 If I were to do a fully detailed and systematic and try to prove every point, I couldn't do it in three hours any more than Israel Kirchner could do, his economics in three hours, or George Smith could do his history. So I'm summarizing to give you a context for the week and for further reading. I would recommend to you that you read such things as Herbert Spencer's social statics, the first edition, not the mutilated second when he revised it. There's a lot of good material in his two volume set, the principles of ethics. There's much good stuff in his book, Man Vs. the State. There's much good interesting material read in this context by Ayn Rand and her essays on the objective of ethics and man's rights. There is a considerable amount of good material in Murray Rothbard's book, The Ethics of Liberty. Although I don't think he spends as much time as he should on laying foundations. He seems too eager to get into the meat. And happily, there's a whole flock of young libertarian philosophers coming up who are beginning to treat some of these subjects in great detail with great professional acumen. And I hope that in a few years, one of them can replace me at this talk because this gets further and further away from my own areas of particular interest. Now, I want to raise the question of end state or patterns or current time slice principles. Is it a just theory? I'm going to take as our model here, egalitarianism, the view that people should have equal wealth, equal shares, that sort of thing. And I'm going to build on that as best I can and try to show you how really it is an incoherent approach to a view of ethics and justice. Okay? Is it a coherent or a just theory? The question that I wish to throw before you is whether or not such a static theory can be coherent in a dynamic world. Now, we went through really what I was talking about in terms of what is justice and property rights. Suppose then, let's assume that some end state oriented person could achieve or could have achieved on this planet or this country a distribution of wealth that they would regard according to their pattern theory as just. What would happen? Well, people have different expectations, different value systems, different approaches to life. And so I put it to you that if everyone started out with equal shares and stocks or so on and so forth, that they would use this in divergent ways and that the outcome would upset the pattern. Notice it calls this how liberty upsets patterns. So we're gonna look at it a little bit more detail in about two or three minutes. But I'm going to point out a difficulty that there is with this theory, this pattern end state, current time slice view of justice. Suppose we have equal distributions of wealth. What we mean by justice is that a person is entitled to do what he wishes with whatever is justly his, right? It's a common sense notion of justice. If it's justly yours, you're entitled to use control and dispose of it as you would. Because of differences in human evaluations, expectations, some people would consume the wealth quickly. Others might invest it. In other words, they do different things with it. Some people would exchange for others for the sake of short-term gratification rather than for the pursuit of a long-term goal. The result of this would be over a period of time in a dynamic world that that pattern would change. And the state of affairs that would exist would no longer fit that particular pattern. Now the question is, would this outcome be just or not? And no longer is just according to the principle of the end state theory. The pattern is no longer just because it changed. What started out as equal became unequal. And incidentally, I put it to you that one of the strengths of Austrian economics in dealing with dynamic functioning changing world is really that it understands that you can't even define wealth in such a way that you could have such a thing as an equal distribution of wealth. Because by wealth, we mean things people use to achieve purposes. And purposes are subjective, individual, personal, contextual. It's not as though there is a physical thing that can be distributed equally to produce equality of ownership of material goods. The concept makes no sense. But you begin with equality. You begin with this Robespierre of equality, achieving equality in some sense that's meaningful to him. Equal shares and ownership of companies, equal distributions of plots of land. Again, you can't even have equality. It's really meaningless. I want to make that point very clear because one person, a plot of land on an ocean would be far superior than to an inland plot of land while to another person who perhaps experiences agoraphobia or other things, a plot on the ocean or any wide open space would be perceived as a negative thing. So if you can't define equality, you've got a problem to start with in trying to get your equal distribution of wealth, okay? But let's grant them that. You get it and then people do things, they change. They do things with what they justly own. They change it, give it away. Some person is trying to win over a beautiful young woman. He's old, he's going to die, he has this wealth, he uses it short term to impress someone to achieve this result. Other people who are very young and they're going to live a long lifespan or so they hope so they invest. Wisely they think. The outcomes then are unequal. Now I'm going to maintain that this is the reason why this view of justice is incoherent because we began with the view that this equal distribution was just because it fit a certain pattern. But what we mean by just more than just fitting a certain pattern has to be that people are permitted to act with these things that they're entitled to own. To use control of dispose of them. And the result of this because of human differences because you can't have some kind of twilight zone equality in the real world. The result of this inevitably is going to be unequal outcomes, unequal outcomes even if you have equal starting points. That is the case if you permit liberty, freedom of action over those things which someone justifiably owns in this egalitarian paradigm. This is why I'm saying it's incoherent. Let this think in for a second. It's really incoherent. You have a justice distribution of wealth. Therefore they're entitled to do what they want. They do so. The result is unequal. It doesn't fit the original pattern. Therefore by their standards and criteria you would need continual state intervention to set that pattern back right. You would need continual interference with individual liberty to establish and maintain that pattern, that time slice, that end state, continual interference. But if you were saying that the original state of affairs namely equality was just and the people were entitled to do with that just distribution what they wanted. But the result of that is it doesn't fit the pattern. What is your conception of justice? Either your conception of justice is that the pattern is just but that people are not entitled under that pattern to use whatever it is that they're entitled to have which is self-candidatory. Or they are entitled to use it however they choose which will upset the pattern. In which case by the original criteria the outcome has become unjust. So you have a dilemma if you're an egalitarian and you are a strict egalitarian. I use this purposefully as a reductio because I think reductios are very useful in such cases. Which are you going to choose? The freedom to upset the pattern by using what you have just title to in ways that are unequal and have unequal outcomes or indeed the alternative. Are you going to continually have the state interfering to set that pattern back straight? I think that for this reason any end state pattern, current time size principle of justice is incoherent in a dynamic world. It's incoherent in the sense that it's terms no longer have meaning. It's terms no longer have meaning that can be translated into anything realistic, anything functional, anything really human. Now I'm going to play a little bit with Bob Nozick's example of Will Chamberlain because see this is a breathtaking book. It's breathtaking. I mean you read through it and it's just sometimes you get dizzy and you get a headache because he's zipping all over the place back and forth and up and down. The quickest mind I've ever seen. At any given moment he has 14 different objections to any sentence he can conceivably utter. That's how quick that mind works. It's just something to behold. But this book made a splash and it upset a lot of people because it came into the world upon the heels of the publication of John Rawls book, A Theory of Justice. This ponderous track coming from another Harvard professor who defended his own point of view of justice. And this book really is a very entrepreneurial work and that is hooked on a critique of Rawls but he goes on from there to defend a minimal state and to obliterate a whole bunch of other opinions. But where Rawls is sort of ponderous and slow in getting to his point. Nozick is witty, he's charming. You'll have extremely abstract argument strung along this book, extremely abstract and bring it home with an example with a witty series of rhetorical questions with an example that's very vivid. So okay, he's dealing with how liberty upsets patterns. He says, it is not clear how those holding alternative conceptions of distributive justice can reject the entitlement conception of justice and holdings. That is, he's saying, it's not clear to me, Bob Nozick, how these end state types, time slice types, pattern types can really reject an entitlement conception. For suppose that a distribution favored by one of these non entitlement conceptions is realized, sorry, like we talked about equality. Let us suppose it is your favorite one and let us call it this distribution D1, okay? Perhaps everyone has an equal share, perhaps shares vary in accordance with some dimension, you treasure. Now suppose, and see yourself as an egalitarian who's constantly, you know, googling and eyeing about equality in the pages of the New York Review of Books or the New York Times magazine, you know, or dissent or democracy are one of these leftist things. And he does something marvelous here, marvelous. Learn from not just the wisdom of the book but learn from what he did here and how effective it is in arguing. It really is something special. All right, so you've got this distribution D1. Now suppose that Will Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams being a great gate attraction. Also suppose contracts run only for a year with players being free agents. He signs the following sort of contract with a team. In each home game, 25 cents from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him. We ignore the question of whether he is gouging the owners or we got them look out for themselves. The season starts and people cheerfully attend his team's games. They buy their tickets each time dropping a separate 25 cents of their admission price into a special box with Chamberlain's name on it. They're excited about seeing him play it is worth the total admission price to them. Let's suppose that in one season one million persons attend his own games and Will Chamberlain winds up with $250,000 a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than that of anyone else. Is he entitled to his income? Is this new distribution D2 just? If so, why? There is no question about whether each of the people was entitled to the control over the resources they held in D1 because that was the distribution, your favorite that for the purposes of arguments we assume was acceptable. No question that D1 was just according to your own assumptions each of these persons chose to give 25 cents of their money to Chamberlain. They could have spent it on going to the movies or on candy bars or get this or on copies of Descent Magazine or Monthly Review. I just love it. They're going nuts at this point. You can see my herrington tearing on his hair. But they all, at least one million of them converged on giving it to Will Chamberlain in exchange for watching him play basketball. If D1 was a just distribution and people voluntarily moved from it to D2 transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 what was it for if not to do something with? He comments. Isn't D2 also just? If the people were entitled to dispose of the resources to which they were entitled in D1 didn't this include their being entitled to give it to or exchange it with Will Chamberlain? Can anyone else complain on grounds of justice? Each other person already has his legitimate share under D1. Under D1 there is nothing that anyone has that anyone else has a claim of justice against. After someone transfers something to Will Chamberlain 30 parties still have their legitimate shares. Their shares haven't changed. By what process could such a transfer among two persons give rise to legitimate claim of distributive justice on a portion of what was transferred by a third party who had no claim of justice on any holdings of the others before the transfer? That is really a nail in the coffin of the ideal of equality. And Nozick points out that the general point illustrated by the Will Chamberlain example and the example of the entrepreneur in a socialist society which is something else he uses in here which is brilliant is that no end state principle or distributional pattern principle of justice can be continually realized without continuous interference with people's lives. Any favored pattern would be transformed into one unfavored by the principle by people choosing to act in various ways. For example, by people exchanging goods and services with other people or giving things to other people. Things to transfers are entitled to do what they want to under their favored distributional pattern. To maintain a pattern one must either continually interfere or stop people from transferring resources as they wish or continually or periodically interfere to take some from some persons that and give to others who chose not to transfer resources. But that over a continual period of time, continually, continually again and again and again the state or some other agency is going to have to interfere to set that original pattern back as it originally was. And Nozick concludes that it puts things perhaps a bit too strongly to say that every pattern or end state principle is liable to be thwarted by the voluntary actions of the individual parties transferring some of their shares they receive under the principle for perhaps some very weak patterns won't be thwarted. But again, remembering the Aristotelian proviso in general these pattern theories of justice are going to be incompatible with liberty and ultimately incoherent, incoherent on their own terms. To give you another example, I mean, I talked about stock markets. Suppose you gave everyone equal shares of stock and they were allowed to exchange them. Everybody got a certain share of GM, of Bell Telephone, of everything. What would happen over a period of time because of people's individual choices because of their expectations of changing values of production structures in a free economy? What would happen is there would be capital gains and losses, constant shifts in transference of wealth among individuals who guessed right or guessed wrong. So the issue is either equality or liberty. And I say either equality or justice, not both. We turn from this to the details of Nozick's entitlement theory, okay? It gets a little rough, but just for about five minutes and I think that when I'm finished, you'll see that it's been worth the time spent. He really has got some neat little, what Aristotle would have called practical syllogisms, what we might call normative syllogisms here. And it's fascinating. I have to take it slow, both because I get a very dry mouth trying to read this accurately. And because it's complex, that's one of the problems with Nozick is that you have to pay attention. And it's one of the delights if you can do it and it's a source of frustration if you can't. This is taken from the book. It's a section on the entitlement theory. The subject of justice in holdings consists of three major topics. The first is the original acquisition of holdings, the appropriation, the getting of unheld things. This includes the issue of how unheld things may come to be held. The process or processes by which unheld things may come to be held. The things that may come to be held under these processes. The extent of what an individual can hold, et cetera, et cetera. We should refer to the complicated truth about this topic, which we shall not formulate here, as the principle of justice in acquisition. The second topic, he says, that's justice in acquisition. That's the first thing. The second is the question of the transfer of holdings. That is, by what process may a person transfer holdings to someone else? How may a person acquire a holding from someone else who holds it? Under this topic come general descriptions of voluntary exchange and gift, and on the other hand fraud and force, et cetera, et cetera. The complicated truth about this subject, we shall call the principle of justice in transfer. One, justice in acquisition. Two, justice in transfer. This being held in mind, if the world were wholly just, he writes, the following inductive definition would exhaustively cover a subject of justice in holdings. One, a person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding. Two, a person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer. From someone else entitled to the thing is entitled to the holding. Three, no one is entitled to a holding except by repeated applications of one and two. The complete principle of distributive justice, then he writes, would say simply that a distribution is just if everyone is entitled to the holdings they possess under the distribution. A distribution is just if it arises from another just distribution by legitimate means. Well, where would we go from here in terms of justice and property rights? I pointed out that just because every system rests tacitly on a conception of property rights doesn't mean that any conception is as good as any other. Some make more sense, some make less. Some are more compatible with human nature, some less. These are important things to bear in mind. So I will return to my self-ownership principle that having been nailed down in the last session and point out a corollary. Let's take three corollaries. Everyone owns his or her own body and life, being a process. No one owns the body of anyone else. If ownership means use, control, and disposal, then this means that what we end up with is a principle which has been stated in three different ways. There's Herbert Spencer's principle of equal freedom, equal liberty, that everyone shall have the freedom or liberty to anything that he or she wants provided that they respect everyone else's equal liberty to do the same. If everyone is a self-owner, then they have a right to use, control, and dispose of themselves as they wish so long as they respect the equal rights and liberties of everyone else. Ein Rand and her derivation talks about the non-initiation of force. Since we're talking about a physical thing and use, control, and disposal, no one may physically interfere with another person's use, control, actions. There's another way of putting it when you're talking about a sentient being. No one can use physical force to interfere with another person's actions. No man or no group of men, as she puts it, may initiate the use of physical force. Force may be used in self-defense in the defense of that principle, in defense of oneself but not initiated. And Murray Rothbard calls it the non-aggression principle. No person or persons has the right to aggress against anyone else. By aggression he means physically violate the property boundaries justly conceived of another person. Now, that's self-ownership, that's self-ownership. How do we go from there to the world of things? Essentially, there are two or three different approaches to this, John Locke, Father Sudowski, and a libertarian reader by T. Boer McCann. Locke's theory is that you start out assuming a state of nature, that is where nothing is owned. Or as he puts it, everything is held in common. I think that's misleading. It also misled Herbert Spencer in the first edition of Social Statics. If no individual unit of a collection of units known as the human species owns anything, I think it's a misnomer to say that they collectively own something or that they have it in common. In fact, it is unowned. It's unowned until it's acquired by someone or some group acting in some agreed upon fashion. Locke's view then is really the homesteading principle that you acquire ownership over unowned things by mixing your labor with them, using them, beginning to, in effect, take a thing which was previously a thing in nature and using it for a goal or purpose. And as you use your physical and mental labors to transform something, to make it into shapes and sizes and forms, that you have by this action taken something unowned and made it into something owned. Since it wasn't owned, your acquisition of it violated the rights of no one and notes its sense. That means the original acquisition of a holding, which was unowned, by means of acting as an owner over it, identifying it as yours, is a legitimate means of justice and acquisition of an unknown property. Father Sadowski does it slightly differently. He says if you start out with the assumption that nothing is owned, that anyone has the right to the unlimited acquisition of things that they can acquire. The reason is that the only principle that would prevent them would be someone else's claim on the same thing, but by our hypothesis, it was unclaimed on owned. Therefore, there is no restriction. Therefore, individual has the unlimited right to acquire and use as their personal property on owned things. Now, this can get very sticky and I'm not gonna get, let it get sticky. Because as a maxim of law holds a hard, cases make bad law. Nozick uses the case in Anarchy State Utopia of you pouring a can of tomato juice in the ocean. The only ocean is it sort of spreads out. I don't wanna consider this here. And I just mean that as a personal preference. I don't want to consider it here. We can talk about discussion groups and other things. These are very difficult questions when you get on the margins of things. But remember the Aristotelian dictum that I began with. You don't want really more complexity than is relevant to the kinds of actions that you're gonna be taking. And when you're talking about original acquisition of things, you're talking about farming, hunting, you're talking about sort of a primitive level of property rights, which are fairly distinct and self-evident. I mean, you're farming, you know, you're farming. You build a house, you build a house. It's occupying an area. It's physically perceivable. Where things get more difficult is in more complicated property rights. Which are not all that complex because as Thomas Hodgson points out in the artificial natural rights of property contrasted, you sort of define the property rights as you create the thing that you're going to own and use. For example, the spectrum of the airwaves. You're going to transmit. You define a property title in the process of learning through technology or science or whatever to use something for a purpose. If you're using it means that you can't use it for that purpose if someone else interferes with you. So you sort of define, in many, many cases, not all. You define the nature and restrictions of this right of acquisition by looking at the process by which you are using something and the purpose is being used for and what kinds of things can interfere with it. That's all that I'm going to say about justice and acquisition. Justice and transfer I have less to say. And what I want to point out here in Bao's a very, very minute digression. There is a difference between physically using a thing and having a property right in it. I have his pen. Do I own it? I say no. And it's on this grounds that if you look at property rights and look at how they're derived from our nature's human beings, consider the fact that we're rational creatures, have the capacity for such, at least. You see that the relationship of property rights is really a conceptual relationship. It's not a concrete physical relationship. It's a relationship between you and physical things or even things like an airwave or a frequency between you and that in a social situation where you're acting to use it in a certain way, you see, and other people can interfere by certain delimited ways. It's a conceptual relationship, not physical. To put it another way, there's a difference between my physically using a physical object and my having a title to it. The entitlement theory of justice, you see, is dealing with the conceptual relationship with the abstract moral relationship between you and physical things in a context which includes other people. To put it another way, if you were on a desert island alone and there was no one else there, the issue of property rights wouldn't arise. It wouldn't be a conceptual thing, then. You see, it would be only a purely physical thing, what you could use for various purposes and what you could protect from destruction by wild animals or the environment, by forces of nature, so to speak. But in society, you've got a different situation. It's a conceptual relationship, a moral relationship, if you will, and there's a difference between a physical property and a property title. Now, we're talking about the entitlement theory of justice, which means we're talking about property titles. Then what is the principle of justice in transfer? If you as an individual own something, you have a right to use control and dispose of it as you see fit. What you own is the title to a property. What then determines the principle of justice in transfer? It is title transfer, title transfer. You're taking a title and you're transferring it to an active will with another human being, either through a gift, which is sort of like a one-dimensional, unilateral transfer of a title or an exchange, a mutual transferring of titles. I'll give you this if you give me that. What's happened as a result is it's a conceptual thing that's going on, not just physical. It's a moral relationship we've entered into. The moral relationship of exchange. Now, I have this and you have that, whereas before this was the other way around. If you take Austrian and most modern views of economics seriously, which I think you should, you see that every active exchange comes about because people are individuals, they're in different contexts and circumstances, they have their own value systems and scales, they have their own hierarchy of values, they have their own agenda of ends that they want to achieve and the means they need to achieve them. This means that every exchange comes about in this voluntary sense as a result of a double inequality of values. The only situation in which an exchange will come about is if I value A higher than B, you value a B higher than A, I own one, you have the other and we transfer. As a result of that moral act, I now own B where before I owned A or vice versa and you do the reverse. That's the principle of justice and transfer. It's that simple. It's a conceptual thing. See, it's not just a physical moving of an object, it's a conceptual thing that's going on. It's a moral relationship we've entered into. We've exchanged titles. So that is the basis of the justice in transfer. Now we begin to move along rather quickly and very light when we touch on a zillion little things because I want you to see the implications of this. This is how we derive the right of giving gifts, including inheritance, for example. This is how we derive the right of exchange, freedom of exchange is deduced from this. It's how we justify something like wages. What is a wage? It's a contractual relationship entered into, of exchange relationship where you are selling amount of effort on your part over a certain period of time or a completed result in exchange for some other commodity or service. In a barter service situation, it can be you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Everything up to a very complicated money economy where you agree to, say, lecture for a certain number of hours, for a certain wage, it can be a very complicated thing. In other words, since these are conceptual relationships we're talking about, when we deal with self-ownership and wages and things like that, contracts, the kinds of exchanges that can take place are virtually unlimited. They're limited really only by the law of identity and by your conceptual imagination and what can be separated out and agreed upon in so many terms in an exchange relationship. So that we see, we see that when Marx, something is bleeding blue on him, I don't know where it's coming from, it's your pen, punishment for my criminal act. So when we look at Marxism, which talks about wage slavery, we see that something fundamentally flawed with its approach because to forbid people to exchange labor services for money over a period of time is to forbid self-ownership. And in effect, this is one of the typical double-think elements of Marxism because they make a labor into a slave situation by not permitting a person to act as a self-owner. So that's how you justify wages. Now it's said that, all right, Locke and everybody says you have the right to the product of your own labor. What about wages? Doesn't that mean that if you're working to build something that because you put labor into it and you own a part of what's produced? No, no, and this is because Marxism here is fundamentally not conceptual and not working on a conceptual level. It's working on a materialistic level. It's not seeing exchanges and ownership as being conceptual but physical. It's Marxism's materialism here that's screwing him up because what you've done is entered into a relationship where you agree to do this and to exchange, to give the title to this, this product of your labor in exchange for a wage payment. You see, so that's why if you enter into a wage agreement and you help produce something, if it's been a voluntary contractual agreement and you complete it, that's why you don't have any claim to the completed thing, is because you've transferred the title to that in the wage relationship. So you do have the right to the full product of your own labor but don't think of full product of your own labor as mechanistic or materialistic. It's a system of values we're operating within and you will only enter into that relationship. You see, if you value what you're getting more than what you're giving up and so everyone benefits, everyone benefits, this is how you justify wages and this is how you justify the right of an employer to own the results of physical things produced physically by someone into whom he had entered into a wage contract with. Well, let's go from, you know, in the production of wealth in a free society, a production and it's a very complex thing. I could spend a little bit of time talking about the structure of exchanges in the market economy and the structure of production and the structure of values but I think I'll duck it. We'll have a chance to come back to it later in another lecture, I think. But this is, it's important to realize here that we're not, we can't deal with things as though we were materialists. It's just not what's going on and to perceive it the way the Marxists do or indeed even the early quasi-libertarian individuals anarchists in the 19th century, Benjamin Nartucker and other people like that when they thought that interest, rent, profit, wages and so on and so forth were bad, were morally unjustified. It's because they have this approach which is very materialistic and very non-conceptual. So, how do you justify contracts? Contract is nothing but a title transfer agreement that takes place over time. All exchanges take time. We exist in time, we move and breathe in time. Everything we do takes place in time. A contract is something where, because we have the ability as rational beings to construct measurements of time to sort of parcel out exchanges. To do this for this period and exchange for that at this period. All human relationships take place through time. All that contracts do is it makes explicit the time unit involved in the title transfer process. All right, what about the three big bugaboos of 19th century economic thought? Interest, rent and profit. Well, let's take interest in a simple level, so I'm gonna take all these in a simple level sense. As you are more sophisticated in economics you can see how this applies to higher and higher realms of transactions. Interest in the sense of my borrowing wealth from you, money from you and a money economy, say borrow $10 now in exchange for $15 a year from now. That's a 50% interest rate. That's what people have called, including this scholastic philosopher's usury. And they said it's immoral and unjust. Well, it's not. Again, you can't be a materialist in this area. They said it was unjust because you're getting $10 but you're being forced to give up 15 and those two things are not equal. Therefore there's something unequal going on and the person who's getting the $10 and giving up 15 later on is being exploited by the person who gives up 10 but gets back 15. That of the scene is immoral and useless. It isn't and again you just gotta sweep away the materialism of the standard approach to much of this. What's going on is you are loaning me a commodity that I want now because of a certain structure of time preferences because of my own hierarchy of values. If I get $10 from you now to buy a watch or medicine to save my life or a newspaper or a book and I give you back in a year from now $15 what you have to understand is this 10 and 15 are illusory. These are illusory. You don't look at things in terms of numbers like that. You're getting and you're giving up different commodities. They're different. Just the fact that you can enumerate them in numbers and Arabic numbers doesn't mean anything. $10 now is the same as $10 a year from now. Not in the context of human life. If I need $5,000 for an operation to save my life now that is not the same as my being able to get $5,000 a year from now when I'll be dead. It is not the same thing. The fact that they're identical numbers means nothing. It means nothing. It is a completely meaningless concept. What is happening is that you're transferring wealth over time what you're paying for is time preference because of your situation now $10 now is more important to you as of now than $15 a year from now. The same with any exchange over time of capital or wealth or credit. It's because I have an American Express card. I go crazy with it. I know I have to pay. If I had MasterCard or Visa it would be the same thing, 18% of whatever it is. But you're doing it because gee, I'd like to have the freedom to go out to dinner now or I really want to get this new Vladimir Horowitz or George Ballot record or I really have an interest right now in buying some new clothes. I've lost a lot of weight and I look like a slob. You see you're dealing with human relationships over time and that's why interest is justified is because you're dealing with an individual time preference. It's more important for me to have something now than later because of my situation in life. It's very subjective. There's no reason for it to be quantifiable. So interest is justified because exchange of property and taxes is just, there's nothing more complicated than that. Rent, for the purpose of this, except Murray Rothbard's definition in many economy and state is the unit hire for good or service. Of the owner of physical thing, it can use control and disposal however you want. What I can do for example is transfer a title to him. The right to use my lighter for an hour or 10 cents. At the period of determination of that contract, I have the physical thing back. I've made money on it. He has gotten what he wanted, namely the use of something for an hour. It's the same to renting a house over a period of time or a farm or any piece of property. If the original holding was just, then the contract and the contract is voluntary, then the end result is just. Profit is the same way. There's nothing mysterious about profits at all. Profits come not because of wage, slavery or surplus value or any other nonsense like that. Profits are made possible by price discrepancies between present and future goods and between means which are used to produce a good and the value of the end which is produced. Profits are made possible by discrepancies in knowledge and expectations. It's made possible by the fact for example that I may have an idea of how to buy a certain amount of water, a certain amount of this, a certain amount of that, a certain amount of that and combine them to build a house which is more valuable in this whole swirling situation of a system of voluntary exchanges. You see, more valuable after it's produced than anticipated by the markets of the end which is a euphemism, a reification of a complicated process. So profits are justified by the same way interest and gifts and rent and wages and everything else. If it's a voluntary transfer of titles, if I'm selling you this amount of wood, he's selling you this amount of bricks, he's selling you this amount of glass, they're all entitled to it and you use it to produce something which is worth more to some buyer than the sum of its costs. It's a profit, tough bananas. There's nothing immoral about it. There's nothing illegitimate about it. In fact, if you look at it the way someone like Isabel Patterson would, the person who takes these discrete things and combines them into something worth more than the sum of its parts has in fact added a store of wealth and a value to the world. You've produced something. Isabel Patterson took out a sort of materialistic view once in a while to shove it down the throat of Marxist in her book The God of the Machine. She said, if you take something and you plant it on the ground and it dies and withers, you produce nothing. If you plant something else and it grows up to be corn when it's an adult or any other kind of plant or edible substance, you've produced something. You've increased amount of wealth and value in the world and that's really what all human action is to her. All human action is a pursuit of profit in the sense that all human action is a pursuit of taking a number of things, combining them in such a way that the outcome is of greater value to you than the things you started with. And if you wanna see how silly Marxist can be on this point, imagine if the reverse were true. What you would have is a continual series of exchanges over time where people, what we call quote unquote standard of living, keep shrinking year after year after year after year. Where we take more resources to produce less and we take that less to produce less and we take that less to produce less. The result is a winding down of human life to that ultimately barbaric level of starvation and conflict. You see. So profit, both as a motive, as you're pursuing profit, is not only the most natural thing in the world, but there's nothing the tiniest bit sorted about it. Wipe away from your minds this Marxist and socialist and left-wing claptrap, even the neoconservative and conservative claptrap like George Wills and Irving Crystals and George Gilder who tries to paint the entrepreneurs an all-choice because he's giving things to others and the expectation that he just might get something back later. No, the pursuit of profit is a glorious thing. And if we take our Aristotelian view of ethics, if we take our Aristotelian, Rhenian, Spensarian view of human life and progress and human development of the unique individual personality, of eudaimonia, of self-interest, whatever term you want to use, at pursuit of profit in the most meaningful and human sense of the term, is the pursuit of a good life. This does not mean that one cannot have a psychologically twisted view of things and adopt such modes of behavior that are, let's say, just in the sense that, you know, you're entitled to it, but still a little slimy. There has to be a distinction made, which, again, I'd say mill doesn't make strongly enough between that which is immoral and that which is impermissible. There are lots of nasty things in the world that shouldn't be illegal, that shouldn't be punished. This isn't social Darwinism, but it's something very interesting to look at. It means that there's sort of a spontaneous order even in the moral sphere. If everyone starts to act in this very cheap, nasty, sort of little, niggling way where they're trying to cheat other people, they'll only get so far even if everyone is trying to do it. Because no one wants to deal with a person who is dealing with them in that way, even if they try to deal with other people that way. It has come up against a natural limitation, a natural limitation of cause and effect. So much for interest, rent, and profit. Do I have to say anything about corporations? It's really nothing but high, flutant, complicated contract over time that defines relationships in a structured production between people who are entitled to use certain resources and combine them in such a way as to produce outcomes which they then distribute among themselves in terms that are agreed upon beforehand. It's all that a corporation is really is. You shouldn't reify it. A corporation like a society, like a state, is a set of individuals. The rights you have in a corporation depend on what you contracted for, with whom corporations are no different than any other set of voluntary relationships. They can have a right to profits, interests, so on and so forth. Don't reify it. To reify, incidentally, means to take something abstract, symbolic, conceptual, and use it mentally, use it as a tool for thinking, as though it were a physical thing. Do I have to talk any about the limits of wealth? What should be permissible in a free society? I think not. The limits to wealth should be determined by the principle of justice and acquisition and transfer. Any accumulation of wealth, done in accordance with the principles of justice and acquisition and transfer, is a just ownership of wealth, even fantastic sums of wealth. What one does with that is another question. Can be immoral. You can hire criminals to do nasty things to people. That's a different issue, but the accumulation of wealth itself is just if you acquire them through a just process from just owners. And those who want to level down or level up, and it's very interesting to me that in practice, socialists almost always level down and never up. I chop off the top parts of things by leveling people downward, that there's an implicit, again, sort of very grubbily materialistic view of life there. And that's that what you need to live is dirt and food and clothes and a shack, and that there are some kind of natural limits to the kinds of and diversities of joys one is entitled to seek from life. If one isn't a materialist in this sense, and doesn't think that everyone has certain just limited and definable needs, limited and definable needs, that once satiated they should not try to go beyond, but one rather has a more Aristotelian or generous and non-materialistic view of human nature, all sorts of things you can do with fantastic amounts of wealth. You can support people doing things who otherwise would not be supported in doing these things in a market economy. You can pay the salaries of people to write music or play beautiful music or write plays or produce them or act in them. Fantastic amounts of wealth give one a fantastic amount, not of political, but of social power, because one can make things possible to otherwise were not. And in fact, fantastic amounts of wealth also make possible something very important in society which is innovation. Things always begin with an elite. The first bathtubs were very expensive, elitist items owned by a handful of people. First indoor plumbing, similarly. The same thing is true of any one of a number of medical procedures. By permitting this unlimited accumulation of wealth, you send into process a structure of motives for other people to fulfill relatively esoteric desires at a high price. Results of that and the pursuit of profit is the attempt to find a way of satisfying more and more of those kinds of desires at less and less cost to get the greatest market overall for what you want to sell. That's why when Henry Ford went to paying workers $10 a day and mass produced the Model T for under $500 a piece, when automobile started out with an elite, but a creative entrepreneur will find a way in a market system, a system of voluntary exchanges to satisfy the needs and desires of more and more people, thus leveling up. See, the disparity between the richest and the poorest in this society, even as far as it is from the standpoint of market analysis, free market stuff, is much less great than it would have been several centuries ago where you had fantastic amounts of wealth in the parts of kings or emperors or czars and death and starvation and concentration camps on the lowest possible level. What I'm saying here is sort of an interesting twist on the usual redistribution of wealth thing. Redistribution of wealth goes on all the time in the market economy, it just doesn't do so coercively. That's though as a result of spontaneous giving and exchanging and producing and wild frenzied economic activity and creativity. I'm saying that socialism tends to level down, whereas capitalism or free market tends to level up. Tends to improve the situation of the worst. I lived some years ago in Harlem and I was a janitor in the basement of a building. I have been in a position to see what real poverty in the United States is like. And it still often includes, ladies and gentlemen, a color television. I mean, you have to take a gigantic leap to understand what we mean when we talk about grinding poverty in this country. Very often we still do mean a much higher standard of living than exists in most of Africa and large parts of the rest of the third world. What we take to be real poverty in this country is a relative concept. It really is a relative concept. It's changed drastically over centuries. That's why I have to say on limitations to wealth. Do I need to say anything about this whole argument about the pie, providing the pie? No, again, it's a static view of wealth. It's a static view of production. It holds that there's a given amount of something to which we can attach a label of wealth and it can only be quote unquote divided so many ways. Again, this is a legacy of a materialistic way of viewing life and it cheapens the reality of the human condition because we are capable of producing, of increasing wealth. And there is no conceivable, given the nature of the human mind, no conceivable upward limit on this. No conceivable upward limit on this kind of production. Why? Because to know what's going to be possible in the future, we have to have future knowledge. And to use a phrase of an old teacher of mine, Ludwig Lachman, future knowledge cannot be had before it's time. Otherwise it wouldn't be future knowledge. You see, it would be present knowledge. So I won't say much more than that on the issue of this pie and distribution of wealth. Now I want to turn to a sort of fun area. When David Bowes wants to make fun of me, he talks about being my capitalism and sex part of my talk. But it isn't, it's property and civil liberties. Sex sort of sneaks in and out here. So you might want to pay attention, but it's peripheral. Mill's difficulty in trying to define liberties as I've said earlier is that he didn't have a proper conception of property as an underpinning. It's both a material and a conceptual underpinning of personal liberties. There's an interrelationship between people and property. I talked to you earlier about how property could be seen as liberating, of making possible expressions of genius and of all sorts of things. Everything from, every spiritual thing from love to beauty, whether it be beauty of an art form like painting or sculpture to work with music. It's an interrelationship between people and property. It's not anything that simple. I'm trying to do this not through rigorous reasoning, but through sort of imagery. Try to raise in your own minds the nobility of the concept of property. I want to free you from the spell of conservatism and a conception of property. I want you to see property as something spiritual. Something profound and moving as something precious. As indeed, each of your lives is precious. Your lives are precious to the degree that you can achieve something with them that has meaning and value and worth and dignity and that through freedom and through property. Well, what about something like victimous crimes? Well, see, Milgit's into problems here because of this whole thing about harming others. What do you mean by harming others? Suppose I'm an alcoholic who's slowly destroying my ability to function in the world and to produce nice things, to write nice things, to give lectures. Is this harm others? A certain common sense way it sure as hell does, right? Don't major flaws in character harm others? If you're gonna use the concept of harm as your criteria, I'm saying you're opening up a can of worms because one man's food is another man's poison. One man's harm is another man's treasured goal. One man's heresy is another man's deeply held religious belief. What property enables us to do is to treat civil liberties in the whole interesting context of I want this harm business and even the issue of victimless crimes sort of begs the question, what do you mean by victimless? What do you mean by victim? Am I a victim of some hobo eyesore lurching down the street in search of the latest newfangled contraption of drug to obliterate their consciousness and self-respect? There's sense, I suppose we are and this is where George Will and Irving Crystal and others who see a moral dimension in society have a point. But the issue of victims and harm is not the issue. The issue is self-ownership and consent and consent. We're really going to be concerned with spiritual values. It seems to me the dignity of the human being's sovereignty over his or her own life certainly must take some degree of precedence over the aesthetic question of whether or not you are surrounded in society by people and things that you find pleasing. This would mean that according to this kind of conception, I'm developing that so-called victimless crimes using drugs, sex between consenting adults, that sort of thing is all justified. The use of drugs may or may not be harmful to yourself and others. It may or may not be immoral to yourself and others, but it should not be prohibited. Similarly, it's true, things like sex for the most part. I mean, in certain difficulties, if you talk about somebody with AIDS, not telling someone and having sex with them, that's a difficult side question, but that involves possible violations of rights. I won't get into it. I'm just trying to show you that that can be really tough questions in life. And anyone who ever tries to talk to you about any of these things, who doesn't pretend that life is complex, is not loved one with you. Now, what about free speech and freedom of the press? I have a lot of fun with these with liberals because I don't think a liberal can define them without reference to property rights. Let's talk about free speech for a minute. What is freedom of speech? Does my freedom to speak mean that I have a right to drive my car through the plate, glass window in your living room, leap out and beginning waxing eloquent on the virtues of Erwin Neerajahazi, a pianist I happen to be a fanatic about, or about my latest love in the area of fiction or in the area of libertarian theory. Am I just practicing freedom of speech if I do this? No, why? Because you can't define freedom of speech unless you define property rights, you see? Freedom of speech comes from my self-ownership, contractual relations with other people who own property titles. My freedom of speech does not mean that there's not a license to fire in a crowded theater. That's because they're trying to introduce an element of relativism here, which I think doesn't work. When you're in a theater, you've bought a ticket. The ticket is a ticket for something. It's a title transfer. The right you have purchased is the right to perceive or to view a movie, a play, a concert, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's what you're agreeing to do when you buy it. If you then get up and start shouting fire, you're violating a contract. You're violating a property right. If I break into your living room and try to justify it on the grounds that I'm discoursing on Shakespeare, or on John Stuart Mill, or Madame d'Esteal, or Frederick Bastia, that's not freedom of speech. I broke into your goddamn property. What I'm saying here is that freedom of speech only has meaning in the context of a property view of things. The same is true of freedom of assembly. The same is true of freedom of the press. Absolutely without qualification. Communication in the real world takes place by means of physical objects, even an airwave, a transmitter, a receiver, a microphone, a hall, a newspaper, a book, a magazine, our physical things. What freedom of the press means is the right to justice and acquisition, justice and transfer, to contract with various people to sell you papers, this type setting equipment, photocopying equipment, to produce something, and to offer it for sale in a market. That's what freedom of the press is. Freedom of the press does not mean that I have a right to break into your paper warehouse and steal paper on the grounds that I'm going to use it to write things on, which I then want other people to read. And if someone stopped me from doing that, nobody in the right mind would say, they're violating my right to freedom of the press. If I walk in with the 75 people with machine guns and take over the Washington Post, so that the name of my freedom of the press, that's clear, what's going on is a violation of property rights. Maybe not so much in the case of the Washington Post, but. So books, magazines, newspapers, the electronic media, all of this is a property context, okay? And all of the hairy little problems we face come because civil libertarians and First Amendment absolutists don't want to look at it as a property relationship, because they think to talk about properties, to talk about something sort of greasy and grimy and dull, rather than something liberating and intoxicatingly heuristic and its implications. Well, what about obscenity and pornography and in a free market? Do we have to put up with all this junk? These sort of little portrayals of sex between people who are anonymous to each other when it's just a physical act and it's sort of spiritually debilitating? Do I have to put up with this? Well, the Supreme Court has come up with a criteria and it's the criteria of community standards. If we take seriously the economic view of demonstrated preference, then a point I want to make at this point is that the amount and kind of pornography and obscenity, so-called, which existence in any society are a direct reflection of the precise proportion of community standards which are reflected in the activities of those involved. To the extent that there is a market for porno theaters or magazines, that is reflecting to that extent the market in these things. The market is an expression of people's will, their desires, their values. All I'm saying is if you take the Supreme Court notion of community standards seriously, that you've got something pretty simple, that any existing state of affairs on a market reflects precisely the degree of community standards which people actually hold. Now, what do I think of obscenity and pornography on other grounds? Irrelevant. I happen to think a lot of it is trash. I happen to think that the view of human life and human interaction that it presents is not a noble one. It is not even particularly fun. Not even particularly interesting. It's irrelevant. The issue is the freedom. And there are all sorts of other ways of achieving the end results that all the Irving crystals in the George Wills of the world want to see. The bottom line, of course, there, is that they don't really want to define pornography because either it's simply any artistic representation of a sexual act in whatever context or else you're bringing values to bear on it. And I think the closet values being brought to bear here is a view that sex is evil. If not, then one could see that we could have something quote unquote like pornography, which would be a romantic interpretation in pictures and music and so on and so forth of a different approach and the sort of sleaze stuff you get with porn today. If that's the case, then interesting enough, the George Wills and the Irving crystals face a paradox which is the precisely extent that they succeed in stamping out a legitimate market for certain portrayals of certain kinds of human relationships which people find it a value to perceive to the precise extent that they can stamp out that legitimate expression. You're going to drive the rest of it underground where the most sordid elements of society will be the ones producing it and defining these kinds of relationships. That's a paradox. Many things are. You start out to achieve one result and you achieve the opposite of your intentions. I should, before leaving freedom of speech and freedom of the press, say something about, oh, the case of 1977, 78 of the, the Nazis marching in the Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois, right outside of Chicago. How did libertarians solve that sort of problem? Here are a bunch of people, many of whom were refugees from the Holocaust and from concentration camps, peacefully having settled down in the United States of America and a bunch of ragtag Nazis. People calling themselves Nazis. I mean Nazis without Hitler is to me, you know. George Lincoln walking on these people is just so ludicrous. They're just so ludicrous. I can't tell you in what contempt they hold them. I don't have complete contempt. That is why, incidentally, I was against at the time and said so in the libertarian review making a big issue of it on the part of the Jewish people there because they allowed Nazis to get their hands on an issue like freedom of speech. You just don't do that, I think, morally. You don't do that. But why was it a problem? It was a problem because it was damn government property. The streets. The community was not privately owned. You see, money was extracted from all taxpayers to build roads and streets and parks in the middle of this community, thereby obliterating property rights. In a sense, if we have a government, we have to say the government can't discern against types of speech and press. The government created the problem by obliterating property rights. Same as true in areas of Polish. The same is true in one area after another. The government obliterates property rights. All hell breaks loose. People are hurt, their values are rubbed in their face, they're spat upon because the government has violated property rights. If Skokie, if the citizens in Skokie had owned their streets and their parks, they could have told the Nazis to get the hell out and there would be no second opinion about it. The Nazis wouldn't have had a right to break into the living room and they wouldn't have a right to come on their streets and their parks if they owned them. Because you see a corollary to all these kinds of freedoms of self-ownership we're talking about is the freedom not to associate, to discriminate if you would. A very profound and important freedom. We're all discriminated. Lots of different ways. Some ways are morally reprehensible, some ways are not. It's impossible not to discriminate because not to discriminate means not to choose. So the situation like that of the Nazis in Skokie are very simply caused by obliterations of this liberating obliterating that this really visionary concept of human property rights. Now, I have only about 12 minutes. I have everything in the world to talk about. This is all so far, millions of things. That I'll cover one thing pretty quick. That's the moral justification for capitalism. Dun-dun-dun. And then I'll make a few side points and wind up and we can go to lunch. Well, what is the moral justification of capitalism? This is a question which Irving Crystal and a bunch of other people have set out to solve. I, in randomness, try to make one approach. Others have made others. I see the problem as a simple one. The problem is you're trying to justify something which doesn't exist. You're trying to reify or make capitalism or free market into something holistic as an entity or a system that exists somehow independent of the participants or the units. No way you can do that. No, no. Capitalism or free market is a system of units. Its units are acts of exchange. These acts of exchange themselves are composed of units and that is transfer of property titles. If the transfers of property titles are just, that is the ownership is just, the acquisition is just, the transfer is just, then this process of exchange is just. If these units, the acts of exchange are just, then they're resulting in what we call system. It's really a complex web, you see, of interacting individuals. Resulting system is just. So you justify capitalism by breaking it down into its units, justifying the units, you justify the outcome which we call capitalism or the market economy. I should pause to consider issues of crime, theft, just and unjust titles. I think I will give that some pause and do it in my Liberty and Third World Talk. I will, however, talk about for a couple of minutes about property and class conflict, what I call an entitlement view. I mentioned Thomas Hodgkins to you with his natural and artificial rights of property contrasted. Another interesting person, it's Franz Oppenheimer, a late German sociologist. He distinguished between two mutually exclusive means of gaining wealth in society, what he called the economic means and the political means. The economic means is the means of production and exchange, voluntary interactions that all of us engage in. That's the economic means of gaining wealth. The political means is the method of theft, predation, parasitism, coercive, title transfers, that sort of thing. And in fact, Oppenheimer points out that these are up war with each other and that Marx makes a mistake in his kind of class system by not looking at the fact that the important thing is not the ends that are pursued, but the fact that the identical ends, namely possession of units of property, are pursued by two very different means, political and economic means. Oppenheimer had the fortuitude, really, to define the state, the government, as the organization of the political means in society. Your private criminals using the political means, so to speak, on sort of an ad hoc random or minimally organized basis. And you have the state in position of a gigantic structure of predation. Frederick Bastiat considered socialism to be a form of spoliation, predation. I think that all governments that exist today should be looked at that way to a lesser or greater extent. The issue of whether or not you can have a legitimate minimal state or limited government, it does not have these characteristics is a complicated one. We can get into it throughout the week. I do not intend to debate at any length the issue of so-called anarcho-capitalism or a state-to-society, on the one hand, versus a limited government or minimal state on the other. I wrote a great deal on this many years ago when I was a baby. It doesn't interest me that much anymore. If Nozick or Arnie Mann's minimal state could be constrained, I would not have any significant objections. If Rothbard's competing agencies of protection could abide by a common code of justice and not resort to mutual violence, to enforce agreed-upon rules, I would not have any major objection to that. Both anarchism, in my view, and minimal state-ism or limited government have real problems. Democracy has a chair of problems. We can't get into those here. I want to talk about the state just for a moment about as it is, as the organization of the political means. In fact, most states throughout history come into existence through conquest and class domination. One group of people conquering another in the field of battle and subjugating them to political rule. It's a very interesting book you can read that sort of interprets the grand panorama of human history according to this principle. And that's Alexander Rostov's book, R-U-S-T-O-W with an umlaut over the U, Freedom and Domination, a historical critique of civilization. Rostow uses this kind of class analysis, originally developed not by Marx, but by French classical liberals or libertarians to interpret most of human history. And it's a broad sweeping panorama by a man who was close friends with Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, Oppenheimer himself and many other great, great men. Freedom and Domination, a historical critique of civilization by Alexander Rostov, R-U-S-T-O-W, an umlaut over the U. Published by Princeton University Press, so far just in hardcover, 800 pages, about $40. Available from laissez-faire books at $40, even though the list price is now going up to $47.50. I know, it really hurts too, but sometimes an investment in a great book is worth two or three meals. You might surmise that I've managed to have the best of both worlds, but I'm seeing if I can do something about that. Now, a couple of quick digressions and I'll wind up. My God, everything I could cover. Oh, it's beautiful stuff. I like this stuff. I really do. All right, a digression. Laissez-faire capitalism is the only conceivable social system that could in principle be a classless society and that political sense of the word class because you don't have to have rulers and ruled. You don't have to have domination by people who dominate others. Any other kind of system does. In one sense, every system is always a class system because you can multiply a number of classes by any characters you wish to identify. You pick a class of all redheaded women, class of all men over six foot tall, a class of this or that or the other thing, class of everyone over 50, under 50, but for the relevant political things. We're talking here about the principle of whether or not each individual human being has the recognized right to control his or her own person in life as they wish without interference by others. In principle that's possible under Laissez-faire is not in principle possible under any other social system. Now, I've talked a little about economic means versus economic ends and I think there's some important things in there. Hayek has some delight to read, but the third section of Anarchy, State and Utopia might be called your attention. It's called a framework for utopia's plural. And what Nozick points out is that under this kind of market system, there's a room for playing out in the great stage of human life of a wealth of diverse lifestyles, forms of life approaches to living. So we return now to the part of Mill that I like. That under capitalism, under a market economy, you can have peaceful coexistence between people of different lifestyles because a market tends to harmonize interests in pursuing property, produce things which other people then use in the process of producing other things, which other people use in the process of producing other things that may satisfy the needs of even social groups you may hate. Whether it be Jews or Catholics, gay people, anything you want to name. A market tends to promote harmony because under a market economy it is possible to have proprietary communities. You buy up an area, you let people come in and rent or buy unconditioned that, ABC. You can have voluntary communism, small C. Voluntary socialism, small S. You can have co-existing side by side, communes, collectives, single owner proprietorships, all sorts of different things. You see, far too long, we've tended to see capitalism as synonymous with a certain particular kind of business structure. Not true. It should be seen as synonymous with a certain kind of process, voluntary interaction. If more or less we see some rather than others, it may be because people have not been inventive enough or some are more efficient or people like them for a variety of reasons. So capitalism, free market makes possible a diversity of different lifestyles. It makes it possible for you to pursue not simply the greatest amount of profit, for example, or wealth, but you can pursue other things. You can, under a purely market economy, you can work enough of the time. I have friends who've done this, you know, worked six months of the year. The other six months they devote to leisure, to a hobby, to some other kind of life. Under capitalism, your work, your means of earning a living might also be the most fun thing in life for you. But it might be something you have to do in order to get the income in order to permit you to do those other things, the doing of which will not get you an income sufficient to survive. In other words, it allows you to specialize in sort of splitting your life into work for income and profit even though not enjoyable work and enjoyment and leisure, which is not productive of an income. You can mix them up in a whole variety of different ways. It's one of the interesting things about this. So, notice it points out that capitalism, free market really, if you consider it the way I'm doing here, is a framework for a whole variety of conflicting competing utopias, plurality of ends and means played out on the great stage of human life. What relevance is all this to what I have said? Well, I should think a great deal. I should think a great deal. We sing a great deal more of this throughout the week. But what have we faced in our own time? We've faced communism, dictatorships, tyranny, mass slaughter, barbers practices of war and enslavement of some people over others. We've seen just horrible possibilities when the dark side of human nature reveals itself to visit destruction. One group of people after another for just reasons which are so trivial. Can you imagine the slaughter of tens of thousands of young men from Britain over something called the Bower Wars? What was that about anyway? Were 100,000 French and Germans died to capture and recapture two miles of territory in a battlefield in Europe? What is this about? This is insanity. This is insanity. I put it to you that by looking at property a different way, by looking at justice a different way, by looking at liberating means of production rather than controlling them or state owning them, by liberating them to be free to produce this great diversity of human needs and desires and even a whim. That society of tomorrow can be a society of peaceful coexistence, real human community, progress and of real human development. Imagine the kind of world that we could work for or imagine the possibilities. I'd like to close by reading you portions of a letter. It happens to be the last letter that Thomas Jefferson ever wrote. He had been invited by Roger Waitman to come to Washington, DC to celebrate the anniversary of the 50th year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. His health did not permit him to do so. In fact, both he and John Adams died on July 4th, 50 years after the signing of the Declaration. Jefferson wrote, I should indeed with peculiar delight have met and exchanged their congratulations personally with a small band, the remnant of that, host of worthies who joined with us on that day in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country between submission or the sword and to have enjoyed with them the consolidatory fact that our fellow citizens after half a century of experience and prosperity continued to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world what I believe it will be to some parts sooner to others later but finally to all the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition has persuaded them to bind themselves and to assume the blessings and security of self-government is referring here to the Declaration of Independence. That form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and the freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science is already laid open to every view. The palpable truth, the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs nor favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others for ourselves at the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights and an undiminished devotion to them. Thank you.