 This is just an anarchistic Q&A. I'm going to just be the moderator and pick on people and we have a mic over here. So if you want to ask a question, raise your hand and we'll give you. I'll just pass this around. I don't want responsibility. He'll pass it around. Where's the thing that you throw at people? Okay. So you ask any questions to any of the today's speakers? Yes, sir. You had your hand up first. I have a question for Dr. Klein. I was wondering with big tech, do you think there's an exact point where we can draw the line with data collection? I know you talked about collecting basic data, things that you're interested in for advertisers to target you and then give you those specified advertisements. Where do you draw the line with that? Also, if we continue in this path in the future, we've seen big tech firms and companies like MySpace going out of business, but if we continue in this way in the mixed market the US has, do you think that big tech could even grow dangerous in the future? Well, on the first question, I'm not sure I completely understand what you're getting at, but I think all of these data collection issues are really contractual questions. When you sign up for the service, there's typically some user agreement in which some data disclosure policies are provided. In principle, if those were all considered enforceable contracts and the courts have ruled in many cases that they're not enforceable contracts, then the issue of what information can be collected by the platform and how that information can be used would be determined by that contract. There was a case, for example, it was last year or two years ago where some Facebook data was sold to a third party in violation of the user agreement. If there are lots of cases where various retail stores, it happened to Target here a few years ago, it's happened to several retailers, hackers broke in and got people's credit card information or something like that. If a store voluntarily gave up personal information that I have not agreed to disclose, then that would potentially be a breach of contract, not necessarily a criminal act, but I would have a civil case for breach of contract. What makes it complicated is that courts have ruled in some cases that those click-through licenses, which you don't read, you want to install the thing or create an account, click, click, click, click, click, click. Now I'm done, you just click that you consented to this, you consented to that. Are those considered enforceable agreements or not? I mean, that's sort of a question that in a free market, a libertarian legal system would have to work out. So I mean, to me, it's not like a volume issue. Well, if they collect only a certain amount of data, it falls under one set of rules, but if they collect a larger quantity of data, it's different. To me, it's sort of the same thing that the way we want that system to work is that the contract governs what can be collected and how it can be used. And I mean, as for the second question, I mean, I don't know, we'll have to sort of wait and see what happens. I mean, can I imagine a world in which, even in the absence of government intervention, we care so much about access to some gadget. Somebody invents a flying car or a teleportation device, but to use it, you have to sign a restrictive contract that they can take your kids when they turn 18. Some people might do that, and then later sort of wish they hadn't. One thing that's interesting, and I talked about this last year when I did a talk specifically on privacy, there are a lot of privacy enhancing alternatives. Like, you can use DuckDuckGo and a non-Google in a browser other than Chrome, and less of your information will be collected than if you use Chrome and Google Search, but only a tiny, tiny percentage of people are willing to do that. You can encrypt all your emails, you can encrypt all of your texts and so forth, but most people, when they evaluate that trade-off, it's not worth it. I mean, most people, they've revealed through their actions that they're not willing to sacrifice a little bit of convenience or presumed accuracy in search results to have more privacy, so it wouldn't shock me if we sort of give up more of what many of us would consider to be our sort of rights to privacy and so forth, because that's a price we're willing to pay to get other benefits of technology, but we just have to wait and see how this plays out in the market. Let's go in the back of the room, the way in the back. We tend to ignore the people in the back, us old guys, because we can't see that far. This is for... Like, it just barely may come out, though. This is for you, Dr. DeLorenzo, and also anybody on the panel who has an idea on this. I was talking to a couple of my colleagues yesterday about my interest in writing a paper that I was gonna title in Reluctant Defense of Castle Culture and the Platforming, and we got into this big argument about, is it right for Twitter to de-platform people? Is it right for schools to de-platform people? And I came up and I said, if students choose not to want somebody to talk to them, they have the right to do that. It's their graduation. It doesn't matter what the idea is. And my question basically is, is where we talk about... My argument was, if you do not valid the non-aggression principle, you have the right to not talk to people or not want people to talk to you. Is that, do we, because the other alternative to me seems to be laws, because there's some bad behaviors that we don't like or that we think are not okay in society and we usually either ostracize people or talk to people in our own personal lives to basically punish those ideas or bad behaviors that would be completely ridiculous and probably immoral if we say, go to prison for saying this. Isn't that a less cost, a more effective way of punishing ideas of people we don't like? I wanna get your thoughts on that because you were talking about how Twitter could stop people from their platform and that might not be a bad thing. I just wanted to get your thoughts on, if you don't break the non-aggression principle, don't you have the right to de-platform people if you wanted to? What is wrong with that, basically? Well, he's asking me, well, if you believe that freedom of association is a good thing, then freedom of disassociation is just as good. We don't have forced association, although the government tries to force us to associate with people we may not wanna associate with and vice versa, tries to disassociate with us with people who believe in ideas like I do, for example. And the problem I have with the de-platforming, so-called, is that I think Facebook and some of these out in Google are just too much in bed with the NSA and the CIA and the whole spying apparatus of the government and are doing their spying for them. I think a lot of what they do is they, the government knows it's unconstitutional, they're breaking the First Amendment, what they're doing, but then they make the argument that, well, it's not the government that is doing this, it's a private company, it's Google, but they work hand in hand with Google. I mean, it's been all over the news that the Biden administration and Facebook have their heads together trying to determine who to censor next. And so you have sort of these de facto fascist organizations like Google and Facebook who are doing the government's dirty work for them. And so that's just the way I see it as of right now. And I don't consider them to be purely private organizations anymore once they're in the same room. Years ago, I did a consulting project for Coca-Cola and when I had a meeting with some of the Coca-Cola executives, they had, there were people from Pepsi in the same room and we all had to sign this legal document saying that we did not conspire to fix prices just because Coca-Cola and Pepsi executives happened to be in the same room. But now you have the White House people and Facebook in the same room conspiring against all the rest of society. And there's no lawyer in there saying, oh, you better sign this, Joe Biden, to make sure you're on the up and up and you're not breaking the First Amendment here. And so they're lawless. They can do whatever they want in that situation. And that's the way I see it. I don't know if Peter wants to add. This is Peter's area. Just a brief comment. I mean, I agree with what Thomas said, but, damn, I think your question, when people use the phrase canceled culture, sometimes they mean sort of the legal and political aspects. Sometimes they mean the social, cultural, communitarian aspects. I mean, I would say that, I don't wanna be the kind of person who, if somebody hurts my feelings or rubs me the wrong way or says something I disagree with, I will shun them forever. Never have another conversation with them. I mean, I wouldn't be able to talk to any of these guys if that were the case, but independent of the legal and political issues, is it a good thing that we live in a society in which there's sort of bullying or calling people out, not exercising any forgiveness or forcing people to make these ritual apologies for this horrible thing I said. I don't think that's good from a social and cultural point of view, independent of the legal issues. How about you, right there, yeah. My question is for Dr. Gordon and it is about Hans-Hurman Hoppe's view. I can't remember if you specifically went in on it in your lecture, but it's about his view on monarchy and why it is preferable to democracy, even though it's not the preferable option. And he mentions that most of it comes from the fact that the monarch owns the country, so he has a lower time preference than other leaders and is encouraged to not pillage all the country's resources in a small amount of time because he can pass on leadership to his children. Would this kind of philosophy also apply to an oligarchy that also came off the same principles of that you kind of divide up the country among a group of leaders who also own that specific part of the country and then also pass it on to their children? Would this same concept apply or is there something specifically about there being one leader of a nation that is making this principle hold out? Yes, I think that's a very good question you ask. It would sound to me like the argument would apply to an oligarchy, but I should say in the way I presented the argument, at least I hope I presented it, I didn't say that the monarch hasn't advantage because he owns the country. That is something Hans does suggest, but I gave the argument without that because I just mentioned that the monarch expects to be around for quite some time and the reason I did that is one could possibly object, I don't say, try to assess the validity of the subject, one could say, well, the monarch owns only his own estate, not the whole country. So I wanted to avoid that point so that was why I didn't state the argument that way, but I think your point about oligarchy is a good one and it would apply to my version of the argument also. By the way, guys, hold the mic closer to your face because, David, you went farther and farther away as you were talking. Oh, well, that's why that was the better part of it. You had a multiple answer. They were all sitting on the edges of their seats at the end of your comments. Another question, yes, right here. This is a question for Dr. DiLorenzo. So you talked about numerous riots and protests led by college students against visiting speakers whom they happened to disagree with. It's kind of a simple question, but how would you suggest that we talk to people who refuse to listen to any argument opposing socialism and just seem to prefer violence over discussion? How do you talk to people who? Who prefer violence in no context? Oh, violence. You call the cops, I guess, on them. If they're perpetrating violence, that's what they would do. I gave a talk a couple of years ago now at a large community college in North Carolina and it was on capitalism and I get there and some of the left-wing faculty knew that I was coming and so they started raising all kind of trouble online and I get there and my host who invited me said that she had to have like three or four extra campus cops around, not that they feared that I would, well, what am I gonna do? But that's the way that they were. And so I don't know, these people are not worth dealing with. I mean, you're not gonna convince everybody or persuade everybody. So my advice is forget about it as far as those are concerned or work one-on-one. You know, I was telling some of the some people today that years ago undergraduate economic students of mine would tell me things like, you know, we totally understand the argument against the minimum wage laws and things like this but then when we go back to the dorm, our students give us, our classmates give us a hard time. You know, the sociology major or the education major in the same dorm because they're sort of brainwashed in this idea that poor people have a problem, government is the solution and they don't wanna hear it. They don't wanna, so they were fearful that they would have a bad social life on campus if they espoused economic sanity or they're supposed to be economic stupidity is the sort of the requisite thing to have a good social life on the campus, at least where I worked at the time. And so they were hesitant to do what you're suggesting and try to, you know, have a civilized discussion but you have to pick your targets. People who you think would be a little more reasonable but the ones who would, you know, are borderline joining Antifa and setting fires to buildings. Just call the cops on them. I wouldn't waste my time on them. You wanna devote your time to where you think you could have some impact on people and that's when you have to use your imagination on how to do it. Our friend Tom Woods is the real genius at that in sort of persuasive language and we all have to work on that. When I was your age, I was taking economics, I ran across The Freeman, the magazine, The Freeman in a classroom when I was a freshman in college and I started reading some of the great libertarian writers, including Mises who had written in there. And I started working as a freshman on persuasive writing. I started trying to imitate their methods and their techniques of explaining economic ideas to the general audience. And so that's something that all of you can work on and get better at and as you go through your college years. One, when you're talking about violence and speech, it reminded me of a story about the great Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw. He once started a lecture by saying, gentlemen, I'm a socialist and atheist and a vegetarian and someone yelled out three good reasons why you should be thrown out. Yeah. You know, ridicule sometimes works. How about, yes, sir, how about this man right here, make it easy on the guy passing the microphone around? Hello all, I have a question for David Gordon about the argumentation ethics. So I'm a debater, I debate a lot and one thing that I've noticed a lot in people is when they seem to be almost pretending to have a debate or pretending to have an argument. And I say pretend because so often people aren't, like they aren't arguing, they're just sort of repeating words and phrases that they've heard or they've seen on the internet or that they've heard from other people. So my question is, does owning oneself necessitate owning your own language? Well, I'm not sure I'm understanding the question I should say, I'm rather sure I'm not understanding the question. I think when we talk about own your language, I think, do you mean in the sense some people use the term own now to mean something like be responsible for or to mean sincerely or do you mean something like ownership in the sense that you're claiming that certain parts of the language belong to you. I'm taking you to mean more of the former. Sort of, I guess, what just, because I mean, if you're merely repeating these words, you're not speaking them because you understand them, you're just, it's like you've adopted somebody else's, somebody else's words. I guess it's like somebody gave you a set of clothes that you wear, you don't exactly own them, they're not yours, but you're still, you are adopting them as if they were your own. I see, I think I understand what you mean now, unfortunately, I would say that that's not a condition for argument at all, what the person's motives are, what his thoughts about what he's saying are really not relevant to evaluating what the validity or otherwise of what he says. I remember there was a rather bad argument I've seen in print where someone has said, if someone is a liar, you can't trust what they're saying, because say they say something, I mean, even if they're making an assertion about some philosophical point, if they're known, if say they don't believe in objective truth, maybe they're lying, but that doesn't matter what, you can evaluate what they're saying independent of whether they mean it or not, maybe they're lying, they think what they're saying is false, but it could be true, doesn't, so I would say the motives are people having, whether they're intended, whether they're just repeating what other people say their sincerity really has very little to do with how correct their ideas are. Okay, we'll go back to this side, how about this gentleman right here, he had his hand up on the end there. Hi, this is for any of you, can you help me distinguish the difference between, if any, between these two scenarios? So we've talked a little about cancel culture, but I think we also agree that people vote just by making a choice to frequent one place or another, so how does any of the conversation of cancel culture, how does it affect that? So suppose you have a business owner and you make some bad statements or acts in a way you don't like and you choose to not frequent his business, how does that differ from what goes on with cancel culture which seems theoretically to be the exact same concept except that individual is marketing your views publicly to other people, so can you differentiate between those two and does anyone have a problem with cancel culture and if so, why? From that perspective. If I understand correctly, you mean if I offer some kind of digital product to you, communications platform or email service and you say things on that email service that offend me and I wanna restrict your use of my service because you've violated some social mores. I mean, is that what you're asking? Is that, you're saying would that be an example of cancel culture? For any reason really, anything that someone would do. Yeah, but again, it's a question of what does the contract say? I mean, if you've paid for a one year subscription and there's nothing in the language that restricts your ability to say X and then you say X and I cancel your subscription, then you have a potential claim against me for violating the contract. It'd be no different from a retail store if Walmart says we don't want people with bow ties to come in and they throw Sean Rittenauer out. I wouldn't call that cancel culture. I mean, that's just, like Tom said, that's just the commercial context of exercising your right to not associate with someone for any reason unless you previously agreed that you would and now you're breaking a prior agreement. I don't see any reason to object to that. Where would Sean get his bow ties if Walmart didn't sell them? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Are you gonna take that? My mother. She works at Sam's. Nobody on this side. How about Marcus had his hand up? Here you go, Marcus. Okay. I called on him because I wanted everybody to see his suit that he's wearing. He has a date tonight. He's on a trip. All right, so this question is for Dr. Lorenzo, Dr. Klein, also to an extent, Dr. Gordon, even Dr. Terrell. Okay, so Dr. Klein, you can take this as just me saying the code words, talk about section 230, but what do you think of this as like a nuclear option on cancel culture? So even if we don't say that Facebook is a public company, it certainly is a public accommodation by most measures. And from my understanding, the legal argument for the Civil Rights Act was that any public accommodation could not discriminate based on certain categories because to do so even as a private organization would compromise a 14th Amendment equal protection that was incorporated out of the federal government but to the states and therefore to any entity that contracted with the state. So couldn't we just use again as a nuclear option the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and say that any firm that plans on trafficking in human language has to adhere to the same free speech standards that the government does, that Facebook needs to give me the same free speech protections that the state does in the same way that according to one of our favorite laws, any company, for example, Walmart cannot discriminate against me from walking in the door for being black because it is a public accommodation or we can talk about section 230. Feel free to take like 15 seconds before you answer my question on the Civil Rights Act. Is that for Peter? Yeah, I mean, I'm not a constitutional lawyer but fortunately we have some in the building today who perhaps could address whether that would work. I mean, the platforms claim that they're exercising their rights to restrict access based on violations of the terms of service, the so-called community standards. I mean, what a constitutional case claiming that enforcing the community standards violates the relevant part of the Civil Rights Act. I have no idea if that would work. Well, I think the Civil Rights Act applies to discrimination on race, creed, national origin and that sort of thing, doesn't it? So I wouldn't think it would apply. You'd have to argue that the thing that they kicked you out for was a so-called protected class as interpreted by, you know, and the Supreme Court has recently expanded the definition of protected class, but, you know, libertarian would not, it's not one. No, but being a Christian is certainly a creed, right, for certain, for real. I think so, anyway. I mean, I suppose if you claim the only reason they kicked me off of Facebook is because I said, Jesus is Lord, then you might have a claim, but I don't know how many victims of cancel culture would be able to make that kind of argument. How about the lady over here that has her hand up? Well, I thank you. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to ask a question. So my question is a bit about intent with censorship being a hot topic. So I'm going to think of how to word this properly. I had it going through my head. So with censorship and government politicians, all these officials who are choosing to pursue these strategies, do you feel that there are dark triad, I guess, dimensions that are in line with this, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, or do you feel that these politicians genuinely actually have good intentions for protections of the citizens? That sounds like a De Lorenzo question to me. Perhaps it is. Do we think politicians have good intentions when they violate the First Amendment? Yeah, that or that's always the case. Well, I'd say they have totalitarian intentions in doing that. One of Judge Napolitano's speeches, he didn't coin the phrase, but he uses the phrase libido dominante, which has nothing to do with sex. It's the lust to dominate. And, you know, in every society, he has a certain number of people. Our friend Clyde Wilson calls it the Yankee problem in America. That's a Yankee to Clyde. It's a group of people who are sort of the descendants of the Puritans who believe that they were God's chosen people and have a God-given right to dominate and control everybody else, you know, at gunpoint, if necessary, as they did during the Civil War. And so, and we still have those people. Clyde says that Hillary Clinton, in his word, he said, for example, would be a museum quality specimen of such a thing, a Yankee. She, you know, born in Illinois. She went to New England and school in New England. You know, perfect definition. And I think that's what motivates people, the libido dominant, the lust to dominate other people. That's what motivated Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler and right on down the line to, you know, most members of the United States Congress today who do these things, you know, to some degree, although they're not willing to commit mass murder so far anyway, like Stalin and Hitler and the rest did. And so, that's where I see it. And as far as what goes on in universities too, you know, all universities save Grove City or government funded, and maybe Hillsdale, and I read something Hillsdale may have accepted a penny or two at some point. And so, you know, supposedly the government itself said that the bill of rights applies to the states as well as the federal government with the 14th amendment. And so they're using tax dollars to crack down on free speech, which they're not supposed to because they receive government money. And so that seems to me, I'm not a constitutional lawyer either, but it seems to me that they're just thumbing their noses at the First Amendment. All of these university presidents and administrators who do these things and allow these things to happen on their campuses. That's... Can I add something to that? I mean, there is some, you know, in terms of sort of the positive analysis of what motivates different politicians and bureaucrats. I mean, there is some literature on this. Joseph Schumpeter famously argued that you know, there's sort of the, there's kind of a selection process. So what types of people are more likely to rise through the ranks of government bureaus? What attributes are they more likely to have? And he pointed out that these are typically people who are unfamiliar with or uncomfortable with how the market works. And so they're largely ignorant about the world of affairs, you know, like Bernie Sanders, you know, has never had a job of any kind in his life. Hayek has a chapter, famous chapter in the road to serfdom called Why the Worst Get on Top. Or is it How the Worst Get on Top? You know, why the worst get on top? Why the worst get on top? Yeah, essentially he says, look, here are the characteristics that are typically necessary, you know, ruthlessness and willingness to cut moral corners and so forth. So I mean, we could sort of think about, rather than just speculate, we could think about, well, what is most likely to get somebody in that position and maybe try to come up with some general principles that would suggest, and I think what most of those authors suggest is that it's not, however, someone starts out, I mean, a really well-intentioned person who wants to make the world a better place just is unlikely to survive the rough and tumble of the political process, the bureaucratic process. They're not gonna rise up to the very top of that chain of command. That's why there's one and only one Ron Paul and because of what he just said. So read the chapter of the road to serfdom called Why the Worst Make it to the Top. And the next chapter or maybe two chapters after that is called The End of Truth. And that's why people like this do rise to the top. Now, Hayek wrote this book in the early 40s and it was about, it was a warning that if we keep going the way we were going in sort of more and more collectivism, this could happen. That was the 1940s, but we're there now, we're there now. So we're there now where the worst do rise to the top. He was saying, if we keep going in his direction, the worst will rise to the top, but they're all there. Just open today's newspaper and look at the mug shots, Nancy Pelosi, all these people, all the rest of them. So I think we're out of time. It's only supposed to be a half hour, right? Okay, and otherwise they're gonna have to double our pay.