 Do a final check. Sound all right? Jan says it's worse now. Okay, well, it looks like it's working. Okay. It looks like Jan and William just posted something in the Q&A box, so that works too. Okay, so welcome everyone to the – oh, Lord, let me get the presentation back. How do I get it back, Danny? Just click this tab. There's a Cancel a Libertarian Controversies tab. Sagan, where is it? In above the slides or above where the slides would be, there are tabs. There should be a Quick Start tab and an Info tab. Okay, can everyone see this now? I can. Can anyone see the slide? Okay, good, good. All right, well, welcome to Libertarian Controversies. If I remember right, this course was actually Danny's idea. Danny Sanchez, our helpful guy behind the scenes. And I think it's a neat idea, so let me just go ahead and get started because we have a lot of things to cover over the next five weeks. Some of you have taken courses from me before or read some of my stuff, so you know who I am. I'll just do a brief introduction. My main influences are Rothbard, Mises, and Hoppe. And I talk about how I became a Libertarian in this article. I have linked here on page two of the slides, how I became a Libertarian. I'm getting one that's curious about my sort of background because it will influence how I try to answer some of the questions and issues that we're going to discuss in the course. Last time I checked, we were about 50 students from eight countries. And what we're going to do in this course is cover a number of topics, sort of isolated topics. Some of them relate to each other from time to time, but not really like the other courses I've taught, where it's sort of systematic and laid out. It's just one topic after the other. I've roughly divided them into three types. Misconceptions and confusion and fallacy. It's just things Libertarians, I think, sometimes get wrong because they haven't thought carefully enough about something. I'm not going to talk about misconceptions about Libertarians, but misconceptions that some Libertarians hold. I'm not going to deal with all of them in a systematic way. I'm not going to talk about a misconception of menarchists is that they believe we need a state. We're kind of aware of that debate. I will talk about some things like that in the controversies section, which is the next one. So these are things that I'm not going to say are so easy to solve. There are kind of perennial controversies among Libertarians. For these, I'll kind of outline how I think we should be approached, but lay out both sides of the argument here. And then conundrums are things that are difficult for most of us, and that we still haven't figured them out. I don't know if anyone's completely figured them out. So these are just things that people scratch their heads about. And by the way, the plural of conundrum is conundrums. I used to think it was conundrum, but apparently it's not Latin origin. So it's conundrums. So what we'll do today is I'm going to do a brief kind of overview of the Austrian libertarian framework, because that's what I'm going to draw on in analyzing most of these issues. It won't be in too much detail, because we don't have too much time for that. My course, Libertarian Legal Theory, was devoted towards all that. That was a six-week course which dealt with kind of this framework in detail. And then we're going to start talking about misconceptions. Now these categories, by the way, are not really strict. Sometimes these topics you could say maybe should be a misconception instead of a category. Thank you, Jan. Glad you enjoyed that course. And just to let you know, so this is the fifth course I've taught, if I remember right. I've taught rethinking intellectual property twice, Libertarian Legal Theory once, and then the Social Theory of Hapa was my most recent one, which ended a few weeks ago. And by the way, I'm doing a webinar, a one-class Mises Academy webinar this Friday night, US time, on this new patent reform legislation that Obama just signed into law. So that would be about an hour and a half, about half lecture, half Q&A. So if anyone's interested in that, just check it out on the Mises Academy website. For those of you who haven't done a course before, what we'll do here is we'll have one final exam. It's just multiple choice. Actually, I should take the word weighted out. That's a mistake. It's only one class, only one test. It's totally optional. Don't feel compelled to take it. It's sort of a fun way to review what we've done. If you take the exam, then you would receive a certificate of completion. Otherwise, you're entitled to get a certificate of participation. Now, the exam will be based upon everything that I say in the lectures and the slides, not every link in the slides, but just the material in the slides. And also, any reading material I suggest, and I've only suggested a couple of things. One of my essays and one of a couple of chapters from more to pop up in the books, because there's just too much to read, enough background that covers every single thing we're going to cover here. I do provide, try to provide links in the slides as much as I can for the particular issues we discuss if you want to drill into it in more depth. I also gave a large reading list below, and you'll see additional things that if you want to pursue it further, just optional. This is a certificate of completion that was given for one of the courses. That's just what it looks like. So after the course completes, you're able to log in and generate that certificate. Now, as I mentioned, so the recommended reading I really like, and I should say required, but this is a voluntary course of grown-ups, so I'm not going to require anything. But the ones I will test on, which I think you really should read, would be what libertarianism is, and then the first two chapters of Hoppe's Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. And I've got listed here a lot of other important books and articles that I've read and that I think are crucial background for really getting a good background knowledge of libertarian issues. So I won't go through all those. I won't read them all. I've also got a large number of articles I've written, which I will draw on those as necessary to answer some of these issues we're going to get to. And by the way, I'm collecting these articles right now into a book, editing them, and this is the tentative cover. So that should be coming out later this year. It all goes well with the scheduled law in the libertarian world. And there's some more background reading too. This last page, some of them – well, the first two or three are really good. Well, the first half are really good. The second half, some of them I'm a little bit – I'm not completely sold on their approach, but they're definitely worth reading. And finally, I have here a list of bibliographies. These are all sources for more recommendations for books that would be relevant for libertarianism in particular. Okay, so let's have a quick overview of the framework. I assume most people here are libertarians. I'm curious, is there anyone here who's not really a libertarian? I'm not going to pick on you. I'm just kind of curious if I can assume everyone's at least a self-regarding libertarian. I'm going to assume that unless anyone tells me otherwise. William is not. Okay, curious. Interesting. Well, I assume all of you know what libertarians are. There are different types of libertarian approaches. And the one that I find the most useful and most coherent is the Austrian economics-informed and anarchist libertarian framework. And again, you can kind of get a flavor for a lot of this in the article I wrote that I have here on page 12 of What Libertarianism is and Hoppe's Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. And also, Rothbard's two books, The Ethics of Liberty and For New Liberty are fantastic, but again, I'm putting it as optional. So the idea of libertarianism in a broad sense is people should be free to do anything that's peaceful. This is Leonard Reed's formulation. Or as Dave Bose says, it's the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses as long as he respects the equal rights of others. I had this in another class. There's a joke that a libertarian is anyone who's co-authored an article with Walter Block. He's so prolific and he co-authors with lots of people. So just a joke. Now, these are not really precise definitions. They're certainly not justifications. They're just loose definitions. A more precise way of looking at it would be to think about the non-aggression principle. This was formulated – it wasn't called this by Ein Rand, but it was – this is the essence of her formulation, which is John Galt say that so long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate or start the use of physical force against others. Then Rothbard, of course, said something similar that our whole viewpoint, our whole belief system rests upon one axiom. And by the way, I'm going to get to this at the misconception later about the word axiom being used here. But he said he called it the non-aggression axiom, which is the threat – which is aggression – it's the opposition to aggression, where aggression is defined as the initiation or the use of threat of physical violence against someone else or their property. And he calls it also invasion. And we'll get to this later to see if this is an appropriate way to define libertarianism. I think it gets at it, but there are some problems with this. Okay, going on to page 14 now. So the way I look at it and the way I've come to look at it over the years – and I've been a libertarian for at least maybe 25 years – is that our basic stance is that we believe – we are people that believe in certain basic values, or one norm, you could call them, being grounded norms. This is a term from Hans Kelsen, a legal philosopher, but I think it's useful here. Basic things like peace, cooperation, society, communication, trade, and prosperity. Okay, so basically people that value peace and prosperity and cooperation as opposed to interpersonal violence. If you accept those things, for whatever reason – now some libertarians think you can justify those basic values. Others think you have to take them as a starting point. But the point is among the community of civilized people, that is people that basically believe in harmony and peace and cooperation and prosperity, people that are not missing troops, they want to hurt each other, people that want destruction, people that like interpersonal violence. These people will – we recognize because of economic literacy basically that the fundamental problem is scarcity. That is that some things in the world are scarce. They can be fought over. That gives rise to the possibility of conflict. In fact, you can think of scarcity or rivalousness as conflictability. It's not lack of plenty. It's a particular item is scarce in the economic sense that is rivalous. There can be rivalry or fighting or conflict over that thing. Only one person can use that thing at a time. So if you value peace and if you want resources to be able to be used peacefully and productively, then you have to realize that there's a need for social rules or norms about who gets to use it. So this is what property rules are. And this is why we are in favor of certain types of property rights. Now, it's also important to recognize that we are not the only political theory or philosophy that believes in property rights. In fact, I would say everyone necessarily has some at least implicit property rights to you. Everyone believes in a certain set of rules that define who has the right to control particular resources. So in socialism, there is an answer to the question who owns this factory and the state owns it. In fascism, it's nominally owned by some private person but controlled by the state. In capitalism or a free market society, it's nominally owned by a certain private owner. Even the thief, when he takes something from you, he's basically asserting that he has the right to control your body or your property. So he's asserting a property right in it. So what makes libertarianism – is anyone else having a problem with the sound? Matt just said he's having a problem with the sound. Hello? Is it loud enough? Okay. Matt, sorry. I'm not sure of the problem. So what is unique about libertarianism is not that we believe in property rights. It's how we believe property should be allocated or assigned. So you can think of it as two components to our particular view. Number one, it's what we believe about bodies and number two, about everything else, other external objects. So the libertarian view, and I'm not trying to justify it here, I'm just trying to lay it out, is number one that each person owns his own body. Now, this is not an absolute rule. It's a prima facie or a default presumption, right, because most of us believe that you own your body unless you are committing a crime or have committed a crime. So it's limited and contingent, but assuming you haven't committed a crime, then you're the owner of your body. That means you are the one who gets the right to control it, to decide what to do with it. And number two is the sort of homesteading idea, the Lockheed idea, that each person owns external objects, that is scarce resources, that number one, you're the first user of, the homesteader, or if you acquire it by contract from a previous owner. So that basically answers any possible question of conflict that might arise, because conflicts always involve scarce resources, and if you want to avoid conflict, then the question is always, well, who owns this resource? And you can look at these two principles here, and you will always find an answer. If it's someone's body, then he owns it, unless he's committed a crime. If it's an object, then the person who first found it owns it, unless he's sold it by contract to someone else, in which case they own it. So it's very simple actually. So this is the libertarian view. By the way, so I mentioned this in one talk a couple of years ago, that the libertarian rule is that the owner of a resource is whoever the first user is or his descendant entitled, and then someone asks me, well, what if you don't want to give it to your heirs? Descendant entitled doesn't mean a person you're related to, it just means down the chain of title, someone you transferred it to directly or indirectly. In any case, so the difference between libertarianism and every other ethic is out of a private criminal or any other political theory, any other basically type of socialism, fascism, totalitarianism, socialism, even welfare statism, and modern democracy. They all basically adopt some other kind of property allocation rule, some bearing of what Hoppe called the latecomer ethic. See, the homesteading idea of Locke is that the first person who finds this thing is its owner, and anyone else who comes along later has a worse claim to it because they came second or later. Well, if you don't believe in that rule, then you have to believe sometimes the latecomer does get it, which is what, for example, happens in taxes. I'm the first owner or the current owner of some property that I produced or some money that I own, and the state just takes it. They came later, and yet they claim the right to take it, and then they make it with someone else. So my view is that only libertarianism is consistent in opposing slavery and conflict. Every other political theory basically has to end up supporting some type of conflict and or some type of slavery. I mean, the drug war itself, for example, treats people's bodies as partially owned by the state because they're saying, if you don't listen to my commands like a slave, I'll put you in a cage and treat you like a slave. Okay. I've already gone over these things here, so I'll skip page 16 to get to some of these concrete issues. But I will mention quickly, my view is that the reason people are civilized, I view libertarianism as sort of the end result of a very consistent civilized stance. That is, people who have adopted civilized norms like peace, prosperity, and that are, number one, economically lurid and preferably Austrian economics. And number two, believe in honesty and truth and consistency. So you have to have some – you have to know how to reason and you have to know some things like this. Now, the reason I believe people have the basic ground norms in the first place, right, why do they value peace as opposed to violence? Why do they value cooperation and prosperity? And I think it's because of the way we evolved. I think it's because of our nature as social animals. I think it's psychological partly. I think basically it's empathy. We have empathy for others. That is, those of us who are not sociopaths. When we contemplate, you know, kicking someone to get what they have, a normal person has some psychological twinges of uneasiness at the prospect of using violence to solve the problem or using violence to get what you want. And that's why people pause and wonder, hmm, is this right or wrong in their own terms of morality? Is it justified? And then when they start searching for justifications, if you're engaged in the reasoning process, you have to use reason. You have to use logic. You have to use consistency. And you have to recognize the nature of reality and economics helps inform that. And then out pops out the libertarian norms because we're right basically. But it rests upon people adopting voluntarily the norms that it rests on ultimately. Lee says you're video frozen, but is the video frozen for anyone else? Or is it working? Okay, good. Now, so let's start talking some misconceptions. And this, we will cover at least two or three classes on this before we get to the other sort of groupings I have here. Okay. So I'm going to take some simple, easy, maybe fun ones to start, and then we'll have some more complicated ones later. And I'm also going to talk kind of near the tail end of this about the danger of metaphors and equivocation, which is usually not an intentional misconception that policy people make, but it usually, through uncareful use of metaphors, sometimes people end up having bad reasoning. So I'll go through some examples of that. And by the way, I was going to have one slide with everything in it. I'm sorry, one PowerPoint. But it was already 18 megabytes just for tonight, partly because of the pictures in the beginning. And I think that would maybe take too long to upload. So what I probably will do is just do it per week like I did before in previous classes. Okay. So let's start with a few that are no-brainers, not too hard. And by the way, I don't claim to be a Rothbardian pronouncer of what libertarianism is. I'm giving you my opinions. I'll try to let you know when I think my opinion might be controversial and what other people believe. And anyone here is free to disagree or to ask questions. I'm just trying to give you my approach based upon this sort of Austro-libertarian perspective of how to approach these issues, and at least call to your mind issues that you might never have thought of before and that can be illuminating. So there's a debate raging in libertarian circles. It has been for a long time. But lately, these left libertarians have become more prominent. And they are pushing the idea that libertarianism is naturally of the left. So these are people like some associated C4SS, Center for the Study of a Center for a Stateless Society, which I'm actually affiliated with. I'm on the advisory panel, but I'm not a left libertarian, I don't think. Roderick Long, mutualists like Kevin Carson, Sheldon Richmond. So they argue that we're naturally of the left. And then there was actually a right libertarian movement for a while, a paleo-libertarian movement. It was called Rothbard, Rockwell, Jeff Tucker. Hoppe was sort of involved in it. That phased out, there were some attempts to have an alliance between the paleo-conservatives like Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, the Chronicles crowd back in the 80s, I think, early 90s. And that's pretty much gone now. That was, in my view, that was more strategic and tangible than substantive. And what they did was they emphasized conservative issues, cultural issues, and also the importance of private social institutions arising in a world without a state to replace the authority structures the state puts on us. So this is, both of these right and left libertarian approaches will lie upon what's called thickism. There's a thickism debate, and we'll discuss that later, too, more in the controversy section. So let's hold off on that for now. But let's look at some, this is the classic Nolan chart. Most of you have probably seen this. And what he did was he was struggling to break out a left-right axis that everyone uses, and he made it into a two-dimensional axis. And that's a pretty nice way of looking at it. So the libertarian, as you can see, is not a left nor right. They're above the left and the right. And because we believe in a lot of personal liberty and a lot of economic liberty. Whereas the conservative or the rightist would believe in a lot of economic liberty but very little personal liberty. And the person on the left would have the opposite sort of pairing, whereas a totalitarian or a status would have believed in very little personal or economic liberty. Now, I think if you take these little quizzes from this chart, some of the questions are controversial themselves. So I would view myself as at the top right, top corner of this. But if I took a test, that might not be because there might be a disagreement on abortion or school vouchers or something like that. But anyway, it's a useful thing. Now, I also would disagree that left are good on personal issues and under the right is good on economic issues. I think they're actually both pretty close to status. And in some ways, I think the right is even better than the left on personal issues. But anyway, that's not a bad way to look at it. Brad, Tom Knapp did something similar. He did a more of a bell curve type shape. And let me go to the next slide, which shows us a little bit bigger. He did the political spectrum showing fascists and communists in the middle and liberals on the left, conservatives on the right, anarcho-capitalists on the right, and classical anarchists on the left. And actually, I told him that he should curve this into like a cylinder so that it meets, because the classical anarchists and the anarcho-capitalists are very similar in a lot of ways. Anyway, another interesting way to look at it. But in my view, we are not left or right. In fact, I get a little bit tired of people saying that we need to join the left or work with the left or learn from the left, shed what they call our vulgar capitalism. My view is that the left needs to learn from us, not that we need to learn from them. The leftism has killed hundreds of millions of people. I'm not saying it's really any worse than conservativism or the rightism. No, it's not a beer, it's a pariet. I say the liquor to the Q and A section. And Leonard Reid actually has a nice classic article, Not a Left Nor Right in the Freedmen, I forgot when it was first published. It was republished in 1998. I've got a link to it here on this page. Walter Block has a nice article too on this here. And then there's, of course, the classic Rothbard article, Left, Right and the Prospects for Liberty. He does trace some left antecedents to some of our movement, but I think we are definitely not left or not right. They basically are not libertarian. They deviate. They're both statist in different ways. Okay, let's turn to another topic now. This is kind of a terminological one, but you'll often hear libertarians say they're against coercion. Well, to my mind, that's like saying we're against force and we're not against force. There are some pacifist libertarians, but we're not all pacifists. What we're against is the initiation of force or aggression. So when people say we're against coercion, then they're basically equating the word coercion with the word aggression. Now, I just think semantically this is a problem. Coercion literally just means to use force to compel someone to do something. Okay? But just this force can sometimes be justified. So can coercion. Coercion is just a type of force. This force used to compel someone. If you need to use force, someone to stop an act of crime, it's not itself wrong or libertarian. And I just got this further in my plug. So see, this is a simple, easy one. I may be wrong, but I've had a lot of people say that they realize – and I used to do this myself. Some of my earlier articles, I would use the word coercion sort of in the synonym for what we're against. But we're not against violence. We're not against coercion. We're not against force. We're against unjustified force. Okay? Here's a related issue. And this highlights one problem with making aggression primary, saying that we're fundamentally against aggression. Let's see this next slide for a second. Okay. Because if you believe in property rights and then you're opposed to trespass, then if you classify every wrongful, unlibertarian action as aggression, then it's aggression to step on someone's lawn without their permission. But is that really an initiation of force? Who are using force against them? What does it mean to be initiated? I think the best way to look at it is to recognize that aggression is not the primary concept in libertarianism. Instead it's what I said earlier. The libertarian view is how property rights should be assigned. Okay? So that really comes first. And then what counts as aggression pops out of that way of looking at property. So property is primary and fundamental. Or to be precise, the particular property allocation rules that libertarians believe in is the fundamental thing. Aggression is a derivative concept. It depends upon how you define property assignment rules. So for example, if I use force to take a wallet from your hand, then if I own that wallet and I'm reclaiming it from a thief, then it is not initiation or force or aggression. But if it's your wallet, then I am committing aggression. So you have to know who owns the thing to decide whether a certain action is force or not. Now, I used to struggle with this issue of which came first. And I would lean towards the position I just gave in the case of external objects. But in the case of the bot, I wondered. And I think if you separate the way we view property rights in our bodies and property rights in owning things, then it helps to sort this out a little bit more clearly. So let me elaborate on that a little bit here. If you notice the libertarian idea of ownership and property is that the first user of a previously unowned scarce resource is the owner. But that very notion has a couple of things about it that make it different from the reasons that you own your body. Number one, the good that your homesteading was previously unowned. That was just sitting there unowned and you became its first new user or owner. Number two, it required a homesteading agent or person, a human being with a body. It's inconceivable to homestead a piece of property without already having ownership of a body. So the very concept of homesteading presupposes some kind of body ownership, which is why I think it's a mistake when people say we homestead our bodies as well. You might can say we homestead our bodies, but you have to recognize that if you're using a word or a concept that applies really differently in two cases, and it could lead to confusion if you use the same word, because your body was not previously unowned, just sitting there, and you didn't have a body to go homestead your body. You want a homesteading agent until you have a body and are a body. So there's different. Now, I'm not going to go too much detail into my view of why I think body ownership is justified. The hoppy in view is that what's common between the two cases of ownership of your body and ownership of external resources. What's common between them is not homesteading and not even first use, but rather it's the person with the best link to the resource. Because every dispute, whether it's about ownership of a body or ownership of a resource, is an attempt to avoid conflict by assigning an owner, in accordance with, in the general matter, whoever has the best claim to it, which means the best link to it. Now, we automatically then say, well, the best link, in the case of an unowned resource, is the first user. And the reason we say that is because the very concept of ownership implies this latecomer ethic is impermissible, because if the first user didn't own it and a latecomer does own it, well, then how could the latecomer own it? Because another latecomer could take it from him. So unless you ban latecomers making better claims than prior owners, no one could ever homestead something in the first place and no one would ever own anything. You would just have possession instead of ownership. You would have a world of might and makes right. But that's what everyone, that's actually fighting the presupposition of trying to find a rule in the first place so conflict can be avoided. So the nature of ownership of external resources, the fact that they were once unowned, the fact that a first user can get it and he has a better claim than a latecomer, that's all part of the reason why the homesteader has the best link to this unowned resource that is now transformed or possessed by him. But you can see that doesn't apply in the case of bodies. In the case of the body, the reason you have ownership of it is because you have a direct link to your body by virtue of your direct control of your body and the unique relationship between a person and your body. Now, you don't need to get into metaphysical debates or religious debates about whether there's a soul, whether there's an afterlife, whether you as a person can exist without your body. It's all irrelevant to libertarian theory. You can believe whatever you want to believe, in my opinion. Whether you're a materialist, not a materialist, but the same atheist, or whether you believe in a soul and a spirit and the spirit somehow, let's say you're religious, then you have to believe there's some connection between your soul and your body. I mean, they're not the same thing, but there's a connection. There's a link, which is why you are inhabiting your body and or you get to control your body and decide what to do with it. Or if you're non-religious, you still make a conceptual distinction between you as a person and your body. I mean, when I say my body, it's different than saying me. And that's why a dead person, there's still a body there, but there's not a person anymore. There's not an agent. So there's a difference between the concept of the identity of the person and its body. But in any case, you can see why they're different. So what I was going to say was, when you separate them this way, I think it helps make sense of this issue about what's primary, aggression or property. And I think in the case of your body, that aggression and property are basically the same thing, or the concepts are mutually dependent, or basically they're expressing the same idea. So if I say I'm against aggression in the case of interpersonal violence, like two people hitting each other, then when I say I'm against aggression, that is just another way of saying that the person that you're committing aggression against owns his body. It's just another way of saying it. There's no way to separate these two things. But as I mentioned, in the case of external objects, then property becomes primary because, as I said in the wallet example, I can perform the same externally similar behavior or action, snatching the wallet by force that is in your hands and whether it's aggression or not depends upon who owns the wallet. Now, in the case of bodies, it's not the same thing. If I strike you, it's aggression only if it's initiated force. This is why Ein Rand could have John Golf say in his speech, the words I read, no man may initiate the use of force without really elaborating. It's sort of a self-evident statement and it's self-contained because it's the same thing as saying people are self-owners. But when you get to property, you really need to focus on property itself. Does that make sense? Okay. So basically the way to think of it is this. Property is primary to aggression, but in the case of the body, they're the same thing. They collapse into each other. But in the case of external and acquired property, aggression is more dependent on property assignment rules. By the way, what I plan to do, unless anyone has a request or an injection, I'll talk until the hour, 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock PM, Eastern time in about 18 minutes and then I'll take a quick break and then we'll do Q&A. If we don't have a lot of Q&A, I'll go on to more things because I won't cover them all in this lecture. So here's one that I've thought about for a long time. I don't know how many of you have read a lot of anarcho-capitalist literature like The Market for Liberty by the Tannenhills. There's a common notion of a PDA, a private-assist agency, something similar by I think Stepan Mollinu came up with the term DRO, Dispute Resolution Organization. But the idea is that in a free society without a state, you would have private competing agencies that would provide police type services, defense basically. HAPPA talks about insurance companies performing this role or playing part of this role. Now, it's been commonly said that a PDA, so what you do is, Lee Cape says in one book, what's in one book? Are you asking about HAPPA or Mollinu? Oh, HAPPA, looking HAPPA's, I think, in the midst of national defense, he's got, just look on his website, HAPPA.com-HAPPA.com, on the publications page, which I run for him. So I know it's on there. And just type in something like insurance or something and you'll see two or three articles. I think it's in the midst of private defense, the midst of national defense. It may be a chapter on that also in the economics and ethics of private property, in any case. So some libertarians say, well, what happens if you have customers A and B of their own respective PDAs? Well, the idea is that presumably these PDAs would have agreements with each other that if two of their customers get into dispute, then they'll work it out. They won't have wars because that's too expensive. And one of the reasons you join a PDA is you want to have it worked out. Just like when you buy insurance now and you have an accident, a car insurance, I'm talking about automobile insurance, and you have an accident with someone with another insurance company, the insurance company work it out. And you actually want them to have worked out these agreements ahead of time. So if two people that are both civilized people with a contract with a PDA have an altercation or dispute, then their insurance companies or their PDAs can work it out. But what about, excuse me, an outlaw or a third person, a third party who comes to a stranger from out of town, someone who does not, excuse me, belong to any PDA? Well, some of the writers on this, and I believe the Ten of Hills do, I'm not sure, they say they think that there's a problem in asserting jurisdiction over someone who has not signed anything. In other words, if I commit a tort against you, and I'm a member of the first agency and you're a member of the second one, then they would say it's okay for the second agency to assert jurisdiction over me to have a trial or whatever because I've already agreed ahead of time to my insurance company's rules, which includes the rule that I have to agree to other agencies' rules. So they think that that's the reason why it's justified to use, to have a trial over me because I've already agreed to it ahead of time. But you don't have this in the case of a third party who's not a member of any insurance agency or any PDA. So then they say, hmm, well, it would be immoral or unjust to assert jurisdiction over this guy to see if he committed the crime or see how much he owes the victim because he hasn't signed any agreement. Now, I think this is a little bit of a confusion because, well, first of all, it ignores the rock Guardian notion of contract. The rock Guardian notion of contract is based upon this libertarian view that I mentioned before of what property rights are and what defines what we believe in. We basically believe, as I said, that the owner of a piece of property is the first owner or his heir and title or his descendant and title. So that's what contracts are. This is the transfer of title from one person to another. I'll get in a little bit or later on to some problems with contract theory. With faking a contract as a promise, it's a binding promise, an enforceable promise, instead of faking it as a title transfer. But for now, let me just mention that when people have this conception of a customer of a PDA agreeing ahead of time to their jurisdiction, that is not a contract in the classical sense. A contract is transferring title to property. What does that have to do with consenting ahead of time to the rules of an agency? Now, if the agency is only going to take property from you, then you could say that I basically contingently agreed to transfer some of my property to someone else if a trial following certain procedures rules that someone else gets it. I mean, that could work. But in any case, I think the problem here is that the reason it's permissible to use force against an aggressor is because he used force. So in a way, committing aggression is a type of consent. So there's two ways you could use force against someone, like actually physically manipulate their body. Number one would be consent. So for example, imagine a girl invites a guy to give her a kiss. So he's got her invitation or her consent. This is why Rothbard called a synonym for aggression invasion. Invasion implies an uninvited crossing of a border or the uninvited or unconsented to manipulation of someone's body or crossing of a border, damaging the physical integrity of that object or that body. In any case, force can be justified if it's consented to or if the person has committed aggression because they can no longer complain about having force used against them because they're using force themselves or laying down this rule. This is sort of my own theory of rights, which I call a stop-all, and it's compatible with Hoppe's argument which is called argumentation ethics. But the point is, if you have a community of people and an outsider comes in who's not a member of a PDA, if he commits a crime, let's say he commits an act of a theft or robbery or assault and battery or murder, well, that act of aggression itself is his granting consent to the victims or their agents, the PDAs, to get restitution, to punish, to defend, whatever. Now, because the advocates of PDAs mistakenly think the reason PDAs have jurisdiction is because you can send it ahead of time, they think you can't get jurisdiction over someone who doesn't cooperate, and therefore the only thing you can do is resort to ostracism. And then they have an argument for why ostracism would probably be sufficient anyway because it'd be too costly for someone to remain in outlaw because they wouldn't be able to get the benefits of being part of civilized society. Now, actually, I think they're probably right about that, and I actually believe that they might be correct that ostracism would be enough. It was enough in some systems in the past, like to some degree, the law merchant was used, you know, used a system of ostracism, people that didn't participate in the decisions of arbitral tribunals and things like this would lose their membership, and they would lose a lot of advantage to this. So even if you are wrongly convicted of something, you better pay the fine as long as due process was followed, otherwise you're going to be in outlaw. So I think that actually could be right. I just thought that you have to argue that. I don't think you have to say the PDA can't assert jurisdiction. So I think it would be three levels. I do believe that in a free society punishment while technically justifiable would rarely be used because it's very expensive. If you make a mistake in punishing someone, you cannot undo the punishment. Also, punishing someone doesn't really make the victim whole. In some cases, psychologically, maybe they are. But as a real matter, a system based on restitution would tend to be better for allowing the offender to reintegrate back into society, to be forgiven, it would do something good for the victim. And if there's a mistake, then all you have to do is give the money back. It's not like it's impossible to undo the capital punishment or something like that. So for this reason, I do believe that restitution probably would be the dominant mode of justice in a free society. And that would largely solve this problem that advocates and PDAs used to see about outlaws. Now, there's still a distinction about whether the restitution could be forcefully awarded, even against the third party, or whether you still have to resort to ostracism. And I think you could even argue that ostracism would be even less costly than an enforced restitution award. But who can predict which would be more prevalent in a free society? A system where the PDA of a given customer is willing to actually have a trial against the third party if he refuses to cooperate, let's say. And if they find him guilty, they go use force to take some of his property away to give it to the victim as a restitution. Would they do that, or would they just ostracize him? It's hard to say ahead of time. I tend to think they might use it. But who knows? Maybe insurance would just make you all and you just go along with your business, sort of like people that have title insurance on their homes now. Right? If it turns out that you bought a house from someone and they didn't have a good title, then the insurance agency did a title search to make sure you own it, and then they give you an insurance policy. So if somehow someone else shows up and claims your property and wins, then your insurance agency and title insurance company would give you enough money to go buy another house. And for that reason, they would do a good job investigating it first. And in that way, you would have type of title records arise in the free market, which I'll discuss in a little bit more detail later on in the class. Lee Cape has a question. Well, William Peters has a question first. Do the Tannehills discuss the issues regarding third parties in detail? William, like I said, I don't remember if they're the ones who make this argument. I've read a lot of anarchist stuff and I've seen this in a lot of places. I didn't. Their book is online. You can look in there and see if they talk about it in there. I think they do. I think it's also discussed. If you look at the back issues of an old journal published in the 90s called Formulations. Formulations. Roderick Long was associated with that. And they have a lot of discussion by these anarchist guys about these kind of issues. I believe it was in there, too. And a lot of them were – there was a couple of pacifists, even, so they had all these – they saw all these problems with a certain jurisdiction over a third party that didn't consent. If any of you have ever read L. Neal Smith books, two of his best ones are as early as the Galatin divergence and the probability broach. And there's an interesting – it's one of those, too. I can't remember which one. I think it's in the probability broach. But it's a quasi-anarchist society back in the 1800s, very advanced, and they abolished Congress almost, and it's almost a libertarian society. And there's one guy that's accused of a crime, and he's taken by force, but they put him like in a five-store hotel instead of a jail because they haven't determined yet that he's guilty. And if it turns out that he's innocent, they won't have to pay him as much of a fine or – they won't have to pay him as much of a damages type of award. If they treated him nicely and given him good food, put him in a hotel. So I think his point there was to illustrate that if you're going to have to pay if you made the wrong decision when you sports against someone's body, then you're going to be really careful. And I think actually it's going to be expensive to do it even if you put him in a nice hotel. Lee Cape, how would competing PDAs settle disputes without a final authority? Well, first I would say how do disputes get settled in today's world without a final authority? I mean, we have about 200 states. There's no final authority. The states don't have a final authority between them. So in the past what they've done is they've relied upon natural law, international law. And number two I would say why does everything have to be settled by a final authority? What if some disputes just can't be settled? Well, then you're going to have violence or someone's going to be dissatisfied. But having a final authority, putting that into place, which is a centralized state, to avoid that type of perfectionism. Because, I mean, if you set up this final state, what if they make the wrong decision? I mean, let's say there's a one UN world's court that is the final authority and you finally get to the end and they say, no, well, you can be executed. You did it. And you didn't do it. Well, I mean, final authorities are not infallible either. But as a practical matter, I think they wouldn't have disputes with each other. It's our customers that have an dispute. So two PDAs are going to have customers. And if they have an dispute with each other, then they need to follow the procedure set out in that they've already agreed to by their PDAs. And so the PDAs have every incentive to work out these agreements ahead of time. Because who would you rather sign up with? A PDA that has civilized relations with the other 100 PDAs in the area, or the kind of loaner PDA that doesn't have any good treaties basically with the other PDAs. Because if you have such a PDA and you have a dispute with a customer of one of the other PDAs, you're not going to have your dispute resolved. So the PDAs that refuse to be civilized and have agreements with each other to compromise, cooperate, are not going to get as many customers. So they're going to have higher costs. Basically, if you go to war, it's costly. And they have to charge that to their customers. See, the governments can do that because they can tax their citizens, whether their citizens want to pay or not. But if you have to charge people a premium, and their premiums are in the double or triple because you have a belligerent, bellicose PDA that's becoming kind of state-like and warlike, it's not going to be able to survive. It wouldn't be able to lose customers. It would lead to go to a cheaper, i.e., more civilized PDA. So this is discussed in depth in the literature. Bob Murphy's Chaos Theory. The classic is Morrison, Linda Tannehills, The Market for Liberty. Matt Morlauro points to a Roger Blum article. Excuse me. It's on loorockwell.com where his step question answers that. Yeah, that's great. That's great. All right. It's 8 o'clock. Yeah, actually, I should list that on the read. That is a good article, Matt. It's 8 o'clock eastern time, my time. Why don't we take a seven-minute break, come back at 7 past the hour, and we'll resume then. What I'll do is I'll see what questions you guys have, and I'll be happy to take Q&A. If there aren't a lot, which I see there's a couple already, then I can go on. Let's see here. Let me just review the comments here about the PDA's fighting. Yeah, it looks like, Matt, you're saying kind of what I was saying about the PDA's, the ones that fighting is more expensive than peace. Okay. In the Q&A box, I have a couple of questions. So let's see here. One from Jan. I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. Jan Jan Masek is left libertarian – oh, Jan, I get it. Jan Masek is left libertarian. Roger Glong, the same thing, is known Chomsky kind of Marxist anarchism. I don't think so. I'm not real familiar with Chomsky's exact views. I know he's a type of left anarchist. I think he's more like a syndicalist or something like that. I don't think he's similar to this. I think left libertarian to Roger Glong, first of all, I don't think it has to be anarchist. I mean, Roderick is an anarchist. But I believe they would say left libertarians are a certain type of libertarian. And the libertarians can be either anarchists or anarchists. But among those libertarians, some have a left orientation, in a sense. And what they mean by that is, number one, they tend to have certain cultural views of left, certain emphases. And they also tend to think that there are certain thick reasons for being opposed to certain things that are not aggression, but that are still problematic in the same way. So for example, we might believe as people that it is immoral to insult someone because it hurts their feelings or whatever, or it's just rude. But it's not a rights violation. But if you go so far as to hit them, then that is immoral and a rights violation. But you can't say that libertarianism itself says that insulting people is immoral. Libertarians can believe that, but they believe that in their capacity as people not as libertarians. In my view, a thicker type person, they believe that, like Sir Roderick Long and these guys, what they believe is that the reason we are libertarians, the reason we oppose aggression is because it's a type of authority. And therefore we have good reasons to be opposed to all authority. Now that's arguable. And even if it's true, I still don't think it means that being opposed to authority is part of libertarianism. It just means some of the same reasons that make you be a libertarian would also mean you ought to oppose authority too. But you could say the same thing about honesty. You have to be honest and logical if you're going to be a libertarian. And so therefore if you're honest and logical, you should see that there's a God, or that there's not, whichever. And therefore the belief in God or the absence of belief in God is kind of a close cousin of libertarianism, which I don't think it is. Oh, someone, Matt and Yon are talking about Chomsky being an anarchist. Yeah, I think I've actually heard that Chomsky may not actually be a good anarchist at all. I mean, he says he's against the state, but is he really even against the state? In any case, Roger, are you talking to me, William? Roger Long? Oh, Roderick, Roderick Long, sorry, Roderick R-O-D-E-R-I-C-K Long. Okay, let me see some of the other questions here. Yon asked another question. Non-aggression axiom is an axiom. I've seen people make fun that it's not an axiom, but a tautology, implying that it's meaningless and nothing to be derived from it. What's the difference between tautology and axiom, and why is non-aggression an axiom? Well, as I argued earlier, I think it's – I actually have a slide on this later on, but we'll talk about it in more detail next time. But I don't think it is an axiom. I think it's a principle. But I think – because aggression is dependent upon property rules, so it's not the primary thing anyway. It's just a principle, and it's a way of expressing that you shouldn't take people's property, but you have to know if their property is to do this. This is why I said that I think you have to focus on property allocation rules, because otherwise you could say that non-aggression axiom is a tautology, because as I said, if you say, don't initiate force against others, well, but you don't know what that means, it's empty in a sense. Not in the case of bodies, because it's clear what that means. You're striking someone's body. But in the case of other property, it is kind of an empty tautology. You have to fill it in by specifying what property rules are. Oh, okay. Jan is correcting me now. He says he didn't mean the non-aggression axiom. Do you mean the human action axiom? Well, again, this is a little out of order, and I'll revisit it in more detail later, but it's a tautology thing. Number one, the Randians used the word axiom to mean almost what the Misesians would call a priori truth. They both used the term axiom for Rand or human action, that axiom, as something that is undeniably true. And you'll see this criticism a lot from people that oppose a priori truth. Anti-confians, they will say that there are no synthetic a priori truths, that anything that's a priori is merely analytic, that is a tautology. And anything that is substantive has to be an empirical type statement. But I think this is completely false, and I think a really good book to read on this is Brand, Blanchard's Reason and Analysis. Brand, a Blanchard's Reason and Analysis. But in any case, the human action axiom just says humans act and that has certain meanings. I mean, as opposed to behavior, it means that human beings are agents who make choices to select means, which are scarce resources, to achieve certain ends. And all of these things inform our analysis of economics and human behavior. I don't think it's empty at all. Okay, another question from Matt. Matt says, I mentioned the paleo-libertarian strategy movement is mostly over. It's no longer pursuing the paleo-libertarian strategy. Well, I think that, first of all, the word is not used that much anymore. If you search the Property and Freedom Society website, I think it's used once or twice maybe. There isn't still an instances by Hoppe on conservative cultural mores, but that's more along the lines of his view, which is a type of thickest in itself, that in a free society, you would have a lot of culturally conservative enclaves and societies that would serve a lot of the functions of today's state-influenced and run institutions. So I think he still believes that. Probably the biggest element in recent years of the paleo-libertarian strategy would be the immigration issue, which we will talk about here. But you don't hear Hoppe talking that much anymore about even a second or third best policy would be not to have open borders. I mean, he made his argument, and I've got some slides later on this, by the way. He made his argument that ultimately we should have anarchy, and that's the ideal society, and immigration would have no meaning in such a world. But he said that democracy was a step back from monarchy in many ways, if not most ways. And he said the monarchs tend to have better incentives about what they're going to do, about what rules they would impose to maintain the value of the country. And then he says, well, a monarch wouldn't have open immigration, and he would have a more sound immigration policy than democracies have. So it would be better if a democracy emulated what a monarch would do, because the democracy is getting back more towards the way a monarchy would be run, which is better or less bad than the way democracies are run. So it's basically arguing for an imperfect second best sort of outcome. But he doesn't emphasize it that much anymore. In fact, he specifically says he's not in favor of the feds having this power. And I've got some slides on this. We'll get to them later. So I do think it's been downplayed even by him. Now, he does have people speak at his events that are more conservative, like Peter Brimelow, and these guys are against it, but I don't hear Hoppe talking too much about that himself. All right. In the Q&A – I have a private Q – my Q&A from Cam. Is the PDA used to check an enemy army? If so, are the PDAs all on the same page in terms of coordination when it comes to operations, strategy, and tactics? You know, this might be reserved for the thorny issues, or the conundrums issue. I mean, this is a difficult issue, and I don't know if I've seen this dealt with satisfactorily myself. I don't know if I can answer that. I do think the idea is that insurance companies of a prosperous regime would have a strong interest in having some kind of defensive policy. Maybe they would have nukes. I don't know. So I can't answer that. There's stuff out there you can read on this, but I cannot claim to be the world's greatest expert on the nitty-gritty of anarcho-capitalist theory on this. I read it like you guys do, too. Tony Cape, can you clarify why promoting peace, prosperity, and cooperation are good? Rothbard leaned on natural law, and the promotion of virtue is behavior which promoted core humanity. Your version seems to rely on empathy. I was trying to explain why people tend to value, say, peace and prosperity. I wasn't saying that's a justification for it. As I said, some libertarians like Rothbard, he's more of an aristotelian natural law type, they believe you can justify certain classical values like that. I am of the mind with Hoppe that it is very difficult to overcome what Hume identified as the is-ought gap. That is, if you just have a bunch of factual or is statements, you cannot deduce an ought from that. You have to, at some point, introduce a value or an ought or a normative statement. And the only way to do that is to basically point to values people, for some reason, happen to hold. Now, I suspect some people take a religious view or a more natural law type view, and they think that there's a naturalness about certain things and that it's good for humans, et cetera, to live a certain type of life, and that's why they think these things are good. But to me, I think that's more meta-libertarianism. It's not really libertarianism proper because it doesn't really matter why you have those values. As long as you do, and as long as you value truth and consistency and logic and reason and you have a little bit of economic literacy, you can't help but ultimately conclude that politically only libertarian rules can be justified, that every other rule would contradict one of the basic values or be illogical or inconsistent. Now, I actually don't think you can prove that it's good to promote peace, except in the sense of Hoppe's argument, that basically says any person that ever seeks to justify anything at all is already by virtue of that participating in some kind of peaceful activity of argument or discourse with other people. So the only person that could ever question that peace is good or not would have to do it in the context of a peaceful activity that he's engaging in. So he's almost contradicting himself to say he doesn't value peace as part of a peaceful activity of argumentation. So it seems like to be consistent, you have to just shut up and go be a criminal or outlaw or a misanthrope, and the civilized people can just ignore that guy. So I was trying to explain why people have, not why they try to justify their values, but why they actually do have them, and I think they do have them because of empathy. That's just my personal insight. I mean, this is how it seems to me from what I've seen. Mises has some stuff on this. Do I have a blog post about empathy being the source of rights? And by saying source, I mean it's the reason people believe or hold certain values that imply rights if you reason consistently. Mishory Clark says doesn't Hopp link to the ought, is to ought in argumentation ethics? Well, first of all, in argumentation ethics, Hoppe explicitly says that the gap between is and ought is logically unbridgeable, and he agrees with him on that. And then he denies that he's trying to bridge the gap with his argumentation ethics. But others have argued that he actually does it. He doesn't realize that he's doing it. I mean, he doesn't characterize it that way himself, but he actually ends up bridging it. And I think in a way he does, he bridges it by showing that certain oughts are necessarily presupposed as valid by anyone engaged in a certain type of activity, which is argumentation. So as a practical matter, no justification of a non-libertarian ethic could ever be made because the justification would have to be done in the course of a peaceful argument. So you couldn't basically have an argument to justify that peace is horrible and we should kill each other because you're contradicting that by engaging in peaceful argumentation. So just the logic of what justification is and the fact that people have to adopt a peaceful stance in order to do it is a way of sort of bridging the gap. But it's doing it by introducing the ought. It's not doing it by reducing it. It's showing that it has to be there among people that are part of this what we call relevant community. Okay. Let's see here. Kim says, oh, I already said that question. Tony Cape asks, committing aggression is consenting to the victim's jurisdiction. Isn't the third party only accused? How is consent given if the charge is bogus or at least uncertain? Yeah, I agree. This is an epistemic problem, right? This is the problem of what do you do with the guy before you have proved that he's guilty? And even if you prove it, you could be wrong, right, because we're not infallible, which is why I believe that restitution would become a dominant mode in a society like that. In a restitution-based society, you're basically only assigning property titles to non-bodies to reward the victim. It's just so much less costly. And that is one point some of the PDA advocates argue is that you can't put this guy in custody until you know he's guilty. So what do you do before then? Which is why I mentioned in the Elle-Mill Smith book, The Probability Brooch or The Galatin Divergence, you know, the accused criminal is put into a hotel instead of a jail to minimize the damage they might have to pay the guy if he turns out to be innocent. So I agree. But think about an act of aggression. When the criminal is attacking you, you have to judge him as a victim as being an aggressor, and you basically are judge, jury, and executioner right there on the spot. You have no choice. So if you use force against him, then you are treating him as if he deserves it. But after the fact, it gets harder and harder. So I agree. That is an issue. Pavel Kogan says, couldn't you consistently argue that both war and peace are acceptable? Well, war is usually waged by states, and it always involves aggression against individuals, right? You have to conscript them, you have to tax them to pay for the war, and then there's always collateral damage or third parties that are killed. So to justify war, you would have to justify aggression. But to justify aggression, you'd have to engage in the peaceful activity of argumentation. So this is Hoppe's argument. Not everyone agrees with it, but I think it makes at least intuitive sense. See here. Tony Cape. Hoppe's version of property, best link or claim, doesn't just vary from Rothbardian. I have a classic car sitting in my garage for decades. My friend gets permission and spends mass, time, and dollars to fix it up. Does he have a better link? Well, Rothbard said that he wholeheartedly endorsed Hoppe's argumentation ethics approach, and he thought it was a radical improvement on his own natural law approach. So I think it's not incompatible with it. It's a little bit more explicit, but I don't think it's incompatible. Rothbard believed in self-ownership and Rothbard believed in the Lockheed and Homesteading rule. Rothbard believed in using contract to transfer title from one person to another. So I don't see any difference at all. Now, I don't quite understand, Tony, your example. You have a classic car sitting in your garage for decades. Your friend gets permission and spends time to fix it up. Does he have a better link? No, he wouldn't have a better link in either Rothbard's or Hoppe's theory because he's not the owner. The owner was you in this case, the guy that has it sitting in his garage, and just because he gave permission to someone to do something to it doesn't mean he transfers title to it. If your friend spends his labor on it to fix it up, I mean I don't know why he would do that if he knows he won't own the car. If you don't pay him, why would he do it? So I don't understand the hypo. Remember, once the car is owned, then it's owned by the owner, even if he doesn't put any more effort into it or labor onto it. If someone else puts labor onto it, they're throwing their labor away. If they don't have permission, they're committing trespass. If they do have permission, then I guess they're just – it's a hobby. I mean, I don't know why they would do that. Pavel, in the case of a third party that isn't the client of a PDA allegedly committing a crime, who had the right to judge them and then enforced their judgment? Well, yeah, well, this was my point about the dilemma that some anarchists see about these third parties. Well, it would be the PDA of the victim. The PDA of the victim would avenge or seek justice for their client. Or maybe they would just write it off and give them an insurance claim. And then just like when you get in a wreck and you hit an uninsured motorist – I mean, when an uninsured motorist hits you and it hits fault, he doesn't have insurance, then your uninsured motorist policy kicks. And maybe there would be uninsured human policies. And then that would just give the PDA or your insurer an incentive to have really good defense so that the crimes don't happen in the first place. Because usually if you just get a restitution award against an aggressor, most aggressors are deadbeats and lowlives. They don't have any money to take anyway or any property to take. They could try to go on a manhunt and lynch the guy or kill him, but the problem is that dangerous and risky doesn't really get you much. And it would have a higher premiums because if there's a mistake, there's going to be a lot of damage to pay the estate of the killed, innocent, purported aggressor. Okay. Matt has a question about – well, let me see. Tony elaborated. He's talking about the Seinfeld episode where the mechanic steals Jerry's car. He cares more about the resources than the title owner. I don't remember the details of that episode, but I don't see what it matters. If he steals the car, then Jerry's still the owner. Matt says, what about abandonment? Isn't there a point where there's sufficient disinterest and disuse to say that a person no longer owns something like adverse possession cases? Yes, I do agree completely. I don't know what you mean. Why do you say that though? I don't see how that's contrary to the cases we just discussed. I mean, if the car is in your garage, I don't think that's abandoned. You leave it in an unsupervised field two states away and you don't visit it for two decades. But sure, I do agree. I think that you can abandon things that you own and that a type of adverse possession or what we sometimes call statute of limitations, although it wouldn't be a statute, but that would arise, of course. Yeah, sure. I don't see a problem with that. I don't agree with the mutualist idea that if you're an absentee owner, that you abandon it because abandoned rules like the adverse possession rule is just a default rule when you don't know what the owner intended. We have to make a decision at some point. And if the owner didn't express his abandonment, then we have to infer it from context. But in the case of a factory or a hotel or an apartment complex that is owned by some distant owner, I mean, believe me, if you tell him we're going to assume you abandoned this unless you make it clear you didn't, he would make it clear he doesn't abandon. He's got employees working there on his behalf. He's managing it. He doesn't intend to abandon it, so it's not a case of abandonment there, in my opinion. By the way, I have a slide on this too. A lot of these questions are good. I have slides on abandonment. It's interesting that in legal systems I'm familiar with, like the Louisiana Civil Law System and I think in the common law, there is no express provision for abandonment of land, a movable property, real property. There usually is for personal property. But it's like the law doesn't even contemplate, number one, that there could be an owned land or that you can abandon it. The only thing is you could let someone gradually take it by a 20-year, 10-year adverse possession. But if you just wanted to have an official declaration, I hereby give up my ownership of Blackacre or what was the land in Scarlet O'Hara's land and moment of wind. Anyway, okay, so let's go on with some more questions. Jan says, Jan says, yeah, Tara. That's right, Tara. Jan says, Rothbard considered an atomic bomb un-libertarian because it can't target criminals. It can only kill civilians. Should atomic bombs be illegal to own? Well, this is one of these more controversy issues. I don't know the answer. I tend to think no because there are some legitimate uses of atomic weapons. Mining for asteroids, you know, scientific experiments that they don't have to be used offensively or even defensively. They don't have to be used as a weapon. So I don't think that they're necessarily per se un-libertarian. So I kind of disagree with Rothbard. I tend to agree with his argument that you really can't use it as a weapon because it's basically impossible to use it without killing innocent people, too. And I think that's what he was focusing on. Pavel says, I was just saying that while you can't logically argue against peace peacefully, there's no logical problem if you accept it but only in certain circumstances. Not thinking of any circumstances in particular. Well, it's not a purely logical problem, but according to Hoppe's argumentation, I think it's still unjustifiable because argumentation is a practical activity that has certain presupposed ideas in it. And all these tie in together to mean that you can't just pick and choose like this. You've got the universalizability requirements. You've got the practical fact that to engage in argumentation, you have to be alive and you have to survive and you have to have had some kind of control over your life and resources to get there. So there's sort of this mutual recognition by all parties to an argument of certain practical things as well as the rules of consistency and logic, truth and honesty, economic literacy, and plus the values, the grand norms themselves. And so all these things together, Hoppe would argue, and I tend to agree, mean that you can't just pick and choose like that. You can't say, well, I believe in peace, yeah, but not in all cases. I mean, the cases where you don't believe in it is inconsistent with the values you're expressing here in the argument. Well, Tony says that we would lose adherence if they think we're advocating private ownership of nukes. Well, remember, the question is a little bit out of context. Should it be illegal? I mean, what does that even mean? You're not going to have a central lawmaking authority. The question is, is it per se aggression to own a nuclear weapon? And I think it's not per se aggression, but does that mean that you have the right to do it? I mean, is it per se aggression to have a purple house? No. But does that mean that you're able to paint your house purple? No, because you may live in a neighborhood with restrictive covenants that prohibits painting your house purple because it's too ugly. And would that be a common arrangement? Probably. Now, what about if you have all these insurance companies and PDAs, you're going to tend to have pressure for these insurance companies and regimes to have rules that prohibit things that are going to make it very expensive to get insurance or to protect people's property. So over time, you're going to have contractual or quasi-contractual norms in certain areas that I think would prohibit you from owning a nuclear bomb in your house just like you wouldn't be able to paint your house purple. Jan says, why should consistency be a worthy goal anyway? So what if they're consistent? Well, I would suggest you read in Hoppe's book, Economics and Ethics of Property, read his appendix, reply to four critics or something like that. And he talks in detail in there. He basically, I mean, if you're conceding that the only way to justify socialism is to be inconsistent, I mean, you've done a pretty good job of getting them to back down. So what if they say that, yeah, I'm wrong, but I believe in it anyway? Or, yeah, I know it makes no sense, but I still believe in it. Well, the only point of argumentation ethics and of libertarian norms is to show what can and cannot be justified. If all we can show, if we can demonstrate that you cannot argumentatively justify any non-libertarian norm, that's all that you can ask of political theory. If people want to say, well, I know it's not justified, but I'm going to do it anyway, I mean, then what can you do? Then you're dealing with irrational or evil people. And if there's too many of them in the human race, then we won't survive. At least we won't survive as civilized people. But hopefully there's enough of us that the majority will be civilized to a large degree, and we will regard these other people as outlaws. And then we recognize them as just criminals. So yeah, some people could choose to be criminals, but they can't justify their criminality. That's the point. Matt says, do I think someone could be a libertarian without holding the values you mentioned? Someone supported libertarian property rules and the NAP but didn't care about peace, cooperation, and civilization? I've never thought about that before, but it seems to me logically, yes, you could be. As long as you support the non-aggression principles, and I think you're a libertarian, and I suppose it's logically possible to support the non-aggression principle, defined strictly as the impermissibility of the use of using property as defined by Lockean rules, et cetera, without the consent of the owner, I think you're a libertarian. I'm just saying I think the way that most people – the way you can justify it to most people is to show them that it's incompatible, that a socialist ethic is incompatible with norms that they already necessarily hold in the attempts to deny it. But take this libertarian you're talking about. He doesn't engage in argumentation to argue against libertarian norms with you, so he never really enters the field to – he doesn't have to because he's not trying to justify an un-libertarian norm, right? So sure. But still, he has to arrive at its conclusion somehow. He's got to have some reasons. I can't imagine it's completely arbitrary. I guess that's logically possible, but it seems very unlikely. And so to the extent he's engaging in any dialogue and discourse and reasoning process, he is at least, to some degree, participating in some kind of peaceful activity and can't help to value that to some degree. Pavel, what's the stop-up group forming a PDA explicitly to prey on those who aren't customers of another PDA because they can't afford them based on spurious charges? Well, let me say a few things. Number one, presumably in a world that we're talking about, there would be mass wealth and riches. We'd be orders of magnitude richer than we are now. So criminality would be largely extinct because, number one, the wealthy people would be able to afford very good security and defense. Number two, they would be very charitable because they don't care. They're all billionaires, basically. Number three, almost no one would be poor because it's so easy to make a million dollars, and if you're not, then there's plenty of charity to go around. So I think it's an unrealistic idea in the first place. But if that happened, I think they're not a PDA. They're basically a gang and it's preying upon the uninsured, basically. So I think that what you'd have is you'd have charity. You'd have people that would buy insurance policies for these unfortunate poor people. You know, they wouldn't want them to be preyed on. Or maybe they would spend some of their excess money on a PDA that's dedicated towards defending the rights of these uninsured people, which is the same thing, basically. Or maybe PDAs would have a pro bono policy, really, you know, dedicate one-twentieth of their excess profits to helping out the indigent, you know, things like this. So, but if none of those things happen, then there's nothing to stop it. I mean, you know, rights are not self-enforcing. You might have a right to not be murdered, but you don't have a right to have other people protect your right. But I think that they would tend to in a free society. Tony says, with PDA justice, does the burden of proof shift? If I believe John has killed my sister and I killed John, does someone now have to prove John didn't kill her? Not sure I understand how that would play out. So let's get the hypo straight here. I think that basically self-help or vigilante action, like you're discussing, would tend to be frowned upon in a free society. And as I said before, I think that restitution would tend to be the primary justice norm. It wouldn't be executing murderers. It would be bringing them the justice, which means trying to find a way to have a restitution. But on occasion, you're going to have someone run off half-cocked and they're going to just shoot the guy that killed his sister, or that he thinks killed his sister. Now, let's say he is correct and the guy, he did kill a murderer. I think this guy, everyone's going to keep an eye on this guy. He might get kicked out of his PDA because he's a risk now. But people probably leave him alone. He'd probably suffer a little ostracism. People look at him a little funny. So there's a cost to being a sort of vigilante. But if it turned out he was wrong, then he would be liable. Now, who's going to have to prove it? Well, if this guy, John, is a total homeless nobody with no family or representatives or relatives, I guess there's no one to represent his case against you. But presumably he's got friends and family and they would bring an action against you if they think he's innocent, if they think you did commit a murder. So basically John's agency or John's heirs would have to see justice for him. I don't see the difference here. Brian Mooney asks, let me go back to what Matt says, Matt Mordellaro, I don't think anarchists like Trumps are libertarians, but left libertarians are. I agree, Matt. They think that authority is bad but not to be resisted by us. Yeah, I agree. But some left libertarians go a little bit too far, I think, and they blend these things together, which I think is a danger of thick of them. But in any case, yeah, I agree with that in general. Josh, Robert Cummins, a predatory PDA, so it's like a government or a state. Right, that's correct. Brian Mooney, defined homesteading, how are claims made to land? Do you stick a flag in the ground and claim it? Assuming it's unoccupied, what prevents someone from claiming Mars by simply claiming a flag on it? Well, here I would have to refer you to, I think it's in the antics of liberty. It's not search on my blog or just search Googlebind, Steppen Cancella, and Rothbard, and then the phrase relevant technological unit, RTU, a relevant technological unit. And this is Rothbard's idea that it's a practical matter, but you can only homestead the relevant technological unit. That is the unit of property that you're actually using in a certain economic sense, as recognized by your fellow economic actors. And this is where Rothbard's view of, oh, yeah, by the way, someone says, D'Espici or Columbus did that. Well, of course, they did that by virtue of the state granting them a patent, one of the early uses of patents, a patent to go on behalf of the crown and claim this whole land or stepping your foot on it. Anyway, Rothbard's idea is that the essence of homesteading is setting up visible borders. The whole purpose of property rights, that's my tool, excuse me guys. Hold on, let me close this door. Okay, so the whole purpose of property rights is to let people use things peacefully and productively, but the only way that can work is if the people that are not the owners know what is owned and can respect it and avoid committing trespass. For that to happen, there has to be visible public borders, which is why Hoppe believes that the essence of homesteading is in bordering, setting up borders. And, of course, it depends upon the nature of the resource. For land, you could set up a border by putting up a fence, building a house, telling a field, showing somehow that you're staking a claim. And you can't do that with the whole continent, obviously. Okay, so that's the Rothbardian and Hoppeian approach to this. We have a lot of people in other countries, so I don't want to go too much longer because it's getting really late for some people. Carol says her poodle is barking back. Yeah, I do have three standard poodles, and two of them start barking. One's name is Louis von Mises, can you tell them by the way? I'm sorry. Let me say one more thing about homesteading. The way I look at it is the way you determine this relevant technological unit that Rothbard talks about, which she doesn't go into a lot of detail, think of it like this. Whenever there's a dispute, there's always a dispute between two or more people about who gets to control a given resource. So the very nature of the dispute, the very fact that there is a dispute, is already defining the context. And it's already getting the attention of the disputants aimed at the nature of this resource and the nature of the types of use you can make of it. Obviously the uses of this resource of the two different contestants are somewhat similar, otherwise there wouldn't be a conflict. So the nature of the use, the type of conflict that they're fighting about, that is going to define the nature of the resource that we're talking about. And then you just ask who had it first. So I think that the nature of disputes themselves and dispute resolution procedures helps to answer these practical questions. Lee Cape, how would you answer a friend of mine who says having a state military is good because we get to fight abroad rather than here at home? Well, I would say that to have a state military, you have to have a state. And states are necessarily criminal because they always commit aggression. They always outlaw non-criminal actions and make them into crimes. They always tax and they always kill. And they outlaw competition in their jurisdiction, in their area. So that's the first problem with the state military. And then the second question is the second point would be that I just don't think it's, why would it be good that you get to fight abroad? You say rather than here at home, but I think the state actually stirs up. I mean, the last fight we had here at home was 9-11, which was a blowback, a result of our foreign aggression, I mean, a foreign intervention of them. So why don't we fight neither here nor at home? I think of a better limited state solution would be to have a well-armed military with nukes and stay home and say, we'll be peaceful as long as you're peaceful. No, that's not the energy solution. Lee Cape said, let me see here, Joshua Rosenblatt says, Lee Cape asked in the chat window, how are the right and left libertarians being distinguished from one another? Well, the right libertarians tend to emphasize conservative cultural norms, usually religion, families, heterosexual unions, et cetera, and even capitalism in a free market sort of variant. Left libertarians emphasize the side of the workers. They fight what they call vulgar libertarianism, which is equating today's corporatism and crony capitalism and mixed economy with the free market. And they also tend to oppose a lot of the same things that are opposed by people on the left, like bosses that are too unfair, this kind of stuff. Tony says, if I'm anti-development and homestead at first and say my use is actually to ensure it stays natural, or the unutilized portion is meant to be sold for profit later, like Swampland in Florida, is that legitimate? This is one of those things which I think is a conundrum. This is hard work. I don't know the answer. I think it's difficult to say that you can keep undeveloped, wide stretches of property, undeveloped as property. I mean, it seems like a contradictory thing. It may just not be possible. I mean, what if you wanted to live in a world where there are no airplanes and you never saw jet trails in the sky? I mean, it's too late. People will use the world, and we're going to increasingly bump into each other. I don't mean in a conflictual way, but we're going to see effects of each other's existence. And I just think it's not possible. Now, it's probably going to be possible to homestead wide tracks of land and use them for parks and reserves and forests. And if you embroider it and set up a ticket mechanism and keep the lawns manicured or available for hunting, I think you can do that. But you have to figure out a way to do that that's compatible with the norms of the community of setting up borders on property. I think Missouri is right. The cost of protecting it makes it almost impossible. I think that that's true. There's a limit to how big you can homestead. I mean, I was just at Callaway Gardens in Georgia, which is about a 25-square-mile, if I've got my numbers right, private land reserve, and it's phenomenal. But they have revenues from tourists all the time and guests, and they maintain it, and there's golf courses, and there's employees, and that takes some work. And if they fell apart and they just left, they couldn't defend their land, and eventually other people are going to use it. I think we should call an end to this now, and I want to go beyond two hours because it's going to be just too much for people to keep up with. I see no newer questions in the Q&A box. So unless anyone objects, why don't we call it a night, and we will pick up where we left off, slide 24, next Monday. Thanks, John. Glad you like it. Have fun, too. Thanks, guys. Good night.