 Hello. Good evening, everybody. Can everybody hear me? Okay, we have about eight people right now, pretty low number given the previous classes. I don't know. Is there a football game on or something? Or are people getting burned out on this? I thought maybe so. That's why I offered last time. I wanted to find out whether people wanted me to do a sixth lecture, and some people did. We'll be doing just to keep everyone up to date who hasn't heard this yet. We're going to do a sixth lecture next Monday, a final lecture, like an extra lecture, just because there's so much material and I wasn't able to cover everything. This is the last set of slides I'll use, and it's got like 80 or something slides. What I did was I put a lot of material in there, a lot of links for you guys to whoever's interested in seeing what the other issues are that we don't have time to cover. I have a lot of links. You can follow them on your own later. So let's get started. I hope I am recording now. It says I'm recording. Danny is having technical problems, so Danny is not on right now. He started it, but then he got kicked off. So let's get going. What I'll do is I'll use these slides for this lecture and the next lecture, and wherever I stop this time, I'll pick up next time. And for the final test, which I'll start trying to finalize the next week or so, I'll only cover what we cover up to the end of the lectures today, just because some people may not be able to attend the final lecture. All right, so let's get going. Before we start, if anyone has any questions, go free to hit me with them now or as I start going here, but I'm going to start now. Someone asked about immigration. I had this further down. I moved up a set of slides early, so let's go ahead and talk about them now before we rejoin where we left off last time. There are sort of two aspects to what you might regard as a controversy about immigration. Number one is what should the policy be of a state? And really, and the other would be what are different anarchist views on this, because the first question is really, to my mind, not that controversial, primarily because I'm an anarchist libertarian and I really don't see very good arguments for menarchy. Really the only way to support the idea of immigration policy and even citizenship is to believe in a state. Only a state can enforce these laws. And to be honest, I find it hard to see how you could oppose some immigration policy if you are a menarchist, that is, if you're not an anarchist. If you believe the government's justified at all, even a minimal state, then the government is some agency with some legitimate authority over a given territory, and it's got authority over the residents or citizens of that area. So it has to have some way of defining who's there and the borders of that country have to be defined. There are some menarchists like Jacob Hornberger, who I believe is against all immigration controls, even though he's a menarchist. I don't know if that position is very coherent because, again, once you admit the government should exist, it's like saying you believe in the government but not taxes or you believe in the state but not it's abusing its powers or you believe in the state but not it's defending and defending and protecting the borders and defining who are citizens. It's just not realistic. So I don't see how you can support or oppose immigration laws in a principled way if you're not against the state as well. So that's my take on that. The other controversy would be, you know, most anarchists, I think, would have to say they're against immigration control because they don't believe in the state. There has been a controversy in a few years ago, maybe a dozen years ago, centered around some so-called paleo-libertarians or Hans-Hermann Hoppe and people like him. And that's engendered some controversy. So let me discuss that. But let me first back up a little bit and talk about, Hoppe has had a critique of democracy. He's got a book called Democracy, The God That Failed. And what he argued there was that contrary to sort of the assumed notion of a lot of even radical libertarians like Rothbard and Mises, we cannot assume that the move in the world from monarchies like in the early 1800s, 1900s to democracy was progress. In other words, the common story, it goes that democracy is of course imperfect and not the same as an anarchist society or even a monarchist society. But it's closer to it than monarchy was. And monarchy is closer than some feudalist society or even especially totalitarianism. So you have a spectrum of types of governments. And the view is this sort of what we call the wig, a WHIG theory of history that we always have progress over time. And so when in the Enlightenment time and after World War I, the monarchy, the traditional monarchies of the European world were overthrown and largely replaced by democracies in England and Germany and Russia, et cetera, or things other than democracies, but which have now become democracies. So basically had a wide scale movement of replacing monarchy with democracy. So the assumption has been that this has been progress because of the wig theory of history. We always are getting better. We were informed by individualism and the Enlightenment. And so replacing monarchy with democracy is an improvement even though it's imperfect. So Hoppe's argument is that this is not necessarily so. There are many systematic reasons why democracy is even worse than monarchy. I mean, the simplistic presentation of it is the idea that if you had a monarch, a limited monarch, not a dictator but a monarch in control of a country, in a sense the entire country is his property. By the way, in a recent talk Hoppe gave two, I think I've published it, it was either on Mises.org or on Libertarian Papers, my journal. He argued that, see, this is a brief aside. I remember now, the paper is about the Malthusian Trap. It was about how we got out of the Malthusian Trap. I think it's on his website. I had a blog post about it. If you're curious, go to SteffenCancella.com. We just searched for Hoppe and Malthusian Trap and you'll find this blog post. Maybe someone can blog it while I'm talking. It's a recent paper, and a recent presentation of his. Sorry. He's got a paper too. I don't think the paper's published. In that presentation Hoppe argued that he was talking about around 1800 there was a radical increase in productivity and living standards in the world. That was the sort of industrialization of the world. And scientists have been wondering for a couple centuries now what gave rise to this. And the standard explanation is that we had stronger protection of property rights, more institutionalized property rights. But Hoppe's argument is that this cannot be the answer because this is actually not true. There was not a radical change in protection of property rights around 1800. Thank you, Cam. That is the post. Yeah. If anyone's interested, go to that post and it will discuss and link to a video by Hoppe discussing what I'm talking about now. Actually, that may be an old one. That may be a newer one. That's a 2009 post. I think I did something just a couple months ago about this. So maybe another search for Malthusian Trap and Hoppe on my site. In any case, Hoppe's point was that actually under feudalism, property rights were in a lot of ways more secure than they are now. And my point only there was that even the idea that a feudalist order was worse than democracy is actually wrong as well, arguably, at least in many respects. So the point is we can't assume that different types of social orders throughout history are always worse the older they are. feudalism might have been better than what we have now in some ways. And monarchy was certainly better than what we have now in many ways, not in every way, but in some ways. Tony Cape says he's having trouble with audio. There is a way to fix that, Tony, but maybe Cam can tell you or maybe he can talk to Danny offline. Danny's offline right now and he can get you the instructions. You're supposed to – anybody who can't hear me right now, this is pointless. So, Cam, maybe you can help Tony Cape get back on his audio working. Okay. So my point here is Hans's basic theory here is that we have to reevaluate the relative merits of monarchy and democracy. And as Hoffa points out, even Mises and Rothbard, even Rothbard, the radical anarchist Rothbard, has sort of the American pro-American, pro-Western, pro-modern times soft spot for democracy. They sort of assumed that it was an improvement as well. Okay. Sorry. We turn this ringer off. Hold on a second. Now, to be clear, this is another controversy. You'll hear sort of modern libertarians who are sort of the cosmopolitan types who have an axe to grind about Hoffa for a variety of reasons. They'll basically slur him and say, oh, he's ridiculous. He's in favor of monarchy. Clearly, he explicitly says he's not in favor of monarchy. He's just pointing out the relative merits of monarchy and democracy and trying to basically use monarchy as a criticism of democracy to show that as unlibertarian and unideal as monarchy was, the move to democracy was even worse in many ways. It makes the government worse because a monarch that sort of has ownership of the country has an incentive to take care of its property. Whereas in democracy, you have short-term leaders. They come in for two, four, six years, eight years, maybe the most. And so they have an incentive to rob the future for their personal current benefit. They have the short-term orientation. So we have an explosion of legislation and regulations. We have special interest wars. We have the growth of the state. The state has grown tremendously in the U.S., for example, since the size of the U.K. government, or the Great Britain government, that we were eroded from in the late 1700s under King George. So we went from monarchy to democracy, but we're much worse now in terms of government, tyranny, and taxation and regulation than we were under monarchy. Now modern monarchies are bad, too. Well, there aren't really many modern monarchies. They're usually dominated by the legislatures, parliaments. So there are more figureheads now anyway. Okay. So with that in mind, let's talk about this, too. So what he does is he probably uses this model of – he's really talking about second-best policies. Like if we have a modern democratic welfare state society, then of course the most ideal option would be to abolish it, right, and to move towards an anarchist private property society. But you can also ask the question, well, given that we have an imperfect social democratic welfare state, what should its policy be? Or what should our priority be in reforming laws? So for example, we definitely want to get cut back on war. We want to cut back on the drug war. We want to reduce government spending. We want to reduce taxation. But one way to sort of get an idea of what a better policy would be when you have a second-best or even third-best question, like given that there is an immigration service in place, given that we have limitations on citizens who can immigrate into the country. And these rules are set by a democratic government. And we know that the democratic government tends to make even worse decisions than a good monarchy would tend to do. Then we can imagine what would a monarch do in this situation and say that, well, if the democratic state would emulate the decisions a monarch would make, then it would tend to be more like a monarchy would, which is less far away from the ideal society. So this is Hoppe's view about immigration. His view was that if you had a monarch, okay, let me turn to the next page. This stuff, I'll have to skip this stuff here. The stuff on pages three and four on discrimination and diversity. If anyone has any questions about it, I'll be happy to talk about this too. But this stuff here on pages three and four is basically about his views about covenant communities and the different types of restrictive covenant communities. Private little societies or towns you would have with their own private rules in a free market. You'd have conservative ones, family and faith-based ones. You would have the Greenwich Village type things of homosexuals and other things. So you'd have a diversity, although you would tend in Hoppe's view to have natural elites and conservative norms be the norm. But anyway, so here in immigration, Hoppe simply says the monarch would tend to allow people in for temporary purposes like migrant workers, but he would also tend to have quality controls over who could immigrate into the country and live there in the long term and change the character of the country because if he has bad quality control, then over time the character of the country is changed or made worse and his wealth goes down. So he has an incentive to choose people based upon quality, which means you would not let criminals or if you were the monarch in charge of immigration policy, you would tend to dissuade criminals and deadbeats and low-lifes and people like that into the country. And you would tend to welcome people that would be productive, that is, they could perform some useful tasks. In other words, someone who has a job waiting for them or someone who is employable. And so Hoppe's comment basically is that if a democracy, instead of just opening its doors within purely numerical limitation based upon statistics, if it would have some other kind of limitation like allow people in that were employable or that had resources, so that would be closer to what a monarch would do. And presumably it will be a policy adopted by the state that is closer to what a monarch would do and probably closer to what the ideal anarchist society would be. And the ideal anarchist society is the idea that every piece of property is private property and every person can invite someone onto their property, but on the other hand no one can immigrate into a country unless they have an invitation because every piece of property they might step on, even the roads are privately owned and they have to have some private owner's invitation. And this is similar to or approximates or rather what the monarch would do, approximates this because the monarch would only invite people into the country that he basically owns if he wanted to, if he had a good reason to, if they were employable or had means or were decent people. So Hoppe's argument is simply that the immigration policy of the central democratic state, if it's going to have an immigration policy ought to resemble that rather than what it is now. So there's been a lot of controversy about this on the grounds that this is racist because he doesn't want, he thinks the policy ought not to favor to change the ethnic composition of the country on purpose. So he's just against the government with artificial immigration policy engaging in social meddling, you know, so I don't really see why that's that controversial. And in fact, most people like Don Routro, who have criticized Hoppe for this, are not usually for completely open borders, or they are closely allied with a lot of menarchists and Cato-type people that are also menarchists and for reasonable border controls but not for open borders. So it seems like a strangely selective attack on Hoppe, given that they or their friends are also for the state imposing restrictions on immigration. And Hoppe is not really for restrictions on immigration. He's just argued what a better policy would be if the state is going to have it because it would be closer to what a monarch would do. But it's not even his first best choice. He's an anarchist and he wants the decision to be devolved and decentralized, not the feds but down to the states and then down to towns and communities and then ultimately down to the individual. So his entire push is to find a way to decentralize the state and have authority devolve more and more locally and finally down to the individual level. So I don't really honestly see what's that controversial about it. Jackson asks, substitute Covenant communities for monarchy and any group could be excluded. I don't understand the question. Well, Covenant communities don't own the country, if that's what you're asking. They're only a group of people who live in a small area who have all agreed to certain rules, like in a small neighborhood when you sign onto a restrictive Covenant. What he's imagining is that in a given society, you could have, in a given society, a small area you could have rules that everyone's agreed to, but they wouldn't be open-ended rules. But theoretically, sure, the rules could be anything. They could say no gays, no blacks allowed, no Protestants allowed, a Jewish community could say no Christians allowed. Just like women's advocacy groups now or gay advocacy groups now tend to be constituted by women or gays, et cetera. Is the Covenant community equivalent to a monarchy at the local level? No, I don't think it's equivalent. A monarch basically is a ruler who owns the property. A Covenant community is a collection of private owners who have just agreed to a certain set of rules that limits their property rights in a few well-defined ways. There's not really a legislator or a king or a sovereign. It's an anarchist society or it's an anarchist situation. So no, there's no government at all. There's no state. There's no democracy. There's no king. There are some things similar, of course, but you could say the same thing about some person owning a house or the owner of a mall. They do have the right to set rules on their own property. But in the Covenant community, I don't think you imagine that it's like a thousand square acres owned by one person who is the king. Rather, it's just a bunch of privately owned plots, but they've all agreed certain rules. Just like in my neighborhood, I can't paint my house purple and gold to celebrate LSU. I'd have to get permission of my neighbors to do that because it violates some things like that. But it also points out there would be tons of trade between these groups. I mean, you could have an Israeli group next to a Palestinian group and they would trade all day long. They would benefit from trade, but there's a difference between people passing borders and goods passing borders, according to Hoppe. The goods don't have any rights. The goods can't commit aggression. The goods don't have the right to vote. The goods don't commit crimes, et cetera. Jackson has a question about wouldn't the Covenants pass with a transfer of the land? The subsequent transferes would be bound by the previous Covenants. Yes, they would, but they still are limited Covenants. The way I think of Covenants is its co-ownership. So imagine two people who live next to each other. So A owns Blackacre and B owns Greenacre. Well, each one is the owner of those tracks, but they could make an agreement with each other that each one has a limited, well-defined veto right over the other's use of their property for certain defined purposes. Like, they might each agree that the other person, neither one of us can use our property for commercial purposes without the other's permission. And then you could put in some rule saying that, and you can't sell your property unless you get your buyer to agree to this rule, too. That's how you get that to work. At any point in time, if both property owners agree to get rid of that restriction, they could do it, just like they imposed it in the first place. So sure, that's how restrictive Covenants work. But they don't empower a king or a monarch at all. Okay, so I think this is the immigration issue. And people have questions about it. This is the controversy about it. Should we have a state or not? And if we do, then they could impose immigration controls. But the better argument in my view is that no state is justified, partly because they would impose immigration controls. So the better view is that the entire INS should be abolished and there should be no border controls. Immigration is a good thing. But that it is true that having a democratic state in place that limits immigration like we have now, they tend to adopt criteria that would be less ideal than the criteria adopted by a monarch with a longer term view of the country's wealth. Okay, so that's the basic view. I'm going to slides. Let's try to set it. Let me just read this quote at the very bottom just to make it clear that despite accusations of the contrary, Hapa is not in favor of the United States federal government limiting immigration. He says, the power to admit or exclude should be stripped from the hands of the central government and reassigned to states and provinces, cities and towns, villages, residential districts, and ultimately down to private property owners and voluntary associations. So he's just trying to decentralize and push this decision-making down to the individual level, which means everyone owns their own property and can choose to admit people who are invitees or not. So when you have a decentralized anarchist society, you would not have immigration in today's sense. All right, let's go to slide 8. Now, I said skip these slides last time to get to an issue someone had questions about. So let me return to these. I had discussed a little bit in the lecture before last, and you guys had asked me questions about it. We've discussed most of this already, but let me get to some of the things here. So we discussed the issue of whether the boss or someone who incites or induces someone to commit a crime. So think of the boss as the person who indirectly committed the crime or did he at the question. But there was another person in between who directly committed the crime. And as I discussed the last lecture or one before, the criticism has been that some libertarians are afraid to impute liability to the boss because they want to attribute liability to the middleman, the direct actor, and they're afraid that there's like a 100% fixed-piece pie of liability and they've got to divvy it up. Well, of course you don't. You can have what's called joint and several liability, which means the victim can pursue either one of the co-conspirators for 100% of the damages. And the point here is that most people recognize a conspiracy like, say, three people robbing a bank or two people robbing a bank and one being the getaway car driver, but they recognize them as co-conspirators. But there's no reason that you can't have temporal co-conspirators. So one guy does one part like the guy who orchestrates it and plans it, and then his henchmen go out and rob the bank and then the getaway driver picks them up. They're all co-conspirators, even though their actions happen at separate points in time. There's no reason to restrict it this way, especially if you're in Austria and you recognize the importance of the division and specialization of labor in the cooperative market, right? People use each other for means all the time. One means I have to get a cake is to bake it. Another is to hire a baker to bake it for me. So I'm using him as my means. Well, bad guys use other people as means, too. In effect, imagine I send a letter bomb through FedEx to some innocent victim. So the FedEx guy carries the bomb to the victim and the explosion kills them. By the reasoning of the people who were afraid to attribute liability to the boss, unless he either coerces or has a contract, so-called, with the middleman, with the direct actor, you'd have to let them both off because the FedEx delivery guy had no intention of doing anything evil, and the guy who delivered the bomb to FedEx didn't deliver a bomb to the victim. He just gave it to FedEx, and there's an intervening act of will, they would say. So you'd have to let them both off. Or you'd have to say the FedEx guy's liable, even though he had no intention of trying to hurt anyone, and the boss still gets off. So it's totally confused. The best way to look at it is simply look at someone's action in the human action context. That is, according to Praxeology, the Misesian framework of action, where every action is understood as the manipulation by a human with his body of some scarce means, or some means in the world, something that can causally achieve some desired end. So a crime can be understood as the action of a human employing a means that is causally efficacious. That means it actually causes some end where the end is an invasion of the body or property or the, you know, unconcerned to use of the property or body of some victim, some other party. And because we can use other humans' means, just like the FedEx example shows, there's no reason to have these artificial criteria that Walter Block has that you can only attribute liability when the boss coerces the middle man or has a contract with him. As I mentioned last time, these are just arbitrary ad hoc exceptions that don't really have an over, you know, an underlying theme. And the contract idea is un-Austrian because it focuses on payment of money, but payment of money is not special. It's just something people value subjectively, but they value other things too. So if a woman pays a hitman to kill her husband, that's a one way of attributing responsibility to her, according to Block and the hitman as well. If she seduces her lover or promises him favors of sex or just affection but persuades him to kill her husband, she has still had the end of her husband being killed in mind and she employed a means calculated to achieve it, which is she has used another person by persuading them to do it. Now, you could have judgment calls and gray areas and continuum issues and cases that's hard to decide. And none of the cases that Rothbard would reject that he says are incitement, I would tend to agree that, you know, if you write an article saying, I disagree, I don't like, you know, I don't like brown people and I think people, and then people listen to what you say and they beat them up, you know, the chain of causation is probably too dilute. Just like Rothbard and other common law writers say with regard to a threat, right? For me, if I threaten you with injury, you're entitled to strike me first in self-defense before I hit you. So if I point my gun at you, you can shoot me first before I pull the trigger. You don't have to wait until I pull the trigger. But that's because the threat is imminent and immediate and direct. I mean, it's right there. But if I just tell you at a party, you know, I don't really like you and I might show up at your house in a year and shoot you, if you pull out a gun and shoot me now, that's not considered self-defense because the threat was not immediate and direct. Well, in a similar way, you know, if I write an op-ed, there's not really a direct and immediate link between my action and the intermediate actions of lots of other people. They have time to think. They have time to make up their own decision, their own mind. But if a woman persuades someone she has a direct relationship with, her lover to kill her husband, she could intervene at any time. She's basically literally in bed with him, but she's a co-conspirator with them, I would say. Just like, you know, likewise in certain cases of incitement, I think there could be liability. So for example, if the – I think I gave the example last time, you know, if you see a crowd getting stirred up because there's a rumor going around that some poor white woman was, you know, raped by this rampaging black guy, you know, and you see a guy you know to be innocent and you tell the crowd, there he is. Go get him. Well, and if you sit back and let them lynch the guy, I think you've played a callable role in his death. And I think you've helped to commit murder. So I would call that incitement. And I think so in some cases, incitement can be proximate enough or can be immediate and direct and close enough to make you responsible. So this is the one problem I have with the Rothbardian and Block approach is I think it's too mechanistic. They basically say, look, incitement is never liable – you're never liable for mere incitement. Well, I think that it's a judgment call and it's a gray area and it's a continuum issue. And some cases I think it is close enough. Tony says, the preacher says, breath of the sea who removes sinners from the earth and the fire within kills someone who's immoral. Is the preacher guilty of murder? Is that an immediate and direct connection? I mean, I can't answer these questions myself. I think what you would have is you would have basically jurors or justice communities in a libertarian society trying as best they could to make that determination. And I would tend to go by their understanding of what these relationships are like. I mean, are these people really led by the guy? Was he pointing out a concrete victim actually? My gut on that is no. He's very immoral, but I don't think he's quite to the line because there's enough time intervening people can make up their own mind. And the way you described it, he's giving general advice. You know, just like if he said, I think we should vote socialists. I mean, you're doing something on the edge, I believe, of being a threat to others but not quite because the final evil act is when you vote for a socialist or when the socialist legislator gets in office and votes for bad laws, or when someone takes a job with the government and helps to enforce those laws. Or especially, in my view, as I mentioned previously, when a juror on a case in a common law system like the U.S. has where there is double jeopardy, that is the jury basically has carte blanche to vote to acquit someone if they don't believe they should go to jail because they oppose the law to legitimacy. In that case, there's no excuse whatsoever for the juror to vote to convict someone of a drug crime or income tax evasion. At that point, there's no excuse. Anyway, that's my take on this. And there's another similar thing Rothbard does and blocked to. In Rothbard's contract theory, which I think is largely correct and revolutionary, he says that what he does, he does something similar to this thing where he says, mirror incitement is not enough, where he defines the category of incitement and then just says there can never be causation or responsibility if you're merely inciting, where I would say it's a judgment call. If you have a more general theory of human causation, then in some cases it could be, like the example I gave. Or the other example I gave, like the captain of a fiery squad who just says, ready, aim, fire. And then 12 guys lower their guns and shoot some guy. I mean, he calls the guy to be shot, so did the shooters, but sure he's a cause. He does something similar in the contract case where he says that a promise could never be binding. And he doesn't go into a lot of detail about this, but what he does say is that, first, the standard theory of contracts is wrong. And I agree with him on this. The standard theory of contracts is if you make a promise with certain formalities, like you give consideration or you have witnesses or whatever, or you write it down and sign it, then you've made a binding promise that is an obligation that's now enforceable by the law. And Watford says, look, that's not the right way to look at contracts. The right way to look at contracts is not in binding promises, but as transfers of title to own property. So for him it goes back to his property theory. So there's really no obligation. There's just a way that an owner can get rid of his ownership of his property by transferring that title to someone else. So that's what contracts are. There are networks or webs of related, reciprocal, usually, and usually conditional and usually teacher-oriented transfers of title to property. So if you look at it that way, then it's not about binding promises, okay? But I think that that doesn't mean that the word promise, if it's used, can never suffice to make a contract because people use informal language all the time. And in fact, you could have a contract according to Watford's theory with no language whatsoever. So for example, you have two people who don't even speak the same language and I'm visiting France and I point to a newspaper on a newspaper stand and I hand a euro to the guy behind the stand and he takes it from me and hands me the paper. I walk away. We've had an exchange of title. I've given him title to my euro. He's given me title to the newspaper without ever exchanging a word. So the point is context, custom, language conventions determine what was meant by the actions or the words of two people. So given that people are not lawyers or not legal theorists and use words imprecisely, I think that in most cases if you say, you know, if you paint my fence, I promise to pay you $1,000, then that's just a way of saying I hereby transfer $1,000 of my future money to you conditional upon your painting my fence. I mean, it's just another way of putting it. But his few examples indicate that he sees the word promise as if the word promise is used and it means it can't be a contract. And I think that's not right. I think he's right on the substance that a mere promise is not a binding contract or promises are not contracts and contracts are not binding promises. But that doesn't mean that the word promise couldn't be used to signify a title transfer. Okay, so let's go on. Here's another one that's kind of interesting. You will hear quite often people that are opposed to libertarianism or at least opposed to a very principled property rights-oriented type of libertarianism, or even menarchists or utilitarians who are opposed to a more principled or anarchist type of libertarianism. Oh, and this also comes up in the intellectual property context. So for example, one argument against intellectual property like patents or copyrights is that if the state gives you a patent, that gives you a veto right over what I can do with my own property. So if you've given a patent on selling a certain mousetrap, then if I use my own property, like my own wood and metal, to change my property into this mousetrap design that's similar to what you have a patent on, you can stop me from selling that or even from making it in the first place. So basically you can do patent and copyright as just a reassignment of copyrights. Before you were given the patent, I had to say full ownership of my property. I could do whatever I wanted to with it. After you've given the patent, I only have limited rights in my property. I have like 99% rights in my property. You have a 1% right. You have a veto right over some uses of my property. You remember this is identical to the negative servitude idea or the restrictive covenant idea. Like I said before, if you have two neighbors, they agree with each other to give each other a limited veto right over each other's property. Like neither one of us can paint our house purple. Neither one of us can put a pigsty on our property. But those are agreed to. So I am transferring a little piece of my property to my neighbor. I'm giving him a veto right over my property. I'm the co-owner of my property now with me. I'm the predominant owner, but he's got a little bit of a right. He's got a control right. And likewise, I have a control right over his property. And we exchanged these things. I gave him a control right voluntarily in exchange for his giving me my own veto right or veto right over his property. But patents and copyrights grant these control rights to people by the state just by dictate. And I didn't grant it myself when the property owners didn't grant this negative servitude. You can look at it. So it's a taking of property. It's a limitation on my property rights. So in response to this kind of argument, you'll have intellectual property advocates or others, menarchists or utilitarians or other people who believe in a less principled view of government than some of us do. Well, property rights are always limited. Or they'll say that, you know, your property rights limit what I can do because I can't use my gun to shoot you, right? Or I can't use my gun to murder you. So they'll use this idea. They'll say, well, I can't use my gun to shoot you. Therefore, all property rights are limited. Therefore, you have no complaint about the fact that intellectual property limits your use of property. So they try to overcome this objection to intellectual property. Well, there's several things wrong with that objection. Number one, just because one limitation on property is justified like I can't use it to shoot you doesn't mean every limitation is justified. The limitation I can't use my gun to shoot you is because that use would invade your property rights. In other words, the limitation presupposes someone else's property rights. So the limitation is a consequence of property rights. Whereas my making a mousetrap does not invade your property rights. Or at least you have to show that it does. The burden of proof is on you to show that it does. For you to assume that it does is question begging because you're assuming intellectual property rights in the very argument where you try to justify intellectual property rights. Second of all, this is the fallacy I've noticed and it's implicit in almost all these criticisms and I think it's time to expose it. And my view is this. And I have blogged on this. I don't know if I have a blog post linked. Yeah, I do. Look on page 10. Let's say your rights and your gun are limited because there are some things you can't do with your gun. Well, but that's not what the rule against aggression says. The rule against aggression doesn't say you can't use your gun to murder someone. No, it says you cannot murder someone. In other words, you can't murder someone with any means. You can't murder someone with some means that's effective at doing it whether you own it or not. In other words, it has nothing to do with ownership. In other words, the limitation of aggression is not a limitation on property rights. It's a limitation on action. It just says A may not invade the borders of someone else's property. In other words, the entire rule is a respect for property rights. It simply says you be owns his property, not you. Therefore, you cannot use these property without his permission. Now, using it would be an action that employs some means. Your use could be any number of things. It could be shooting a gun into his body or watching a missile onto his property to destroy his house, to be using your hands to choke him. You don't have to use external objects that you own. You could steal someone's gun and shoot the guy with a stolen gun who someone else owns the gun. So the ownership of the object used as a means to invade someone's property is completely irrelevant. And the point is the entire limitation on action that would invade someone's property is itself based upon the inviolability of property. That is the property of the victim that you're not supposed to aggress against. So this entire criticism is completely disingenuous, I believe, and relies upon equivocation. Okay. So I think once you understand and put it this way, you can diffuse a lot of disingenuous arguments against property. So don't accept this common report that, well, property rights are always limited because you can't violate them with these property. And that makes no sense. So you're saying that because there are property rights, there are no property rights. I mean, it makes no sense. It's like the expression, you know, you're right to move your fist into where my nose begins. Well, but it's not a limitation on my fist. It's a limitation on what actions I can commit. And I cannot commit the action of using your body without your consent. This is similar to the old argument that, well, our rights are limited. That's what the status will say, right? Our mainstreamer. Well, property rights are limited. After all, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, you know, U.S. Supreme Court Justice said, no one has the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. Well, well, there's a couple of things wrong with this. Number one, as Rothbard talked about, in a private property society, someone owns a theater. And presumably all the guests are in there at the invitation of some owner. And the owner is presumably going to have certain reasonable rules of what's permitted in the property. You know, someone owning a boxing ring or a football stadium has a rule. The guys that enter this rectangular or square area are consenting to being hit by each other. Okay? So if you enter that, then you're consenting to it. You're not consenting to being stampeded when you enter a movie theater because the purpose is to have a peaceful evening with your spouse or kids to see a movie. So presumably the owner would not permit people to shout fire if there's not a fire because it would cause injury to people. So you don't need to limit property rights. You just need to respect property rights. And if you respect property rights, you recognize the owner of property sets the rules. And if someone violates that rule, then they've acted – they're basically trespass. They use the property that they're a visitor on without the permission of the owner for that purpose. So they're actually committing an aggression. So you don't need to say there's a limit on property rights to say people can't do certain things that are themselves trespass or violation of property rights. In fact, it's because of property rights that we say they can't commit this act of trespass. They can't use this property contrary to the owner's permission and consent. So again, this is another insidious argument. Okay? Someone said, is an ownership based on the idea of who can exclude use rather than on the specific use? Yes, it's based upon the fact that we live in a world of scarcity where there are scarce resources that humans want to use productively in action, as means to action, but because they're scarce, there's only so many of them to go around. So the only way to use them productively is to have rules that specify a particular person is the one who gets to use this thing. And that's what property rules are. But it eventually says you can use this thing – you can perform any action in life that you want. We don't live by permission, right? It's not like the Soviet or the communist or totalitarian model where you have no rights to do anything except that what the government gives you permission to do. Rather, it's the other way around. You have liberty to do whatever you want except use other people's property. And of course, that means you can use your own property as you see fit. But you can't use your property or your body or other people's property as a means to attack someone's property because it's their property. So yeah, it means you can exclude other people. It means it's up to you to decide whether someone can use it. So if you have a piece of land or a car or a knife or your body, your ownership of these things means that you can get permission to other people to use those things. But if you don't get permission, if you withhold permission, they don't have the right to use your body or your property. That's basically what property is. Here's another little one. So it's good. We've had a lot of big ones. Let's take a few small ones down, or at least this one is. Even I do this sometimes. The word property is one of these words that is used in different senses. Like, you know, I'll say that this stapler is my property. It's a piece of property. That's a common way of using the word. But another way is to use it, property is the proprietary right that you have to an object, to a resource. So I think the better, more careful usage when you need to be careful is to say, I have a property in this object or in this scarce resource. So the property is a socially recognized relationship between me and the stapler. In a Crusoe society where I'm alone on a desert island, I use the stapler the same way, but I don't own it because there's no other people to recognize my right to it. I don't need a right to it. Remember, property arises because of the possibility of conflict. It's a response to that problem. If there's only one person, there can be no conflict with other people. So these things go hand in hand. Per Kajelda says, Obama, does Obama own the U.S. Army? Well, I mean, I think he has the right to direct their actions, but I would say it's more he's in collaboration with these other human beings, and he's at a certain hierarchical level above them in the chain of command, but he doesn't normally own them as slaves. And in fact, in our system, he's not an absolute dictator in his own. He's limited by checks and balances and by the other subparts of the big state. It's a network. So his power is not unlimited. So all the power to control the army is not vested in him. If he tried to use it in certain ways, he would be stopped by other people seeking power, his political enemies, et cetera, of judges and things like this. But in a loose form, yeah, he's a partial owner of the armed forces, you could say, because he has the right to control them, the right to direct their actions. But if I have a bunch of employees who I've hired to, instead of a company to make iPods, I think it's imprecise to say that I own those people. I think even if I have the practical ability to control what they do, ownership means legal title to them. It's legal title to the body of. Now, in a sense, Obama as a representative of the state is the owner of those soldiers and even us because they maintain the right to throw us in jail or to shoot holes in us if they choose to, like if we don't pay taxes or if they want to conscript us and we choose not to fight in their army. So they do claim a partial overlord status over our bodies. So yes, I do think in a way the state has partially enslaved us and regards us as slaves, although they wouldn't use that word. It's illegitimate, but yes. But since we have a volunteer army, I don't really think – there are penalties from leaving, but I think it's imprecise to say he owns the army. Tyron Price isn't saying something is mine, essentially saying it's part of me, an extension of myself. Now, I think the word mine is a possessive, right? So possessive words can be used ambiguously, so we have to be careful not to engage in equivocation in this kind of reasoning. I mean, I have a wife. I call her my wife. Does it mean I own her? No. So just because you say, but I have a body, it's my body. Do I own my body? Yes. Is it because I use the possessive word? No. I use the possessive because there's a natural connection between me as an agent, as a person, and the body that I inhabit or that I control or that I'm associated with. And that might be a rationale for saying I have the best wife to control this body, which means I am the owner of it. But just because we use possessives doesn't imply ownership necessarily. By the way, intellectual property advocates use this all the time. They'll try to get you to admit that if they write a novel, it's their novel. Well, they're playing with words. They're engaging in equivocation because when I can seed that, yes, it's your novel. All I mean is the possessive sense of recognizing attribution, like who wrote it. That doesn't mean I recognize it in our ownership sense, but they try to switch the meaning. That's what equivocation is. That's why you have to be really careful. Like these terms you're using here, it's an extension of myself. I mean, this is the kind of language Locke uses in his homesteading theory. And I think it's kind of ambiguous and vague, and this is the danger of metaphors. I mean, is it an extension of yourself? What does it mean to be an extension of yourself? That's to me not a rigorous, precise phrase. It's kind of poetic and metaphorical. I'd have to get a gist to help you kind of understand things, a good way to learn things, a good way to teach others, but you have to recognize it's not really precise and rigorous because there's no way to put an end to the extent in yourself. I mean, you know, good gates of influence extend over the whole world. So is the whole world an extension of itself? Steve Jobs had iPods and iPhones and millions of people's hands. Was that an extension of himself? I don't know. I mean, it depends on what you mean by extension of yourself. Okay, let's move on to slide 12. This is a good definition. I tend to think the civil law, which is a law in my home state, Louisiana, unlike the rest of the U.S., which is common law, and civil law is a law of most of Europe, too, France, Spain, Holland, Greece, Italy, even Scotland. Their terms tend to be better. I believe they're legal concepts. And this is a well-known civil law legal theorist from Louisiana, Neonopolis, the Greek guy. And he has a really nice, he's not a libertarian, but he has this nice almost Austrian libertarian definition of property as being an exclusive right to control and economic good, which is something that has value. There's value by people, just like the Austrian idea of subjective value. And because people want to use them as means of action, they are regarded as scarce, scarce resources. So this is good. This is a nice, simple, concise way of understanding what property is. Okay. All right, it's three minutes to the hour. Let's take a break right here and come back in about five past. I'm going to pause the recording and I'll see you guys at five past the hour. Okay, it's five past. Okay, so let's resume. Can everybody hear me? Okay. Say hello, Ethan. Yeah, you can have that with some milk. All right. So this one, let me go over this one fairly quickly because this is a fairly complicated issue. I find it interesting. I have a blog post about it. You guys would check out here, but I'd rather have more time for some of the shorter issues. But this is something that has intrigued me for 15 years. I've always sensed that there's some connection. Well, in fact, ontology, right? Mostly we might know of ontology. Ontology is a philosophical branch that deals with the types of things that exist, right? And then there's a branch of ethics called deontology or deontological arguments. And you would think there's some connection between them, but apparently there's not. Deontology comes from some root or something that has nothing to do with the word ontology used. In other words, it's just a coincidence that trips you up. Well, likewise, there's something called legal positivism and there's also something called logical positivism. And I always wondered if there's a connection between them or if it's just a coincidence that they have the word positive as part of the name of these doctrines. The more I think about it, the more I think there is at least some kind of connection, a loose connection. It's probably too hard to go into here, but in brief, legal positivism is the idea that, well, there's two aspects to it. People that believe in natural rights, libertarians that believe in what they call natural rights, tend to say, or natural law, tend to say that they're opposed to legal positivism. And legal positivism is the idea that you can have a separation of law and morals. Now, this is another one of these metaphorical sayings that I think means almost nothing. Separation, you can't separate things except physical things or it's not clear what this even means. The reason it's not clear is because people that debate this were not libertarians. So they tend to become positivists in the legal sense that as a faking of law is emanating from some sovereign, some lawgiver, and nowadays that's the state. I think I've already mentioned some of this. I did mention logical positivism so quickly. So they believe that the state is the issuer of law. But once you start believing that, you really have no basis to criticize law on outside standards, although they do it anyway. So they're a little bit incoherent. Libertarians should have no trouble with admitting this is a law, this is not a law. I freely admit that it is against the law to evade income tax. I freely admit that in the United States it is against the law to sell cocaine. I have no problem separating law from morals in that sense of legal positivism because I have a framework that informs me I don't need the state to tell me what the law is. Since it's not my only framework, I am perfectly comfortable admitting that this is a law, but it's an immoral law. It's a bad law in comparison to my ideal system of law, which is a set of laws that enforce libertarian rights. So basically, you have an ethical framework that you can use to compare law to. How you identify something as a law is a totally different thing. That's just trying to find whether there's some legal rule that's actually widely enforced in a given legal system. It doesn't imply that you think it's legitimate. It's almost like the legal positivist and the natural law types are afraid that if you admit something is a law, then you're granting it some kind of power. You're admitting that it's legitimate. That's because natural law thinkers I think have not been quite libertarian and they don't have as solid of a grounding as we do in a totally ethics-based legal template or legal system. Also, a lot of natural lawyers, as I mentioned last time, tend to be religious and believe God is the source of law. So they do believe ethics has a source. They think there's a law giver. They just push it back a level and they think it's some mystical source. Now, it's a hard divine source. Now, this is probably preferable because for a couple reasons. Number one, God has thought of as being good and different than humans. So it would be better if he was decreeing law than a legislature. And number two, in my view, no matter what your religious views are, religions tend to be intermixed with common sense, civilized ethics and norms. In a way, religion is used as a convenient packaging or way to codify or to teach ethics, which is why most religions, I think, teach. You should be honest. You shouldn't hurt other people. You shouldn't kill. You shouldn't murder. You shouldn't steal. So to that extent, religion is, even if you don't agree with the religious aspects of it, it's a convenient way of presenting sort of a natural morality, which is largely compatible with libertarianism. But the state's artificial morality is not. So if you had to, I think in a way, we have modern state worship. We have worship of the state by status. And they tend to be secular and atheist and reject religion. But the truth is they've substituted one religion for a new one. And in my opinion, even as a non-religious person, they've substituted an inferior, I'm sorry, they've substituted an inferior modern artificial religion, worship of the state, for a traditional organically developed religion, which at least has some libertarian aspects to it in its ethical teachings. So that's one criticism I think I would have. Magical positivism is this idea that there's only one reality, that's the material reality, and all science has to be discovering causal laws. That is, the scientific method that's appropriate for physics and chemistry and the natural sciences is the only way to determine truth in other areas like teleology or economics or human interactions. So this sort of what we call scientism is a type of monism. By the way, the best source on this is Mises, the ultimate foundation of economic science. The short book, one of his later books he wrote, one of his, I think in the 80s, but it's fantastic. It's a great attack on monism and scientism and logical positivism. Now what I see is having legal and logical positivists have in common is they both deny the reality of the non-material realm, or they think there's only one realm. Whereas we, being libertarians and dualists, sort of see both ethics and law as having two realms, and the world of science as having two realms. We're dualists. That is, in the realm of ethics, we can see that there's a realm of what law is actually the government or the society is enforcing. That's positive law or actual law, coerced physical, forceful law. And then there's the realm of normative law, like what law should be in place. Because we believe in the distinction of is and ought, we have no problem talking coherently about what law should be. On the one hand, this is what the law is. On the other hand, this is what the law should be. And determining what law is, there's one way of doing that. You look around you and you see what laws are acting enforce. To determine what laws are should be, you need ethical reasoning. So there are two things. Likewise, in economics, we see that there's the realm of causality. And we study that through the empirical method of natural sciences, the scientific method. But there's also the realm of teleology, that is human action. And there we know from the inside certain things about how humans act. We know that we have certain ends. So we know the ultimate cause is actually for human action. So it's totally different. That's why, as Misa says, there can be a priori knowledge in economics. We can know for sure, apodically sure, some things about the structure of human action and other things we have to find empirically. So we distinguish. The logical positive is denies the reality of these synthetic a priori statements. They deny the entire teleological realm, or they try to study it. So they're both monists. So you see the similarity. They both deny the reality of things not connected to hard, material, forceful things. The legal positive is thinks of law as real law only if it's backed by force. The logical positive thinks a proposition has meaning only if you can measure an effect in the real world that it's with physical matter. So they're all, in a way, hyper-monist, hyper-materialist. So that's my theory. I didn't see anyone else write on it. I'm operating without a net here. That's my take on it, and that's all I'll spend on it in there. Here's another one. We talked about this before earlier, but I think I touched on it. Maybe someone can remind me. Did I talk about fraud? Anyway, let's just touch on it here. This is another one of these cases where you have to be careful of equivocation. Equivocation means using a concept or a term or a word in different ways in the same argument so that the meaning switches so that you end up proving something that you really haven't proven. So I gave an example with intellectual property. Like they'll say the word year, the possessive word, Y-O-U-R. I'll admit that, yes, that is your painting or your novel that you wrote, but that doesn't mean that you own it in a copyright sense. They try to switch from the attribution meaning to the ownership meaning. It would be like arguing, is that your wife? Yes or no? Yes. Well, then you own her. When they say you own her, they're switching to the sense of year that you would use in a possessive sense. Like, is that your car? Yes, it's my car. When you say you're there, you mean you own it. But when you say it's your wife and you say yes, you're just meaning you're identifying her as the woman who you married. It's a different meaning. You switch the terms. The same thing is done with fraud. Fraud is used in a variety of ways and it's not always done carefully. There's an article by James Child about 15, 20 years ago. Can the libertarianism sustain a fraud standard? I have it here on page 14. I'll link to it. And what he argues is, but he engages in equivocation. You have to see it, but I have a response to it. What I do is I say, listen, you can't just use the word fraud to mean dishonesty. In fact, Frank Van Dunne, who's a friend of mine, he's a great anarchist, legal theorist, a Belgian guy, he does this a little bit too in his criticism of me and Walter Block, I think, but me in particular for my intellectual property views when it comes to trademark. In any case, sometimes we use the word fraud to mean just dishonesty, right, or deception even. But in law, when we say fraud, someone was defrauded. What we mean is deception was used as a means of obtaining something of value from someone else without their really informed consent. So it's really this old common law idea of what's called theft by trick, right? So what does theft mean? That means taking someone's property. See, again, I'm using the word property to refer to the thing. Taking someone's owned resource, you could call it, which I mean property here, without their consent, right? The owner has the right to consent to who gets to use it. But the consent has to be meaningful and communicated and manifest, and it has to be not coerced, for example, right? And it has to be informed. That's why when you could send the surgery, like, let's say, to have your appendix removed, you could send to this operation. When the doctor cuts you open, he's not committing a battery on your body because you consented. But if he does while he's in there, he decides to remove your liver, or part of that too, without your informed consent, then that would be a type of tort, right? So likewise, if the consent is not really informed, then it's not genuine consent. It doesn't apply. So that's what happens when there's fraud. You use deception as a way of acquiring possession and maybe even legal ownership of someone else's owned property without their consent. Because they thought they were giving their consent, but they were doing it based upon, conditioned upon, your truthfully making certain representations that they're basing their consent on. So if you were lying to them about that, then the consent was really not effective. So you're basically taking their property without their real consent. That's why fraud is a crime, if and to the extent it is used as a type of theft by trick. But just because I admit fraud should be a crime doesn't mean every act of dishonesty should be a crime. That's a different sense of the meaning of the word fraud. So again, we have to be careful not to engage in equivocation, even unintentionally. We have to be very precise, especially when we talk about law and rights and legal policy and libertarian policy. We have to be careful to define and carefully inspect all these building block terms we're using to make our conclusions. So that's another one. Be careful how you use the word fraud. It's like the word coercion we talked about earlier. People use coercion in a loose sense. It really only means to use force to compel someone to do something, but throughout a force. But sometimes you have the right to do that. So coercion is not really equivalent to aggression. Coercion is a use of force, and all force is not aggressive force. Sometimes it's defensive or otherwise rightful. So just be careful with some of these terms. Calvin Price, I peers claim fake trademark sales are a theft of potential sales. Well, actually, I don't hear them make that claim that often. I wish they would because that would be a more honest argument. What they say is you have a right to your trademark because there's a value in your trademark and you developed it. You created it. Therefore you own it. That's their basic argument. But of course, if you point out what Rothbard has argued about defamation law, for example, the very same argument is used by people to say that their defamation law is legitimate, which means there are rights and reputation. And the same argument is used by, like Randian, the objective is they'll say that, well, you create your reputation by your hard work, and so there's an economic value in having your reputation. Therefore you have a property right in it. So both for trademarks and for reputations, the argument is there's this intangible thing that you created by your effort. You put labor into it, right? And it has value. Again, this is a non-Austrian because it's like a belief in intrinsic value, objective intrinsic value in something. Therefore you own it. Well, of course, there is no such thing as intrinsic or objective value. Valuing is more of an action. We value things by seeking to achieve them. We demonstrate that we value something by seeking for it or aiming at it in an action. So value is demonstrated, preference in value is demonstrated in action. It is not a substance or quantity in something. And if you had a value in a trademark or in a reputation, as Rockwell argues, that really means you own other people's minds because it's other people's brains and minds and opinions about you, which is your reputation. Your reputation is what other people think about you. How can you own what other people think about you? Your trademark has a value if people regard your reputation in a certain way. But it's again what other people think about you. So you can have a property right to that. So then the trademark advert will fall back on what you said, Tyron. They will say, well, of course you're harmed. You lost potential sales. It's like, well, hold on a second. It's okay to harm someone. Harm is another one of these words that's subject to equivocation. Do you mean by harm aggression or do you mean by harm someone's war soft because of something you did? Well, if I steal your girlfriend, again, the word steal is another word that's prone to equivocation. I harm you, but did I violate your rights? No. If I steal your customers by competing with you, did I violate your rights? No. Did I harm you? Yes. In one sense, I harmed you by competing with you, but that's what the market's about. I'm entitled to harm you. So likewise, in this case here, if you lose potential sales, it only harms you in a libertarian sense if you owned those sales. But the sales means money in the hands of customers. You don't own the customers, and you don't own their money. They have the right to spend it on you or not. They have the right to rely upon whatever information they want, whether it's a lie or not, to choose whether or not to give you their money. If they don't choose to give it to you, you've been harmed, but only in the same way that you've been harmed if I stole your customers away by competing. So really, trademark law is based upon the idea that you own other people's property, which you don't. Brian Mooney asks a question about conditional consent. I consent to give you a million dollars in exchange for your Picasso painting on the condition that it truly is an original Picasso versus lying, no exchange of controlled resources. Right, I agree. That's the difference. The first one would be a type of death by trick, assuming it was a false Picasso. And the second is just saying something false, which doesn't violate anyone's rights. Brian Mooney says, can value be owned? No, in fact, I've written several posts on this. There may be one in this slide. Papa has a great explanation of this, that you only own the physical integrity of the resources that you have a property right in. Because otherwise, so for example, imagine you have a house and your neighbor has a beautiful rose garden and you enjoy looking at that rose garden. And your house has a higher value on the market and a higher value to you because of the beautiful rose garden across the street. Well, if your neighbor cuts his rose garden down, then the value of your house will fall. But does that mean that he took something from you that you owned? No, obviously you don't own value in things. You own the physical integrity in the property. And that gives you the right to benefit from the fact that it has value to you or to others. But it's double-counting to say you own the value. Or it's trying to give you ownership in what other people think about it. So no, you cannot own value. And oh, so I see your example now. It's the opposite of what mine was. Your neighbor doesn't take care of his home and the market value of your home goes down. Right, you don't have a right to the market value of your home. So only if your neighbor committed some kind of trespass against your property, including a nuisance, would that be a violation of your property rights. Tyrant says jobs are not property, they're exchanges. Well, actually I don't think it is an exchange technically. I think it's called, maybe you can view it as an exchange in the economic sense. It's an exchange of money for labor services. But technically you don't own your labor. You just own your body. That gives you the ability to choose to perform an action or not to withhold actions that others might desire. So you could use that in a contract to say if you agree to pay me $1,000 a week, then I will paint your fence or I will mop your floors every night. So it's really those, I would think employment contracts are one, so they're exchanges in the economic sense, right? The shopkeeper or the employer is receiving a service in exchange for the employee receiving money. But you don't really receive service in a literal sense. I mean you don't hold it in a bucket or own it after. And the employee doesn't own the service. It's just the labor he performed with your body. Sorry about the poodles, my wife is just getting home. Legally, I think it's not an exchange. Legally, an employment contract is a one-way transfer of title. A regular exchange would be like I give you a dollar for your apple. That is a bilateral or mutual exchange, right? Two transfers happen and they're both conditional upon the other, like in the Picasso example. That's a sale. A sale means I'm transferring title to an owned object to you and you're transferring title to your money to me, or if it's a barter, a pig for a chicken, or something like that. But in an employment contract, it's actually a one-way title transfer. No, title transfer is literally just transfer of ownership from one person to another. An exchange implies there's at least two, and they're mutual. They're conditioned on each other like a sale. But if I give you a gift, like I say, here is $1,000. I give it to you. That's also a contract, okay, and it's not an exchange. It's just a one-way transfer of title. An employment contract is also one-way, but it's not unconditional. If I give you $1,000 as a gift, it's unconditional, right? If I give you $1,000 of my future money conditioned upon a certain event happening, like let's say we have a bet. I say I will give you $1,000. I will give you $1,000 if it rains tomorrow. Now, that's a perfectly legitimate contract. It's a way of setting a condition that will trigger whether or not the title to my $1,000 transfers tomorrow or not. But it doesn't mean I own the weather or that anyone owns it. It's just a way of setting a coherent, objective condition that we can determine whether or not it triggers the title transfer. But that's a one-way title transfer. So is an employment contract. The trigger is the performance of services. Now, the fact that the guy you're paying is the one performing the services doesn't mean that he owns his services or that he's exchanging them to you legally because the employer doesn't own the services after they happen. The only way to think that is to have this labor theory of value where you view labor as a substance that emanates from your body and sort of fills up the property that you mix it with and gives it an objective and transit value. You see how all these concepts are completely confused and how the non-Austrian view of the labor theory of value of Adam Smith and Eden Locke and some of his predecessors infected the Marxist and led to the Marxist theory of value and also is prevalent among mainstream economists who believe in a more objective theory of value. So all these fallacies go together politically and economically. Tyrone says, if you volunteer labor, it's one way. Well, you'd have to give me a better hypothetical. No, it doesn't have to be volunteered. It could just be, I will give you money if you perform an action. So you know that you have the ability to trigger the title transfer, so you have an incentive to do it, so you do it or you don't. Tyrone says, oh, Tyrone says, working for a food bank is volunteering. Well, that's nothing. That's no contract at all then, right? Because you're not being paid, you're not receiving any title transfer in exchange because you're doing it gratis, and you're not giving anything that you own to them either. You're doing something that they like and that they value, but you don't own your time. Tyrone says, what about your time? You don't own your time. You don't own your labor. This is a metaphor. Labor is just action. I mean, think of it instead of labor as action. Would it make sense to say you own your actions? I mean, you could say that, but it's just redundant with saying that you own your body. If you own your body, you have the right to – I think time is actually – someone said it's time of scarce resource. I think it's technically not a scarce resource in the same sense that we talk about ownable scarce resources. There we're talking about conflictability really. That is, only one person can use it at a time. Now, from the point of view of one single actor, even Robinson Crusoe on his island, time is scarce in that only – he's only got so much of it in his life, or there's so much things he can do at one time. But bananas are also scarce. But if more people show up, now there's a possibility of conflict over those bananas, right? But there's no possibility of conflict over time. I mean, anyone – there's a possibility of conflict over gravity. Time is just a sequence of events that we all experience. So time is scarce in a sense to each person, but it's not something that there's a possibility of conflict over. So it makes no sense to talk about ownership of time or ownership of actions, right? On the trademark issue, someone brought up the trademark issue about – and you can see why I brought it up here in connection to this. A lot of times the defenders of trademark – and then even copyright and patents when they confuse these things, they mix them up together – will talk about plagiarism, right? Or they'll say, if you use someone else's trademark, then you're engaged in plagiarism or fraud. So they're sort of trying to implicitly defend or justify trademark law on the idea that they are just really against the frauding customers. But if all they were in favor of was preventing the frauding of customers, we already have laws against fraud. It's already there. And in fact, trademark law would not be able to be used like it is now in cases where there is no fraud. So for example, if a fake Apple store sets up, pretends to be Apple Computer authorized, big Apple logo, still fake Apple computers, then the customers who buy that thinking they're getting a genuine Apple Computer could have a claim for fraud against the seller. And in fact, this is one reason why this is never going to be a big problem, because the only people that are going to do this are going to be fad-by-night shady operators because they're going to get sued right away. So they could never become a large, legitimate company with a high profile, able to afford retail space and a local high-dollar shopping mall, etc. So it's just a non-existent problem. The only time you're going to have these shady operators, they're almost always going to be committing this kind of fraud on consumers. In a case where other consumers should know better, you know, when the guy sells you a $20 Rolex on the street, no one is defrauded by that. They actually know they're getting a fake Rolex. And in fact, they want the fake Rolex because they can afford it. But trademark law would stop that too when there's no fraud whatsoever. So the defenders of trademark, if they're going to defend it based upon fraud, would have to say, well, then we don't need trademark law in that case. So the only case where trademark law is justified is when a consumer is actually defrauded. But in that case, we already have fraud law, so we don't need trademark law. So basically, if they're going to defend it based upon fraud, they have to admit there's no need whatsoever for trademark law. Robert Cummins, there's a conflict of time as a resource in the case of the military draft. Well, again, I think this is a metaphor. I think that we have to be careful of using metaphors which can serve to explain what's wrong with something that we see as a problem in society. And you can't take these two literally. So for example, let's suppose you spend 15 years building a business up, investing your time and effort in labor and action and sweat and tears. And you make money and you use it to buy a house. And then someone burns your house down. They destroy your house. A crime of arson. Now, you could say metaphorically that in a sense they stole your labor because your labor, or you could say they stole your time because it took you 15 years of time to achieve that house. But did they really steal your time or did they really just steal your house? I mean, you can't say they stole both. That'd be double counting. So I think stealing your time is just a way to picture in an imprecise metaphorical way the fact that aggression was committed. Likewise, when you're drafted, yeah, five years of your life are stolen from you, you could say. But that's just another way of expressing the fact that for a certain period of time the government was committing aggression against your body. I mean, you don't really own time. I mean, it's scarce in the sense that, again, you only have so much of it, but it's not something that people conflict over. But at this way, if the government could give you another five years of your life at the end somehow, does that mean that they're not stealing your time? Because you had 50 years of life left and the government enslaved you for five, but they gave you some treatment that lets you live another five years at the end. So does that mean that they didn't commit aggression because they actually didn't steal your time? So you see the problem with these metaphors is they can backfire. That makes sense to everybody, what I'm saying there? If you equate it and you take it literally and seriously, then you can basically justify kidnapping or conscription as long as there was a way to let you live longer. Let me see if I had anything more on this fraud issue here. This is another really fun one. I kind of came up with this way of looking at it too, so I kind of like this one. Well, we didn't see. We've been talking an hour and 30 minutes totally if you discount the pause. Let me ask people here. We have 17 left. I don't see people dropping off yet. I don't want to make this too long. Oh, wait a minute. Let me check my, hold on a second. I think I have to, hold on. Yeah, I've got to get off. I'm actually 10 minutes late. Danny sent me a message. He's got to use this now. So I need to stop this. So we will have a bonus lecture in one week tonight on the same date. So I will see everyone up then. I hope everyone has a good week. Feel free to email me questions or post questions on the course forum between now and next week if you have any other questions. Sorry I have to go, but I just realized that Danny needs this WebEx for someone else training or something. So good night, everyone. Have a good week, and I will see you in one week.