will any sexual harassment laws get enforced. No longer will any wage regulations be enforced. No longer any safety regulations be enforced. Your binding arbitration get around almost any existing law. Okay, okay, okay. Chris, comment from you, Aaron. Comment, go ahead. Yeah, who's binding it? What's the problem? That is, who actually implements the decision of the court if the parties decide not, at the end of it, to not agree with the binding arbitration with the decision. There has to be somebody who steps in and uses force here. And the question is, the question is, I mean, today it exists, today arbitration exists because there is a final authority. There is a final determinant of the use of force and the application of it. But in Anarchy, it's just, I don't wanna go to jail. So actually not really. I mean, here's the thing, with binding arbitration, there's a really easy way to make it enforceable without government, which is everyone posts a big bond and that's what the damages come out of. That means you don't even need to go to the government in order to get it enforced. If you post a million dollar bond and then the arbitrator says you owe 500,000 and you say I object, well, too bad, we've already transferred 500,000 dollars out of the account because you signed it over to us. Sure, these are easy in these, if it's only monetary, it's easy. If it's smaller than the million dollars, it's easy. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Sure, and I have no doubt that arbitration would exist under any system. Much of this can be done in arbitration. My point is that once we get to Minarchy, a Minarchic government is morally obliged to accept binding arbitration contracts and once they do that, there's almost nothing for them left to do. And that point is like, so all you do is deal with enforcing binding arbitration when one side refuses to go along. That's your job. That is not just like 1% of what it currently does. We're talking about 0.0001%. It's down to next. It's not clear that most people would want binding arbitration. There would be an option of them to get the arbitration done by the state. There's no reason to believe binding arbitration would be better than arbitration. Because government's incompetent, it sucks. Government incompetent, it sucks as the government we have today. That's not how government has to be. And there's absolutely no reason why government couldn't provide that arbitration. It could be one option. Next question. I have no objection to shrinking government as much as we can. As long as it is the ultimate authority, as long as it is the ultimate authority in terms of use of force in a particular geographic area. Next question. Hi, my question, Mike. Go ahead. You hear it? No. Can you hear it? Yes. Go ahead. My question is for Brian. The first conceptualization of anarcho-capitalism where you have these small corporations that occupy a certain territory, it sounds to me a lot like monarchy in a very small form. What's the difference between this capitalist who owns this area and then allows people to rent a part of it versus a king who has an area and has their peasants on the land? I mean, the big difference is just who does it and who's going to actually be good at doing this. So in the real world, we see that when there's competition between monarchies and corporations, corporations win. Monarchies just aren't very good at doing anything in the modern world other than maybe promoting tourism or something like that. So, yeah, I mean, in principle, yes, you could have someone says, I'm the king of Barateria and you can go and move here and be under my rule. I don't think that's likely to be a successful business model because it doesn't work in almost any other industry that I know of. Again, other than maybe promoting tourism a little bit. So if a corporation sets up its territory and says, come here and be a surf and there are people who go there, you're fine with that. So gone individual rights, who cares about individual rights? Who cares about individual freedom and liberty? Well, of course, as long as they did it, quote, voluntarily, they might be poor people who don't have any other options. They come from the South and they go as long as, you know, that's fine. Violate their rights freely as long as what? You realize this is the standard complaint about of every leftist against almost every job that low school people get, right? There's a difference. I, you know, there's a big difference, I think we understand between, you know, becoming a slave and becoming an employee. There's a big difference in how you're treated. There's a big difference in how your rights are respected. And the reality is that even if people go there and become slaves, who's gonna protect them? Who's, why should anybody protect them, right? They went there voluntarily. The corporation can change the law, by the way, and they can change it and turn them into slaves. And who cares, right? So the principle of individual rights doesn't exist under Anarchy. It doesn't exist. Property rights are not being protected. They're being violated at the whim of the monarch, the king. I mean, we might have monarchs under Anarchic capitalism, under the corporation. So the whole principle on which freedom is founded, the whole principle on which individual liberty is founded is trashed in the name of, well, let's see, maybe the corporation can make a living. Maybe it won't. Maybe the slave is not economically viable. Final comment from you a little, to write about that. We can try, we can see. This is more, this is more tautological thinking of you're going comparing actual corporations to a theoretically ideal government. If we're talking about the real world, you say, how do you know the government most group people over? It's like, yeah, I don't. Now, in the case of the business model you're talking about, it's very similar to the company town, which has a very bad reputation, but as noted economic historian Price Vishbeck has shown, company towns actually were fine. Next question. So both of you can respond to this, but if I'm understanding Brian's argument correctly, you're saying that even though most people think anarcho capitalism wouldn't happen here today, couldn't happen, might be terrible if we try to force it right now, that it's conceivable because in 1200, the Vikings couldn't conceive of democracy, but here we have it today. So my point though, you know, to question is that in 1200, even though the Vikings might not have known about it, there were historical examples of democracies and republics that had flourished and gotten along peacefully with their neighbors, right? So they had existed actually before 1200, well before 1200, but I don't know of a single example of an anarcho-capitalist society ever, right? So doesn't the fact that anarcho-capitalism has failed to reify anywhere in the world, in fact, count massively against the probability that it wouldn't be a disaster for them at it? Questions clear, take it away. All right, yeah, great question. All right, so David Friedman, if you were here, would tell you all about Iceland. I think he's probably right about Iceland as being darn close to anarcho-capitalism. I take his word for it, but I don't speak Icelandic, so I'm not going to say I've gone through the archives myself. I would actually just point to not just minarchy, but cases where of private arbitration, private security, where we see that we actually, not only can we get away from government law, but there is immense demand to get away from government law because government law is bad and people would rather deal with something that is more efficiently produced by the business community. Now, by the way, so my argument is not just that people in 1200 didn't realize the world could be really different. Therefore, my idea about how the world could be really different is likely to. That would be about argument. So I am actually referring specifically to literature on what are the incentives under anarcho-capitalism. I didn't have time to go over them in detail, but it is out there. I mean, and just to say, like is it all expectations? No, there's sometimes expectations aren't enough. Like if everybody expects that everyone will clean up the communal kitchen, do you know what happens? The kitchen is filthy because everyone says somebody else will do it, so I don't need to, and then the kitchen's filthy. But on the other hand, if everybody expects that war is not gonna happen, guess what? Then if you push war, you do seem like a crazy person. So again, it is not just this very, this pretty lame argument that things have changed a lot. Therefore, things could change a lot of my direction. That would be just true, but pretty trivial. But rather what I say is actually we can look at the actual analysis, the incentives. Furthermore, I think there are historical examples that are very close, but yeah, it's not gonna be perfect. But then again, guess what? Those Greek democracies aren't such great examples of democracy either, and I think you're wrong about the peace, right? Usual stories, Athens was the big aggressor in most of the Greek wars of the time. Come in, Mary Ellen. Yeah, two things. One is if you're interested in Iceland, I would recommend reading the Icelandic sagas as I did on a visit to Iceland. Wow, the brutality, the violence, pretty amazing how Anarchy deteriorated very quickly in people killing each other's siblings and destroying each other's property. That's what happens in Anarchy when you don't have any kind of rule of law. But... David Freeman says it was 200 years with a lower per capita murder rate than the continental Europe. I tend to believe him. Super skeptical. And again, read the sagas, read the stories. Read the stories of Icelandics right about their own period of Anarchy and the stories they tell about how it was, I think it will be quite eye-opening in terms of the David Freeman story. Had another point, but it's gone, so go ahead. Next question. Just as a demographic prediction from each debater, do you think a large portion of objectivists nowadays, perhaps a growing portion, are anarcho-capitalists since completely consistent property rights adherence presumably means you can't steal from somebody and call it taxes, you can't regulate somebody, and you can't assault somebody and call it regulation, are they turning into anarcho-capitalists whether Ayn Rand would have liked it or not? Yeah, and why don't you take that question first? Yeah, I would say by definition, no. So I don't think you could be an objectivist in an anarcho-capitalist. And indeed, I meant to say this during my talk, but I think anarcho-capitalism is a contradiction in terms. I don't think you have capitalism and anarchy at the same point in time. You're either an anarchist or a capitalist. Anarcho-capitalism requires government as I try to articulate. So no, I don't think there are. But you know, the anarcho-capitalists, as they call themselves, community is definitely growing and a lot of them were influenced by Ayn Rand. I think Ayn would be one of them, right? So people who've been influenced by Ayn Rand and are today anarcho-capitalists, there's a lot of them. People who are objectivists and anarcho-capitalists, they are none of them. You wanna come in, Brian? No, you wanna wave? You wanna come in? No, okay. Totally for Iran, except on the definition. Next question. Thank you both for the debate. I have a question for Kaplan. Could you please share your thoughts on how global trade would function between an anarcho-capitalist country and a non-anarcho-capitalist country? In general, I'm concerned about the practical integration of an anarcho-capitalist country on a global scale. I mean, honestly, I would say that you're likely to get a great pacification of the earth and a moved in a Minerca direction before you're gonna get anarcho-capitalism anywhere. Once that is the norm around the world that countries are, first of all, pacific, and second of all, that most of them are at least in general sympathy with these ideas, then one area going further, I think, will get the same kind of, what's the right word? The same kind of sympathy in fellow-travelerhood that the Soviet Union got from all the socialist-sympathizing countries in the world is like, well, they may be going a little too far, it may be a little crazy, but they're noble idealists, so the fear that they would get attacked by others are taken over. In the world, what's likely to happen is, I think, really low. I mean, worth pointing out, the Soviet Union did not actually suffer any serious invasion until the Nazis. There were some very feeble efforts to unseat them, but that was it, and a lot of it was these fifth columnists around the world saying that it's a noble experiment, give it a chance. A common, again? No, no, okay. Next question. A question for Kaplan, which is, how do we guarantee that the conditions of freedom from coercion exist without a final arbiter, especially when there's some decisions just should not be on the table, for example, you should not be allowed to be an organization that allows child molestation, and even if some people, a large number of people think that's okay, and there are always gonna be a large swath of people that are vulnerable and not capable of making decisions, and also, like, yeah, like, yeah, oh, I guess answer that one first. All right, so this is the real world, so there's no guarantees, sorry. Of course, this applies for both governments and anarchy. How do we guarantee that there won't be any government that goes and starves millions of their own people? Oh, whoops, there were a bunch of governments that did that. There's just no guarantees, right? So the only thing that's sensible is to think about comparative risk. Which system is likely to have a lower risk? This is one where, like I said, if we are in a society where most people think that anarcho-capitalism will collapse, then guess what, it's going to collapse, right? On the other hand, if we are in a world where most people expect to be stable, then it will be stable. How do we guarantee that there won't be any area that allows anything bad? We can't, I mean, like, so right now, actually, I was just hearing the story that in the 70s, Denmark legalized child pornography, and you know what the response to the rest of the world was? Nothing. All right, so that's the real world. Like, there's just no guarantees, sorry. So I think there should be guarantees, and I think that's what we should be advocating. By who? World governments? No, by anything. In a particular geographic area, there should be guarantees. Or at least that's what we should be striving for, that is to set up an ideal that internally says there are going to be no guarantees. Yeah, if some people want to have less children and they get a security agency to protect them, so be it. Then we're negating this fundamental principle of individual rights. This is why it's a complete disaster. This is why it's bad for humanity. That is, in a particular geographic area, we should be striving towards a system that does guarantee that children are not molested. Now, will some children be molested? Yes. Will they be prosecuted? Yes. So that is the kind of system we want to achieve. We want to strive towards. To set up a system which we know, if enough people pay enough money, they will be protected. That is a negation of the whole idea of human flourishing and individual success and liberty. Yeah, what would you think you went to Costco and you said, is this product guaranteed? And they said, well, we're striving to guarantee it. That's the same as not guaranteeing. All right, so yes, I'm all in favor of making the world better and doing a good job, but to me, that's just empty promises, and you've got to do better than that if you promise to guarantee what you can't. But capitalism is. This really is just like the, let's see, in the movie Fargo, when there is the guy who's responsible for having his wife kidnapped, sorry to give the movie away, and then his father-in-law says, what guarantee do I have with this money? And he says, well, the guarantee is, I guarantee you'll get it back. It's not a guarantee. So look, this is just the real world. I'm not going and expressing a blasé or a different attitude to human suffering. I am saying don't make promises that you can't actually back up because you can't. But that's the whole principle of individual rights. The whole principle of individual rights, the whole idea of a government that protects individual rights is to provide that guarantee, whether it's implemented and applied 100%. But that is the kind of system that you wanna build, the kind of system that is defined in a sense of we are going to protect people's liberty. We are gonna protect people's individual rights. And if you set it up without that protection, then you're setting it up for a failure if the standard is individual flourishing. Okay, yeah. Next question. I have a quick follow-up. Excuse me, I'm sorry. Wish we could do that, but we wanna give more people the opportunity to ask questions. Go ahead, sir. This is for both debaters. One method that's been suggested for encouraging competition among provision of security is to allow districts to secede from their historic states and either go independent or join the adjacent state, or state government. Should the United States be allowed to secede from the British Empire? Should Ukraine be allowed to secede from the Soviet Union? Should Crimea be allowed to secede from Ukraine? Should Maine be allowed to secede from the United States and go join Canada? Would either of you go along with that or do you think that is a question? Yeah, you've let off most of the time, so the right of secession can California secede from the US? I said the only reason to secede is if you're moving towards a state of greater freedom. If you're moving towards a state of greater protection of individual rights, then I think you have a right to secede, but that right to secede is irrelevant because nobody's gonna let California secede. That is, it's not gonna be negotiated, not gonna sit down and agree to it, just like it didn't happen with the United States leaving a great Britain. A war has to be fought, a war would be fought. So secession, no state in the US is gonna secede without a civil war. But Canada almost allowed Quebec to secede, that would have, they would have, if the vote had gone the other way. No, there's no war. Canada is special. Britio, UK gave Scotland a vote. So the only reason to secede, the only legitimate reason to secede is to become more free, to become more socialist than you're violating, you're violating the rights of your own citizens by making them less free through secession. I mostly agree with your own there actually. I do not support secession in general. You gotta show me it's gonna give you some incredible benefits or else it's just a waste of time. Next question. Thank you. My question is mainly directed at Dr. Kaplan, although I would enjoy hearing Dr. Brooks' thoughts on my question, which is Dr. Kaplan. I operate from the premise that capitalism is a political system and that politics is a derivative of ethics or morality. And if you are an advocate of capitalism, I wonder if you could explain from where your moral basis or your moral foundation that you build on to be an advocate of that political system called capitalism. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm going to ask Dr. Kaplan to plug Mike Humeur's incredible book, The Problem with Political Authority, which answers the question. What he says is that we have presumptive individual rights of the libertarian kind. If it would lead to total disaster, then it's okay to violate those rights. Normally that doesn't happen. And that's why it's important to understand social science, to see is it really true that it would be disastrous to go and follow these policies? And if it's not, then I go back to the default of individual rights. I'm coming from you, Yaren. And unfortunately, that's gonna have to be the last question. This is gonna, okay. Last question from you then, sir. Go ahead. Dr. Brook, you are an advocate of monarchism, but you acknowledge that states exist in a world of different nations. And Dr. Kaplan, you described the world as an anarcho-capitalist world, but I believe at some point you said that ideally, we would have a world of a lot of monarchist states, perhaps like a Hopi and a thousand Lichtensteins. So are in fact, both of you saying the same thing? And this actually isn't even a debate. Oh, well, okay. I'm afraid that that question's gonna have to stand. No. But, okay. This non-debate will have to conclude its Q&A section. We have now go to the summations. And of course, you can address that question if you'd like. Yaren, you're the affirmative. So you go first in the summation, five minutes for summary, take it away, Yaren. Thank you. So, God, it went dark suddenly. So, no, this is an actual debate. The differences between us are not whether we agree that there would be competing governments over separate geographic territories. I think we agree with that. The disagreement is whether such a competition can exist in a particular geographic area where the sovereignty overlaps between the different security agencies. And I think one is, different soverties is the way in which the world would function. And I hate the term monarchism. I prefer to consider myself an advocate for limited government, for limited by the principle of individual rights where government only protects individual rights and nothing else. I believe that is what capitalism means. That is the essence of capitalism. That is it is a system that protects individual rights, not leaves it up to maybe the security agencies will do it and maybe they won't. Maybe they'll arbitrate it appropriately. Maybe they won't. But where the system is built, geared towards the resolution of those disputes based on a principle. On the principle of individual sovereignty, on the principle of the sanctity of every individual and his right to his own life. So, I think that is what brings objectivity to the system. It has a principle that guides decision making, that guides the resolution of disputes that are bound to arise even if we're all friendly. So, the system we have today is indeed a disaster system, a system of gangs and horrible. And yet, in spite of this, we live probably in a time of greater, of greater prosperity, certainly of to some extent greater liberties and ever before greater freedom, at least in certain dimensions than ever before. And all of this is because the concept of individual rights has been discovered and applied, flawed. But in a flawed way, and therefore the system that we have today is dramatically flawed. But we have an opportunity to really fix it. We have an opportunity to actually make a truly free society. But to do that, we have to abide by what makes a society free. And that is the abolition of force and the institution of this principle of this guarantee. The guarantee that each individual has his rights and those rights will be protected by government. Anarchy does not do this. Anarchy makes it all negotiable. Rights are negotiable, truth is negotiable, facts are negotiable. Anarchy is a demolition of everything that has been built up to reach where we are today. It is worse than a distraction. It subverts our efforts to actually change the institution that exists, the institution of government, to make it better. As Brian said, we wanna move towards freedom, yes, we wanna move towards freedom. Every movement towards freedom is necessary. But to do that, we have to have an idea, a concept of what that freedom is, where we're moving towards, where we are heading and what our ideal is. And that ideal is, has to be centered around the principle that makes this government function even half decently today. So by advocating for a system that indeed demolishes the principle of individual rights, demolishes, I think, the principle of private property. We are undermining our efforts to being about greater liberty and greater freedom to the world. I think the more we advocate, the more we promote the idea of anarchy, the more we promote ideas and philosophical foundations that undermine the idea, the very idea of individual freedom and individual liberty. So it's not just that I think that anarcho-capitalism is a disaster when it happens, a complete and utter disaster. But I believe its advocacy today is a disaster in terms of our ability to move the goals forward, to move us towards greater individual freedom, greater individual rights, and towards a real capitalist society, which I think is possible. But the work needs to be done and the work is intellectual work and educational work. Thank you. All right, so let's just go back to that shared principle that I think almost everyone in this room agrees with. You know, rational self-interest plus free competition plus reputation normally equals excellent results for both consumers and producers. All right, the strange thing is though, Iran I believe would totally be on board with the principle you don't see any sign that he's using this principle when thinking about this issue. Instead, what we've got are honestly a lot of tautologies. Like he keeps telling us that government gives us guarantees, government doesn't give us any guarantees in the real world. You could say we should aspire for a guarantee, all right, but guess what? Aspiring for a guarantee isn't a guarantee. So again, it really all comes back to comparative risk and looking at things empirically. Right now, it is striking to me that he really didn't seem to wanna talk about the empirics and especially didn't wanna talk about the actual failures of all known existing governments and how disappointing they really are. You just have this idea that existing governments in the West are just flawed versions of what we're talking about. Yeah, that's really nice. It's very charitable. In fact, it's altruistic in terms of how charitable it is to existing governments. Existing governments barely care about individual rights at all, or if they do, what they care about is their Rosalia notion, which is primarily about positive rights. That's the main thing that they care about and they are super happy to go and trample normal negative capitalist rights in order to go and guarantee all the things that they really care about, so-called, which by the way, aren't guarantees either. All right, so whereas when I was going over my story, I was trying to appeal to these basic ideas, rational self-interest plus free competition plus reputation, that reputation part is important. When Iran talks about what is to go and stop someone from saying come to my area and then enslaving them, yeah, that's reputation that does that. That's why when we had come, with a company town, you might say this company says come over to our town and I'll give you a great job, but once you're out in the company town, you spend all your money, maybe they will go and then go and offer you one-tenth of what they promised you. Yeah, that's theoretically possible, but guess what? Market forces, reputation, competition, self-interest, these are things that actually stopped it, which by the way are a much better guarantee than government saying I guarantee it, way better. Now on this question of multiple governments, I'm very glad that Iran admits that under Minerci we can have multiple governments, but once you admit that, there are many big implications to this, namely that a lot of his complaints about anarcho-capitalism, in fact, I think all of his complaints about anarcho-capitalism still exist if we have multiple independent governments, especially if they are small independent governments. What do you do if there's one agency that goes and protects child molesters? All right, what do you do if one government protects child molesters? Yeah, that's tough for any system. It's like, all right, well, do we go and do a trade embargo on them? Do we attack them? Do we try to assassinate their leaders? This is where it's like, hmm, yeah, all of those solutions have a bunch of problems, don't they? Gee, what are we gonna do? And you know why the question is hard because it's in the real world. It's not a bunch of tautologies where we use words to go and solve problems that actually have to be solved by actions. All right, now the last point, this miniscule step from Minerci to anarcho-capitalism. Like I said, I do think that it does count as anarcho-capitalism if you have a bunch of very small, private landowners who go and bundle police and courts with their services. This is just like a homeowner association. The key element of being a government really is that people that don't consent can still be made to join. That's what actually distinguishes governments from private organizations. The real world is that governments violate unanimous consent, right? Right, and yeah, everybody knows the United States was not founded on unanimous consent, right? Like Sandra Spooner's constitutional authority. Right, you should read it if you haven't. Now in terms of the social science, my point here is once we are at Minerci already, then the difference between that and actually full-blown anarcho-capitalism is very slight. Most obviously because a Minerci government would have to respect binding arbitration and there are very strong reasons for people to agree to binding arbitration just to go and reduce administrative costs. If you're going and applying for a job and you say, hey, I don't wanna sign this binding arbitration clause, like huh, you sound like you're gonna go and sue us in the government courts. So yeah, we probably don't really want you as an employee. And on the other end of his employee, you might say gee, why do you want me to sign the binding arbitration clause? What are you planning on doing to me? And again, the obvious answer is oh yes, reputation is going to protect me. So like I said, I think everyone in this room has had debates of this kind many times over. And I think that if you apply not my principles, but your own principles in a slightly different context, you will wind up agreeing with me and not your own. Thank you very much. Jane, please open the voting. Again, anarcho-capitalism would definitely be a complete disaster for humanity. Yes, no, or undecided. I have in my hand the Soho Forum Tootsie Roll, which I'm gonna toss to the winner once the winner is announced. Again, we are of course hosting the after party, just two blocks uptown at 55 Great Jones Street. Follow me, follow the crowds. Unfortunately, Brian has promises to keep tomorrow morning and has to take, catch a cast, to catch a plane. I'd love to party with all you guys, but I've got to run. He's got to, yeah. But unfortunately. I'll buy anyone here lunch if you come to Fairfax. How's this? Yes, okay. That's a binding offer. And yeah, but Yaron will be there with his wife. He's a heck of a charming guy, quite friendly, quite approachable. And, and, This is quite a lot of ideas. Yes, and well, and that's what I sincerely believe. I've known both of these guys for a long time and they're both, they're both great guys. I want to announce as well that we have other debates planned. October 18th will be our next debate. That will be a debate about electric vehicles. Mark Mills versus Rosario for 2-No. And Mark Mills will defend the resolution, little wordy, but again, you've got to negotiate every word and make sure both sides agree to the wording. Between now and 2035, electric vehicles in the consumer market will likely disappoint environmentalists by remaining a product bought mainly by the well-heeled minority. That's Mark Mills versus Rosario for 2-No. On Tuesday, November 14th, we're going to have a debate about artificial intelligence. Susan Schneider versus Jobs Landgreed. She will defend the resolution. Artificial intelligence poses a threat to the survival of humanity that must be actively addressed. That's Tuesday, November 14th. Sunday, December 17th, we're going to have a matinee, a 3 p.m. matinee on Sunday, December 17th. And that will be a debate between law professor Kate Klonic and epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya. The resolution that Kate Klonic will defend will be worded as follows. The making of national internet policy was hindered rather than helped by the July 4th federal court ruling that restricted the Biden administration's communications with social media platforms. As many of you know, Jay Bhattacharya, who will be taking the negative on that resolution, was one of the key plaintiffs in that federal court ruling. And that's St. John's law professor Kate Klonic will defend the resolution. January, this will be, actually on January 29th, we're going to take a long break after the new year, and this resolution will read, government must play a role in fostering scientific and technological progress by funding basic research. Taking the affirmative will be Anthony Mills of the American Enterprise Institute. Taking the negative will be Terence Kealy, author of the Economic Laws of Scientific Research. That will be in late January. Jay, how are we doing on the voting? It looks as though the results are coming in. Drum roll, please. From now, thank you. Okay, well, the yes went from 38.4% to 48.1% picked up 10.7 points. Picking up 10.7 points. Very close. The no went from 33 to 41, picking up a little over eight points, a little over a two point margin in favor of the yes, so that the Tutsi roll goes to Yaren. But, congratulations to both. I have to say that a two point margin is extremely close, almost within the range of statistical error, but you still get the Tutsi roll. Follow the crowds. It's two blocks uptown and we'll get a chance to talk about the debate.