 So my talk is, I'll explain the title as we get into this, Kinsella's libertarian quote constitution. So I've prepared a libertarian constitution and I hope to cover as much of its 18 parts and 45 pages as possible in this next hour. So part one, section A, subsection one definitions. I'm just, I'm just joking. I'm not going to read my constitution. I haven't even finished writing it yet. I read this to my wife and she said, is this what you geeks think is funny? I said, I said, we'll see. I said half the people in the audience might be relieved, but the other half might be, damn, I really wanted to hear a libertarian constitution read to me point by point. I'm going to talk about the idea of constitutions and libertarianism and whether the whole idea makes sense at all. So I've been a libertarian since about 1982. And I've seen so many libertarian, utopian libertarian projects that I can't even remember them all. Most of them are scams I think are failures. And I've been involved in a few of them. So I'm just going to go through a few. Some of you guys may be familiar with some of these, but this just going back to my memory archives from the 80s. So there's, of course, always the idea to have a cruise ship type of nation, like now it's called Seasteading or Blue Seed, but the earlier version was called Oceania, the Atlantis Project. And then those same people that started Oceania years later started something called Project Lifeboat, which was an attempt to create a spaceship so we could save the human race from the singularity, the Werner Vinge, a libertarian sci-fi writer was talking about. Occasionally, crazy guys homesteading oil rigs that are abandoned and calling it a nation. There's, on occasion, private justice and arbitration in common law groups that crop up. There's one that cropped up a couple years ago called the Creative Common Law Project. And the guy that started it was on Tom Wood's show, and I thought it was intriguing. So he got in touch and he got me on a board as an advisor. It was called Creative Common Law 1.0, Anarcho Capitalism. And then a few months ago, I looked up the website to update my resume and everything had been changed. And now it's moved to Creative Common Law 2.0, Anarcho Socialism and Syndicalism. So the guy told me he had changed his mind. I'm always wary of what I call way station libertarians, guys that came into it like 10 minutes ago, because I let it sit for five years and see if you're still here. Libertarian law professor Tom Bell has created something called Ulex, an open-source legal operating system. He's trying to get people to collaborate to develop kind of a libertarian-ish common law framework. Liberland, which I actually helped draft an early constitution for, which we published an article on called the Voluntarius Constitution. Gullskull Chili, which some of you guys may have heard of, which I think it was a scan that ended in the disaster. I think my friend, well, Honduras Economic Zones, they were trying to get some kind of free market enclaves there for a while. I was a while associated with general governance, which was started by David Johnson, who's now a Bitcoin guy. And the idea was to work with Indian tribes in the U.S. and leverage their special constitutional status to try to extend their free market, their enclaves, so American citizens could work there without paying federal tax. And he promised me that this would be, the whole country would be libertarian within nine months. And this was 10 years ago. He abandoned it to do Bitcoin. We actually met with the Indian tribes of north of Houston, and they were interested. But the Free State Project is another one, of course, which is having some success. There is a constitution written called the Libertarian Constitution on the National Constitution Center. It's written by some libertarians like Tim Sanderfer and some others. Roderick Long even made a stab at it, even though he's an anarchist. It was kind of a Swiss style model he wrote it years ago. And then there's others. Even Dennis Pratt here has written something on the Bill of Rights. So, as I said, I've been dragooned into helping with some of these, like the general governance. And there was a, there's a Mississippi legislator named Joel Baumgauer, a big Christian guy, a nice guy, successful businessman and a libertarian. And he wanted me to help him work throughout the Constitution. Libertland, I swam with Vitt, the president in Turkey at Hapa's conference a couple years ago. And he went to the bottom to get a rock about 30 feet down. And I tried to follow him. And I almost busted my eardrums in it. He said, no, you have to push out with your lungs. I said, thanks for telling me now. Anyway, others I've forgotten. So they all, these guys always talk about perfecting the Constitution or improving the Constitution or writing a better Constitution. But why do we even use the word Constitution as libertarians, as if it's a good thing? So the modern libertarian movement in the U.S. started, I'd say, in the 50s with Ayn Rand principally, and then others like Milton Friedman and Leonard Reed and Mises and Rothbard. And because of this American base and Ayn Rand's reverence for the American system as opposed to the Soviet system she left, there's always been a reverence among libertarian circles for the declaration, the war of independence, the Constitution. I mean, the libertarian party uses the freaking Liberty Bell, right? The Statue of Liberty, all these American founding generation symbols as if they're libertarian. So the idea is that the Constitution almost got it right. It was almost libertarian. So if you remember the Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand's famous novel, at the end of the novel she shows the victory of the heroes and the wise judge Narragansett sitting at a table and the light of his lamp fell on the copy of an ancient document. He had marked and crossed out all the contradictions in it that had been the cause of his destruction. And he was now adding a new clause, Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of production and trade. That'll fix it, right? And in the Libertarian Constitution by Eli Shapiro and Tim Sandefur, they say in their introduction, this was an easier project for us than the conservatives and progressives who drafted their own constitutions because the current United States Constitution is fundamentally a libertarian or classical liberal document. So much so that at the outset we joked that all we needed to do was add and we mean it to at the end of every clause. Yeah, it's kind of funny, but not funny. I mean, they really believe this, I think. So, and some of us, including me, have written articles like saying, how can we improve the Constitution? You know, you hear people talk about term limits. You kick them out after two years, like that's going to fix anything. But there are various things that we imagine we could do to fix the way the Constitution is going astray from its so-called libertarian origins, like Tom Woods' idea of reviving the idea of nullification. States can nullify the Kentucky and Virginia resolves. Marshall de Rosa had an amendment where he proposed it would allow the states to actually vote to overturn Supreme Court decisions. I propose and others propose making any legislation passed by Congress have to be subject to a supermajority requirement, because legislation is not the right way to make law in the first place. You could have sunset provisions where every statute expires automatically after a certain number of years. You could extend the jury trial requirement to all civil cases, not just criminal. We could enforce jury nullification, the fully informed jury amendment. Joseph Soburn, one of my favorite writers before he passed, he had proposed an amendment. Any state may, by activist legislature, succeed from the United States. So the threat of exit or succession can help restrain the state too. The right to immigrate, repeal the incorporation doctrine, abolish judicial supremacy, and restore concurrent review, which is the idea that all three branches of the federal government are equal and have an equal and independent responsibility to review the constitutionality of any law. Okay, but there are many problems with this idea of trying to perfect the constitution and make it libertarian. So first of all, why do we call it a constitution? The word constitution, the word constitute means to make up or to create or to compose or form. So the whole purpose of the constitution is to set up a framework for a new government and to create it. It's not to protect rights, like we say. It's to create a new government. And this is actually what happened. The Confederacy in the US was too weak, according to the proponents of the new government. And so they drafted a constitution to create a new central government, which we have today, which has become the strongest, most powerful, tyrannical entity in all of human history. So they succeeded. Congratulations. But I don't know why people think that's libertarian. I mean, the founding generation was not libertarian. This was a coup. Women in blacks didn't have rights. Native Americans were massacred and robbed. The War for Independence conscripted slaves and poor whites and executed deserters, benefited mostly white male landowners. George Washington stole teeth from slaves mouths to make his false teeth. And the Constitution set in motion the powerful state that we have today. So I would say the idea of a libertarian constitution is a contradiction in terms, because governments and states are not libertarian. They're criminal. And it's also futile to expect paper limits in the Constitution to do any good at restraining the state because there's a state has a monopoly and it controls in the courts are its courts. And so who interprets the Constitution, the Supreme Court, which is part of the government. So you have the government interpreting a document that purports to limit what the government can do or the state, I should say. Joe Sobrin had one of my favorite lines in one of his articles. He says, what we need is an amendment forbidding the circumvention of the Constitution. It could simply read, quote, the Constitution shall not be circumvented. I just got a big laugh from any lawyers who may be reading this. What I like is a libertarian sci-fi novelist, Elnil Shulman, who wrote some great books like The Probability Broach and The Galatin Divergence. And one of his other alternate history books, Tom Payne-Maru, in that whole book, it's an alternate history where the Confederacy won and Anarchy is coming to the U.S. And the Constitution failed. It was viewed as a coup. And in that society, the word Constitution is an epithet. So one of the lines is, one of the characters says, Constitution, Lucille, it was the first time I had ever sworn in Confederacy. So what do we mean by libertarian Constitution? What are we getting at? I think what we're getting at is we need a libertarian society put in place somehow, and that requires law, right? So we need libertarian principles respected and we need libertarian law to be put in force somehow. So what we really need is we need libertarian thinkers to, we need libertarian people, first of all, we need people to agree with libertarian ideas and principles. And then we need libertarian thinkers to help develop these ideas, clarify them, write them down, and state our libertarian principles. And then we need law to develop based upon these principles, and we need the law to be compatible with these principles, okay? So you have libertarian ideas and principles and ethics and values, and then you have legal systems that are based upon that and that embody that and they're useful in a day-to-day basis. Libertarian legal philosopher Randy Barnett in his book The Structure of Liberty talks about the distinction between what he calls abstract legal principles or natural rights and concrete legal principles or laws or legal precepts. So one is basically abstract general. They don't do much guidance for everyday behavior. Like the non-aggression principle itself offers some guidance, like don't commit aggression, but really the non-aggression principle's purpose is to, is to guide us in what laws to enforce and what laws are just, right? So you can, as Rasmussen and Den Oil or Douglas, Rasmussen and Douglas Den Oil talk about in their books, we really need to look at rights as what are metanorms, not direct norms, like they don't guide individual behavior, they guide what laws are just and what you're, what you're justified in enforcing. Okay, so we have to keep in mind the distinction between legal libertarian principles, our core beliefs and practical laws based upon those. Now some libertarians do mix up the word constitution and law code. Like Rothbard, for example, says we need to have a fully developed libertarian law code and libertarian jurists and legal theorists will arise to hammer out the system of libertarian law in detail because you need that, right? So the idea there is almost a rationalist or constructivist one that you have these libertarian philosopher kings who sit down and use a priori reasoning to deduce how we should live, what our principles are, think commandments of libertarianism, and then the whole legal code. I think that's a little bit off base because there are limits to what I call armchair theorizing. And this is sort of recognized in the way law has actually developed in the West and in the world. The two great legal systems of the world are the Roman law and the common law. And the modern instantiations of those is the common law in the US and in the British Empire, the British Commonwealth, which is based on the common law, but is heavily overridden with statute law now, legislation. So it's sort of a mixture of statute law and the original common law principles. And in Europe and the continental law, the civil law there is based upon a codification of the Roman law principles with added legislation. So the modern systems are both perversions of the original decentralized systems of the Roman law and the common law. But in those systems, the way law developed was two parties with an actual real dispute would come to the judge and say, we have a dispute. We want to settle it in a peaceful way. So we're going to present to you the facts of the case and let you decide who's the winner based upon principles that have been previously established and everyone widely agrees upon. So the whole purpose of a decision in a tribunal, in an arbitral tribunal, in a court hearing is for the justice finder, the jury, the judge, whoever it is, to hear the evidence and to try to do the right thing, to try to come up with a fair result based upon established principles that are accepted and based upon the evidence as far as you can tell. So this is not legislation because the judge can't just come to work one day and say, I think we should have a minimum wage. I'm just going to announce that there's no parties in front of him. It's not a dispute. He has to wait for a dispute to come to him and hear evidence. So when he hears evidence, that means he can ask questions. So there's always a context. These libertarian hypotheticals, like two guys are on a boat and there's only room for one. One guy's going to die. Who gets to live? Or is it okay to murder you? I mean, these questions are like Jan Helfeld in a debate one time, that annoying menarchist Randy and Gadfly. I'm not going to curse, but he's like, you're in a desert and you have to steal someone's water bottle. Would you steal a water bottle? I'm like, what the fuck does it matter what I would do? But the point is that hypothetical has no context because how did we get there? Did I put him there? Did we have an agreement of head of time? But in a real case, you can ask these questions and determine. But these libertarians come up with these abstract questions with no context and it's really hard to answer them, which is why I think there's a limit to how much we libertarian theorists can deduce like what would the statute of limitations be? What would the age of consent be? When would abortion be considered murder? All these kinds of questions have to arise as a result of negotiation, compromise, custom, tradition, a recognition of the limits of what the law can do. So we're more on firm ground with our abstract libertarian principles like the non-aggression principle and what that means. But we have to realize that we can't sit down and come up with a code that's all-encompassing and hyper-detailed from our armchairs. We have to wait and see what people come up with. And a lot of times you'll have private contractual regimes. You'll have like Mormon land. You'll have Las Vegas hedonism land. You'll have different areas with different rules within those areas. And partly that's because of contracts among people, which is like a type of private law among people based upon fundamental principles of property rights and contract law, which are not up to negotiation. But within that framework, you can come up with whatever you want. And then between enclaves or between societies, they have treaties or contracts between each other. And that's international law. So over time, principles develop. They reinforce each other. The law develops. Hans-Hermann Hoppe talks about his covenant communities where he says a libertarian world could and likely would be one with a great variety of locally separated communities engaging in distinctly different and far-reaching discrimination. Or as my friend Jeff Tucker wrote in an article talking about it called Idiot Patrol, for example, nudist discriminating against bathing suits, private rules. And Rothbard wrote, in a country or world of totally private property, including streets and private contractual neighborhoods consisting of property owners, these owners can make any sort of neighborhood contracts they wish. In practice then, the country would be a gorgeous mosaic ranging from rowdy Greenwich village type contractual neighborhoods to socially conservative homogeneous Wasp neighborhoods. Even David Friedman who's here who talks about this, about the internal rules of different enclaves would be different. And I imagine, given some of his comments, he would think that intellectual property law might be enforcing some of those, which I just have my note of him. If you're going to be an anarchist philosopher, get IP straight. Okay. No offense to micro humor and Jan Lester. So libertarian philosophers can help systematize and identify general abstract libertarian principles. We have to be wary of the limits of armchair theorizing and rationalism and constructivism. We can't deduce all the legal rules that would flow from basic principles and the law has to develop organically to meet real needs. Okay. So that's where we're heading. That's where we want to head, right? So we need to have a libertarian society. We need thinkers to help develop these rules and write them down. And then we need concrete laws to develop based upon a legal system that helps solve problems. Now in the past, you've had these codes. So what happens is you have codes, scholars and even lawgivers write down codes of what moral principles are or what basic principles are, or even what the developed law is. So like one of the most ancient is the code of Hammurabi from 1750 or so BC. But really the modern codifications of private law that developed in an organic decentralized system, which was the Roman law and the common law in England, would be the Roman Corpus Juriscivillus around 529 AD, which was instituted by Emperor Justinian, right? So this is famous. It helped preserve the Roman law when it was rediscovered hundreds of years later. So this includes the institutes of Justinian and the digest or the pandex of Roman law. And then later on in England, you had Koch, his Institute of the Laws of England in the 1600s, and then later Blackstone, who's famous, his commentaries. So that's sort of like a scholar summarizing all the case law that's developed so that the average, so that the judge or the average person or the other scholar can read and say, okay, here's where the law is heading. Here's how it's developed. And then they can suggest changes like, oh, we made a mistake here. Maybe the next judge that takes this up should change this law. And then you had the codification efforts in Europe in the in the late 1600s with the Code Napoleon of France and the Spanish Civil Codes, which in my home state is Louisiana, and it's the only state in the U.S. which is a civil law state. All the other 49 are common law states. So we have a civil code-based system. But these codes, while they're problematic for the libertarian because they're legislation. So you have these scholars draft the code, which is a summary of the developed principles that developed in a decentralized, more or less libertarian private law way. And then the legislature makes it the law. So that's the problem. That's the part we have a problem with. It should just be a private codification. But the fact that the legislature made it law doesn't take away from it, except it entrenched legislative legal positivism, legislative supremacy. But those codes are beautiful if you read them. They're not like statues that you read. The U.S. Constitution itself is like one of the few true codes in the American system. Although I view it as a statist and legal positivist because it's the law announced by a committee of white men, but it's still pretty beautifully written and abstract in general because it borrowed from a lot of the principles of justice that developed in England in the previous centuries, right, from the Magna Carta, things like that. So one of the best ones in the U.S. is the American Law Institute's restatements of the law. Those are beautiful, elegant, systematic, treatise-like compilations of American case law. And then you have encyclopedia, it's like Corpus Juris Secundum, which is named after the original Roman Justinian Corpus Juris Sevilis and the American Juris Prudence II. These are encyclopedias. So there are private works that can arise that would happen in an anarchist or free market society where you have everyone widely agrees upon certain principles. The thinkers write them down and help spread them and refine them. Law develops based upon those and over time an organic body of law develops in a common law or decentralized system and also based upon contracts within societies and contracts between societies, which are treaties, international law. All this develops and then you have commentators who come up and they say, you know, because the average person might say, well, what is the law in this area? So they might pull up a private book written by a renowned legal law professor who says, okay, I've summarized all the commercial law in Libertopia. And then judges would consult that as authoritative and they might take a recommendation to revise the law here and there. So that's how it would work. So that's the job I want in every society. I want to stop doing patent law and become a arbitrator and a Supreme Court judge or whatever the Supreme Court would be there, right? Satoshi willing. That's right. So my title is a little bit tongue in cheek. Cancelo's Libertarian Constitution. The reason I put it that way, first of all, scare quotes are on constitution because my real title is going to be state constitutions versus the Libertarian Private Law Code. So I'm criticizing the idea of constitutions per se and explaining that what we would really have in a pre-society is private Libertarian law codes that would emerge. And I put my name up there, not to self aggrandize, but because I'm so sick of working on fucking committees with all these other people and having to compromise. I mean, look, I'm going to put out. So I am working on this. So I do plan to have an online outline version of all the principles that I think summarize and distill what's the essence of Libertarian principles. And if others disagree, they can write their own. Or if a judge or someone wants to draw on it, they can do that. And I'm going to have foot notes and hyperlinks to commentary on these things and 1.0, 2.0, update it over time. That's one of my goals. It'll be hierarchical, carefully defined definitions. So I'll just give you a teaser about how it will start. Just the very beginning. Have some definitions, of course, but the essence of, so what is the essence of Libertarian principles? So this is my sort of way that I like to summarize it and present it, which I've come to after beating my head against the wall explaining intellectual property and what's wrong with it to people for the last 25 years. It's forced me to go back and clarify my understanding of what the essence of Libertarianism is. You know, I used to say it's non-aggression principle. But that's always an awkward thing, right? Because first of all, as I said earlier, the non-aggression principle is a norm that is really not directed towards individual behavior, but it's directed towards what the law should be. The way you can realize that is to think Libertarians are often careful to say not everything that's immoral should be illegal, right? But the converse of that is not everything that should be illegal is moral or is immoral. So for example, if I am cruel to my grandmother, who's been a wonderful grandmother all my life and I make her sob and go to her deathbed thinking her grandson hates her, it's immoral. Go ahead, got a question? It's immoral, but it shouldn't be illegal. Yeah, I hope to get the heaven to apologize to her someday. But on the other hand, you know, imagine you're stuck in the woods and you have a baby and there's a storm out and your baby's gonna die and there's an empty cabin and you can break in and get a can of soup and save your baby. That is technically illegal because it's trespass, but is it necessarily immoral? I'd say that Libertarian philosophy doesn't say whether that's immoral. Libertarian philosophy only goes to the justice of enforcing a law. So it doesn't say, you know, it's, you could be an asshole if you stand on your rights, if you're one of these people who sues people all the time or if you have a house and you, you know, the neighbor kid, Frisbee goes under your front lawn and you refuse to let them get it because you're an asshole. You know, you have a right to stand on your rights, but you're an asshole. So it could be immoral to enforce your rights and it can be arguably moral to violate rights as long as you're willing to pay the penalty. So the whole point is that personal morality is not what is guided by the Libertarian principle. That's a personal ethical issue. And so the non-aggression principle is really not a useful guide to conduct for that reason, but it's also awkward to say, well, we Libertarians are against aggression, which includes trespass and which includes assault and which includes threats. Well, aggression, the word aggression really means, you know, the model is someone punching someone with their fist or the weapon. That's what aggression means, physical fighting between human bodies. So we extend that to say, if you walk across someone's lawn without their permission, that's aggression. Is it really, is it really aggression or is it analogous to aggression? If I threaten someone, am I committing aggression? If I say, I'm going to kill you. Am I committing aggression? I'm not physically hitting them. So, or in fraud, we say fraud. So if I deceive you about the quality of the apple I'm giving you and you give me an orange in exchange, I'm committing aggression. So I think we've tended to generalize the word aggression to mean anything that can be made illegal in a just way. But it's a stretch. So the way I think about it is the non-aggression principle is more like the concept of metonymy. Metonymy is like using a figure of speech, like drinking, you say hitting the bottle. The word bottle represents the alcohol you're drinking but you're not really hitting the bottle, it's metonymy. So when we say we're against aggression, we're using the word aggression as a standard. Like when we say Washington today, Washington D.C. said this, we're using the city Washington to represent the entire federal government, right? So when we say aggression, I think what we mean is the constellation of actions that violate basic libertarian principles, the core one of which is aggression. The reason it's the core one is because aggression is just another, saying non-aggression, the non-aggression principle is just another way of saying everyone is the owner of their body. So it's self-ownership or body ownership is what is expressed in the non-aggression principle. But when we, and the ownership of the body is the core fundamental right because all other rights flow from that because you can't own anything unless you're a human actor with a body and you have to be able to own your body to own other things because if you don't own your body then you're a non-body owning thing, owning something else that makes no sense. There has to be a starting point, you know, sort of like the regression theorem and money or the big bang, something like that, you know, we can regress it all the way back to the beginning or the natural argument for God, there has to be a first call. But anyway, so the point is this, I think the actual way to express libertarian principles is not the non-aggression principle, it's just a shorthand, think of it as a shorthand. Here's what I think libertarian principles are and this would be the beginning of my code and then detailed articles would elaborate on this and show applications. So it's this, whenever there's a dispute among two or more actors, human people, and the dispute is always dispute over a scarce resource, what I call a conflictable resource, something that there can be conflict over, what means is called scarce means, scarce means of action. Whenever there's a dispute in the real world between two or more people over a resource, then an owner is assigned according to these libertarian principles. This is what libertarianism is. If you think about it, every legal system, and I think actually Dennis Pratt earlier had a similar comment about who owns a woman's body for sex, you know, the rapist, he agrees there's ownership rights, he just think he owns her body, you know, libertarians would say she owns her body. So libertarians often say that we believe in private property rights and no one else does. First of all, I think the word private property is a confusing misnomer because the essence of property is public. It's public because it has publicly visible borders. So the word private is a little bit confusing. But the point is every legal system in the world from North Korea to Soviet Russia to, to theocracies, to monarchies, to democracies, to libertarian polities, they all have a property rights system, which means in that legal system there's an answer to the question, who owns this thing? There's always an answer. It's just usually the answer is the state or the society. Only the libertarian has the answer, the rightful natural owner owns it. Okay. That's why we're different than everyone else. Now in the West, in the private law systems of the West, the common law, the Roman law, the answer is generally that it's just not fully consistent. So the private law systems of property, contract law, fraud, they're roughly libertarian, but there's deviations because of statute law and because of the state's special immunity and they get special treatment, things like that. So what distinguishes libertarianism is what our property allocation rules are and what are they? So I would say this, whenever there's dispute over resource, number one, we have a question. What kind of resource is it? Is it the human body or is it something else? If it's the human body, then the answer to the question, who is the owner of that body is that person himself is the owner, or at least he's the prima facie owner, the default owner, the presumed owner. You can lose your rights to your body if you commit aggression, but the default answer is everyone is presumed to own their body. That's the core first libertarian principle, which is another way of saying the non-aggression principle. You don't have the right to commit aggression against someone else's body because they own it. They have the right to be the one to decide who can use that body. Now, in the case of other types of scarce resources, things over which there can be conflict, conflictable resources, these are external resources in the world that are not human bodies, but that we employ a scarce means of action. There are tools, land, cows, wood, food. In the case of these things, there could still be conflict over them because their nature as a rival or scarce, conflictable resource is such that only one person can use these things at a time. Therefore, they can be conflict and therefore civilized people prefer to have a society where peace, prosperity, and cooperation are possible. We want a rule that says who gets to use it, so we can all respect that. That's why property rights are public in the sense that boundaries are public. The connection between the owner and the thing is visible to others, so you can know not to trespass. The rule is this. We determine who owns this resource by looking at three principles. Number one, who got it first. That's original appropriation or homesteading because the first owner has to have a better claim than everyone else as a primer face you matter. Because if you didn't have that, we would never be able to survive because we would never be able to use anything. We wouldn't be able to go out into the world and use resources because they're unowned, no one's using it, and I wouldn't be able to be the first user. So the first user has to be able to use it for the human race to survive. So the first person has to be able to use it, and if we believe in property rights, that means you hold something until someone else gets it legitimately. That means you can't have it stolen from you and have the thief be the owner. So that means that once you are the first one to use it and you have the right to do that because no one can complain. No one can complain because they're not the owner. If they can complain they're the owner, but they're not the owner because you're the first one to use it, right? So once you're the owner, you're the earlier user compared to everyone else. So original appropriation or first user, that's the first principle. So we determine who owns the thing by asking who had it first. The second question is was it transferred by contract from a previous owner to a new owner, right? So you might have homesteaded this thing first, so you're the owner, but I have a better claim than you because you sold it to me by contract. So now with respect to the rest of the world, I have a better claim than the rest of the world because I have a chain of title going back to someone who has it earlier than everyone else and I have a better claim than the original homesteader because he gave it to me by contract. So we have homesteading contract and then one third category is what's Roderick Long called rectification. That is, if you commit a wrong against someone, basically an act of aggression, a tort, then you trespass against them. You use their property without their consent. Then you owe them some kind of damages. So by committing an act of trespass against someone, I transfer some of my resources to them in payment to them for the damages that I've done. So it's like a contract too. So basically those three principles alone are sufficient to develop the entire body of law plus the self-ownership principle. You ask who had it first, was there a contract, did someone commit a tort or a wrong that would transfer the property there? So that would be the beginning. That's a teaser. So the rest of my code will go into other things like fraud, threats, intellectual property, different applications. So that's where I am and I guess I'll stop here and if anyone has any questions I'll be happy to discuss any of this further. Yeah, go ahead. So when you think about the broader legal tradition, are you seeing libertarianism as like a preferential departure from the western tradition or a perfection of striving towards individual rights and liberty? The way I look at it, actually Jeff Dice and I have been talking about this. We have a slight disagreement on this. He's, Jeff Dice, Murray Rothbard had written in Ethics of Liberty, criticizing defamation law and explaining why it's not libertarian, which I completely agree with by the way, which is why Rothbard was confused about copyright because his critique of defamation law also would apply to trademark law and to copyright law, but he got confused. And his own contract title theory, title transfer theory of contract is also incompatible with what he said about copyright. So he just lost track there. But Jeff Dice argues that in the modern age with social media things have changed from the way they were in Rothbard's day. He couldn't have imagined what's happening now where you can be de-platformed by someone just lying like, oh, he's a neo-Nazi. So he gets de-platformed, his wife leaves him, she takes the dogs, he loses his job, his house gets foreclosed on. So a lot of damage can be done to you by what's essentially defamation. So he's saying maybe the common law courts should be able to decide whether to extend the old doctrine of defamation to the modern age. I don't have quite so much of a view where you just punt to whatever the courts decide is fine. What I think is that, and I also don't agree with, a lot of libertarians think we should take the common law or the Roman law, some decentralized system, take it as presumptively libertarian and then maybe go in and correct it, sort of like I and Rand wanted to do with the Constitution. I don't think it's that libertarian, I think it's mostly libertarian. So I think we should take it as a template to start from, but don't presume anything there is the libertarian. We have to compare it, always compare the concrete legal rules that have developed in the positive law, and that includes common law and Roman law, compare it back to our basic libertarian principles. I think that the libertarian principles that I've enunciated are more or less implicit in the assumptions of the judges of the Roman and common law, like they assumed homesteading, they assumed contract, but they weren't fully consistent about it and they made lots of exceptions. So I think we can, we don't need to start from scratch. I think what we would do is we would have people like me come up with like my basic statement of libertarian principles, which is not law, it's just the principles. And the more convergence we have on that, we all kind of agree more or less on the non-aggression principle and the way we say that. And as we have a more libertarian society, disputes will arise and they will have to be decided by arbitration or whatever, and hopefully these judges would refer first back to the libertarian principles. They would borrow from solutions in the common law to the extent they made sense. This is what the US court do now, the US courts do now, like the Supreme Court. They will look at what French courts or Spanish courts have done in cases, but they're not bound by it. They just use it as like we have a tricky dilemma here interpreting this constitutional thing. So they're not bound by it. So I don't know if that answers the question. That's more or less how I think it ought to in wooden could work. Yeah, go ahead. I have three challenges to a common law, let's say, evolution of the law. One is most cases get settled out of court, so there's no public record of what decisions were made. The second is that it seems like with a common law system, you kind of have to wait until something goes wrong before you can set the standards for it, especially with like emerging technologies like getting a function research, something like that. The third is that civil law, at least today, and I don't know that it would be much different in a libertarian society, is unaffordable and it's essentially inaccessible to a lot of people. I made a civil law argument in a town, my town's legislative, you know, in short, her mental. And I made a civil law argument and the town manager told me that this argument was a lead balloon because she said the town couldn't, shouldn't expect people to, let's say, if a nuisance can play with a neighbor, the town shouldn't expect them to have to take them to a civil law. She thought as a town's duty essentially to put a law in place that the town itself could enforce to save the residents the cost and expense and stress and uncertainty of going through a civil law procedure. Well, okay, let me, I'll ask you a question in a second, but let me clarify something. So when I say civil law, it's a little bit confusing because you're using civil law in the positive, in like, in the common law in America, civil law means non-criminal law. When I say civil law, I'm talking about the tradition in Europe which was opposed to the common law. So the civil law means the codification efforts of the civil codes which codified the Roman law principles. So when I say civil law, I'm talking about the civilian tradition. I'm really using it just to refer to Roman law. So when I was talking about civil law earlier, I meant the two great traditions are the Roman law and the common law, and those are both decentralized principles. So you mean, you mean that you mean the, yeah, yeah, that's common law and, but what you're talking about is the non-criminal law, the private law side of the common law system we have now. Although we don't really have common law in the U.S. anymore, we have a mixture of common law and statute law. We have tons of statutes that override the common law. So the domain of the common law has been shrinking for a century. A lot, there's more and more statutes get written that override it. So you have to look at statutes as well as the common law. But first of all, I would say that the fact that the government's implementation of their private law system is expensive and inefficient is no more criticism of a libertarian system than the post office is a criticism of the idea of having mail, you know, or roads or private roads. There's nothing wrong with private roads. It's something wrong with the government running roads. They're gonna fuck it up. As for the advisory, so you talk about you have to wait for a decision. Well, I mean, what would be your alternative? First of all, in the Roman law, there was something interesting. So in the common law, you did have to, the judge, you had to wait for people to have a dispute. Two actual people had to go to a judge. In the Roman law, there was a procedure where, because these guys found that they were border, they didn't have a lot of cases. Actually, the International Court of Justice in the UN has done this for a few decades too, because they don't have a lot of courses. So they'll just get together and they'll say, let's come up with a hypothetical and let's say what the answer would be, which is sort of what Rothbard and libertarians do. The Roman law jurists did that. They called the jurist consuls. They were legal philosophers and they would sometimes, they would just come up with a hypothetical. They would add as much detail as they could to make it realistic. They say, let's suppose a merchant's going through town and the wheel breaks up as chariot and he runs into someone's pottery stand, what would the result be there? And they actually give an answer, which is like case law based upon a hypothetical, which so I see no reason why in a private law society, if there's a demand for people for legal certainty and there's an issue that hasn't been hammered out yet in the developed law, two people that want, they would, they would want to go to someone, they would, they might just hire an arbitrator to decide. And I see no reason why the arbitrator couldn't publish his decision and that would add to the, and you said a lot of things are settled out of court. Partly that's because when the law is developed and settled and everyone knows what the likely outcome is, that's when they settle because they don't want to bother to go to court. So usually when there's a settlement out of court, it's because the law is already settled. When the law is not settled, that's when they go to court and the precedent is made that develops a law. But I would, I guess I would ask you, what's your alternative to if we believe in libertarianism and we're opposed to the state, maybe you're not, maybe you believe in we need to have a government and they need to have legislature that can, they can help us out by announcing rules ahead of time. I mean the libertarian idea is that we only believe in simple rules. Richard Epstein wrote a book, Simple Rules for a Complex World. We actually believe that, I mean why does the positive law say that a retroactive legislation is wrong? Like when they make something a crime after the fact? That's because they're making things crimes that shouldn't be crimes. So at least you should give people fair notice that, because they have no way of knowing that it was a, that they shouldn't do it because it wasn't naturally wrong. But we libertarians only believe in making things wrong that are naturally wrong. I mean the old expression is you really know what's wrong because it's engraved on your heart, you know. There's a natural law. You don't need to have a tribunal say from here on after we're just gonna say arbitrarily that murder, we're gonna say murder's wrong in this society. Okay, oh now I know. So I won't commit murder. No. The idea of libertarianism is that if you commit murder, you deserve punishment even if you didn't know. You should have known. Even if it wasn't a statute passed saying murder's wrong. Because you committed an act of aggression and you can't complain about act of aggression being used against you. You know, it's all natural. So I don't think it's really much injustice in applying libertarian principles to people that they weren't announced ahead of time because they are announced ahead of time because they're just implicit in basic principle of morality that everyone really knows are right. Yeah, go ahead. I have a question. You mentioned sort of restitution or damages as a way of legitimately getting property. Can you say a little bit about the libertarian conception of damages? I'm kind of familiar with the current, you know, law, how that works. Yeah. So let's take, for example, the case where the frisbee was in your backyard and you're not even home. Yeah. Roll over the fence and get it. Yeah. Leave and you see it on your door. Right, right. You know, theoretically, I might say you encounter no damages. Correct. You don't really have a cause of action or duty. No, I mean, I mean, there's opinions vary. I can just give you mine. I mean, David Friedman would say one thing. Randy Barnett would say another thing. This is one reason why we have to be wary of armchair theorizing because that hypothetically gave, see, if it was a real case, I could ask you questions like, well, what's the custom in the neighborhood? Because you could argue that it's not trespass at all because, like let's say you walk up to your neighbor's house and you knock on the door to borrow a cup of sugar. Is that trespass? No, because the understanding in the neighborhood is that people are free to use their neighbor's property for innocuous small uses like that, unless, so if that's a default presumption, then basically by having your door open to the public and not putting a posted or warning sign up and changing that rule by an announcement, you are consenting. It's like a girl on a date, the guy's kissed her 10 times and he kisses her 11th time without asking her explicit permission. She didn't object. She didn't change the default presumption. So it's actually not aggression. You know what I mean? So in that case, you could say that if it's common for people to do that, then the kid assumed he had the permission of the owner. And because he didn't communicate properly and change it, it wasn't that. But let's say it was trespass. Right. So I think what would happen in... If you want justice, you have to count on the support of your community because unless you want to self-help every time. And if you pull your gun out and you blast the kid, people are going to regard you as a murderer and you're going to be outcast or punished or killed by the parents of the kid, you know. So if you want help getting justice done, you have to be reasonable because at a certain point people are going to wipe their hands of you. They might not deny that you have a right to charge someone with trespass for stepping on your lawn, but they're not going to become jurors to help you out. The insurance company that you hire to give you insurance might raise your rates because you're a troublemaker. I could see the minimums requirements. Like people say, listen, if there's like literally no damage, go away. This is not what the legal system is for. It's for serious issues that we... Because the whole purpose of the legal system is to avoid disputes and avoid conflict. If it's such a minor thing, there's really no conflict to avoid. It's already done. You didn't suffer any damage. So I think that there would be proportionality built in and if you continually use the system and abuse it, you're going to start paying a price. You know, maybe the arbitral commission is going to charge you a higher fee and all your neighbors are going to say, I'm not going to even testify and give evidence because you're making my life miserable. Mind your own fucking business. Be a good neighbor. Things like that will have an interplay. I have a role. Gene, go ahead. The what story? Sorry? The barrage. The baby is starting to get into the barrage and the barrage is a mortgage. Oh yeah, okay. Yeah, he was in the barrage and put the baby up. So do you feel, is that a problem? Or I would have thought that if you were on the cabinet, you would have said, hey look, I'm happy the baby was fed even though the cabinet was broken into just pay for the broken lot. And you... Yeah, that's my view. So yeah, my view is that libertarians often say when they think about it carefully that morality, I'm sorry, that rights are a subset of morality, which is another way of saying that not everything that's immoral should be illegal. But I actually think rights are not a subset of morality. They're an overlapping set. I think most things that are rights violations are immoral, but not all necessarily. So there's a narrow thing of rights violations that... So I think if you're in the woods and you have to break someone's window to save your baby who's starving, it's not immoral. In fact, you'd probably be immoral not to do it. But it is a trespass. But as a practical matter, the person might say, just repair the window. Correct. As a practical matter, well, a normal decent person probably would just forgive you. But then if you're the parent, you might say, let me pay to fix your window and give you season tickets to the Astros. You know? Exactly. But my kind of historic reason is we found out he was a massive child. He writes about the stain on the history. There's no clean capitalism historically. Land was given freely by the princes and queens, unjustly to people. So there's so much property acquisition that was done unjustly. Correct. That would never have unraveled. Correct. And then so his consequentialist argument is only that if you let the free market operate over generation, then that will sort itself. Yeah. And that's not what I'm saying. And that coast says something similar to that, right? Like, whatever, even if you have the wrong assignment of rules over time, they'll be allocated toward the more sufficient uses. That's what I think Coast argues that too. What I would say, I have an article on this about this idea. So what I said about you go to homesteading as the touchstone of property. Some people think that means that all properties tainted them because you can't go back to Adam. And there's always conquest. But I have some subsidiary stuff. Like, it's all relative, relative title. So if I have a better title, what happens in the law is it's two people that can test a piece of land, they trace their title back to what's called a common ancestor and title. So some guy 200 years ago, they both agree he owned it then. So even if he got it by conquest or his ancestors got it by conquest, these two guys are tracing it back to this guy. So then the question is, from that point in time, who has it better? And the point is, unless someone can come earlier than that and prove it, whoever wins that case has a better claim than anyone else in the whole world, which is what real property is. So the homesteading idea doesn't mean you have to go back to Adam or to some pristine state of nature. You just have to go back far enough where you have a better claim than anyone else. But still in theory, if you could show the first one to own it, that would be the ultimate decision about who is the rightful owner of the property. Okay, I mean, you said you traced it back to the person who got it by conquest. That person got it by justly, so it doesn't turn you, why would it turn you on your own? Okay, I don't know. So let's say some guy 200 years ago stole it from someone else. And then he sold it to one guy, but he also tried to sell it later in his will on accident to some guy. And they both claim title standard laws of property and contract and wills can tell you which guy wins as between those two, as to who got it from the bad guy. Now, if they have stolen from some slaves or some black people, if they can come and show that it was stolen from me, I think they should win. They actually should win. It's just that over time, the older things happened, the older things happened in the past, the harder it is to find evidence and prove it. The witnesses are all dead. But if someone could prove it, they would get it. But if we assume it's been lost to antiquity, we have to start at a certain point. I think we have to wrap up. So I'm available after. Thank you guys.