 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. I'm Trevor Burrus. I'm Grant Babcock. And I'm Jason Kuznicki. Today we're doing part two of our discussion of Murray Rothbard's 1982 book, The Ethics of Liberty. Today we'll be discussing chapters 6 through 13. Before we begin, there was a critique that came up on one of our Facebook pages a while back about criticizing the arguments made by people like Rothbard or Rand. The argument goes that these people, these are key foundational texts that you should approach them as works of libertarianism but not works that should be held to the same argumentative standards of say academic philosophy and that you're somehow misfiring, there's something wrong with saying like Rothbard's arguments don't work for reasons X, Y and Z. That's unfair and I thought it would be good to start with this question of criticizing in this case Rothbard because I think it's something we're going to do a fair amount over this episode. I think all of us were rather underwhelmed by the quality of the argumentation in this book and so I'll start by asking you guys, I guess, is there a value in libertarians who are, I mean in many cases, very inclined to agree with Rothbard's conclusions about the proper role of the state or the lack of the state's role in any way. Is there something valuable in criticizing him? Are we going wrong in attacking someone as central to the movement as he is? What's the point in critiquing him philosophically? I think a good analogy here is, I mean it is valuable to critique him, it's intellectually honest but it kind of reminds me of horror movies. So horror movies have had a huge evolution over the years and if you watch old horror movies you're like, this is pretty bad and I have some friends who are very big horror fans and if you start criticizing something like John Carpenter's Halloween, like this is a really silly kind of movie actually at the end of the day, they're going to be like, well you don't understand the place of Halloween in the pantheon of horror movies and how important it was at the time when it came out and how much it developed other horror movies into the future and you say, okay I agree but I can still criticize this so I think you need to have both, you need to respect its place in terms of sort of jump-starting things and there are things that wouldn't exist if this did not exist but then also criticize it through modern sensibilities and modern thinking. I think the older I get the more I become a skeptic and one of the things that I am skeptical about is how people actually do philosophy and it might even be said that a lot of philosophy maybe all of it is done backwards, that philosophers in fact begin with conclusions that they want to reach and then they try to find justifications for those conclusions. It's not that they begin with axioms that everyone accepts and then transform them and find themselves surprised at the end of the exercise. They begin with conclusions and then try to put foundations under them and to the extent that I think Rothbard is doing that, which I think he is, there's nothing necessarily wrong with it. What we can do since a lot of us share his conclusions is to take those justifications that we find useful and build on them and fix the other ones that aren't so good or reject some of them and find better ones and in that sense we're all engaged in a common intellectual project even if we will be sometimes critical of the things that he has to say. I think the end of what you said there, Jason, is right exactly on the nose. Rothbard isn't like a sacred text which is the end of the research program and libertarianism is over and we just need to read this and apply it and then we're done. It's a living, evolving, growing, improving philosophical tradition and part of improving the arguments for liberty means looking at some from the past that maybe were important but maybe could have been better. I also want to say in terms of, is it fair to apply the standards of rigorous academic philosophy to Rothbard? I guess maybe there's a case for that in other books but I think in the case of Ethics of Liberty this is his attempt at a rigorous philosophical treatise to justify narco-capitalism. So take it as he uses it. Okay. So I guess we'll get started. So we're doing, as I said, chapters 6-13 which is the beginning, the first half of part two of the book today. The first episode that we did on Rothbard was on part one and in part one it was his setting out of the basic system of natural rights that he saw himself operating as part of. It was providing the grounding for the theory that he was then going to explore through the rest of the book. In a sense, if you missed part one you should go back and listen to part one but if you don't feel like doing that right now it's probably okay because he begins part two by basically restating the summary version of what he did in part one to the extent that it almost feels like this is the real beginning of the book and the other stuff was written later in order to fill in some of the missing details. But so we'll start in chapter 6 which is called a Caruso-Social Philosophy. So the idea here is he's going to construct a system of ethics by starting on the small scale. So we're used to this in economics like economics textbooks start with, you know, there's the one guy, Robinson Crusoe on the island and he needs to have stuff to survive. So he starts building and then he makes trade-offs and then one other guy enters and now we've got trade and you can see how the system works on the small scale before you add the complexity. And that's exactly what Rothbard sets out to do for ethics. He says the abstraction of analyzing a few persons interacting on an island enables a clear perception of the basic truths of interpersonal relations, truths which remain obscure if we insist on looking first at the contemporary world only whole and of a piece. Is that fair? I mean it's interesting to start off with political philosophy as just basic ethical conundrums of one person on an island and then added another person and then maybe just person by person you get up to a country or something like that. But it's odd because people aren't actually created that way. It's weird because if you contrasted this very straightforward right space like what's right for one person to do or wrong for one person to do is wrong when you make a bunch of people. You contrast it to Hayek who kind of looks at society was never building it up person by person. That's not exactly the first sort of premise of trying to figure out how to do things correctly. I don't know, is this the valid way of doing political philosophy? I think it's potentially a valid way. What's going on here is not that he's in fact trying to construct a society. What he's trying to do is to isolate individual action and look at it because he is a methodological individualist and he believes that when you have an individual you're looking at the necessary building block of any possible society. Yeah, that and I think also that there are certain things that are best illustrated almost by their absence. To understand what problem it is that we're trying to solve with a contract system with talking about trade and all that, we need to imagine what it would be like to not have that and then we can see why we would want it. That said though, there are problems here. There are problems because certain actions that would be in fact suicidal in a Robinson Crusoe situation are beneficial in an extended society. If I were Robinson Crusoe and I decided that the first thing I wanted to do was set up a shoe factory, that would be nuts. I would not survive. I would die. It would be immoral by Rothbard's standards but setting up a shoe factory in a wider society is actually at least a harmless thing to do might actually turn out to be a good business idea. Yeah. I think this is where he goes wrong in an interesting way and so we'll get to that critique. We should walk through how he gets to that problem and so he says like, okay in economics we do this so we're going to try to do this in ethics but then what's interesting is he basically tells us the same story in economics and so there's this slide from justifying economic exchange to a system of ethics and the way that this works is he says look, so Robinson Crusoe he just stands alone on the island, he's going to die. He's got certain needs and he doesn't have any knowledge. He doesn't have the recipes for food and shelter and whatever else so he has to use his mind to go out and start changing the environment around him and so he starts building these things and we get economic production, we get capital accumulation and then somehow we get an ethic of the good from that. Of some sort which apparently is pursuing life as far as I can tell which I mean to the point that you can't hurt yourself. One of the weirdest parts I mean but is this what you guys got out of it that the ethic of the good is synonymous with pursuing life and that's it. I think so more or less and what's difficult about this section is that economics in the Austrian tradition is supposed to be a value-free science and he's making a very strange transition from value-free observation of economic activity to inferences about the good. He even says that someone who has a high time preference is acting in an evil manner. Immorally. Immorally. That's not immoral. That's just having a high time preference. It's like having a higher preference for money or a higher preference for savings or for clothing or food or whatever. That's not necessarily immoral or at least it is not the job of an economist to tell us that. Or punching yourself in the face. You might have a big preference for that. Yeah, because if we think about property rights normally we think I have the right to destroy whatever this thing is that I'm holding this book. I could shred it up and none of you three could restrain me or stop me or pass moral judgment on me. Well, I could pass moral judgment on you, but. Well you could be wrong. But it seems that the idea of self-ownership, ownership over your body is really important for Rothbard but he seems to rule out, for example, suicide. Not just suicide, like eating a burger as far as I mean like. Yeah, he's very clear. He says, so I'll read this quote, he's talking about let's say Caruso comes upon some mushrooms that are poisonous. Are you saying Caruso or Crusoe? Crusoe. Okay, because I would obviously say Caruso. They could picture in David Caruso for a while. That's fine if you would like to get that. That's what I'm running out of my head right now. And on Enrico? Yeah, exactly. So he's come along this and he says, had he eaten the mushrooms without learning of their poisonous effects then his decision would have been incorrect, a possibly tragic error based on the fact that man is scarcely automatically determined to make correct decisions at all times. Hence the, his lack of omniscience and his liability to error. If Crusoe on the other hand had known the point of the poison and eaten the mushrooms anyway, perhaps for kicks or from some other high time preference then his decision would have been objectively immoral and act deliberately set against his life and health. So we get this like he's, we need to apply our reason in order to survive. So therefore the application of our reason in order to survive is the standard of value. And so he's very clear. He's like look, anything that prolongs life is what's good or at least anything that would shorten life as per eating the mushrooms even if you know they're poisonous is objectively immoral. But and this is a theme throughout Rothbard is you want to reply, it's perhaps a bit more complex than that Murray, that he doesn't seem to address all of the totally obvious examples of all sorts of perfectly reasonable decisions we make that do not have the effect of prolonging our life and often have the effect of shortening it like potentially having the burger or smoking cigarettes or just crossing the street at times. Leaving your house. Now a better standard might very well be something like the life that is proper to man and to revert to a more explicitly Aristotelian approach to ethics. I mean that's closer to what Ayn Rand does and I think that's a bit more defensible than prolongation of life per se. Well this is his Rand influence I think. Yes. He was very influenced by Rand I think and then kicked out kind of by her. Yeah he wouldn't divorce his Catholic wife. Ah that's of course. Transgression number 937 on her list. He was tried in absentia and declared a heretic and no one expects the Randian inquisition. So you see I mean this is very Randian which is interesting as Jason said the value free element of Austrian we're just going to get a bunch of things to see how they work together best kind of idea but then he has it but he's writing an ethics book and so he has to have something in there that's. Yeah there are several weird things about this the first is it seems consequentialist right I mean it doesn't seem consequentialist it is consequentialist and if you ask people is Murray Rothbard a consequentialist then we'll say no he's the paradigmatic deontological libertarian. Right but then yeah but then when he's trying to get his system off the ground he he first appeals to the consequences of actions you know in terms of their effect on your life and then and then he seems to want to make this move that says like look you know you you even if you say you don't believe this you know really really you do and I can tell because of how how you act. Right this is where he gives he gives a very short version of argumentation ethics. Yeah yes I should be 32 top of 33 you cannot argue against me that life is the highest value unless you have killed yourself and you haven't killed yourself right so therefore you cannot argue against me right like if you genuinely don't think life is the only thing to aim at then you would have committed suicide rather than having this conversation which seems I mean is obviously not true like I could I could think there are lots of things that are more important than prolonging my life like happiness or good character or whatever else that wouldn't then lead me to say well then I should kill my life. I might find that my heroin habit was a lot more valuable to me than prolonging my life but it just hasn't killed me yet you know I mean I could have right in fact killing yourself heroin addiction heroin habit that's also true yeah this this seems like like there seems to be an immediate and obvious counter example here that was never considered yeah not like other philosophers where you have to think for a while you you think for about three seconds and you can come up with a counter example right like it makes me it actually I mean to be honest it makes me wonder whether the manuscript was read by people who disagreed with it at all or publication because there are so many of instances like this one where someone's way to say no there's the heroin example or there's countless other examples like you may still be right but you need to address them and I've talked to quite a few professional philosophers about the argumentation ethic both here and in Hapa and and it just does not fly with them not at all and I think I have to agree the worst we can say about someone who is arguing against life as the highest value is it their hypocrite that's the worst we can say about them well does not even necessarily that they are but that's the worst possible it's not that their argument is false it's just that they're not acting according to their stated principles which doesn't prove the truth or false sort of the principles or if you are like a very big environmentalist guy a hypothesis human beings should die including me but before I die I'm going to devote my life to convincing other people to kill themselves first that's the better use of my time than me just killing myself I mean there's a lot of ways you can think of how you can get out of this without having to fall into his quote-unquote trap of proving him to be correct the whole time so what do we think about the so we were talking about this in terms of acquiring property in this Crusoe or Caruso situation where you're acquiring property and so he gets very close he gets into the first acquisition of property which is very locky and any problems that you found with the acquisition of property and Jason you're looking at well I have no problem with the acquisition of property I do I do think though that choosing the Crusoe example or the Crusoe scenario as a way of justifying it is not necessarily the clearest way because a lot of the good effects of private property are most obvious not in a community of one but in a community of millions where where private property allows comparative advantage and specialization and gains from trade to work really really well and you don't see that on a desert island with one or two inhabitants or or at best you see very little of it compared to an extended society yeah well that's only a problem if he actually wants to make an instrumental justification for property which I don't think he does except in so far as it's about prolonging life yeah except for that well yes and I would probably live a lot longer and and have a much better life in a society of millions of people than I would living alone on an island the weirdness to me about the property is is I mean one of the things about Rothbard that I like about him is that he bites all bullets and if you're going to say that you acquire property by working it by mixing your labor with land I mean he basically says that it is always interesting because there was always this question when I first read Locke when I think I was like 16 or something like that it's like so you mix your labor with the land so you like reach down and I don't dig a hole like you only own that hole right I mean like that does not transfer into a parcel of like what are you on the the divvied out parcel of this hectare right there's a there's a boundary problem yeah but like you just say you you only if you're going to have this mixing your labor and he he fully accepts this that you when you mix your labor with this one part of it you only own that part of it that you mixed your labor with which gets crazy when you start thinking about it well because you give an example of like how it sort of ends up getting crazy so you don't you wouldn't have so you if you own a parcel of land like right now I mean I think Rothbard would say like if you bought a piece of land in the color the hills of Colorado or or like let's say we start colonizing Mars and so you but you're like you're going to make a you're going to make a you're going to put a retirement home there but you haven't done anything yet so in his view you don't even own it yet I think yeah even so the law might say you own it but the law that could be wrong about this yeah and he actually he actually talks about this a little bit later when he talks about like the homesteading of the American west like he thinks that the fees charged by the government for the plots were just like completely illegitimate you know rents yeah and that like if you show up and you settle then it's your land and you know that's all there is to it well so does this lead though to an odd situation see the only part of land that you can actually own is that what you actually mixed your labor with or that which you improved as he tends to call it where you actually have to have done something to every square centimeter of land I mean does this lead to like so the the hip thing and building houses now as often I'm going to build the house all the way up to the edge of the lot instead of having a yard right and does this almost require that kind of action because if you don't then you don't actually own those those corners that you haven't done anything I think you could walk around your land and like move I don't know pine cones into circles or something like that and no he specifically disavows that actually when he's he's talking about like you know you land on the island and he says if you like do this thing where you walk like walk around the island and you know maybe put up posts or something he says then you own like the fence post you don't own everything inside you own the fence posts but you do not own the spaces in between the fence where they the fences you know suspended over that place but you don't own it I don't know if he talks about it in ethics of liberty but I know he does talk about it elsewhere about this boundary problem and he says basically how you solve it is you have what's called a technological unit which is you you look at the facts of the activity that you're involved in like maybe it's farming maybe it's you know whatever it is and then your your labor entitles you to like however much of the natural resource it takes to do the thing right so which you're going to tell me that's a non-answer yeah yeah yeah you're nodding already I mean like the funny thing is is like is like reading this and it was a lawyer um and and like kind of a real lawyer not a fake one like Aaron but uh yeah Aaron's nodding uh that and I like property law a lot but I but one of the really good things about property law and it is interesting question of like how how do you own a parcel and all this and that but is it you know generally prevents conflict and prevents people from trying to predate each other but like I'm seeing Rothbard's world and I'm seeing complete chaos where you like run onto someone's property and like you like build a little house and you're like it's mine now I mean I mean it's like and that's what he has this thing so so here's a passage from pages 63 64 and this is pretty much one edition of this book so if you have it it says suppose for example that Mr. Green legally owns a certain acreage of land of which the northwest portion has never been transformed from its natural state by green or anyone else libertarian theory must invalidate his claim to ownership of the northwest portion should another man appear who does transform the land and should green oust him by force from the property then green becomes at that point a criminal aggressor against land justly owned by another the same would be true of green should use violence to prevent another settler from entering upon this never used land and transforming it into use this is chaos yes yes exactly it would be chaos and we can ask very simple question here what would we rather have people in society doing on the whole would we rather have them working and improving the land and farming and mining and building factories or would we rather have them squabbling and the reason that we have private property is not because we have mixed labor with land and then we have to make sure that it always attaches to the person who has really the reason I think we have private property is that it means that on the whole we get less squabbling and we get more industry grant who is wearing and I love Rothbard looks like he would like to respond to yeah I think you guys are totally misreading this this thing about the the well Rothbard wouldn't call him a squatter because they're not squatting yeah I know he's arguing against this thing governments do where they claim you know custodians ship over large swaths of unsettled land and exclude other people from using it without their permission well I'm not committed to endorsing that I don't have to I can just say look there's a reason we have private property and the reason is that it on the whole has good effects on people's character well sure nothing to do with government but Rothbard gets you there like he's not he's not all he's saying is you can't just like put up a fence over some empty lot and never let anybody go there just because you don't want them to well I mean I think you're right about him criticizing governments doing this but we're still in crucial land so we're talking about basic morality in its vision here right I think the the issue and this is another one of these like meta concerns I have with a lot of his arguments is that Rothbard is extremely turned off by letting ambiguity enter into his system I mean a lot of his objections to alternatives we get to this later on when we talk about various theories of punishment is that this would allowing this would allow a level of ambiguity into the system such that someone would have to decide make judgment calls and if they can then it's room for abuse it's room for the state it needs to be banished so we need is extremely cut and dry rules that we enforce through libertarian justice but he doesn't there are many instances where it feels like instead of addressing ambiguity he's ignoring ambiguity so this is one where like yes so we can we can set out the very clear rule that you need to actually have improved the land and improve the pieces of it that you claim to own in order to own it because you can't just build the fence posts around it you need to have improved it but we don't know what it means to have improved it and if you have improved it like you've dug the hole is that improving it well if there's a dispute someone has to decide and it's not a party to the dispute right because they they're obviously going to decide in their own favor is is digging the hole an improvement maybe or it's making it worse do you own does does that improvement include just the area that was the hole or the land underneath it or the land three inches to the left of it like these are questions that can't be answered by this bright line rule what about just surveying it is that sufficient improvement what if if you're not actively doing anything with the land but the land was surveyed by the original owner which does in fact improve it in the sense that you have adequately described its boundaries is that more useful to other people yeah that's an interesting i mean i don't think brothard doesn't answer that question i mean i know i mean i think he would give an answer which is no i i i don't know if he's right or not yeah it's interesting i mean the thing to me is is i mean it gave a bias in the law direction but there's a lot of meta rules that exist in legal systems and this goes into the thing of property being a social construction more than what Rothbard is trying to kind of derive from very basic premises that we have rules because we're trying to diminish conflict so he writes about adverse possession which is in american angle american law is the ability to take possession of someone's land as long as you improve it and they don't notice it or tell you to get off of it for 21 18 or 21 years depending on the jurisdiction and so if i have a piece of land in the colorado mountains and i'm not watching it right now and someone has built a mill on it and i don't go and check on it for 21 years then uh then i they can actually take title that now this seems really bizarre and so he has a whole thing about how that works but the reason that rule exists is to avoid chaos of unowned and unknown pieces of land that no one knows who own them and there are holes in the title system and holes in the title system can eventually consume the property system of an entire society and it seems like Rothbard is not concerned with sort of meta principles about can we make a property system well functioning over many generations where people die and we have tidal holes and all these things like this well i understand why he's not he's not doing legal philosophy but in later chapters he does talk about when he's talking about what counts as theft what counts as a criminal he does say like it's there he deals with the issue of we can't figure out who the current owner is yes that's true we don't have a title whether he does a satisfying job is another question but i want to i want to stick to that comes up in later chapters i'd like to try to stay as to the flow of the book as possible so i'm going to jump now to the next part of this section which is where he makes an argument he says like basically he's concerned that in order for this to be a moral system that he's talking about that we can morally critique people's actions based on in this case prolonging life or not he wants to set aside the problem of determinism of a lack of free will because it's he's clearly not a compatibilist he you know there's a he thinks it would be a problem if we don't actually have free will but here and so i want to throw this out here as like am i not understanding because it doesn't sound like he's actually addressing the free will debate at all so he says i'll just read this little passage he says some critics have charged that this freedom namely the freedom to apply our reason and make decisions is illusory because man is bound by natural laws okay so that sounds like the free will debate right but then he says this however is a misrepresentation one of many examples of the persistent modern confusion between freedom and power man is free to adopt a values and to choose his actions but this does not at all mean that he may violate natural laws with impunity that he may for example leap oceans at a single bound in short when we say that man is not free to leap the ocean we are really discussing not his lack of freedom but his lack of power to cross the ocean given that the laws of his nature given the laws of his nature and the nature of the world and when i first read that my reaction was that's not at all what the free will debate is the free will debate is not about whether man can choose to do things that are physically impossible and if the answer you know and if the answer seems to be yes he can't choose those things then there's no free will but instead whether his choosing is actually free or determined so i think that i think that this is a confusion that he's created i think he's only talking about political freedom here i don't think it's a free will debate the first sentence makes it makes it sound like that like kruso as in the case of any man is on page 33 has freedom of will freedom to choose the course of his life and his actions so it sounds like he's talking about free free will and the more metaphysical less political sense but then i think when he's saying that you have freedom you know he's not free to leap the ocean i think the rest of it is about political freedom so he's not i don't think he's misunderstand the free will debate i don't know chasing grant you yeah i think lack of lack of political freedom in this case would be that the government patrols the shoreline and whenever anyone tries to leap across the ocean they get shot that would be that would be political but he's he's talking about something that has nothing to do with whether we internally have free will whether given the same initial set of circumstances we might have chosen differently yeah which is which is completely unrelated yeah i think what's going on here is not that he thinks he needs to answer the determinists to for his system to work i think it's that he's misunderstanding like that free will has a specific meaning and philosophy that is not the one he's using right because if we look later in terms of how he applies this free will issue it's always in terms of uh attacking ideas of of uh well capability in right that that the when he when he thinks free will he he seems to think that people think you're not free because you can't do everything you could imagine right which is and he wants to contrast that with freedom from restraint i i do think it it's an error that inhibits comprehension definitely well certainly i mean a lot of people do like to try to conflate capacity and political liberty which are different things and you know i love capacities it's great that i have the ability to read or to play chess or whatever but that's not that's not something that's a a political question at least thankfully in the united states uh that's a question of individual human capacities not about the arbitrary will of someone else uh forbidding a game or forbidding a you know consumption of literature does ruthbard need to say anything to the determinists i'm not for this book i don't think um unless unless it's ethically meaningful like that if you're determinist then it's hard to talk about ethics in certain ways but uh for most most of time political philosophy does not begin with a question free will yeah the only abelism or whatever the only time i could think of it coming up is he talks about the alien ability of the will a lot and that discussion sort of makes no sense if there's like no such thing as a will independent of just physical processes in your brain okay so at this point what we've gotten to is we're still dealing with the single person in this chapter and how that single person comes to own things and so the upshot is that a man owns himself and he also owns anything that he transforms or produces and so then chapter seven interpersonal relations voluntary exchanges when ruthbard starts introducing other people friday this picture yeah and we we start seeing how how trade functions and the the benefits of that and again this is one where he he's basically making the same sorts of economic thought experiments that we see all the time that he's he's selling us on the benefits of exchange by saying look at you know here's comparative advantage and here's how exchange makes both parties at least objectively better off and then moves into a rather nice summary of the role of capitalists in the society yeah the i think the reason he he's undertaking this this whole discussion actually is he feels he needs to answer answer the commies basically yeah and and i think that he's i mean i flagged the there's like a two paragraph overview of the benefit that the capitalist brings to a free society and why they're not marxist villains that i think is actually pretty terrific oh yeah he has his moments that's absolutely true um yeah should i just read that bit sure thus the indispensable and enormously important function of poke the capitalist in our example of the market economy is to save the laborers from the necessity of restricting their consumption and thus saving up the capital themselves and from waiting for their pay until the product would hopefully be sold to the profit further down the chain of production hence the capitalist far from somehow depriving the laborer of his rightful ownership of the product makes possible a payment to the laborer considerably in advance of the sale of the product furthermore the capitalist in his capacity as forecaster entrepreneur saves the laborer from the risk that the product might not be sold at a profit or that he might even suffer losses and if anything that's an understatement of what a capitalist does because capital also increases the value of labor it's not simply that the laborer gets paid a little bit in advance or or you know several months in advance it's that the laborers work per hour is worth more when it can manufacture goods that are are produced using advanced or or capital intensive processes i think it's important though to distinguish between like that's that's a function of the size of the capital stock it's not a function of the private ownership of capital that's which is what Rothbard is i think trying to defend here so after the capitalist discussion he gives a little overview of what ownership in a free market looks like and so i think this is again probably worth just reading really quickly because i mean one of the nice things about this book is rothbard is very good at summarizing himself throughout which i found refreshing and super helpful and something that a lot of other writers could learn from and that is i mean rothbard is a remarkably clear writer he's a terrific communicator and i think explains a lot of his popularity so here he says okay so we talked about we've we've gone through and looked at how man acquires property how he acquires ownership what sorts of things he can own and then how that works with trade and so he says okay all ownership on the free market reduces ultimately back to a ownership by each man of his own person and his own labor b ownership by each man of land which he finds unused and transfers by his own labor and c the exchange of the products of this mixture of a and b with the similarly produced output of other persons on the market and so that he then tells us look if we have a system that is there's our concept of property there's our concept of exchange and we respect all of those things then that is what he calls the free society or the regime of pure liberty and then he tells us look the rest of the book is just the implications of the regime of pure liberty an important thing to note while we're on this section is on page 36 in my my copy he's talking about exchange of goods and he says apples are not simply being exchanged for butter or gold for horses what is really being exchanged is not the commodities themselves but the rights to ownership of them and that will come up later when he talks about his theory of contract well yeah the ownership thing is I mean Erin said on these these sort of whatever three types of market mark what is it all ownership on the free market reduces ultimately back to those three types of ownership I mean it's it's interesting does it does it seem that he basically says like everything flows from this and I'm sitting here reading about this and since I'm predisposed to you know think along these lines about whether or not what other people would say about this who are not libertarians for example about what what what everything flows from is not ownership but something else having to do with more questions of initial physical allotment or things like this that that you can't reduce justice down to these basic questions I mean and that's and then since Erin sort of asked that he said like the whole book after this is just sort of a discussion of the implications of these like exchanges when someone comes along and sort of denies the entire premise of what's going on like and I don't mean like a specific philosopher I mean a pretty intelligent leftist for example or something like that and they said no no this is not you began at the totally wrong spot here you need to start with and I was trying to think of what they would what they would say what where they would start in terms of we need to talk about a just decided we need to start with a question of what do people deserve or something like this and so they would refute the entire crew so everything about this they would say you can't build it this way but how would they how would they start it then and that's refute the does the question make sense and let's refute the simplicity that he's saying here we just put these pieces together and then we build them off and we say you have ownership people can't take it then we do this and we do this and they say well no that's not that simple there are all sorts of ways that you could you could try to to throw a wrench into the system you could for example deny that labor is properly alienated you're not allowed to work for someone else or or that transfers of that type are illegitimate and that would that would pretty well disrupt the whole thing whether or not whether or not you agreed with it you might you might deny that the idea of mixing one's labor with with property is legitimate I mean to me frankly it does sound pretty metaphysical and I like to justify property with reference to with reference to what effects it has rather than with reference to what this this mixture that I can't detect with an instrument or that I can't always necessarily even tell with common sense has happened I mean another way that I think you could you could try to undercut it is if if we're right that he has not adequately argued for length of life as the ultimate value and the only thing that matters in judging the ethics of an action then substituting something else in there presenting a another standard would lead to a totally different set of conclusions about the nature of property regimes and just transfers I mean if you said if you if you provided a cogent argument that instead of like the good thing to do is whatever prolongs your life but instead the good thing to do is whatever maximizes fairness yeah well I don't think it's true but you could you could certainly make an argument for it then that would lead to something that looked like a different sort of property rights regime than this one well that's why I think it's interesting so like this the reason I brought this up is so like he has a kind of finders keepers or you have to mix your land with your value but the first one there so you can do it so you can homestead it now the reason you might be the first one to come across it has nothing to do with fairness or justice or anything like this whatsoever it's I mean on one level finders keepers is a conflict avoidance principle I mean right like it's it actually has very little it's not saying that you really deserve this or this is like yours for a good reason it's that like if you're holding on to it and someone actually wants to take it from you then physical violence is going to result and so we're going to have finders keepers is just yeah when when hoppa talks about this idea of first comers and later comers and who should be privileged with regards to property rights he he really plays up that angle yeah that like he says look like when it comes to unknown things becoming owned your options are you know first come first served or like we have this massive problem where like you have to like consider the interests of like all these other people who may not even be born yet and it's just it's it's not not only impractical but impracticable like it's it's it's it's not it's not an option that's that's on the table for how to actually organize a functioning human society well that's why I think that like moving on to it the next part which I put on chapter eight where we talk about the meaning of ownership and and kind of coming back to my question previously that um see where I have here written down ah here we go if each man is not entitled to full and 100 percent self-ownership then what does this imply it implies either one of two conditions one the communist one of universal and equal other ownership or two partial ownership of one group by another a system of rule by one class over another now this is kind of interesting because this is weirdly consequentialist I mean in the sense of like these are both obviously stupid so they can't be right it's kind of I mean it's these kind of implication here which I'm you know other people like no you're right that like it has to be number two people have partial ownership of a group by another in the point of the political system is to figure out how to negotiate that problem so I'm just going to like resist this I mean it's like he's trying to do a reductio and a lot of people would be like I'm I don't think it's a reductio at all the point of the political process is to have people negotiate commonly on property including your natural endowments well I mean I hope it's not too pedantic to point out that Rothbard was an anarchist and he really did think that the political process was an instance of one class exerting control over another class no it's not pedantic at all it's a great observation so is yeah there's the we have one and two which people could just accept communist everyone owns everyone else which is always just seeming self-refuting by people which I think is libertarians are a little bit too I just sort of say I flip it about saying well that's obviously not true because some people actually believe that or partial ownership of one group by another and so I mean yes politics according to Rothbard is like that but but I think that this the reason I think this is the reason I brought this up and highlighted is something Aaron has written about for example that you don't own that is like partial is related to this in some way the kind of Elizabeth Warren you don't own that part argument is taking a sort of you didn't build that you mean yeah you sorry you did build that yes yes this is this is to some extent a another possible objection to his property rights regime is the the argument that Elizabeth Warren has made but lots of other people have as well that look you come into the world into a world that has already in basically every way been improved by others that everything that you do all the benefits that you have are the result of the improvements made by others and if you're taking the standard progressive version of this what they mean is improvements made by government so they established the legal system and built the roads and provided your schooling and all of that and so you are because everyone has improved this stuff so everyone therefore has a partial ownership in it everything that you have is partially owned by everyone else and at least to an extent that what that means is that you now need to pay taxes or obey the law or do something to discharge that that debt yes but you can easily deny that Robert Nozick very clearly does so saying that I believe the example he used was if your window is open and someone throws a book into your window they don't then get the right to demand payment for that if you if you haven't asked for it even if you decide to keep it it doesn't create an obligation in you possibly but I the reason I wanted to get to that that question is because you know in the question I was saying well what would left-wingers think about this is that this Crusoe example is actually completely unhelpful for that reason like it doesn't actually give us almost anything about how a person should behave in this world because you don't walk into a world with no on a desert island with no previously existing structures or anything that you don't like owe people for now Jason's point well taken like maybe don't owe everyone but you might owe some group or some subset of people or some group we call the government because they gave you roads in a school and traffic lights and the drug war well maybe not the drug war but things like that and so you owe them for this reason I think that that is the prevailing ethic of you know not even you know just leftists but even a very strong subset of conservatives I think it's a pretty pretty challenging objection to this sort of simplistic system well I mean I think I think great you're looking like I'm crazy well I disagree strongly that it's a good objection to Rothbard system I said cogent I mean I don't mean I'm convinced by it I'm gonna quit my job go because I don't work at Center for American progress I think like well the reason all of us are in this room and not you know somewhere down the street we're not doing a Rothbard episode at the Center for American Progress yes that is that yeah we think that these are silly arguments for for reasons Jason someone gives you a gift that you are actually incapable of refusing then your acceptance of that gift does not create an obligation well and it's not have been otherwise and it's also completely a historical in terms of like where states actually come from right which is I think and in here's actually just below this Rothbard starts pointing out that it's in some ways you know this idea of other us having these kind of like obligations just by virtue of existing it's it's only compatible with some kind of weird aristocracy right where he says let's consider alternative to that one person or group of persons G are entitled to own not only themselves but also the remainder of society are right but apart from the many other problems and difficulties with this this kind of system we cannot have a universal or natural law ethic for the human race we can only have a partial and arbitrary ethic similar to the view that Hohenzollerans are by nature entitled to rule over non-Hohenzollerans so I noted this because this is a big part of his argument is that his system this this regime of pure liberty is universalizable in a way that pretty much everything else would not be and that an ethics a system of ethics you must be able to universalize it in order for it to be legitimate but my my question there is because he doesn't really offer us an argument for it's he basically asserts that I think he thinks it's obvious right and so my question is it is it obvious because is there a way outside of saying that we have a system where everyone has these certain kinds of rights and self ownership to say like what is what is on its face wrong with say a system that says look I've got a universal ethic and what it says is everyone must follow these rules unless you have red hair in which case you have to follow these rules and that's I mean that's completely universal like it applies to everyone it's just that what you do is different based on whether you have red hair or not you're just discriminating against me and I know you've always wanted to put red heads in the corner I know I think there there's that category of unprotected class and I would put red heads in there but you know like they're what is on its face wrong with that sort of system besides that it seems to clash with our libertarian intuitions well it also it also in a sense clashes with intuitions that are widely shared on the left that there ought to be legal equality that legal equality is in some sense important well the funny thing is is that I mean Erin asks a really good question and everything I am now going to say should should be just constructed construed as uh in you know indulging into this question of like if you wanted to say because I've been writing reading a lot about eugenics for example and or any sort of racism and say that there are inherent differences between people there's actually no reason that people should have equal justice around them because there are stupid people or there are different races or whatever classification you want to say but I mean you could say that we already do that we actually give legal disabilities to people of a certain you know under a certain IQ or of a certain ability so we don't ages there's certain ages so we we we have a system for functioning adults but if you wanted to endorse maybe I mean like like Jason said you're going against liberalism in the in the oldest biggest sense of the word the thing that we all are in this town so mostly or at least pretend to be you show you're going against a basic quality of man but there is nothing about this is obviously that any political system has to endorse a basic quality like to have you seen the hones all around I mean like they're they're they're they're the they're the hypochondriac to ask this in a way that the uh bleeders the um is what the hemophiliacs hemophiliacs no those are those are the children and grandchildren of the half queen victoria queen victoria in fact she was the origin I just want to interrupt for for a minute and say that I think in some sense this is Rothbard at his best what he's sort of trying to do here where like yeah he's probably wrong that he's like logically exhausted the the possible ways of arranging you know different people's ownership of other people or not but what he has done is he's taken that liberal tradition that goes back to Locke and that that idea that in the state of nature you know everyone has like reciprocal only reciprocal authority over anyone else and right and you have this bubble of rights and he shows you know I think compellingly that what that implies is that when we endow the actors of the state with special privileges basically what we've done is said like you have to throw the enlightenment out the window to if you want to get there that's a really good point it's like I'm gonna deduct you if you can either be a liberal or a complete class-based person who endorses monarchy and I do I do more or less agree with that at least among the choices presented one is very obviously preferable and that's that's the the liberal alternative but there are a lot of choices that aren't presented you could be a non-cognitivist about self ownership you could just say look ownership is not a thing that apportains to people just like it doesn't appertain to numbers you can't own five right now you can't own you can't own the Pythagorean theorem yeah and there's a footnote here where apparently he did get someone to read the manuscript because it says professor George Mavrodes of the department of philosophy of the university of michigan go Wolverines says also you could it could just be the fact that nobody owns anyone you know themself or anyone else right and then then Rothbard answer is kind of infuriatingly since ownership signifies range of control this would mean that no one would be able to do anything and the human race would quickly vanish and I before before we we sat down I I sort of dug into this a little bit and here here's how David Gordon writes about this he says quote in the way Rothbard is using the term human beings must be owned on a quote and then there's a footnote that says this usage of ownership is quite common among the Austrian school of economics see Mises socialism and then Mises says we're kind of a little deep down the rabbit hole here but Mises says regarded as a sociological category ownership appears as the power to use economic goods an owner is he who disposes of an economic good thus the sociological and juristic concepts of ownership are different and then a little farther down the significance of the legal legal concept of property lies just in this that it differentiates between the physical has and the legal should have there's a lot of there's a lot of trouble with this though because yes it's true that ownership signifies a range of control but lots of other things signify a range of control as well I could rent a car and then I control it but I don't own it we have some I could have some temper a type of possessory right in it somewhat somewhat more horribly I could take people as slaves and then I have control over them am I the rightful owner of them no of course not I like this point so so that's interesting that this is a new thing that I hadn't really thought of with reading that that you could just say no you're wrong like ownership like so no one owns anyone like I'm going to redefine I you know hypothetical philosopher a I'm going to redefine ownership as a term that means not just that you have control which is kind of interesting because then like maybe people with Tourette's don't own themselves or something like this well I have allergies and you know that means I don't fully control myself either I mean there's there's an enormous problem here yeah not just that you have control but there is a that there's a moral right or some sort of component to the fact that you you own yourself and so maybe you could just you could actually coherently disavow owning yourself by redefining what ownership is as a moral right to do with what you want and since you don't have that then the ownership resides in something else like maybe collectively or with the state but I'm saying that's a different like ownership is not controlled if it if he's in a sort of stick to control then that's one way well the problem is he doesn't right it is going all the way back to like chapter six even and up through this point he he he seems to be tacitly and sometimes even explicitly equivocating between like just control as in like property right and just control simplicity right and you know I'm not the first person to make this observation but I think it's it's important that we bring it up that sometimes like you can read something Rothbard says and it's a and you think to yourself okay that can't possibly be right but if you if you just read him his meaning ownership is just control then it makes sense right but it then oftentimes it doesn't actually get him where he wants to go well yeah I mean there's a Venn diagram and and the big the big circle is is control and the somewhat smaller circle that only partially overlaps with that is ownership there are times when I have both ownership and control and there are times when I just have control and there are times when I just have ownership without control it's it's only in a very very limited sense that I control the shares of stock that I own I can sell them I can give them I can bequeath them when I die but you know how much do I actually control the company I can vote you know when a shareholder vote comes up but that's now not a whole lot of control so at this point then Rothbard makes an argument that he pulls from insights Oppenheimer that there are really only two ways for someone to acquire the wealth and resources they need to live that they can they can produce it themselves or they can coercively expropriate it from others and this is where he makes another version of his universal ethic argument because what he says is that because we need to produce in order to live we come into a world that's not set up for us to just live without producing anything that parasitism is not a universal ethic if everyone was a parasite we'd all die and and so we need to all produce and that that's the ethical thing to do well so there's two things to say about this I think the first is is like it's it's just obviously false that any behavior which isn't universalizable is wrong right like the fact that if I flooded the earth we would all die doesn't mean that irrigating some crop lands is wrong the fact that you know everybody shouldn't become a barber doesn't mean that being a barber is wrong but yeah and this is this is really a it's a bastardization of Kant you know Kant did not say that everyone has to be some sort of a universal man and do a little bit of everything what he was saying is that a a maxim behind someone's action ought to be universalizable it ought to be something you could will that everyone desired likewise and that's not everybody needs to be a barber that would be something much more like everyone needs to make an honest living or have the ability to make a choice to be things of which one of them could be a barber and it's more universalizable than than that but like I mean and the universizability or just the basic ownership and voluntary exchange and self ethic of the whole thing so so it's it's a little bit different but I think Rothbard survives here because I could will that everyone made an honest living I could not will that everyone would be a parasite but his criteria isn't could we will this it's going back to his prolonging of life basis for ethics which is that in order to prolong your life you need to produce and so therefore being a parasite you can't goes against this life prolonging thing which it seems if I'm understand correctly it seems just not true I mean we can we can first off there's historically lots and lots of examples who people who lived extremely long lives off the backs of others and and secondly we can possibly imagine you can see this in the animal kingdom equilibrium's that settle in perfectly well with as long as a certain percent of people don't cheat then a certain percent can get away with it and everything's hunky-dory so it's not it's not clear why according to this life is the standard of value ethic we must get to production only and not parasites I fully agree if if that's the basis of the of the ethics here there's a problem if you are going to take the universizability criterion as your your standard of value first of all you have to look at maxims you have to be you have to be more properly content and then and then you can't say prolonging life is the standard of value rather you would have to say something like having a good and consistent and rational will is the standard of value and can you will something consistently and rationally and if you can't do that then you have to give up on it as a maxim but that's a different ethical system entirely yeah I mean I think that the distinction he makes between parasitism and production in exchange is is a good one and I think also that it's true that we like production in exchange and we don't like parasitism in whatever forms it may take unless you're a parasite well yeah but we're not yes well no here's the thing though even even parasites won't imagine don't like other parasites right it's one of the like I'm sure Aaron has a great example of a Greek person who said that that the case is that you know justice is just whatever is good for me right yeah well that's I mean that that's the the Oppenheimer thing here is yeah I mean Oppenheimer is very explicit about it and again like Rothbard is getting at something interesting what he needs more is a better theory of universalizability about why and which basically is that it is like and I think Grant's observation that like he's sort of saying either ditch liberalism like he's like pushing back against the you know either ditch the Enlightenment or get on board with me but if you were going to start even at a further degree is like this is why any political system has to be universalizable within these constraints I don't I think he missed that step and if you get hit that's I was like this is why people can't rule over other people even if they are smarter and Hohenzollern I think what he's trying to do like less than he's like assuming that you think that being a parasite is bad being Hohenzollern is bad right and I think what he's what he's trying to do is like he's drawing this line and showing that this this thing that many people defend is actually on the bad side of the line yes so we ran this risk when we started and it looks like it's come to pass that we have all overestimated our focus and brevity and have I never overestimated my brevity run into our our episode length limit while only making it through chapter 8 instead of the planned chapter 13 so with that in mind I think we will have to add another Rothbard episode to our plan which will come I assure you much quicker on the heels of this one than this one came on the one before it so tune in smash this date actually just dismantle it carefully so nobody gets hurt thank you for listening free thoughts is produced by ebb and banks and mark mcdaniel to learn more find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org