 I'm going to be discussing my two books, Defending the Undefinable, Defending the Undefinable One, and Defending the Undefinable Two. But first let me tell you a little story about how I came to write this one. What happened was I was doing my PhD dissertation at Columbia on rent control, and most of it was on math and stat, and I am very bored by math and stat. So I had to keep pushing. There was a war in Vietnam going on, and my choice was either do my dissertation and stay in school or go and shoot some people and be shocked by them. I decided to stay in New York and do my dissertation, but I had to give myself reward. So every time I finished doing one more set of equations, I promised myself I would take one whole day off, and I could do anything I wanted. And what I decided to do is to write something. I'm a nerd, you know, so that's my pleasure to write stuff. And I would write on, I don't know, to pick somebody out of my table of contents, the speculator or the fat capitalist pig employer or maybe the blackmailer. And then I'd go back to my dissertation and then I'd have another week off or a day off in another week and I'd write another article. And by the time I finished my dissertation, I had about 30 articles floating around and I put them together and that's this book. So I'm very grateful for my PhD dissertation. Boring as hell, but at least it created or helped me create this. So what I'm going to do is read the table of contents of each of these two books and then maybe talk about one or two of the issues. And as I read them off, write down which issue that you would like me to talk about so that I can talk about the ones you want. Okay, so in the first book, here are the chapters under sex, the prostitute, the pimp and the male chauvinist pig, on the medical, the drug pusher and the drug addict, on the free speech, the blackmailer, slanderer, libeler, denier of academic freedom, advertiser and one of my favorites, the person who yells fire in a crowded theater. Then under outlaw, there's the gypsy cab driver, the ticket scalper and the dishonest cop, dishonest cop. Under financial, it's the non-government counterfeiter, the miser, inheritor, money lender and non-contributive charity. Ayn Rand would like that one, I guess. Under business and trade, the commudian, slumlord, ghetto merchant, speculator, importer, middleman and profiteer, under ecology, the strip miner, litterer and waste maker and under labor, the fat capitalist pig employer, the scab, the rate buster and the employer of child labor. By the way, this book came out in 1976. My dissertation was finished in 72, so it took me, it takes a while to get a publisher when you're starting out, it took me a while. I want to read what Hayek wrote about this. And when I saw this letter, I asked different people to write, I don't know, a blurb for the book. And when I read this, I thought Hayek was drunk. Here's what Hayek said. Looking through defending the indefendable made me feel that I was once more exposed to the shock therapy, by which more than 50 years ago, the late Ludwig von Mises was in a consistent free market position. In other words, he's comparing me to Mises. I was just a young punk kid, not that I'm any Mises now, but that was ridiculous, I was like in my late 20s. And I really thought he was a little drunk on this. Later on, what happened is I got a hold of his book, The Road to Serfdom, and I wrote a blistering attack on it because I thought he was selling out on principle. And in that, I said I hate to be like the, what is it, the dog that bites you? No, that's not, the person who bites the dog. Sorry? Bite the hands that feed you, thank you. I'm getting senile, I'm losing it here. You can see, pretty soon I'll be drooling, so the people in the first row, you better watch out for the drool. Biting the hand that feeds you, I felt sort of awkward in criticizing a guy who fed me this magnificent blurb. And then I realized that a good professor, a good scholar is after the truth. And if you don't have it, and one of your students, or followers as I am of Hayek, I mean I revere him as an Austrian economist, I think that as a libertarian he's a little, not as good as he should be. But I think that that's the ideal, that we professors want to get to the truth with a capital T if possible. And if we don't, and if one of you students can set us straight, that's good, we shouldn't resent it, we should glorify that. In my talk on Friday on Murray Rothbard, I will be talking about Murray in this regard and how he reaches the highest levels of just this sort of a thing, of welcoming criticism from his followers. Okay, so that's the first book. The second book, this one came out in what year? 2013, so it's a long time between 76 and 2013. I've now got defending the undefendable three in, I'm sort of halfway through it, but I keep getting distracted unlike the girl who can't say no. You know, people ask me to do this and I say, oh yeah, that's fun and I'll do that. And so one of these years I'll come out with defending three. And if anyone has suggestions for what's not on these lists that need to be defended please send me stuff, get my email and say, hey, you should include this person in defending three. Okay, so here's defending two. Under trade, multinational enterprise or the smuggler, British petroleum, nuclear energy and the corporate raider. Under labor, the hatchet man, the home worker, the picket line crosser, the daycare provider and the automator. Under medical, the smoker, the human organ merchant, that's the person who buys and sells used body parts, the breast milk substitute purveyor. Under sex, topless in public, polygamous marriage and the burning bed, that's about wife abuse, where the wife kills the abuse of husband. The discriminators, the sexist, the peeping tom, the aegis, the homophobe and the stereotyper. These are all people who discriminate. And by the way, two books have come out on the basis of defending the undefendable. One of them is called the case for discrimination. And the other on a topic in this book is legalizing blackmail. So I'll talk a little bit about discrimination and blackmail when I get to doing chapters here. So under discrimination, sexist, peeping tom, aegis, homophobe and stereotyper. In defending three, I'm thinking of having people who discriminate against those who have too few hair follicles. Under business, the war toy manufacturer, the colorizer, the baby seller, baby seller buying and selling babies, David Gordon will appreciate that one. And the heritage building destroyer, under politically incorrect, the bad Samaritan, not the good Samaritan. The duelist, the person who duels, fights duels. The executioner, the dwarf thrower. Those are people who throw dwarfs. Like bowling, you know, you throw a dwarf and try to throw him through a basket, whatever. And the intellectual property denier. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take one chapter from this book and that is blackmail. And one chapter from this book, namely discrimination, and start off with those two and then maybe pick one or two others from each book into the audience where you can choose other chapters or pretty much anything else you want to ask me or discuss. Okay, so under blackmail, what's going on with blackmail? Now you'd think blackmail is a very bad thing and very bad things should be prohibited by law. But libertarianism doesn't prohibit all bad things. Libertarianism is a theory of what law should be and what it says is you can do anything you damn well please. Just do not initiate violence against other people or their property. So the question is, does blackmail constitute an initiation or a threat thereof of violence against someone else? And my answer is no, it doesn't. You have to distinguish between blackmail and extortion. In blackmail, what I'm going to do is threaten to become a gossip. I'm going to go to you and say, aha, I saw you out with somebody else, you're a married person and you're out with somebody else who's not your spouse and I'm going to tell you a spouse unless you give me a thousand bucks. That's what blackmail is. It's the threat to become a gossip. But is gossip, per se, a violation of rights? No. Right? I mean the only violation of rights is murder and rape and theft and threatening to become a gossip is not to threaten to use violence. Now extortion is very different and usually they're conflated and in the literature they use the synonyms for each other which is improper because they're very different. In extortion, what you're threatening is if you don't give me money I'll kidnap your kids or I'll shoot you or something like that. So blackmail, it's not nice but then again, or nice hood. It's a theory of we should prohibit things that have uninvited border crossings or trespass but you're not trespassing on anyone else's property. Look, at least the blackmail has the decency to come to you and say give me money and I'll shut up. Whereas if you're in the hands of a gossip it's game over. The gossip is just babble. So if you're going to put people in jail for blackmailing, you should put them in jail even more for being a gossip and yet that's silly. Gossip is a good thing. Gossip keeps people on the straight and narrow. Gossip is a way of a non-legal way of making people behave better than they might otherwise be because you're always afraid someone will gossip yack, yack, yack. So this is the case in favor, not of blackmail but in favor of legalizing blackmail and prostitution. I don't favor prostitution. I have a daughter. I have a sister. I have a wife. I wouldn't want any of them to be a prostitute. I don't go to prostitutes. I don't think prostitution is a good thing. I think that the much better way of relating male and female or male and male or female and female because you have prostitution all over the place is through love and kindness and being friends. And that's what prostitution does. And nor does blackmail. What happened was the University of Pennsylvania Law Review had a big thick essay, not an issue of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. And what it consisted of was a whole bunch of very, very famous people arguing as to why blackmail should be illegal, illegal. And half of them, and they're very famous people. I think there was, I don't know, I can pick out some of the authors here. Some of them are very famous libertarians. Richard Posner, for example, is one of them. And I think Epstein is another one, Richard Epstein, Nozick, a whole bunch of people and they split. And some of them said, no, no, no, it's based on utilitarianism, namely blackmail is so bad that we have to prohibit it. Not a one of them said, here's the case for legalizing blackmail. And yet I had written several articles and I wasn't invited to that. So Murray Rothbard used to say, hatred is my muse. You know, you read something and you say, I'm going to get them for this if it's the last thing I do. So this is mainly a critique of all of those people who contributed articles to the University of Pennsylvania Law Review saying that blackmail should be illegal and here's why and they diverged as to why it should be but not a one of them made the case that it should be legal. So this whole book is just filled with my ranting and raving against those guys and some of them are very, I read off names and articles. The others are very famous within legal circles. So that's that book and that's the blackmail topic. Okay, the next one is discrimination. Now remember, libertarianism says you've got to keep your midst to yourself. You can't grab other people or their property. Does that mean that you can't refuse to deal with other people based on their race or their sex or how many hair follicles they have or any sort of discrimination? No. You can discriminate till the cows come home. Now it might not be nice but if you discriminate you're not violating their rights because they have no right that you should deal with them. Now, Murray Rothbard has another rule and his rule is people specialize in what they're horrible in. For example, Milton Friedman on wage, on free trade, on rent control, on occupational licensure. I mean he's really, really good on those things and what does he specialize in? Money, where he's horrible in and educational vouchers where he's horrible in. Happily there are two people for whom Murray's law of people specialize in what they're horrible in doesn't work and that's Thomas Sowell as our warmongers. So from a libertarian point of view they're not really kosher they're not really part of our gang but they hardly ever talk about it. What do they talk about? They talk about discrimination. Now you might think that racial discrimination is really a bad thing and it hurts people and what Walter and Thomas do is come up with article after article, book after book showing because the usual feeling when you hear about racial or sexual or any kind of discrimination is oh my god that's disgusting it ought to be prohibited by law because the victims of it are really hurt and what Walter and Thomas say is no no no they're not really hurt and what I say in this book about discrimination is that they're not really hurt. So let me give you some examples. There was a case of the Jim Crow laws where the black people had a ride in the back of the bus and there was some famous case where some women refused to give up a black woman refused to give up her seat to a white man and there was a big lawsuit about that. The question is why doesn't some other bus company start up and say black people you can ride in the front of the bus see the solution the recipe for discrimination is competition so the question is why didn't some other company whether started by a black person or a white person just somebody who discriminates in favor of green namely green as in money because there's profits to be made because if black people are told you can't ride in the front of the bus you have to go to the back of the bus company so why didn't some other bus companies start up in the Jim Crow south in the 1930s or the early 1940s the reason is because in order to start up a bus company you had to get permission from the very people who were espousing Jim Crow legislation in the first place so competition is the solution for this discrimination but they didn't allow competition so of course it's going to hurt black people somebody else could open up a bus company and presumably all black people would go to that one and some white people because that's the next bus well then the whole thing would go away take another case suppose black people and white people have an equal productivity and some of them do and let's say their each productivity is $10 an hour and due to discrimination black people only make $7 an hour well what are you going to do I'm going to offer $701 and I'll make $299 pure profit and somebody else will say $702 and someone else will say $703 and where will it be bid up to to $10 namely the discrimination is perilous and it probably wouldn't even go to $701 or $702 because market forces of competition would see to it that this didn't occur okay I've done a little bit on discrimination I've done a little bit on blackmail let me pick one more from this book and one more from that book and then I'll open it up for discussion and people hopefully will ask about other chapters and I'll try to respond to them so which one shall I pick here let me see personal yells far in a crowded theater that's one of my favorites and Justice Holmes was saying that you know free speech is all well and good but there have to be limits you just can't say anything you damn well please and by the way I agree with that I don't think that all speech acts are legitimate there are certain speech acts which should be prohibited by law namely if you don't give me money I'm going to kill you namely a threat it's just a speech act but I think that that should be prohibited by law it has to be some sort of clear and present danger for example in a play if some character says if you don't give me money I'm going to kill you that's okay or in the present context I just said those words but you all know I'm not going to kill you I mean that's just silly I'm doing a philosophical examination here but if it was you know close in a dark alley and you were afraid and I said that and you shot me it would be legitimate defense was right now if you shot me I'm just an absolutist on free speech because an absolutist on free speech would say anything you want okay back to Justice Holmes who said well we have to have limitations on free speech because otherwise people will yell fire in a crowded theater we can't have that well what's the libertarian answer as I see it what is this chapter in this book all about it says look because you're violating the contract but suppose you had a theater where they wanted to do that shouldn't consenting adults be allowed to yell fire in a crowded theater and then rush together I mean if they all agree to it one of my articles talks about this thing called murder park what's murder park it's a stadium where the walls are 20 foot thick and everybody is issued a pistol with six bullets but wait when the bell rings at 50 minutes of the hour everybody has to stop we cart out the dead bodies we give more ammunition to all the new people and then you start in again for another 50 minutes is this a violation of rights no if there are consenting adults now look I'm not favoring this sort of thing and I don't think anything like this exists but theoretically if people want to commit suicide in weird ways I'm a devout atheist so I have to say that with quotation marks but murder park and yelling fire in a crowded theater are on a par namely the reason you're not allowed to yell fire in a crowded theater unless there's a fire is because in the contract there's an implicit contract if they don't put it on the back of the little ticket they give you they probably have it on the wall somewhere namely whenever you go to a movie you behave yourself shut off your cell phone don't be a pain in the neck to anyone else don't yell fire in a crowded theater so that's why you're not supposed to be yelling fire in a crowded theater not because it has anything to do with free speech and then what Justice Holmes said is well since you can't yell fire in a crowded theater you can't do this you can't do that and little by little the rights of free speech are truncated okay let me pick one from this book let me see which one I shall pick the executioner the death penalty what I'm now doing is defending the death penalty for murder now a lot of people say that we shouldn't have the death penalty death penalty is medieval it's obnoxious it's no good and also on a pragmatic utilitarian point of view it doesn't really reduce the murder rate both of these claims are wrong I claim let me do the pragmatic or utilitarian first what happened was a whole bunch of people economists did econometric studies and they divided the 50 states into those states that had the death penalty and those states that didn't have the death penalty trying to hold constant other things like age of the population because a younger age would have more murders I mean if the average age of 70 you'd have fewer murders than if the average age is 30 and they would try to control for other independent variables in their econometric equations and then they found no correlation between the death penalty and the murder rate so they said death penalty doesn't help reduce the murder rate and that's one argument against the death penalty but then we had a very wise econometrician a guy who graduated a year or two at Columbia and Isaac Erlich was his name and he did it a very different way he didn't correlate death penalty states versus non-death penalty states but rather he correlated execution states versus non-execution states in other words there are some states like California as it happened was a death penalty state in the sense that death penalty was on the books but they never executed anyone in the death penalty state let's look at whether they actually execute anyone or not and then he correlated executions with the murder rate and he found a very very statistically significant correlations which suggest that the execution not the death penalty status but executions actually reduce the murder rate because you know people feel sorry for a guy on death row that he's going to be killed by the murderers you have to take into both into account if you want to be a humanist okay so much for the pragmatic or the utilitarian now let's talk about the day ontological or the philosophical or the rights based okay so here's the situation what's your name William I kill William and now the question is has justified have I given up my right to life there's no right to life but right now to be killed and my claim is so here's the situation with death here we have before and after and here's the murderer and here's the victim and before the murderer I'm going to give a smiley face since he's alive and the victim I'm going to give okay so the murderer kills the victim now suppose we had a machine a magic machine of the sort that Nozick is always inventing that if you flip the switch what happens is you take the life out of the live murderer and you stick the life force or life into the dead victim and out they come after you flip the switch and now the murderer is unhappy because he's dead and now the victim is alive and namely I'm now dead and William you're back now alive not just a zombie but you're actually alive would we have a right to use this machine and the answer is you're Don Tutin because what I did to him is I stole his life I realize I'm being a little poetic here you can't really steal a life you can't grab it but work with me here I stole his life and what he says is you got to return it look if I stole his TV and they caught me surely they would make me disgorge the TV I stole from him and give it back to him now the return theory the way I see it would be a little bit more draconian than that because if all I did is from a pragmatic point of view if all we imposed on me is the obligation to give him back his TV and if I get caught all I have to do is give back what I stole so the second tooth in the there's two teeth for a tooth theory is I have to give him one of my TVs of equal value and if I don't have one then I have to give him the amount of money because the law has to do on to me what I did on to him so now I'm giving him two TVs and the third one is costs of capture if after stealing his TV at the police station I said hey you know I stole his TV I'm sorry here's his TV back well then there were no costs of capture but if dirty rat that I am after I stole his TV I then hid and you guys had to come look for me well who's going to pay for all those costs me and fourth when I stole his TV I scared him his feeling of security has been undermined so how are we going to compensate him I'm the thief here we have to make me play Russian roulette with a number of chambers and a number of bullets proportional to how badly I stole or how badly I scared him so that would be my view of libertarian punishment theory which is pretty draconian you wouldn't have too much theft if we libertarians got in there and dealt with criminals but the very but the very first thing is you have to give back with your stole in his life so execution is justified and it has good benefits okay I've now done what I said I would do I talked I gave a list of the chapters here I showed two books that came out of this out of these things here there was only one little chapter on each here the entire book is sort of a discussion of what I only discussed in a chapter of ten pages or so and I developed it into a book of two or three hundred pages okay so now I would like to call on people to ask about another chapter that I didn't cover yes sir in the front the bad Samaritan well we all know what the good Samaritan is good Samaritan you see somebody on the side of the road who's hurt and you stop and you help him the bad Samaritan is someone who goes by and doesn't help and doesn't have to go like that to the victim but just doesn't help there are now good Samaritan laws on the books where if you go by somebody in an accident and you don't stop to help you can be in violation of law and be considered a criminal so what I'm saying is you don't have to do that also in this chapter take the following case you're drowning and I've got a a rope or a rope with a little thing to save you a life preserver and I say I'll flip you the life preserver if you promise to become my slave forever am I justifying doing that yes it's a market transaction if you don't like the market what do they say if you can't stand this sort of weird thing get out of libertarianism or realize you're being incompatible with libertarianism I tell you if I were drowning and my choice was either drown or be your slave I'd rather be your slave at least I'm alive so it's a little harsh and it would be nice if the guy with the life preserver and the rope just tossed it in be a good guy be a good Samaritan because you're in law no so that would be the burden of that chapter yes sir the miser well there are two different chapters one is the miser and one is the non-contributive charity because a miser could contribute to the charity he just now my favorite miser is Scrooge McDuck Scrooge McDuck yeah she's with me on Scrooge here and what Scrooge does is he gets into his money bin and it goes up and it falls down on him and he goes eh you know so so he's a miser well miser is a hated the Keynesians hate miser the worst thing you can be is a miser or if you stick money under your mattress instead of spending it and the whole idea of redistribution from rich to poor from the Keynesians is that the rich have a low marginal propensity to consume they save a lot and the poor will spend it all and spending is good for the Keynesians not for the Austrians well is what the miser does is it a violation of libertarian principle those are the eyeglasses I use for everything namely of anything I ask is it a per se violation of property rights or rights to person and saving money and putting in a money bin and it is not so it's legitimate and it should be legal but I try to do more than say it's legal I try to soften up my readers by saying not only is it legal or rather not only should it be legal but it also has benefit has benefits what happens when the miser socks away a million dollars prices fall compared to what they would have been otherwise had he been spending it prices would have been bid up a little bit so if prices fall then our money is worth more so the miser is actually a benefactor to all of us the miser is helping all of us by making our cash balances it's called the cash balance effect namely what you do is you take money divided by a price index and the price index falls because the miser is spending less money therefore the fraction money divided by the price index the denominator falls and the price index falls so our money is worth more so we ought to pet miser on the back we ought to have ticker tape parades for them we ought to write a friendly letter to your friendly miser and say thanks miser you demand you're helping us you're making our dollars worth more so instead of denigrating these poor misunderstood miser we ought to carry them around on our shoulders and say thank you now the non-contributive charity is a separate chapter in this book look I think it's a nice idea to give charity it's virtuous people are poor they're suffering and we're pretty well to do people in middle class here or upper middle class or whatever or some of us are very wealthy it's a nice virtuous thing to do but that's not the eyeglasses through which I'm looking at this I'm looking at it through the libertarian are you in violation of what the law should be and the answer is no now I'm ran takes this to a degree that I wouldn't go as far as namely for her charity is almost a negative a bad thing not quite but almost whereas for libertarians you know we don't call libertarian we're indifferent to that look what's the libertarian view on whether chess or checkers is more libertarian whether vanilla or chocolate ice cream is more libertarian the answer is it's irrelevant to libertarianism libertarianism is a theory of what is just law it's not a theory of all of life now a lot of people have a theory of all of life we don't as libertarians call libertarians we're only talking about what the law should be and what's legal and what's illegal or what should be legal another chapter yes sir peeping Tom now here we talk about the rights of privacy is there a right of privacy and from the libertarian point of view right now I'm looking at all of you people and you people are looking at me you're violating my privacy dirty rotten kids and I'm violating your privacy there is no right to privacy there are only rights to private property now if what I do is I sneak into your house I'm guilty of trespass so you don't have a right to privacy you have a right to private property because if we really had a right to privacy we couldn't look at each other and in this chapter what I do is I list every detective in fiction you know like Sherlock Holmes and all those guys if there truly were a right to privacy then the profession of being a detective would be illegal so do you really want to say that the detectives who look up things and try to follow people to see if they're behaving themselves I think one of the members of our group here is a detective and what he does is he's not here in the audience I won't out him but what he does he works for an insurance company and for the insurance company there are people that make a claim oh my leg hurts like this and what he does is he follows them around and he finds out that they're engaging in a marathon and he takes a picture of them running in the marathon and he brings it back to the insurance company and the insurance company says to the claimant hey you know you say you can't hardly walk what are you doing running a marathon well the detective violated the privacy of the claimant the false claim of injury physical injury so they get money from the insurance company so if you really believe in the right of privacy we shouldn't have detectives now none of this has anything to do with NSA because people will say well then the government can monitor all of our speeches all of our cell phones all of everything we do no the government can't do anything the government can't do squat because the government according to Libertarian is a violator so it's an illicit institution plus they trespass they force various computer companies to give them information against their will so I'm not coming out in favor of government eavesdropping or anything like that private eavesdropping is different provided that they don't violate property rights through trespass yes profiteering Murray Rothbard had something there was a calendar, a Libertarian calendar people every once in a while put out a Libertarian calendar and they have all Libertarians on the picture and then they have a little saying underneath and Murray's saying in one of these calendars was a man's contribution to society is proportional to the amount of profit he used but that was the gist of it the more profits you make the more you help people see the way the Marxists see it is it's sort of a fixed pie and if I get more you have to get less no it's almost the opposite if I'm making more profit then I am doing a much better service look suppose I invented the cure for cancer and I charge 10,000 a pill would I make a lot of profit you're dawned to and I'd make a lot of profit for a lot of people who are desperate yes now suppose I make a better rubber band my rubber band is better than the actual rubber bands don't ask me in what way I'm not into rubber bands will I make a profit yeah will I make a vast amount of profit no namely in making rubber band profits I'm making a contribution to society we need rubber bands we need better rubber bands and I make a modest amount of profit so the point is the more profits I make in the market that is the better more contribution I'm making to society now of course if the way I make profits is not through giving a better product at a lower price but rather through crony capitalism or what the public choice people call rent seeking I don't like the phrase rent seeking because what's wrong with rent I mean there's economic rent and they use the word rent to depict something pretty despicable namely going to the government and getting a law pass such that you can't have imports that compete with you or something like that getting a favor from government now if that's the source of your profits then all bets are off I'm not defending that kind of profiteering by the way why don't we have wage earing I mean those guys in the NBA and the NFL you know how much money they're making and for the best players why is there no word wage earing namely getting too high a wage well they did that with Michael Milken Michael Milken made 400 million a year as a wage and then actually people were saying that that wage was too high but somehow wage earing hasn't caught on because wages are okay which is silly I mean profits, wages, rents interest rates it's all the same for libertarians on the left somehow profit is evil but look every time we do anything we make a profit or at least we try to make a profit what's your name young lady sorry Deirdre Alexandra she brought that shirt a very nice white top and she paid 30 bucks how much did she value it at 30 dollars and a penny at least maybe 50 bucks so she dirty rat she is 50 dollars off of the seller on the other hand the seller valued that shirt after he had the 3000 of them at a dollar because he's trying to get rid of them so he made a profit off of her of 19 dollars so they each exploited each other no they each helped each other it was a mutual benefit they each profited off of each other and a profiteer is someone who gets a real big profit and then she made a 4980 dollar profit so there's nothing wrong with profits if it comes from the free marketplace a guy in the red shirt dishonest cop dishonest cop okay what's going on with dishonest cop why do I like the dishonest cop it's all a matter of comparison well that's not true I was going to say it's all a matter of comparison you know I favor Trump over Hillary because I think he's less warmongering in many ways but she's even more despicable mainly because I think World War 3 is a very bad thing it could ruin your whole day and I think that Hillary is more warmongering-ish than Trump by the way I favored a man Obama against McCain in 08 I thought McCain was going to drop a nuclear bomb on whoever and Obama seemed more peaceful I mean their domestic policies Bob Higgs are forever demonstrating to us okay suppose we have an illegal law or rather illegitimate law and the illegitimate law is if you smoke marijuana you go to jail and now a cop catches me I'm smoking marijuana and he catches me an honest cop will put me in jail do we want an honest cop no we want a dishonest cop now the goodness and here we have a hierarchy the best dishonest cop would say block is smoking marijuana do it somewhere else where I can't see you or you know do it so that I can't catch you because if I see you and my sergeant looks over my shoulder he's going to wonder why I'm not arresting you that would be the best thing that's the dishonest cop that we want someone who overlooks an illicit law of runaway slaves in 1862 if you caught a runaway slave you're supposed to return the slave to the rightful owner but you know we think that slavery coercive slavery that is is illegitimate and we want a dishonest cop who won't return an innocent slave to the master well it's the same thing with marijuana so the best dishonest cop would be someone who just looks the other way and says okay block look if I haul you in it's going to be five years in jail and a fine of five thousand give me a hundred bucks and I'll let you go which do I prefer five years in jail and five thousand or a hundred bucks obviously I prefer a hundred bucks so that would be a little lower level he's not a nice guy who's letting me go but you know it's just a hundred bucks so that dishonest cop is not as good as this one but it's pretty better than the honest cop if there's an illegal law or a law that's contrary to libertarianism like you can't smoke marijuana now by the way I don't favor smoking marijuana I personally don't indulge I can understand medical you know it helps people with glaucoma and maybe cancer but I'm not into recreational drugs personally it's just my personal thing I wouldn't want my children or my grandchildren to do that I wouldn't want you to people to do that but it's just a libertarian issue the libertarian issue is is it a perceived violation of a proper law and it's not you've already had a shot Tom well can I just get I can't get this machine out of my head the idea that I get that libertarian theory steals something the murderer basically steals the life force of the murderer out and return it to the victim that would be returning what was taken from but given that we I'm sorry I'm a little thick and I'm not getting your point but given that we don't have this machine and just executing the criminal does not result in transferring his life force to the other person now all we have is two dead people it just seems like vindictiveness no one has made hold shouldn't he have to instead work for the heirs of the guy instead if I were on rent what I would do is say get out because if you ask a difficult question you know but obviously I'm just teasing here in the chapter I do say that I can't do the whole chapter what I do say is since we don't have the machine what I'm trying to say is we can imagine the machine and if we can imagine the machine logically there's nothing wrong with execution but back to the real world we don't have the machine well now who owns the life of the murderer the heirs of the murderer may the heir of the murderer let's say I killed William and he's got a wife and kids and he was their support and now his wife owns me and I say she can do with me whatever she wants one possibility is make me work at hard labor for the rest of my life another one is to execute me and charge admission for public execution with tens of thousands of people and make a lot of money does she have a right to do that I say yes because my life is forfeit as shown by the machine so it's not just that we'll have two dead people now obviously when the government does it you know government shmoverment but the point is my life is forfeit his wife is now the owner of my life to do with which as she will and one of the things she could do is execute me and make money on it because you know the breadwinner is now gone so I have that in the rest of the chapter yes Murray Rothbard shirt would you handle that the same way oh accidental yeah suppose I if it was an accident then it's a tort it's not a crime look if I put a dent in your car with my car by accident remember I gave you the four parts of libertarian punishment theory now only the first part applies I would have to make good the dent in your car or I broke your TV I sort of shoved it with my elbow it fell on the floor I have to give you my TV but there's no second TV there's no cost of search there's no Russian roulette by accident and I'll pick William again I don't want to get everyone mad at me I'm cleaning my gun and I shoot him well now only the first of the four teeth of libertarianism applies but still his wife is bereft of his services I owe a life the tough one is suppose my baby two year old baby somehow I dropped the gun in his crib and he shot William well does the baby owe the life no I owe the life because I'm the guardian of the baby so this would be sort of more complicated issues but the point is there are only two choices it's me or his wife and kids who is more deserving of my life when I killed him by accident so that's a harder one to get through but I think that's where the law of libertarianism leads us Roger am I over time? yeah a little bit oh I'm sorry thanks for your attention