 Thank you, Hans. Before I start, let me mention one thing. Today, this article appeared on Mises Daily, well, yesterday, but this is the current issue. So this is a summary of the Hopian argumentation ethics theory, so anyone who's interested in this idea, you may want to take a look at this. Also, at the bottom of this page, there's an ad for an upcoming Mises Academy course I have here, which is starting July 11th, the Social Theory of Hoppe. So it's a six-week course where I'll go into detail on Professor Hoppe's economic and political theories. So anyone who's interested in that, take a look. I've taught two, well, three Mises Academy courses already, my intellectual property theory twice, and libertarian legal theory. And in the course of doing these and in the course of my thinking over the years, I've started to collect a bunch of libertarian fallacies, confusions, and misconceptions, which I'll try to go through here. And if you disagree with me, I guess I'm promoting some libertarian misconceptions. So I'll start with a fairly easy one that's always sort of bugged me. You'll find libertarians will use the word coercion quite often as a synonym for aggression. We're against coercion. This is more of a semantic point, but technically, we're not against coercion. Coercion just means to use force to compel someone to do something. So if someone's breaking into my house and I get my gun and I force them to leave, I'm coercing the guy and there's nothing wrong with that. So I think we just need to be clear on our terminology and avoid equating aggression with coercion. And libertarians will also, and like things, sometimes say that we're against violence or we're against force, and of course we're not. We're only against the unjustified use of force. By the way, this is a PowerPoint slide and I have tons of links in here. And I posted this on my website this morning. If anyone wants to look it up and look for a... I've often got links to articles or blog posts that have further discussion of the topics in this slide. And my website is stephanconcello.com. By the way, in a light vein, I always get annoyed when people use the word capital L, libertarians, to describe me or other libertarians. Libertarian with the capital L means member of the libertarian party to my mind. And I've never been a member of the libertarian party and don't plan to be. Although I did run for office when I was under the libertarian ticket in Texas. A related idea is you'll hear this idea when people talk about PDAs, private defense agencies, anarchist or private property society. A lot of these guys almost sound pacifist in the sense that they say that you can only assert jurisdiction over someone who's already signed up to be a customer of one of these competing PDAs who have agreements with each other. But of course I think that's false. A criminal in effect consents to jurisdiction over him by committing an act of aggression. So you can think of it this way. There are two ways that a force can be justified against someone that is invading the borders of their body, using their body or their property. One would be consent, right? If someone gives permission or invites them like a girl invites you to kiss her. It's not aggression because it's invited or consented to. But committing aggression would be another way that you can think of as giving a type of consent to force being used against your body. And the reason basically is sort of the Hopi and argumentation ethics or symmetrical idea that you really have no grounds for objecting to force being used against your body if you are committing aggression yourself. You sort of agree to that type of rule of ethics. So these are some kind of initial ones up. Let's get into another one. Restitution and punishment or retribution. These two things are often confused by libertarians. They're all over the map. Some people believe retribution is primary. Some think restitution is primary. Some think we should have both. Now my view of this one is that the general libertarian view is that we're for non-aggression. But what that means is force that is not aggression is not impermissible. What that means is force that's in response to aggression is what is permissible. So I think the general category of what type of force is permissible is responsive force. Now that includes different types of force. That includes defense using force and self-defense because that's in response to aggression. Or using force to achieve restitution after the fact. Or using force to incapacitate someone or to punish them for deterrence purposes or even for rehabilitation. All these are examples of responsive force. So the purpose or the motive of the victim who is using his right to retaliate. His right to respond forcefully against an aggressor. That is what determines the characteristic of that force. So he might have a vengeance. He might want retribution. Or he might want to threaten the victim. Or threaten the aggressor and say, you know, I have the right to torture you or to jail you or to kill you even for the crime you committed. But I'll bargain it away for an award of money, restitution. So the purpose that the victim can put his right to punish or his right to respond forcefully to determines the type. But it's up to him. Now, so I would disagree with the idea that there's restitution is the only basis of a libertarian society because there is a right to respond with force to an aggressor. He basically, his rights are not violated if an aggressor is, his force is used against him or in response to his aggression. However, this does not mean that in a libertarian society, restitution would not be the dominant mode of justice. And I actually think it probably would. There are several reasons for this. Number one is that punishment is more costly than restitution. There's always the possibility of error. If you make an error in an award of restitution, then that can be undone. If you make an error in punishment, it can never be undone. And it could lead to retaliation against you or a high ward of damages from your insurance company or something like that. Another reason it's more costly is it is probable that the standard of proof would be higher to justify punishing an accused aggressor than to get restitution. Arguably you would need proof way beyond a reasonable doubt to justify punishing whereas it may only be a preponderance of the evidence standard for getting restitution because there the dispute is just over property. Basically you're saying this purported aggressor, this alleged aggressor has $10,000. I claim that I am entitled to that money for damages for restitution to me. So it's really a property dispute at that point. And in a property dispute, while the burden of proof can be on the plaintiff which would be the victim, the standard of proof could be just preponderance of evidence. And for people who aren't familiar, this is a legal standard. Preponderance of the evidence is basically more likely than not, 51%. And you can think of beyond a reasonable doubt as 99%. And there's an intermediate standard in the U.S. called clear and convincing which is, I don't know, 75%. And there are several other reasons that restitution would probably be the dominant mode of justice although punishment you could imagine would happen on occasion in an ad hoc fashion even in an institutional fashion. Another reason that we need to keep in mind that there is a right to punish is that without the right to punish, restitution, except in cases of property theft, is fairly arbitrary. If there's rape or murder or assault or kidnapping, that can never be undone. And an award of money never truly compensates the victim for the crime that was done. And so there is just no objective way to determine how much money the aggressor should have to pay. And in fact, in most cases, aggressors are usually low lives and don't have any money anyway. So you need the right to punishment to determine the proper amount of restitution. So for example, if you know that you have the right to punish an aggressor proportionally for the crime you committed, the worse the crime, the more severe the punishment could in theory be inflicted, then that amount of punishment could be used to bargain with the aggressor for a more objective restitution award. And in fact, this also solves the rich aggressor problem where people have said that if you just have a restitution award, then Bill Gates can go around murdering because he can just pay off the $3 million set penalty for murder. But that actually would not be the case because the aggressors of the victim's families would have the right to punish Bill Gates. And because he's a billionaire, he would maybe pay $50 billion, half of his fortune, to avoid being punished. So there's a sort of sliding scale there that comes into play. So the right to punishment helps to make restitution more objective and help solve the rich aggressor problem. It's often said that libertarianism believes that there are no such things as positive obligations, that we only believe in negative obligations. And typically what they mean is the correlative idea, the only duty we have is to avoid aggression. That is, you have to refrain from committing aggression, which means don't trespass, don't invade others' borders, and don't use people's property without their consent. But I think this is actually mistaken. Libertarianism does not oppose positive obligations. It's just that they have to be voluntarily assumed. So for example, if you commit crime, then you have, by that action, you have acquired a positive obligation to, say, make restitution to the victim. If you commit a negligent act or even an intentional act like a tort, like you push someone in a lake, especially if they can't swim, you do have a duty to rescue that person. You have a duty to mitigate the damage you've already done. Whereas a passing by stranger does not have a legal duty to rescue a drowning stranger. He may have a moral duty, and I think he probably does, but he doesn't have a legal duty, but the aggressor or the tort user does. Other actions can also give rise to positive obligations, in my view. For example, having a child gives rise to parental obligations. Now, they may be given some force, but in theory, I do believe that there are legal obligations of parents to children, at least to a certain age. And I do discuss this in one of my articles. Now, some ask how this relates to the issue of abortion, and I won't get into that here, but you could make arguments one way or the other. Now, what about just by malving words, by saying things? Does that give rise to positive obligations? Most people would think so because of a sort of standard mainstream understanding of what contracts are. Most people think of contracts as binding obligations, binding promises, so you make a promise, and therefore it's enforceable. This is problematic under libertarian theory for several reasons, and it is best explained by Murray Rothbard and Williamson Evers, who have written a lot on this issue. Basically, they start from a properitarian perspective. The only right, as Rothbard argued, are property rights. Even the rights in your body can be viewed as property rights. So the fundamental right is the right to control exclusively scarce resources that you've appropriated or come to own in some kind of way. So a contract is simply viewed as an exercise of one of your ownership rights that is alienating the title to some property that you own. So a contract is not a binding promise. It is rather a title transfer. This may seem like just a minor semantic difference, but it's not. It has lots of implications. It's a much more clear way to view this whole area, and it has implications for inalienability, for example, which I'll get to later if I have time. I also think that libertarians who say that there's free speech rights, for example, there actually, as Rothbard explains, there are no free speech rights. There are no freedom of the press rights. There are only property rights, the property right in your body. You can think of a couple of examples where to show that there are no free speech rights, for example. So in one example, if I own my body, then I'm free to use it to say words. So owning my body is sufficient to give me the right to speak. So the right to free speech is really a consequence or an implication of my more fundamental right to my body. So if you say there's a right to my body and a free speech right, you're double counting. So it's redundant. It's not necessary to say there's right to free speech. On the other hand, if you're on someone else's property, you have to abide by their rules. You may not speak on someone else's property if they don't permit you to. So the right to free speech, if it existed, would trump their property rights. So it doesn't exist in that case either. And furthermore, there are cases where speech, and this is my opinion, a lot of libertarians would disagree. Even Rothbard has this view in Walter Block that incitement, for example, can never be a crime. Or that, say, a mafia boss or someone like that is only liable for the actions of his henchmen or other people who perform the direct crime if there's a contract or if there is coercion. So, for example, Walter would say that Truman was implicitly coercing the bomber and the pilot of the Enola Gay who bombed Japan. But of course, that is not always the case. There's not always coercion. And I still think there's liability. I discuss this in more detail in the article linked at the bottom of this page. But in my view, we need to have a more general view of causation. We have to anchor it in the Misesian praxeological structure of human action. We have to understand human action is the intentional use of means to achieve an end. That is what human action is. And the use of a means is using something causally efficacious in the world to achieve the intended end. And these means can be other human beings. As Mises explicitly discusses in human action with regard to economics and the division of labor, of course other humans in cooperative action can be our means to achieve our ends. Now, another misconception of libertarianism some libertarians make is they seem to have this fixed, high responsibility mentality where they're afraid to say that the mafia boss who gives an order or let's take a better example, a wife who seduces her boyfriend or promises him sexual favors and persuades her boyfriend to kill her husband so she gets the insurance money and gets rid of him, say Walter Block would have to say that she's not liable in that case because there's no contract and there's no coercion. But of course I think that's nonsense. Some libertarians would be afraid to say the wife is liable in this case because they think that that means 100% of the responsibility falls on her and the boyfriend is now excavated. But of course this is not true. There's such a thing as joint responsibility and I think they're both 100% responsible in that case. Cooperative crimes are possible. And in this case, if you look at the structure of the wife's action, her end was the death of her husband, which is a crime. The means she selected was persuading her boyfriend. So it fits perfectly into the Misesian structure of action. So the point is in some cases speech can be the means of aggression. So imagine the firing squad captain and he says ready, aim, fire. Now Walter might say, Walter Block might say that he's not shooting the victim of the firing squad. He's just saying words. I think this is just a too simplistic view of the reality of human interaction and cooperation. Likewise, you stir up a crowd. You say lynching and you get your way. The crowd lynches this innocent victim. I think you're responsible. Now there are obviously limits and this is the job of judges and juries and legal science to figure out the limits. But we can't just say there's a right line rule that speech is never aggression. Also, I think that the one way to view this problem, you know, imagine you're in a bar. You walk up to, some guy walks up to a big burly biker and he just looks at it and says your mom is ugly. Now some libertarians say, well, you know, if the biker punches him in the face, then that's aggression. You know, even though the guy was asking for it, even though the guy's doing something risky and maybe immoral, technically the biker is committing aggression. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think in that context you're basically inviting a fight. So by the words your mom is ugly, you know you're going to hang out with this guy. You know he's going to punch you and you're standing there ready to receive it. So it's similar to stepping into a boxing ring or onto the rugby field. You know, you're consenting to the fight. But anyway, this is an example of how there can be positive obligations assumed by word as well. So I mentioned already the contract issue, the confusion that contracts should be viewed as binding promises. But instead, as I mentioned, Rothbard never has argued, they should be just viewed as exchanges. Now one related thing to this is this has implications for the body, alien ability in the body. Now Rothbard, who is great on the title transfer theory, tries to argue for why, this relates to some of the debate yesterday about walking away and contracts. The body is a different type of property than acquired things. So we acquire property by appropriating it or by purchasing it. That means there's a thing that used to not be owned. It was a formally unowned resource. And now by our act of will and our physical and bordering or possession of this object, now we have acquired it into our own ownership. Because of that, we're now the owner. That means you have the right to the exclusive use of that thing. You can consent to others using it. You can invite people, permit them to use it. Or you could deny them permission to use it. And you can use it yourself for whatever you want. But by the same token, because you acquired it, you can unacquire it. When you cease to have the desire to own it, you can abandon this thing. So the reason we can alienate title to some things that we own is because these are things that were previously unowned and that we didn't own before. So you basically undo the ownership, the acquisition of this thing. So alienation of title is not part of property rights. It's just an application of property rights to the specific type of... to the case of unowned objects, things that were unowned. The body is a different matter. You don't really homestead your body. You don't like see your body unowned one day and one day acquire it. You are a homesteader. Human beings are homesteaders. When we homestead objects, it is a human with a body doing the homesteading. So the body is clearly owned in a different way than things that we homestead. Because you don't acquire your body in an act of homesteading, there's no way to undo it by an act of will. This is the reason, in my view, for an alienability. It is simply that if I say, I promise to be your slave, well, contracts are not promises. They're not by any promises. So that mere expression of words does not give rise to the right part of my would-be master, owner, to use force against me. When he uses force against me, it's aggression, like I say, to keep me from running away when I change my mind. Now, it's only justified that it's not aggression. So it's only not aggression if it's a response to my aggression. But by just saying, I would be your slave, I didn't commit aggression against this guy. I didn't do anything like in the previous example of ready, aim, fire. I didn't hurt this guy at all. And because I can't undo the ownership of my body, there's no title transfer either. So this, in my view, is the reason inalienability is the case for human bodies. Now Rothbard argues that it's because our will can't be alienated. I think that's not correct. I think that it's clearly the case that we can own other people's bodies like criminals, for example. You're in effect asserting ownership of a criminal's body when you're defending yourself against him or when you put him in jail. He's basically a slave, even though he disagrees. So it's perfectly legitimate in some cases to, in effect, own someone else's body even though they disagree. So there is no impossibility that prevents that. And if there's no impossibility that prevents it in the case of a crime, there's no impossibility that prevents it in the case of a voluntary, say, slavery contract. The problem with it, as I mentioned, is that body ownership is different from ownership of external resources. Another fallacy I've noted is the sort of sloppy, imprecise way a lot of libertarians use the word fraud. It's used quite often as a synonym for dishonesty, but of course dishonesty is not a crime. So fraud is one of these vague, general words that can lead to intentional or unintentional equivocation where the libertarian will agree that fraud in the technical sense is a type of rights violation, although they're not really clear exactly how to define it. And then later on, you know, you'll talk about a trademark case or something and someone trying to justify modern trademark law will say, well, you know, the reason Chanel can go after the knockoff Chanel bag is because the lady walking around with the fake Chanel bag is committing fraud. She's just a fraud. You know, people see and they think she's rich or they think she has a real Chanel bag, but she doesn't. She's defrauding everyone. Well, okay, she may be lying in that sense, but is that a type of rights violation? Is that the type of fraud we mean when we say libertarians are against aggression and fraud? I think what we have to do is we have to view fraud in the context of the title Transfer Theory of Property. I'm sure the title Transfer Theory of Contract. And we have to view it as basically what the common law calls theft by trick. That is the only type of fraud that it's actually a rights violation. And so you can think of it this way. I want to trade my basket of apples for your chicken. So we're going to make a contract. And this contract is a bilateral contract. It's a double exchange. It's a two-way exchange. Some contracts can be unilateral, by the way. If I give my nephew a $1,000 gift, that's a contract. It's a one-way transfer of property. It's gratuitous. It's not onerous, but it's still a contract because it's a transfer of title to property. Some contracts are one way. And I'll get to this in a minute. This has implications for another fallacy regarding service contracts. But in a typical exchange, a two-way exchange, apples traded for the chicken, there are explicit or implicit representations made by each party. A contract results from communication, language, or intentionality. Both parties are saying, I'm giving you my apples conditioned upon you're giving me your chicken. Well, this has a meaning, right? The chicken seller is saying, I'm hereby giving you title to this chicken. I'm getting rid of it. I'm abandoning it and getting your favor. Conditioned upon you're giving me X, where X has a meaning. It means a basket of real apples, not a basket of plastic apples, or a basket of rotten apples, or a basket of poisoned apples. So if the seller of the apples has poisoned apples, or wormy apples, and he's aware of this, and he hands the apples over, and takes the chicken, he knows that he's actually not fulfilling the condition that the chicken seller is putting on the sale of the chicken. So he knows he's getting that chicken without informed consent, or without the genuine consent of the seller. So basically it's theft by trick. So this is why fraud is a crime. It's basically a way of committing a type of theft. So by his dishonesty in representing the nature of the apples and the condition to transfer the title to the chicken, he is basically stealing the chicken. But only in this type of case is fraud a libertarian crime. And so when people throw around, oh that's fraud, that's fraud, that's fraud, you have to stop and ask, is it a case of the chicken and the apples? Is the Chanel bag, is the woman using the misrepresentation about the genuine blindness of her purse as a means to obtain someone else's property without their genuine consent? No, she's not. So it's not any type of fraud that can be prohibited. These are two fallacies that I think are kind of nice to look at together related to the inalienability issue I talked already. So quite often this comes up in the intellectual property context where people are trying to justify their own intellectual property. And quite often the argument will involve saying that, trying to say that well, you own your labor and therefore you own things you mix your labor with including an idea that's valuable. So the idea has value, you created it, you own your labor, your labor is embodied in this valuable idea, so you own it. This is their argument and to support it, which I think is nonsense, you don't own your labor. But they will try to justify this by saying, well, what about a service contract when you work for someone, an employment contract or a service? You're selling your services. So they'll say, if you can sell something, you must own it. I mean, how can you sell it if you don't own it? So they'll use this to sort of sneak in the idea that well, you must own your labor. Now this is another confusion based upon a lack of understanding of the title transfer period contract. Really a sale contract is not... This is the danger of metaphors, okay? So we use this metaphor to say we're selling our labor and then we start thinking, it's a convenient way to describe what's going on but it's not really a sale of labor. A labor contract is a unilateral title transfer. There's only one thing being transferred, that's the money. Now it's not gratuitous, it's not gratuitous in the case of a gift. It's conditional. So what's going on in an employment contract, for example, is the employer says, I own money. I hereby transfer $1,000 to you if you perform certain actions. Now this condition could be anything. This condition could be, I hereby transfer $1,000 to you if it rains tomorrow. Now does this mean that he owns the rain? No. It's just the fact that he owns the property gives him the ability to condition and to decide what conditions will trigger the alienation of that property. And the fact that the employee owns his body gives him the ability to not work unless he's induced by a conditional one-way transfer of title to money. So there are no sales of services, there are no sales of labor. And the converse of this is also interesting. People will say, this is Walter Block's view. This is his argument for body alienability. He says, well, you agree that we're self-owners. That means you own your body. But if you own something, you can sell it. So this is just this sort of taken-for-granted idea. And as I mentioned earlier, I think this is confusing. I think that ownership does not fundamentally mean the right to alienate title. Ownership means the right to use something or the right to control something. It's not by itself the right to get rid of the right to own. As I mentioned, it only... a consequence of having the right to control an acquired good is that you can unacquire it. That's why you can get rid of title to that. But it doesn't apply to your body. So I think it's actually not true that if you own something, you can sell it. Okay, I mentioned this already about alienability. And these links here are articles and blog posts I've written which I discussed a lot of this in a lot of detail. As I mentioned this on my site. And I'd be happy to answer questions by email too after this if anyone wants to. If we don't get to discuss it in Q&A period. Okay, here's another one. Some libertarians strangely will object when you say that one libertarian view, in fact I believe the fundamental view is that we believe in self-ownership. They either are religious people thinking that you're taking an atheist view or they're atheists thinking you're inserting a religious view. For example, I made this just the offhand comment in an article that we have self-ownership. And Leland Jaeger in Liberty, who's an atheist, and I'm not a big religious person either. So he thought I was assuming that there's, I have a soul and the soul is the owner of this body and there's some kind of distinction. I think this is just nonsense. It's a very common sense view. You don't need to be religious or atheist to believe that there's a person and there's a body. They're distinct. Just like the mind and the brain are distinct conceptual entities. The mind is not the brain. I believe that you need to have a brain to have a mind, but the mind is not the brain. Just like my memories are not my brain. I don't think there are mind surgeons. There are brain surgeons. And I don't think I changed my brain. I changed my mind. There are different conceptual entities. So self-ownership simply means that my body is a scarce resource and I get to decide who uses it rather than someone else. I mean, if you reject self-ownership, then you're either in favor of slavery or some kind of chaotic world of war. So body ownership is the fundamental libertarian view whether you're religious or whether you're not. And this is not new to me or this is an old view and it's shocking to me that it's controversial at all. I've just got a couple of quotes here. This is Richard Overton, 1646. To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any. For everyone as he is himself, so hath a self-propriety else he not be himself. And Locke said, though the earth and all interior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. I mean, this is not controversial in my view. Let me go with this final one here. Then we can open up for questions. This is a fallacy that is made quite often and is used to justify intellectual property. And as I mentioned earlier, the argument is that if you create something of value, you mix your labor with it, then you own it, and therefore patents and copyrights, ideas, or property right in those is justified. So the confusion here is this. Libertarians recognize that production is a valuable activity to engage in. And it's a source of wealth. But they all sometimes say that there are three ways of coming to own things. One is setting our original appropriation, contractual exchange, or production. But this is actually not true. Production is not a source of property rights. It is a source of wealth, but we have to keep these things distinct. We have to keep in mind the difference between acquiring title to property and producing wealth. What does it mean to produce wealth? To produce wealth simply means to transform scarce resources into a more valuable configuration. Now, value is, of course, objective. Who is it more valuable to? More valuable to you or to a potential customer. Value is not in the thing. Value is not a thing that you create, which is another mistake the Randians make. They'll say man creates values. I don't know if that means. I've never stepped on a value. I've never seen a value. Things are valuable. I value things. You demonstrate value. You demonstrate your preferences to produce is to already own the resource that you're transforming. Of course, you can't transform something that's unowned. It makes no sense. If I beat some metal into a sword, the metal had to be owned by me. It was owned by me during the act of transformation. The reason I own the transformed, more valuable product is because I owned the raw materials that I transformed it into. And the reason I own the wealth is because I own this material that is more wealthy to me or more valuable to me. Hava notes this explicitly. One can acquire and increase wealth either through homesteading, production, and contractual exchange, or by expropriating people. There's no other way to acquire wealth, but that doesn't mean that production is a way of creating property rights because you can't produce without owned goods in the first place. So you can think of it this way. Homesteading creates new property titles because the thing that was formerly unowned now it's owned. Contract transfers existing property titles and production transforms already owned goods. They're already owned. So production cannot create property rights. Inran recognized this and she should have recognized that her theory of intellectual property was completely consistent with this. The range, the combinations of natural elements is the only creative power a man possesses. It is an enormous and glorious power and it is the only meaning of the concept creative. Creation does not mean the power to bring something into existence out of nothing. It means the power to bring into existence an arrangement of natural elements that had not existed before. She's actually right. This is why intellectual property is illegitimate. Rothbard saw this too. Rothbard wrote, in an environment or situation we decide to change in some way to achieve our ends. Man can work only with the numerous elements that he finds in his environment by rearranging them in order to bring about the satisfaction of his ends. I'll close on one more slide. Rothbard is often accused of plagiarizing Onran and of course even if he did that shouldn't be a crime because an ultra property is illegitimate. So he's often accused of when he was in Ran's circle of giving her and then using it later in his theory and not giving her credit. So I'll just quote Mises here on this to show that this isn't Ran's idea either. He was talking about the widespread misconception about the nature of production. There is a naive view of production that regards it as the bringing into being of matter that did not previously exist as creation in the true sense of the word. So then he says a role played by man in production always consists solely in combining his personal forces with the forces of nature in such a way that the cooperation leaves to some particular desired arrangement of material. No human after-production amounts to more than altering the position of things in space and leaving the rest of nature. And with that I'll conclude and I think we have time for Q&A. If maybe I'll say one thing. When you say a if you're on volume or anyone says your mother is ugly then the other person is entitled to H.U. or P.U. or something like that. I don't think this is quite correct but the other person is entitled to is to retaliate at the same level that is at the verbal level but not change the level by hitting you back or hitting you back with the energy. So that's one thing. The other thing, the distinction that you make by incitement to violence like if you say lynching is very different from the order that an officer gives to a subordinate drop the bomb the subordinate casts to a bed so the officer is clearly co-inhibited but on the other hand if I tell you lynching it is your distinction because I have no authority over you so what I say is simply a simply word simply words. So there is distinction and the first thing is a freedom of speech on someone's property I don't think that being on someone's property limits your freedom of speech all what it does is that the owner of the property may ask you to leave and not come back or the owner of the property may say in my house nobody says anything about politics, religion or something like that by entering perhaps you agree with this but if it was not prior agreement I would see why someone's property would suddenly force you to sell censorship unless customs or politeness things like that would indeed so all you can say is I don't like what you say please leave okay so on the I mean I'm not saying that as a some kind of rigorous rule that if you insult someone they have the right to punch you what I'm saying is in some context the meaning of what the guy's doing is an invitation to a fight some cases maybe not and in the case I gave he was actually punched so that's an indication that this is what these guys were intending in most cases I would agree that it would be aggression to punch someone for an insult but in some cases I think you're really asking for it and I think you know what you're getting and I think it can rise to the level of an invitation more than just asking for it and I was just trying to give an example that in some cases that was just an example of how positive obligations can arise by actions or even by words in some cases so I mean it's just an example if you quibble with the example I'm not too concerned so that's fine I have a question begging a little bit when you use the word authority and you said has to this is a little bit of a smuggling in some norms here when you said that the commander ordered someone to do something you said he has to and then you said you implied that there's authority there's not authority in any other place well when you say there's authority and he has to I don't know what that means other than to justify the direct actor in this case the example what was the example you disagreed with there but freedom of speech is someone's problem no no the well on one side I think that is clear line of mind if an officer gives an order which is I agree that you could say well I'm going to put jail I'm going to face clients by name so my view there we may just disagree but I don't think that there's always coercion and I think that you don't have to have coercion to say that there's authority I think that some social structures people cooperate with each other and they use people as means to get things done and there doesn't have to be coercion there to say that in the military I don't know if there's always a direct threat of jail if someone disobeys an order I don't want to do that or are you saying that if I give you a gun and say would you please go shoot that man for me and you go do it for me that I'm off the hook because you didn't have to see I disagree with this idea that there's an intervening act of will on your part which breaks the chain of causation and all that kind of stuff if you believe in that there's no such thing as cooperative action or joint crime at all but I think joint crime can happen I think the guy that plans the mob heist his lair while his henchmen go out there and rob the bank I think he's just as guilty as they are even if he's not coercing them at all even if they have free will even if they have the right to walk away even if he doesn't have a contract with them so I would disagree I think that and again my point is not the particulars here my point is that you can't have a bright line rule saying the only time you're liable for someone else's actions is if there's a contract or if there's coercion I just think it's a more general thing than that now how you apply it to particular cases we can discuss in fact I think the view that contract is relevant to determining whether or not there's causal connection between the indirect actor and the crime is based on misconception of the nature of contract I mean contract is not a binding promise contract is just the exchange of title to goods but by the Austrian view of value property is nothing special property is nothing special it's just what we value I mean the woman promising sexual services to her lover to kill her husband is giving him something that he values why does it have to be a contract with property exchange so to focus to fixate on these bright line rules like it's got to be a contract flies in the face of the Austrian view of subjective nature of value and I'm sorry I forgot your third is freedom of speech on someone's call? oh well yeah I agree with you that in general it's not prohibited but I think my point was just that you don't have an independent right to free speech that would give you the right to go on someone's property and use it in ways that they object to say clearly in a contract ahead of time or something like that but the point is that free speech is not an independent right that free speech flows from your right to control your body whatever that means so any other questions? thank you for the presentation I'd like to ask whether you are into this general concept that you are involved in in the concept of natural law in order to treat something as property we have certain conditions like the thing has to be scarce and controllable in general, scarce because you are self-hugging in the case of the idea that natural law provides an idea of doing something that is not scarce or for example you are also holding the moon or Mars because it's not controllable with today's means and they are not going to recommend but having this in mind don't you think that if you support or subscribe to this don't you think that this doesn't contradict the theory of this clear distinction between title transfer and binding process and just to give one example you know that it's saying that you sell your surface as a title it's like the same as saying you know that your contract will be you know that contract will be fulfilled in a condition that it will reign tomorrow but in case of rain you usually do not control the rain while in case of service you will control what you are able to do and what not able to do and in the case of rain if you would have some means to control the rain or sun I mean whether it will be sunny or raining it would be in the service contract or a labor contract if you would agree not to do exact service like leaving a window but you just will sell you a guy like two hours of your tomorrow's day you will agree that the guy you are obliged to do so the thing that this is a little bit artificial is the distinction because at the end of the day service is controllable and scarce because you know and it's related to physical objects like clean windows for example or labor contract again it's scarce because you know you would not have plenty of hours throughout your life and it's controllable because it's for you to decide so what would be your plan? okay so well I mean I agree completely with Hoppe's view of property acquisition and homesteading and I think it's compatible with Rothbard and Mises just the idea and yeah I think you're right that ownable resources have to be excludable and controllable and then they're acquired and that's how they're owned you either embroider them or transform them you put up a fence around it or you possess it to others that you own this thing and they can see the boundaries of the own thing so they can avoid trespassing on it I don't see how that's incompatible with anything I said the point about the service contract yeah you're right the two cases are not the same you do have the right to control your body if you're a laborer or you're performing a service that's why you're able to extract money from someone for it but you don't sell it you control your body that gives you the right to perform a service I would agree that the amount of service you can perform is scarce in that sense the amount of time we have on the earth is scarce but they're not technically scarce resources your body is a scarce resource you act with your body you perform actions you don't own your actions I think it's just a confusing metaphor to say we own our actions if you sell your labor to someone there's only one thing that's being transferred the labor is not transferred it's an action that's performed after it's done does the employer have your labor in his pocket where's the labor so I don't I think there are unilateral transfers of title and there are bilateral transfers of title there are different types of contracts I don't think we are currently in science the major problem with personal rights of retribution is the transfer to a proxy in the case of Grover I'm sure you consider it as a title to be inherited just as any other property title but in the case where there's no offspring I guess you consider it as something to be homesteaded which would affect grandmother of the murderer as we've seen before with right or fair game but how this type of retribution should be homesteaded just by killing the murderer by being the first to claim this right retribution does not bargain what if I protected the murderer from other potential charges well I think, yeah I agree in general that that claim it's a little bit of a metaphor to say it's a homesteadable right but I think it's true because the aggressor still has no right to complain if this retaliation is carried out upon him if the victim wanted that to happen so I think you first look through the guy's will I mean the will that's specified you don't have any heirs, you might have a leg of tea in the will you leave it to some agency or maybe a charitable agency that makes money by by extracting retitution with a threat of punishment against these guys so first you look to the will and presumably it would have heirs in the will there's no will and you look to the default laws of intestacy and there's very few people that don't have someone down the chain of priorities that inherits their property their state you know family and then distant family and then maybe you know if there's no family at all if you don't know any person at all I mean there's something called this cheat in the law where it goes to the state or if there wouldn't be a state in private society so I think in that case in that final little residual case yeah I think it would be homesteadable by anyone so I guess the first guy that kills them would be the one who has homesteaded that right yes yeah I have this in here but I didn't have time to get to it so Rothbard and Walter Block has a similar view to Rothbard in the title transfer of contract article or chapter in ethics of liberty has an so he's correct largely except he has this example of a debt contract so bank loans a $1,000 on day one to be repaid with interest in a year say $1,100 now technically that's another confusing metaphor it's not repaid you can view this as a bilateral contract it's a bilateral to transfer contract on day one $1,000 is transferred it's unconditional well the only condition is that the other guy has a future title transfer of $1,100 so there are two separate title transfers and you have to keep in mind the $1,000 that is loaned well it's intended to be used by the borrower he needs to spend it that's why he's borrowing the money so to spend it to give it to someone else he has to have title to it so the title is 100% in this guy's hands right now that can never be changed that is a fact the title transfer that was set up a year ago of $1,100 happens so if the borrower has $1,100 that $1,100 now is owned by the bank even if it's not turned over yet so at that point in time the borrower is in possession of property owned by the bank and if you refuse to turn it over then he's committing a type of theft or conversion now if he is penniless and is unable to pay Rothbard says that technically the guy's committing implicit theft now I don't know what implicit theft is and therefore technically debtor's prison would be justified although Rothbard says it's disproportionate so he tries to sort of get out of his predicament by saying that it's technically a type of theft because the confusion here is Rothbard I think here is failing to keep his own title transfer theory straight because with this implicit theft there's only two possible candidates for what has been stolen the $1,100 that's owed now or the $1,000 that was given earlier now if the guy's penniless and doesn't own anything there's no $1,100 to be stolen I mean it makes no sense to say you're stealing something that's non-existent so Rothbard has to be talking about the initial $1,000 in fact he is but that violates the idea of who owns something you can't wait a year to find out who owns something you can't retroactively go back in time like a tacky on way over something and say that well the $1,000 that was loaned to the guy so he could go spend it on supplies for his business venture really it turns out really a year later we find out really he didn't own it because the condition wasn't satisfied it's not true the condition was satisfied the condition at the time of the loan was that the borrower would make a future title transfer right now and he did that but everyone knows the nature of human action is that the future is always uncertain it is an implicit inherent unavoidable part of any future oriented title transfer contract that the future thing to be transferred might not exist but the future is uncertain so it's built into the contract the nature of the contract that this future title transfer may not be able to happen the borrower might die he may be bankrupt etc so failure to pay a loan in my opinion is not theft if you're bankrupt what it is that you mean when you say that for each individual I support his own body his own body now this is not historically true this is not anthropologically true it does operate as a theological statement as for instance when he so says that everyone is born men are free so we do what you call attention to the contradiction between what you would like and reality it also operates as a political statement that is to say if the woman said I own my body which means that she has the right to abortion but I do not have the right to impose her or even to express an opposing opinion because I don't own my body I'm a male and my female rights to the woman now I can understand why people would take this position arguments those who say we belong to the state but to me it is not something which is true we do not in fact own our bodies we belong to social context we are a part of existing society we are a part of historical arrangements and in fact most individuals do not think that they own their bodies I suppose this is the argument that the human needs is against a lot I think very effectively saying he's traveled throughout the entire world a bunch of the world and it's found very few places in which people stick to certain contracts as creating the communities in which they live therefore I do have problems with a philosophy of liberty that is based upon seems to me to be an untrue assumption about human self-disection whether we possess our bodies and I would say conclusion that I can see this within a political framework argument somebody says well you belong to the state or you're not a right abortion or something like that I could also see as something that some people would like to see as true the fact that I say that God exists does not mean that in fact it just means I say that God exists all people own their own bodies is something I am saying it does not show that they're true well I'm a libertarian and so I'm not really trying to argue here for the libertarian view of self-ownership I'm trying to express that that is the fundamental libertarian view if you disagree with it I don't think you're libertarian now I think there's a distinction between fact and value and I think I'm not making the crude pro-choice argument I own my body to stay away from it in fact in that case I think ownership of your body doesn't determine your position on abortion you could believe that fetus has rights too in fact but as your first point I'm not I think we can clearly distinguish between norms and facts now it is a fact that humans have direct control over their bodies this is our nature of course I think that that fact as Hoppe argues justifies the normative conclusion that you should have the legal right to control your body so to own your body doesn't mean you're not a slave it means you shouldn't be a slave so I just think between fact and norm I have no problem whatsoever making that distinction so because some people are born in chains I think the fact that they have direct control over their body means they had the better claim to control their body means the slavery is unjustified doesn't mean we're not in a social context and if you say that we don't own our bodies because we're in a social context the only other choice is someone else own your body because your body is a scarce resource someone's got to decide who gets to use it it's either you or someone else so it's either slavery or self ownership and I believe self ownership as a normative principle is the fundamental libertarian view and completely justified and it's just a plain matter of fact that everybody doesn't own its own body in the sense that everybody has control or his body in a way that nobody else has control or his body if I say I want to lift my arm up I can lift up my arm you cannot do this with my arm you cannot do it with your arm so in this sense this is the most self-evident statement about something that exists in nature that is possible and anyone who would deny this would contradict himself by simply opening his mouth and saying this thing because I cannot make you say this only you can make that say this and self ownership of all our bodies does not need anything more than this and this is the most evident statement that exists there is almost nothing that is more self-evident than this there is one more question well I put it in the individual context because of course states are legitimate and wars are always legitimate I deal with this in my punishment articles a long article from 95 I think in the JLS which talks about individual rights and just as I try to explain why fraud is a species of aggression whereas most libertarians assume it they just say that they have this litany they will say we are against theft and fraud they don't really have a clear definition but that is a type of aggression and as I explained I think that if you view it in the context of contractual exchange that explains how and why fraud can be a type of aggression and by the same context they always say threats they will say aggression, fraud and threats like these are separate things now really they are species of aggression in my view a threat is what you are talking about so preemptive force would basically be using force against someone who is a standing threat to you or some kind of threat to you and the reason that threat is a type of aggression is because you have the right to respond to it in other words if someone is threatening to use force against you they are putting you in the civil law that is actually called assault people think assault is a battery assault and battery do different things battery means physically hitting someone assault means attempting to aggress or batter or putting someone in fear of receiving a battery so in my mind that is what a threat is a threat is assault is finding the civil law as making someone reasonably afraid of about to be battered or aggressed against or attempting to do it and by the logic of reciprocity of my kind of a stop-all argument in Papa's argumentation ethics whatever the aggressor is doing whatever the threat is doing to you he can't object if you do the same to him so if he is putting you in danger of receiving a battery you can put him in danger of receiving a battery which means to retaliate I think you can yes and because you can that is why it's not aggression and that's why what his action is that you're responding to is a type of aggression so that's my view on that