 The subject for today's video, like the last one, sadly has emerged from Twitter drama. In my last video I disavowed a movement that has called itself post-libertarianism, and this time I find myself agreeing with post-libertarians on this issue. This time I'm going to call it the Homeless Question, or the HQ, just for fun. Like lots of this crap, the conversation is overrun with strawmen, one side calling the other statists who love cops and hate the poor, the other side calling them lulberts who don't do anything productive and are just childish. Neither are true. Both sides are reasonable, and while I'm going to defend my particular side here, I'm going to give credit to the other at the end by steelmaning their position and showing where I think it fails. So the drama emerged when Thoe Bishop quoted Rothbard, who said the following in his article, a programme for right-wing populism, part of his paleo-strategy in the 1990s of trying to unite libertarians with the old right, as they're called, who wanted to reverse the policies of early 20th century politicians like Woodrow Wilson and FDR. He wrote, Take back the streets, get rid of the bums. Again, unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares? Hopefully they will disappear. That is, move from the ranks of the petted and costed bum class to the ranks of the productive members of society. I mostly agree with Rothbard on this proposal, as well as Thoe Bishop and people like him who've been defending this on Twitter for the last few days. I'm aware this seems extremely confusing with how in my last video I was harshly criticising the movement which he has aligned himself to and it's easy to see why people of that movement find this particular position justified. Like so many confusing positions that I find myself in while discussing libertarian theory, I can quickly disentangle it using one crucial thing, property rights. My issue with post-libertarians was that they praised the violation of some property rights in the name of stopping other property rights being violated. But this situation is different as we have a clear view of one group whose property rights are being violated and another whose only property is their body and they often find that body in the position of trespassing on someone else's property. And so begins my explanation. Government property is illegitimate. It is either obtained by confiscating land and or materials without consent or rightful claim or the land and materials are purchased using tax money collected through theft and coercion. Either way the ownership and maintenance of property by the state is done only through force and is not legitimate. The government does not rightly own anything or even have a right to exist. I claim this, Rothbard claims this, Hopper claims this, I'm hopeful that Thoe claims this unequivocally and I will never claim anything different or promote any idea which insinuates that government ownership is ever justified. But now let's ask two questions. Does the government exist? Yes. Does the government hold and maintain property assuming ownership? Yes. With this reality in mind let us ask ourselves if anything can be done with this property in the meantime or if we as libertarians are supposed to just sit on our hands and do nothing hoping that one day the state just vanishes and then we can finally get to work. If you're a fan of Michael Malice you should already be well versed in dealing with hypotheticals and not being so autistic as to answer actually both are bad. If you had a button in front of you and every time you pressed it one million dollars were diverted from the ATF's budget to fund government housing what would you do? If you wouldn't press it or at least press it as many times as it took so that all the computers, AC, vehicles and police equipment in all ATF offices across the US had to be removed leaving the agency completely unable to function then quite frankly you are useless to the libertarian cause and unless you removed every single dollar from the ATF's budget you're hardly much use at all. We could of course go on forever about how terrible in quality, efficiency and calculation that government housing projects are but if you don't have the sense of scale to see that every dollar which goes to the ATF is significantly more harmful than towards the production of those houses you need a good long think about what you stand for and how you deal with it in reality. These hypotheticals are extremely valuable in shaking up the lack of scale that libertarians can often box themselves into and they get you in a state of mind ready to deal with real issues in a serious and nuanced way. If we don't do this then we are a movement who will never actually do any moving until our objectives are already achieved. How do you achieve your objective when you refuse to move towards it? That's anyone's guess. We can ponder as much as we like about the perfect way that things should be done but we can fall into the trap of only doing this rather than also looking outside at the imperfect world and trying to make it better. If something can be done with government property whilst it is illegitimately held we need to explore what is preferable and to what ends. I'm going to defend the view of Hans Hermann Hopper that this property can be justly steered towards emulating the likely management which would occur if it was held privately as opposed to being left entirely up to the discretion of petty local council politicians that the ends it should be steered towards are that of a low time preference libertarian social order and away from a hedonistic leftist egalitarian one and that the ones to do the steering are taxpayers who by their position of having their money forcibly taken to maintain this illegitimately held property they have preference in its use and management over those who do not have money forcibly taken for it. Let's consider a library. It's a building illegitimately owned and managed by the government on a piece of land which is the same and filled with property which is the same. The purpose of this building is for people to go in and read or take out books in silence. The government claims it is a public good meaning it is open to absolutely anyone and nobody can be discriminated against entering or excluded from its use but there are two easily unequal groups here those who have taxes forcibly levied from their wealth and income to fund the library and those who do not. Already with this inequality egalitarianism and public good theory shows itself to be an illusion. If there were 10 taxpayers in the library and a homeless person out of their mind and high on self-destructive hard drugs were to enter the library, scream nonsense, crap on the floor and knock all the books off the shelves egalitarianism would say they have just as much of a right to use it in this manner as anyone else. When given this scenario I doubt any egalitarian would actually agree to this in which case they are not in fact egalitarians because once again it is an illusion. The managers and tax-paying customers of the library have more of a claim to use this property than someone who is unemployed and does not pay taxes. This greater claim however is not a total immutable claim. This is not to say that taxpayers have the same property and occupation rights as an owner, shareholder or even customer of a private business but their claim is greater than a non-tax payer and as such they are more entitled to the use and exclusion policies of tax-funded goods and can within reason remove people undertaking behaviour that they find intolerable. This does not mean that any unemployed person is not allowed to enter or use this property but that their being in and using it is contingent on the tacit permission of the other class of people involved. This class is the tax-paying class and as I have stated their forced funding of this service gives them priority and preference in its use the same way that a paying customer of a private business can very reasonably expect to be treated with preference over a non-paying person. I said that the ends which should be steered towards are the ones of a libertarian social order which is one of low time preference, high trust, common decency and personal responsibility. It is an unfortunate truth that homeless people and egalitarians are extremely highly predisposed to enable the opposite of these values and prevent the environment necessary to breed acceptance of libertarianism in the minds of its people and this acceptance is contingent on nothing more than a cohesive civil society. It is not an inherent trait of being homeless that such a person should be a drug addict, belligerent, destructive or highly likely to commit the crimes of theft, assault or trespassing but as a result of their environment these results have a great likelihood. Do not think for a second I would not rather that such a person was not this way that they could be helped and rehabilitated that is without a shred of doubt the optimal turn of events but when a person is being subjected to a disturbance or crime by a vagrant giving them a leaflet for the local homeless charity will achieve absolutely nothing. As long as they can come and go whenever and wherever they please on property illegitimately held by the government and proclaimed to be public the incentive to stop engaging in destructive and hedonistic behaviour is a lot lower than it otherwise would be. This gets at the last portion of Rothbard's point that these homeless people would hopefully disappear in air quotes not literally meaning dying or disappearing from the face of the earth but meaning the homeless people would disappear by transforming themselves from their state of self-destructive homelessness and into being a productive member of society. How this happens should not be an area that is hand-waved away imagining that a homeless person can turn their life around without any assistance. A society in a libertarian social order should have the moral fibre to help a person in such dire need but of course you can only help someone who is first willing to help themselves and you cannot subscribe to the egalitarian myth that they have just as much of a right to use something like a public park as a taxpayer and their family. To summarise my position state property such as public libraries and public parks should absolutely be privatised and managed as the private owner chooses but they're not so rather than doing nothing we should be proactive and try to order the state's management of this property in a way which emulates private ownership by enforcing standards that we would expect any private owner to do. While the property rights here are not perfect one group has a greater claim to the property than another and they should function as shareholders being allowed a degree of executive control and expected to use this control in a way which builds a healthy social environment and decreases reliance on state ownership. This is in the benefit to libertarians trying to achieve a better legal system and social order to a huge degree. How the taxpayers would do this via a vote or some other form of moderation is a topic I leave open for other people to come up with answers for but now I want to discuss some genuine concerns and detail an opposing theory and then say why the one I've defended is better. So we need to remember who Rothbard said should be the ones unleashed. Cops. But we should also remember the point he made prior to this one in the same paper. Take back the streets, crush criminals and by this I mean of course not white collar criminals or insider traders but violent street criminals robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed and allowed to administer instant punishment. Subject of course to liability when they are an error. Let's say that part again. Subject of course to liability when they are in error. Wouldn't that be nice but we have to acknowledge it is at present not likely. Rothbard did write this paper to unite libertarians and the old right and as we have seen ever since early 2020, making right-wingers get on board with police accountability has become extremely easy once the lack of accountability actually starts to affect them. We Hopkins especially should hammer this point home endlessly if we discuss the topic with anyone on the right as they're likely to agree by default on the other issues. Achieving police accountability for a very long time seemed to me as totally impossible due to the blocking of it by conservatives for which I've chewed them out on this channel many a time but thanks in no small part to the fantastic work of the previously mentioned Michael malice frustration with and animosity towards government law enforcement from the right has begun to take off but consider another point with a nuanced hypothetical if somebody broke into your home and you had no way at hand to defend yourself should you do nothing at all or call the police probably call the police yes you run the risk that they'll show up 20 minutes later be useless at best or actually shoot or arrest you at worst but there are legitimate reasons to use state protection services as there is to use state roads and as much as we meme it driving on a road does not mean you aren't a libertarian in the industries of protection services for the civil populace and road management the government has assumed itself an illegitimate monopoly by doing this they force you to pay for it whether you want it or not and by forcibly taking up so much of the market share of these products it guts the competitive edge of the private sector shrinks demand and therefore supply making private alternatives rare and very costly this is not your fault and while it is preferable to take the private alternatives if you can afford it on top of your taxes which the government doesn't let you opt out of then you should but if you are an average person who pays taxes and needs some muscle to protect yourself your true property or state owned property which you have a greater claim for you're going to use the police and that is absolutely permissible state police should absolutely be abolished as should state property but while they are here you are entitled to use them if you fund them involuntarily and have preference over those who do not if you call the police and they act in error it is their fault not yours now the good theoretical rebuttal comes from blocky ins as i'll call them as in followers of water block lots of agorists have taken up the fight against hoppians in this drama but frankly they often end up just making fools of themselves most of the time and have little to add but saying cops bad as if this is news to us what agorists and blocky ins do defend is a nearly identical homestead principle and the homestead principle is indeed logical legal and libertarian acknowledging that state property does not actually have a legitimate owner it could be considered exactly the same as abandoned property at that point it can be homesteaded by the first person who gets there and wants to claim it so for hobo sleeps in a state owned kids playground they have homesteaded the available property and become the rightful owner but here's a problem with that as a solution the government does not give a shit about rightful homestead principle and to be honest neither does the hobo it's quite absurd to imagine walking up to a drug adult half conscious homeless person and saying to them how do you do fellow libertarian i see you've done a mighty fine job homesteading this vacant property would you like to trade my pen for one of your cigarettes and then getting an intelligible response back from them then after that the government would just enforce its illegitimate claim and kick them out anyway and you've achieved nothing my point there doesn't refute the homestead principle theory it only calls it impractical and useless undercurrent conditions but the homestead principle also does not refute my point that a taxpayer has a greater claim than a non taxpayer while the government does enforce its illegitimate claims this emulation is the best way to start working towards creating a society where the homestead principle is actually used and respected if we don't take these steps then it will remain useless and these steps are supported by the just principle of differing strengths in property rights claims i think i'm going to leave it here i hope this explanation will bring some desperately needed maturity of understanding of both sides of the argument as it has turned into an emotional playground fight for the most part my recommendation for you now is to go on spotify where you can listen for free to the whole audiobook of hopper's grand slam book democracy the god that failed to develop a greater appreciation of the concepts i've talked about such as time preference libertarian social order and private property emulation for now take it easy