 So I'm just curious how many people just came from Jeff Dice talk where it's okay great a lot of you were down there So for people watching online Jeff gave a very rousing Getting y'all fired up saying it's our duty to go out there and fight statism and promote liberty So you're getting all excited and then you say but they have a lot of guns and nuclear weapons So huddle up everyone. Here's what we're gonna do. All right Okay, so this this talk is about is the images here convey is Talking about what was probably one of the hardest practical objections So in terms of the ethics a lot of people can say yeah I agree in the not aggression principle and it's funny if you're talking to normal people They understand that as well or you're you're at the park or something You got your little kids playing and the one there's a there's some kids bike there That's not being used and some other kid wants to go just play with it The parent hopefully will say well You got to get permission first and then even if ten of the kids show up and eight of them Vote that they should all be able to use that bike and one of the kids who doesn't agree is the old You know the kids whose family owns it hopefully most of the parents would say sorry Maybe that person's being selfish or whatever, but no you can't take something That's not yours and you know majority opinion doesn't matter They don't think like that those grumps when they go home and then it becomes November time then all of a sudden those rules go out the window So it is interesting how you know there are these these packages or these boxes people think of in terms of what? Normal sorts of rules of morality would apply and I'm sure you've heard this too that one way of Thinking about libertarianism in the Rothbardian tradition is just taking the standard rules of morality and extending them to everybody To not make exemptions for certain classes of people. So, you know forced servitude is wrong And so that how can you draft people or how can you compel people to serve on a jury if they're really busy and they Don't want to do it, you know things like that Taking you know theft is wrong Of course Taxation isn't considered that by a lot of people and yet as memes and for me taxation is theft in fact So there's there's that element mass murder most people would say is wrong yet. That's clearly what happens in warfare Okay, and so that's one way of looking at it But a lot of people they might agree with that stuff they might agree that yet We should we could privatize the roads. Yes, certainly the post office doesn't need a monopoly on first-class mail delivery Schools I could see them being completely private. Yep. Yep. Healthcare got it got it going through but when it comes to The police and the legal code itself for a lot of people that seems pretty tough and then also Gee, you know isn't warfare something like, you know, how could a private company as cool as Google is? Can it really defeat, you know, Nazi Germany in a war, right? So that's the kind of mentality So that's the sort of thing we're gonna be addressing in this talk. Let me mention I've been I've been doing this several years now at Mises you I Typically run out of time at the end where I want to field common objections And so what I'm gonna do this year is go more quickly through the opening material so that I can hopefully have more time at the end And so I would say if you've never seen me give this talk before Later, you know go go to YouTube if you want and try to look up, you know Robert Murphy the market for security me says you and you'll see a whole list Grab one when I don't have a beard because that's gonna be from earlier and go ahead and watch that if you're curious And you want to see me elaborate more and some of the stuff in the beginning Okay, another quick caveat before I jump into the main material because this Confuses people several years ago. I wrote a lot on pacifism just trying to explain to Rothbardian types that that hey, you know you've seen how the case for Aggression is overblown and actually a society that Refrains from initiating force wouldn't be sitting ducks the way most people think and so that I wasn't even going further and saying You actually made the case for defensive violence, perhaps is overrated and I was just you know showing people that there's different traditions, you know if you like Tolstoy for example the kingdom of God is within you coming from a Christian tradition, but also just there's You know Gandhi or the civil rights movement in the United States There's various historical examples of people who have used nonviolent tactics to achieve Social change and to stop a much better armed much more physically powerful foe And so I do just want to make a note of that Looking that the one thing I'll say here is this stuff. It's not just like oh, we don't want to hurt a fly And we're not very organized. There's this misconception that nonviolent Conflict resolution or something is real Pansy and not really rigorous and that's not true like there's a very well developed argumentation and tactics Strategic thought that goes into some of these movements. So for example when I was in Nashville There was a museum Exhibit for they had training sessions for the civil rights movement and they would do things like say, okay We're gonna pick this place. You know it was segregated Counter-lunchtop counter. So we're gonna have a sit-in. We're gonna have a chain of people all holding hands now The mob's gonna come and they're gonna start beating us We cannot throw a punch if we throw one punch in response. We're done public opinion will turn We have to sit there and take it let them spit at us try to engage them in conversation They might be less likely to punch you in the face And if somebody you can tell is just getting beat too badly Let him come in the middle of us and other people fan out You know is on the perimeter and take the beatings that are so this is the way they were training for this going into this With that mentality. So whether you agree with that or not. I'm just saying it was not Simply, you know, just a thing like hey, let's just hope it all works out They were really strategically planning because they knew we're in the minority. We're vastly outgun This is the only chance we have so I just want to mention that So what I'm doing in this talk is I'm just as an economist explaining market forces. So the analogy I use is I Don't think excessive heroin use is a good idea. I actually think it would be immoral But if you're asking me as economists, what does the market look like if we'd legalize drugs I could sit there and as an economist explain the buyers and the sellers and prices and so forth so clearly if we got rid of the government's monopoly on legal Judicial rulings and military defense Most people are not pacifist and so they would certainly pay money to have violent armed defense to repel invaders or private criminals And so that that's what I'm doing here Okay I'm gonna spend more of the talk on private law versus private defense because I think private law is actually the conceptually difficult thing as you'll see once We understand how would people know who the proper owner was or what you know the the proper assignment of property titles Then to say how could we defend those things? From people who violently try to invade them. That's actually a pretty simple problem relatively speaking Okay, so that's why I'm gonna spend more time talking about the case for private law than private defense So before I Sort of get into the positive exposition of here's practically speaking how I think a private legal system could work let me just mention a lot of The initial sort of knee-jerk reactions people have in terms of objections It sounds crazy and I grant you that it does the first time you hear this stuff It sounds like how could that possibly work? But I just want to walk you through and show Those sort of immediate Instinctive reactions and to say come on this this doesn't even make any sense if you applied it in other areas of social life You would see those objections would be silly. Okay, so for example You might talk about That how could there be multiple? Power centers, you know, it doesn't there needs to be to one body Promulgating all the rules to have a rule of law, right? It seems like how could you have competition when it comes to the legal code? Because clearly we need one group to be absolutely dominant and in charge to set us you know to establish to promulgate the law Right that sounds sensible when you hear it in that context if someone's walking along and saying why do we need a state monopoly on the legal code? Or legislation how could you have competition in that arena that boggles my mind and I want to point out That's not what's true in science, right? Imagine if somebody said to you we need to have one group of people backed up by guns With absolute undisputed authority to tell us what the laws of physics are otherwise it would just be chaos You'd have various people all over the world saying different things about the laws of physics and would just be a jumble You clearly need to have one group promulgating the laws of physics, right? You see how silly that would be it's not just that it's wrong that would be horrifying if we did go that path Right if that's the way science proceeded that we anointed one group of experts and said you get to tell us what the laws of Science are you know biology chemistry what so forth? Okay, so you see how clearly that doesn't work in that category now you might Push back a little bit against me there and say okay. Yeah, you're right in that analogy You used that type of objection would be silly competition clearly works and then in the physical sciences but you might say that's because There really aren't Physical laws of nature, right? It's not that they're arbitrary They're there are objectively true laws out there or at least that seems to be the case if we think nature behaves in an orderly fashion And so what the scientists are doing is trying to approximate them so scientists are disagreeing There's an objective way to settle the dispute they can run an experiment if it's something, you know That's a repeatable experiment Clearly there's a sense in which there's an objective fact of the matter and that's why the better Scientists win out over time and there can be some type of consensus Using that term loosely, you know, you know what where I'm coming from with that Whereas they might say when it comes to things that involve human conventions like property titles There's it's not the case that the owner of Mama Goldbergs that you know the building next door that establishment You could say that's not as objectively true and out there as a feature of nature The way the charge on an electron is so just so yes, I agree with you Murphy We don't need one agency to be in charge of telling us what the charge on an electron is because anybody can go measure that and figure it out And the people running the better experiments can demonstrate the superiority of their technique to the community Whereas something like to say who owns Mama Goldbergs? One might think is far more arbitrary and just a mere social convention It's not something that's like embedded in the nature of reality per se And so you might think that's why their competition doesn't work very well But what about The definitions of words okay clearly language in a sense is a human convention That's you know what the definition of words is not Analogous to the charge on an electron. It's much closer. I think you would agree with me to this to say who owns Mama Goldbergs And yet that's not arbitrary either and so let's spend just a minute on this What happens? You might say well who determines what words mean right if there's some dispute over the meaning of a particular term Right, so somebody says well that Paul Krugman. He's such an oxymoron Right and other people might say he's a moron perhaps, but he's not an oxymoron I think you're using that word wrong. You're like no, that's what it means It means he's a super moron like no, so how do you resolve that? You go and you look in addiction or you look up oxymoron to see what it says. Okay, so Does that mean the people who publish Webster's dictionary get to define words? Are they the authorities on what words mean? Superficially you might say yes, you must yeah, because look at what we just did if you have a disagreement we go to the book But no, let's think that through a little bit more carefully If Webster has put out its new edition of the dictionary next year and in it the word up, you know UP the definition it gave was tending to move towards the floor What would happen? It's not that we would all say I stand corrected. I've been using that word wrong my whole life Right, that's not what you people would mock them They would screenshot it you know put it around Twitter mocking them like who are the you know the wizards to let this one slip through the quality control process because they how would we describe it Webster's published the wrong definition We would know that is wrong. That's not what that word means. Okay, so what they're actually doing with dictionaries is They're codifying the definitions as the community of English speakers defines the words or uses the words Okay, again, so I'm gonna I'm gonna move quickly here on in earlier Years of this I would spend some time on this because the analogy between private language and private law is Pretty strong and really you can there's several layers of them as far as you want to push it You can see connections between the two for example Something like a grammar style guide, you know, you can have Situations and saying like a particular English sentence to say I don't went to the store yesterday That's clearly ungrammatical right that's not standard English That's clearly wrong where something other cases might be a little bit more borderline like to say hey Who'd you go to the store with and some people might get real uptight and say oh you should never end a sentence with a Proposition right and think it's attributed to Winston Churchill. He says that is something up with which I shall not put but I don't know if you actually said that but you can see That you know, it's it's cumbersome time that you say oh with whom did you go to the store yesterday, right? You see and so people could argue about whether it's ungrammatical or preferred And you know there can be borderline cases and that's what happens when it comes to private law You clearly know if you just you're walking in the park and some ladies pushing a baby around a stroller And you just go up and drop a rock on the baby's face That is illegal you just broke the law, right? There's no doubt about that no reputable legal scholar would possibly dispute Whereas the baby pulls out a gun and starts he's about to shoot you and then you do it, you know Maybe it's stewie or something from family guy then maybe it is okay You know so it's in there It's more borderline right you so you see what I'm saying that that's the type of thing just like with you know Style guides and so on so that's the analogy you can really push that but clearly my point here is if you said Who's in charge of the English language? You could answer or you could say nobody and that there's a sense in which that's true Or you could say the English speaking community because notice if you go and read Shakespeare That's English, but it's not our English, right? There's the way that was written There are things in there that you know how now Polonius and stuff like that and it's not it's not the way We would talk now, but yet it's not German either. It's English, but it's changed over time So definition styles change and yet there is a sense at any given moment There's a fact of the matter. Is this a grammatical sentence or is this person using this word correctly here? And so I'm saying that's kind of how the of the private legal system would work that over time the law would change right before there was Technology that could use radio spectrum You didn't have property rights in the electromagnetic Spectrum that wouldn't even have come up to people living you know in the year 1200 if they were all Rothbardians back then right Whereas you know over time eventually they would have to address that issue Maybe they would decide you can't own it But the point is conflict would arise once there were pirate radio stations and people were trying to use radio Transmissions and some people were interfering with what other people wanted to do. All right, so that's a pretty good analogy I think for that element now you might push back again. You might say Hang on. Let me not jump to the chase here. You might say Okay, you've you've shown me Murphy that mere human convention Also, there's a sense in which there could be a fact of the matter and so on But you know what? There's not a lot of money riding on the definition of up there No one stands to gain if we tweaked the definition of up to mean going down towards the surface whereas a Judge whose job it is or some clerk somewhere who's in charge of maintaining the property titles in Auburn, Alabama And if we had a dispute over who owns Mama Goldberg if we could convince people that oh no This person's the rightful owner. That's a big deal. That really matters And so maybe they would you know pay the person who maintains those property titles and corrupt them So whereas with the dictionary clearly the the profitable thing to do is for Webster's to always codify The standard definitions, you know, the dictionaries might differ slightly There's competition even among dictionaries notice publishers But they would generally agree on the basics and you can see how market forces would ensure that but again You could say because no one stands to gain a billion dollars from changing a definition And so you might say so that's why this analogy, okay It works a little bit but not when it comes to property titles because clearly there There's a lot at stake and so why would we trust a decentralized market process? Why would the the legitimate property titles be recognized in the system? Why would that be the profitable thing to do? I'm not as sure and so you granted yes These things aren't literally the same their analogies But let me just point out, you know, we also have stipulations of what standard units of measurement are and So do you really think? Imagine, you know, it's a free society. We're all big fans of Rothbard People sign a contract and it says okay I agree to work for you for eight hours and at the end of my shift You're going to give me five silver coins and we signed a contract that specifies that so the shift is over You work your eight hours the employer comes out and he drops three pebbles into your hand says there you go There's the the eight silver coins or whatever I said and and you see what we talked about these are these are three pebbles You said eight silver coins And he went yeah, that that's One two eight. That's how I count and you know, this is what silver Well, of course, there's a silver coin. There's things are all over the beach. I don't know why they're so valuable But they are And you know, I'm saying so if the person just saying no what I meant in that contract the definition When I wrote that you know thing that looked like two circles like that it to me. It's one two eight That's how I count. What's your problem? Is there any you know with the community just say ah We thought freedom was gonna work, but apparently it doesn't No, what the community would say is this guy's lying or he's crazy and That sort of thing would not fly. Okay the community now if the guy says oh by the way and Then like 16 guys with bazookas come out Maybe he gets away with that and you just say oh, thanks for the eight silver coins and you walk away Well, first of all, you're gonna quit right? So that's one way that you're gonna limit that sort of thing But you're gonna tell all your friends the community is gonna know that that guy stole from you that he stole your eight hours All right, the community is not going to say the ambiguity of language Right, that's not what's gonna happen. They're gonna know so my point again with this stuff is yes they're gonna be borderline cases and maybe corruption will be involved but in terms of Somebody had that plot of land in their family for generations. They went out They they just league, you know got the trees Nobody ever objected to how they bought the lumber and they built this thing and they put the sign up and it was a woman who was a mother and her last name was Goldberg and she put a sign saying mama Goldberg and then Somebody came in from out of town that no one ever seen before at gunpoint kicks her out of the house comes in and says Guess what? This is my house because of the I'm a you know the way you guys read these contracts is wrong I'm changing the definition If they have superior physical force, they might get away with it But everybody knows that person just stole from her It's not that we wouldn't know what the fact of the matter and who is the rightful owner of that house Also too again With all these things, let me just say before I forget and move on it's always a comparative analysis here So it's not my job to prove to you corruption of judges or the maintenance of property titles Will never happen even one single time in a free society My claim is it would happen a lot less than it does right now. Okay, so it's it's if people say Oh, yeah, because judges might be corrupt in a free society That's why I had the present system when judges are horribly corrupt under the present system all the time, right? So it's a it's an institutional uh comparison Okay, so why don't I walk through a quick example? Just to kind of show you the mechanics in practice How might this work in a modern society? So let's talk about a tv thief. So I I'm you know, I live in a a suburb I'm driving home and I see someone Going out of my apartment with a big tv on his back and he runs away And so I go in my tv is gone. What do I do? I go and I check the the video footage and it's it's I think it's the kid that lives down the street You know, it looks like him on the video and so I could go and uh Present my kid, you know, I might just go to the person and and say hey, you took my tv Give it back and the kids as we tell them I didn't do it And so what do I do there now? I might in the in an abstract sense have the right ethically If especially if I'm convinced but exposed I look around and I think I see my tv in there I might have the the right to just barge in and if it's you know, I could probably take the kid Right, especially if he's like he's like 15 or younger. I bet you I get it but I wouldn't do that It would be foolish for me to do that because then if the kid's going around especially if I have to rough him up I'm going to look like a jerk, you know, if I think it's a black eye or something I'm going to look like maybe I aggress the community's not going to know So what do I do is now one thing is moving into the suburb or what we probably have signed stuff ahead of time Saying disputes will be resolved as I'm trying to make it harder on myself What if we didn't have that what if I didn't have any sort of nexus of a pre-existing contractual framework to deal with this Kind of dispute with this person Maybe it's someone who lives several neighborhoods away and we you know, there were no contractual arrangements between us I would go to Members of the community judges who render opinions. That's what judges do, right? You notice judges don't the language we use nowadays as we say the judge wrote in opinions So what they're doing is they're saying this is my interpretation my understanding Is how the law applies to these facts of the case? That's what judges are doing fundamentally And so that's what I would do here is I would say okay, you know what? I'm going to take all this evidence I have the video footage the serial number on my you know tv that I went to best buy I can get them to tell me what was And then he says oh well the the serial number on my tv has been scratched away You know because when I was bringing it in I slipped in it and rubbed against the wall Sorry, you know and so there's all kinds of circumstantial evidence like that all the evidence I can amass and I'll go to a bunch of judges in the community who all specialize in Um home home theft right burglary cases And I'll and I'll say there's there's 10 reputable judges in the community who all specialize They have whole careers where all they do day in and day out is hear cases Of people alleging this person broke into my house. So they're experts on this The reason they're in business is because they have a reputation for fairness Right that that's why they have that job and if you've never thought about this It might sound like science fiction. You're wouldn't work, but this happens all the time like when people get divorced right now Unless it's a really expensive case and there's a lot of money at stake Usually they will just go to private arbitration just to get it over with right just to hurt You just want to move on with your life or you know a company and the employee have a dispute over the labor contract The employee got sick and says you won't be more time the company says no we don't know you that those wages The the regular government court system is so clogged and inefficient They will often go to mediation and often to the you know, the labor contracts ahead of time say any disputes will be submitted to binding arbitration So how do those companies right now in the real world? This isn't something like that's not a chapter eight from Rothbard This is in the real world. There are arbitrators in business. That's their livelihood They clearly it can't be known if you're a divorce arbitrator You always rule for the wife or the husband Otherwise you would stop getting cases because the one party wouldn't agree to go to that person You see what I'm saying? So all they're doing is rendering an opinion So here I would be saying to this teenager that I thought stole my tv or his parents Okay, I'm willing to pick here's a list of 10 people in the community I'm willing to go to any of them to submit this case and I will abide by the the judge's decision If the judge says there's not enough evidence to prove that's my tv. Okay. I tried I'll walk away And suppose the you know, so the teenagers can they're agreed to it in which case it's fine. We do that or The he'll just keep saying no no, I don't trust those guys And what if he says I'll hear with this guy over here was my brother-in-law You know, I'll take the case to him The community then at that point would realize okay, this kid is being shady And right and so what I would do in that case is I would go to a respected member of the community submit my evidence He renders an opinion. Okay, and so an apotheon looks at the evidence So I'm using this to be funny clearly what I would do in the real world is pick some judge Who doesn't know who I am obviously but and so the community would see okay Yeah Murphy took his case to a reputable judge who's an expert in this area The judge said my understanding of the law yep This person is the thief and then the sentences or the or the restitution is return the tv plus Whatever 10 ounces of gold and restitution or whatever an ounce of gold or for sir for murphy's time in trouble So that would be this outstanding judgment Now how would that get enforced? now here I would Now I would be legally in the right the community would not object if I personally Knocked down the kid's door and then went to go in and take my tv And or even maybe it maybe if the kid used a standard checking, you know bank account Maybe the bank would transfer the money in terms of the compensation Because the bank wants to also be in compliance with the law the community wouldn't want to think This is a bank where criminals go to hide their ill-gotten gains and the bank doesn't care about Legal opinions that are you know are not being disputed by the reputable legal community Okay, so again if if the kid showed up in court and challenged that there could be an appeal process and so on What i'm talking about here is suppose Napolitano makes his ruling and the kid just ah, he's a fraud. I don't care And he's not going through normal legal channels to appeal it Such that any normal legal scholar would look at this in two minutes and say yeah It looks like murphy's tv got stolen by that kid if you ask me So this is the stage where we are So here I could now go into the kid's house and take the tv back with force and the community wouldn't think I was a criminal But I probably wouldn't just for reasons of comparative advantage and so on I would outsource it To somebody whose firm specializes in like property recovery All right, so somebody else would come in that that's what that person's job is Somebody who specializes in the use of violence. Okay, so Now notice even here Think let's let's think this through. Okay, so i'm just trying to get you to see There's no one group that's in charge of the law here I picked napolitano, but there are 10 competing judges who are all experts that I could have picked and said it's not that Andrew napolitano is in charge of who gets tv's in this certain jurisdiction. That's not the way it works He's just someone who's called upon to render an opinion Just like if you're writing a term paper and you're not sure about well Gee that the professor wanted me to use the chicago style manual to cite, you know in the work cited section There's different, you know, you could go google it. There's lots of websites where you could go look that stuff up It's not that there's one website in charge of here's how you cite papers Okay, so same thing here The law is what the community through its actions collectively promulgates just like we all in a sense Determine english language or diction definitions But you just go to look for an authoritative style guide or source to codify that. Okay, likewise. It's not that tom d. Lorenzo's agency Is the monopoly enforcement agency in the community? They're one of several competing ones if I went to him before I got the judicial ruling and said hey, this kid stole my tv Here's the video D. Lorenzo's firm would say, whoa, we don't we don't do that You have to go get a ruling from a reputable judge first before we enforce that We're not in the business of legal decisions. All we do is enforce just Legal opinions you see you see that difference. So this is something that I think even in the standard libertarian Tradition doesn't get emphasized too much. I think in practice The judges would be their own separate thing and the enforcement agencies would be completely separate Entity they would not just all be working like for the same insurance company the way you see it in some of the more canonical Expositions, maybe they would I'm just saying to me those things are so intrinsically different I don't see why they would happen to be the same agencies I think the insurance company might you know have contracts with them to to outsource that stuff So there's no confusion Once something like once a case is pending to know, okay, where are we who are we going to hire to take care of this? But I don't think it would be the same group of people if for no other reason You'd want to assure the community that there was no corruption involved. You'd want to have a hands length arms length distance between them One more thing on this before I move on suppose D. Lorenzo's Agents Are unnecessarily rough, you know, suppose they they put like explosives. They blow the door that they burn the kids house down They kill him and his dogs and stuff to get the tv back He's going to go out of business. Maybe he's going to be legally protected, right? And depending on the legal code, maybe if they can argue in some sense that we've we're feared for our lives Okay, maybe it depends on what the legal system is probably not depending on how egregious They're overzealousness and and getting that tv back would be But for sure, no matter what they're going out of business Nobody else is hiring them again because I look bad, right? I don't want that's bad press for me Especially if I were a business, right? If you're a store keeper and you're hiring private security just to keep to minimize shoplifting You don't want teenagers bolting out of the store who just have like You know a radio or something or some candy bars under their jacket You don't want them getting their arms broken by the security. That's just that's bad for business And so what D. Lorenzo's firm would actually do in this case Is show up, you know, they might have like riot gear, you know Bulletproof vests and stuff to protect themselves But they would not use lethal force to get a tv back that would just be a bad business move Okay, so and if they did again competition, they would go out of business whereas right now what happens When the police force is clearly overzealous and doing something What happens is people put the video on facebook or twitter and there's outrage and the defenders say, okay Well, the next time someone's breaking into your house. I guess you're not going to call 911, huh? The reason people think like that is because they think there's the police period Whereas if there's multiple competing agencies Then you would no longer think that if one agency was clearly using excessive force, they go out of business Just like right now if somebody goes to a restaurant and gets food poisoning And and complains on facebook. I went there and I was thrown up for three days people don't say Oh, well the next time you're hungry. I guess you're just going to go to your backyard garden and grow it yourself, huh? Right, you know, I guess you like restaurants or not, you know, it's not do I like restaurants or not? It's that particular restaurant made me sick. All right Okay, so would there be prisons in a free society? So this is an interesting question Again, it depends on the clientele. I imagine if things switch next thursday that yes given The desire for retribution and the way people think about things written on their value system I do think initially there might be prisons. I think over time in a genuinely free society that most Crimes the punishment would end up morphing into mere Financial restitution, right? I think like the the aggrieved party would real like somebody killed somebody The next of kin would realize no matter what the you know putting that person in the cage or killing them Is not going to bring dad back And then also just in terms of rehabilitation That if the person feels like I can go work Make a bunch of money and pay this these victims back You might feel like you're easing the guilt and move on with your life Whereas you kind of know if I just sit in a cage And have horrible things done to me by other inmates and have got you know prison the guards beat me up And I'm making license plates. I actually haven't paid my debt to society, right? So even in terms of just getting the the criminals either you lock them up forever Or try to actually make them rehabilitated. I think the punitive mentality is is Creating more crime, but that doesn't matter. That's just my personal opinion I'm talking here as an economist. How would this work initially? is I think that the prisons would be like hotels But it would be like the hotel california. All right, and so What I mean here is No matter what let's say there's an out there's some axe murderer running around We have him on video camera. We go to a bunch of judges. They render opinion. They look at it and say Yes, this person joe smith is an axe murderer And he you know, he's offer offer all this restitution and he's just on the run It's you know, people wonder do we have the right to go grab him? You know, what's that you don't need to worry about that stuff because remember every parcel of land is owned by someone in a free society So all you would need is in a case like that where it's crystal clear that someone really is just a mass murderer or serial killer On the run that all you or you know a bank robber or something who's who's staying one step ahead of the law All that would have to happen is all the property owners would say get off my property, right? You notice you always have the right to do that. It's not that we have to worry Is there some intrinsic right for us to physically grab someone and put him in a cage? If he's been convicted of a certain crime, you don't need to worry about that Everyone has the right to say I don't want you on my property And so in this kind of a world if someone were a true pariah I think there would be a role either from profit maximizing Organized firms or like philanthropic or you know church organizations who want to rehabilitate The criminals that would say hey, this is like a relative oasis. You can all come here now, of course We're going to search you for weapons. We're you know, we're going to have control your movements You know, you're we're not going to give you steak knives for dinner and things like that if you're a violent criminal But we're going to work with you. We're going to allow you to work, right? Like maybe someone's a brilliant architect and he came home and saw you know Someone cheating with his wife and he went nuts and killed up, you know killed him Well, you know, it doesn't do anybody any good if that person can no longer work It just sits in a cage that doesn't help anybody So maybe he you know has supervised you he can still do architectural work But he's in this kind of secure facility to make sure he can't get out because the rest of the community says We don't want you around us. You're too violent You know, if you snap you kill people you can't work at a regular architectural firm But maybe they could come up with something and so these firms would compete with each other, right? So different They probably wouldn't call themselves prisons. They would probably call themselves something else But we might look at that and say oh, that's kind of like what prisons are in their world But the point is there'd be multiple ones and it's not that some essential group grabs a guy and says you're going here Buddy for 30 years It's that most of the community says you're a convicted serial killer or you're convicted, you know, you killed your wife Get off my property and then these places would arise to say come on in You can stay here under supervision and they would compete with each other So if there's staff beat up the the inmates, you know, what we call inmates they might call them residents or something Then you would just go somewhere else. Okay, there'd be competition there So just notice that the the interplay of market forces there So the worst horrors of what happens to people in the current prison system wouldn't happen here now, um I'm going to move quickly here because I again I want to get to the objections but In terms of what about parole like, okay So what determines how long do you stay in there or not? I think what would happen is third party groups Would vouch for people, right that and you see Versions of this now and it's again the stuff isn't me. This is not just science fiction All of these things like if you read my pamphlet chaos theory or if you read um, uh, you know, han's hop has done a lot of stuff on military defense rothbard and foreign new liberty has some things, um, you know The bruce benson draws on a lot of stuff There there are historical precedent for this thing. So we're not just making this up of spinning it merely as science fiction But right now, you know, there's there's fraternal organizations. There's things in which If you do something wrong, then the group backing you up Pays for it, you know, they go ahead and they make the victim whole and then you got to settle up with them The analogy here just a simple one is something like medical malpractice insurance, right that you're a brain surgeon If you screw up and there's a big lawsuit against you You might owe millions of dollars to the next of kin if you you know kill the person on the table And it's shown that as you did something really wrong. It's malpractice And the doctor might not have the money. So what happens is you have to you know a hospital There's regulations But even in a free society the hospital might insist any brain surgeon working here has to have medical malpractice insurance So the insurance company covers the person And clearly they're gonna You know look at you and make see what your record is for you to be able to get medical malpractice insurance If you never went to medical school, you're probably not going to be eligible So likewise here somebody who you know that architect he flipped out He's been you know under supervision for 10 years. He's been seeing psychologists, whatever some outside group might come and say, all right um If you pay us $10,000 a year we will vouch for you in the outside community and say if you ever get convicted of another violent crime We promise to you know compensate your victims And then you know you're just going to settle up with us and again The more violent the person had been or whatever the higher the premium just like you get in a bunch of car accidents Your car insurance premiums are higher. There might be things like that And so other areas of the community might say, okay Yeah, you can come into this shopping mall if you've got this outside group vouching for you if you do anything While you're in here shopping, then we know we're getting compensated Someone might not rent you an apartment, you know, that might still be a little bit too lear You see so so that everyone just gets to decide what their own rules are going to be so integrating people back into society I think Would be much more humane and more importantly If the group screwed up if they let somebody out who actually went back and started killing people again They're on the hook for it. Whereas right now the way the system works You go and see the parole board if they screw up and let you out and you go back and kill more people It's not that the people on the parole board are out a bunch of money You know, worst case they might get fired if they keep doing that or somewhere they might feel bad But you see how they're not Strictly liable for the full consequences of what they did whereas in this system The you know the firms or whatever that might vouch for somebody they might they might call it fraternal organizations There could be different names they would use you can see how they would be On the hook for it. So I think insurance companies would would fill this this vacuum Okay, as far as military defense Do this really fast. So here the mechanism is I think it would be Insurance would provide the funding. So you have big skyscrapers. Let's say manhattan area skyscrapers There's no government military defense. How could a free society pay for that? Well, you these skyscrapers have things like fire insurance policies Right, there's a big fire. You could be out millions of dollars. So you have insurance And part of what the insurance company would do for a huge skyscraper is say you better have sprinkler systems You better have fire extinguishers installed every such and such yards All this kind of stuff I want I want you to have adequate Stairwells and ways that the people in the building can get out in case there is a fire and go through You know troubleshooting and have outside firms come in experts analyze the building plans and make sure this is up to There wouldn't be government codes But there would be private sector analogs of safety codes to know this is the modern way we build skyscrapers to minimize Damage and death during a major fire And then if you complied with all that stuff you would be able to get fire insurance policies. So likewise If you're the owner you stand to lose a lot if some outside military comes in and drops bombs on your skyscraper And so you could have insurance that says in the event that you're Conquered by an outside army or that you know It's damaged because bombers drop bombs on or artillery or so forth naval guns hit it We will compensate you And so now the insurance company that's making that pledge is on the hook for potentially billions of dollars of Damage claims and so they would have the incentive to spend money to minimize the chance of that happening So it's the insurance companies getting funding from premiums that owners are paying them That's how they have the money. They're not taxing anybody But now they have hundreds of millions or billions depending on how big an area we're talking about flowing into their coffers And then they know if we just can make sure that nobody ever conquers them or drops bombs here We get to keep this money But if somebody does come in and hurts them militarily then we're on the hook for compensating So they're the ones who are going to go and You know fund people like who are going to have maintain tanks anti-aircraft SAM sites satellite observations things like that All right, so that's the basic funding mechanism And again if you want to read more in my pamphlet chaos theory check that out one thing I will mention is This sort of thing is not going to happen. So number one, we're clearly not going to use swastikas. That's just bad PR altogether That's not good for anybody But what i'm talking about here is large standing armies. That is not going to be A profit maximizing outcome just like look at agriculture right over time What happens the amount of people in agriculture shrinks over time because productivity goes up so much So I think in an apples to apples comparison A free society would be able easily to repel some huge army coming in with a fraction of the manpower just like You know us farms can produce way more wheat with just a few Farmers compared to some other country. That's more heavily statist. All right, so again I don't have time to dwell on that But I just want to mention if people are worried about standing armies turning against you know turning into the state I don't think there would be standing armies Okay, so let me now spend some time on these these common objections here Wouldn't the mafia become the government? Okay, so number one the mafia is much cooler than the government, right? And so might you know the glib response they're they're worried like okay So the mafia right now would do what it did and then over time it would turn into the government And so the glib response is say, okay Well, at least we get eight years of having a cool mafia before they turn into what we have right now So what you know well in other words it's saying we don't want to have this because it might turn into the system We have right now. So let's keep the system. We have right now Just I know I said that fast, but think that through that doesn't make any sense at all Okay, that's like saying we couldn't have energy because then Donald Trump would be president Work with me people. All right Beyond that let me give a more substantive response right now. Look at all the areas where the mafia is in Their power centers. It's all areas that are either outright prohibited or heavily regulated by the state Right the mafia makes its money on gambling prostitution drug trafficking illegal guns, perhaps Okay, they also Depending on the area might be heavily involved with labor unions and again That's not a free market outcome The reason labor unions have so much strength in our current system is because of special privileges that the state gives them Okay, so those are all the areas you know So yeah, the mafia makes money, you know, they hire hit men and stuff, but that's not their That's not their business model, right? It's not that the mafia makes its money from killing people That's just the way they sort of maintain their empire the revenues flow in From the fact that they they sell services to willing customers That can't get it through legal channels because the government either regulates it a lot or makes it outright illegal And so far from strengthening the mafia the more you shrink the state the weaker the mafia becomes And we have a clear cut, you know as far as these things go on the social science the clear cut example The mafia the organized crime was clearly stronger Under alcohol prohibition Right, and then once they legalized that stuff organized crimes ability to engage in in the alcohol trade just disappeared And so likewise if they legalized not you know cocaine and things like that The mafia organized crime would no longer be involved in those areas and if they legalized all these other things The mafia would shrink so that that's the problem The type of people that go and organize crime have a comparative advantage In doing criminal activity. And so if you reduce the state's arbitrary prohibition on things You're reducing the scope for the mafia to thrive in Okay, let me do One one so this one right here wouldn't warlords take over if you google my name in that title I have a whole essay at mises.org where I talk about that. So why don't you go ahead and look that up this I got like one minute left here. Let me just mention wouldn't a neighboring state invade So here notice that In practice, right? There are countries that were neutral like like switzerland, for example And lots of countries that are heavily armed But they don't pick fights. They don't form alliances with other groups and in most states even aggressive totalitarian states kind of leave them alone because there's no really they're not a threat right and so So there's that element a group of roth bardeans somewhere don't pose a threat In the immediate future the only threat they really pose the states is their very existence being a beacon An example to the world to look freedom works But a state doesn't need to worry about them developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that would kill a million people That would be illegal in their own courts. That would be collateral. That would just be mass murder It would be illegal for a defense firm in a roth bard agency to go kill a bunch of people in some other country And so you wouldn't have to worry about them doing that their own court system would stop them from aggressing against their neighbors So they're not a threat beyond that though Let me just flip the last point i'll make is a lot of people will say something like Oh, so a little group of roth bardeans. They would get destroyed by nazi germany. So therefore Your system doesn't work and I could say guess what? Status france got destroyed by nazi germany. So therefore status defense clearly doesn't work Right and so all this stuff you have to use apples to apples the claim is not Libertarianism makes you invulnerable to bullets Don't don't test this at home. This is why we're against testing That's not the claim the claim is freedom makes you effectively mobilize your resources more than other systems Okay, and so for a given level of technical knowledge of people with their sharp skill You know sharp shooting skills and so forth resources ability to build tanks boys You can organize your military defense more effectively if you use freedom to move those resources around than if you centrally plan it That's true when it comes to food production. It's true when it comes to military defense. Thanks everybody