 It's the issue of intellectual property, which is a very, I find difficult issue. I myself hold to the pure abolitionist perspective, although I'm very, very grateful to Alexander because he's been posting very interesting articles on Liberty.me that challenge me personally. I love to read them because in my own view, if you hold a position, you should be welcoming challenges. I enjoy the intellectual challenge of his points. If I'm wrong, I want to know it. So he's been a formidable advocate of IP, I should say, an opponent of the abolitionist position. Alexander Baker writes and produces music for film and TV. In his spare time, he studies law and Austrian economics. He's writing a thesis called Intellectual Space, Libertarian Theory of Intangible Property. So again, I'm very grateful to Alexander for having posted all these wonderful articles on Liberty.me. I look forward to every one of them. What we're going to do tonight is we're going to hear Baker for 10 minutes, Mr. Baker, and then Concella will oppose for 10 minutes, and then we're going to move back to Baker's response to Concella and then Concella's response to Baker, 10 minutes each. We're going to take 10 minutes where they're going to pose questions to each other, and then another 10 minutes where the audience may ask questions of either debater, and then we'll have a five-minute closing statement, and then from each participant. So I'm looking forward to a lovely evening, very excited. Let's get it going. Go ahead, Alexander, you're welcome to start, and I'm going to shut off my microphone, and I'm also going to shut off Concella's, and we'll let you let it go. Well, thank you very much. First of all, it's just a great pleasure to be here tonight, and thanks for letting me be a part of this. Yeah, my name is Alexander Baker. I do write and produce music for film and television. I do favor intellectual property, and I am a Libertarian, and I stand in a great line of Libertarian thinkers who also supported intellectual property. Like Lizaander Spooner, Ayn Rand, and, of course, Marie Rothbard. My thesis, as Mr. Tucker mentioned, is called intellectual space, and the doctrine of intellectual space is like a conceptual framework that allows us to analyze intangible objects, things like songs, movies, computer software, video games, the same way that we analyze physical things, physical goods, like aluminum cans or bicycles, and when we do that, when we do that kind of analyzing, we find that intangible goods have all the same qualities as physical goods, except, of course, that intangible goods are intangible, and physical goods are physical. So tonight, I'm going to support three essential claims. One, property is essential, essential to society. Number two, intellectual property, in particular, copyright, is a valid form of property, and very briefly, that's because it has all the qualities of property, and because the creation of an intangible good represents an act of homesteading. And number three, that the anti-IP case, which rightly is called intellectual communism, is empty. It is, in my view, philosophically wrong. It is strategically misguided, or at least very short-sighted, and it is economically dangerous. So number one, property is essential. I hope I don't need to spend too much time on this. I think all of our guests tonight will agree on that, that we have property rights to avoid conflict over scarce goods. We can look to the works of Mises and Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, and many others who have shown that without property, there is no trade, there is no market, truly, there's no society that we would recognize. What is property? Property is a set of rights. It is the exclusive, or monopolistic, if you like, the exclusive right to make use of some thing and to exclude others from using that thing. I want to say just a little bit about scarcity, abundance, and infinity. The total amount of mass and energy in the universe is unchangeable, and it is infinite. We cannot, and we never have, and we never will, create or destroy energy or matter. All we do is we rearrange the stuff to suit our human needs. I like to use the example of aluminum sitting in the hillside somewhere that we might want to use to make a bicycle out of, let's say. As long as that aluminum is sitting in the hillside, it might as well be at the center of the earth, or on Mars, or on some distant galaxy somewhere, as far as doing any good for people. As long as it's sitting in there, it's completely useless. The only way it becomes useful is if people take the time and trouble to go and get it and transform it into something. And the total quantity of aluminum, even just right here on the surface of the earth, is so unimaginably vast that we will not even come close to using up the aluminum that we have at our disposal for billions of years. So when it comes to physical goods, the limiting factor is not the quantity of stuff, never, and it never will be. The limiting factor for physical goods is our willingness and our ability to go and get it and transform it. And we libertarians, of course, have a name for this process of transforming stuff into a more useful state, and we call that homesteading. Who is the rightful owner? The homesteader is the rightful owner. What is homesteading? Homesteading is discovery, transformation into usefulness, which is also known as to create something. And as I mentioned before, we don't really actually create anything. We transform things into a state of usefulness. And this really leads to a very interesting discovery that Mises, I know, talked about a lot, and that is that, in fact, Mises called this the two most important facts about humans, and that is that we can obtain more stuff for ourselves, more goods for ourselves by specializing in trading with others than we can in self-sufficient isolation. And this leads to empathy, really. This fact is what leads to fellowship. And I bring that up only because it's super, super important, what is truly at stake in this whole debate. It is property, I believe, is the origin of empathy in humans. So I'm going to say just a little bit about myself. I do write and produce music that gets used in film and television. And I actually make a pretty nice living doing this. I'm fortunate because I earn what are called performance royalties. I'll show you just quickly here. I don't know if you can see this. Maybe you can see it. This is a BMI statement. It's a royalty statement that I get. And as you go down it, there is a listing of every song that played on every television show, what time and how long it played on, and how much I'm getting paid, what my royalty actually is for that. Every time a piece plays, I earn a little chunk of money. And that's because the producers of the shows are willing to pay a licensed fee to use the music. And how much money depends largely on the size and the quality of the audience that's being entertained. And to be honest, most of my placements are like in the low-rent district, like cable television. But nevertheless, I've written so much music that's been on so many shows that I'm able to pay for the studio. And it's part of a really nice house that I own in Sherman Oaks in the Hills. So the point is that this revenue stream that I just described is impossible. And that is it's legally impossible without copyright. If there is no property right in the patterns of information that I create, then I have no right to sell it or license it or rent it or anything else because property, only property, can be the subject of a contract. And it's not just music for television that crucially depends on copyright. It's music, movies, TV shows, books, soft books, such as the ones that Mr. Tucker publishes at Laysay Fair Books. They're all these are all forms of entertainment. Business models are all based on a respect for private property rights over intangible patterns of information. And I'd like to do just a little quick sample analysis using my doctrine of intellectual space. So we're going to analyze songs in intellectual space and we're going to compare that to bicycles in physical space. Now, there exists an infinite quantity of raw intellectual matter like language, mathematics, music. Just as there is an infinite quantity of raw physical matter like aluminum, iron, oxygen. I write and I record a song. This is homesteading a producer good, just as building a bicycle factory is homesteading a producer good. As song owner, I now have the ability to cheaply mass produce a consumer good called song copies. Just as a factory owner now has the ability to cheaply mass produce a consumer good called bicycles. For a given amount of time, there is some finite number of song copies that could possibly be made, just as there's some finite number of bicycles that could be made on the assembly line. But I rightly own 100 percent of all the song copies, regardless of how many I make, whether I make one copy or 10 or 17 or 100 million or any other number. I own 100 percent of them because I homesteaded the factory where they're being mass produced, just as the owner of that bicycle factory owns 100 percent of the bicycles that come off of that assembly line. Whether he chooses to make 10 come off or 100 or however many. So here's a little thought experiment. Suppose that there is this bicycle factory and the owner only runs the assembly line during the day and late one night, Jeffrey Tucker sneaks into the factory and using his own labor and his own raw materials. He makes bicycles on the assembly line as he interfered with the factory owner's use of the factory. Now, I have my thoughts on that, of course, but I'll leave that hanging for just a minute. I'm going to say just a little bit about number three, the anti-IP case is empty. For the most part, I'm going to respond to what I anticipate Mr. Kinsella and Mr. Tucker are going to say. But let me just say this for right now. I can I've read Mr. Kinsella's book. I don't know what the gentleman might have to say tonight, but I've read Mr. Kinsella's book called Against Intellectual Property. And I can actually sum it up very, very succinctly. Premise one in Kinsella's book is that property must be rivalrous. And premise number two is that rivalry must be physical. So therefore property must be physical. But follows quite, quite obviously, I think, from the two the two premises. It seems quite clear to me at least that Mr. Kinsella is smuggling his conclusion right back up into the definitions that he starts with in the beginning. And just to give you an example of what I'm talking about. Suppose that I define a mammal, OK, as a warm blooded animal with a big brain that breathes air, has live babies and walks on land. With that definition, I could prove that whales and dolphins are not mammals. And we could come up with a different term to classify them. So if we were to rename ocean mammals, we wouldn't be learning or investigating anything. We're just renaming something is all we would be doing. In fact, we would be unlearning because as it turns out, ocean mammals have a long list of identical characteristics to land mammals with one fascinating difference. That is, ocean mammals live in the ocean and land mammals live on land. And so it is with property, physical property and intellectual property have a long list of identical characteristics with one fascinating distinction. And that is physical property is physical and intangible property is intangible. So but if we actually do want to investigate and learn something, perhaps we can ponder this. We do not see people buying or selling atmospheric air. This is not surprising, you see, because air exists naturally and it's freely delivered to all people with no production required at all. We just breathe. I mean, air is just right there in your face automatically. Air is super abundant. Thus, no property right is needed. Now, it's a fact that free people under no coercion are willing to pay for the delivery. Alexander, I'm sure that your 10 minutes is up. I'm so sorry. I'll finish up in about 30 seconds. Just let me finish this little thing and I'll leave it hanging. I appreciate that. I think we have to move on to Concella now. Can I just finish for 30 seconds? Is that OK, Stefan? Yeah, OK. So what I was the point I was getting to is that unlike, unlike atmospheric air, it's a fact that free people under no coercion are willing to pay for the delivery of patterns of information while other free people are willing to take the risk of capital expenditure needed to produce and then deliver those patterns. People voluntarily contract to buy and sell IP and have been doing it for a long time. So that's that's what I want to leave leave us with this. If there is IP, that's no mystery that people are willing to do that. However, if there's no rightful intellectual property, then we have a big mystery to solve. And that is why do people act as though there is? Thank you very much. My turn. Thank you, Alexander. Yeah, go ahead, Stefan. I'm going to I'd love to be able to control whether or not. I don't know, matter of fact, if you can control whether the mic's microphones are on or not. These are a moderated thing. But Alexander, if you want to shut off your microphone, that would be great and you can go ahead, Stefan Kanzella. And I know that I let a little bit, but I'll let you I'll let you run over if you want to if you want to undercut your time, that would be very generous. I think we'll see. I've argued before that there are no good arguments for intellectual property and I will respond to Baker's later, except it's not even an argument. I didn't hear an argument tonight. Maybe he has an argument for IP, but I didn't hear any argument. I heard a random ad hoc disconnected a series of assertions and jumbled statements, so I really don't even know how to respond to it. I actually have an argument and I start from libertarian starting points. I don't think for this audience and for Baker and for Jeff and I have to justify libertarianism, but I will argue that intellectual property is inconsistent with the libertarian point of view. The libertarian point of view is extremely simple. It is basically the idea that you need a set of rules to govern how people get along with each other and interact, given the fact that we live in a world of scarcity. And it is based upon the idea that violence and interpersonal violence and conflict in the use of resources is a bad thing and that we prefer a world of cooperation and order and the division of labor and society and civilization. And therefore, we prefer when you have a conflict over the use of scarce means, which are tangible physical resources, despite Baker's trying to cram intangibles into that, then you need a rule to decide who gets to use those things. And the libertarian rule, and this is not intellectual property, by the way, this is just the basic libertarian idea. The libertarian idea is very simple. It is that, number one, when it comes to the scarce resource of your body, you are the presumptive self-owner or the owner of that resource, presumptive, because it can be overcome in certain cases. But the person who controls their body is the owner of that body. That means they get to decide who gets to be done, what gets to be done with it. They can get permission or deny permission for other people to use or touch or invade the borders of their bodies. When it comes to external resources, then the, when it comes, when there's a dispute over the control of that resource, the answer is whoever first started using that resource, unless there's a reason to overcome that presumption. And there's two reasons that we recognize in libertarianism. One is, number one, if the original owner or if a successor owner of a resource contractually gave it to someone else. So normally, if A is the first user of a resource or an earlier user of a resource, he has a better claim than B, unless he made a contract with B and gave it to B. And then in that case, B has a better claim than A. And the other case is a case of rectification. That is, if A causes harm to B, which means he trespasses against B's property, which means he invades the property rights of B, means he attacks him or he does something to him that violates B's rights. Therefore, he owes him restitution or rectification. In that case, B might also have a claim on A's property. So unless you can find a case of tort or crime, which calls for rectification or a contract, then A, if he has the earlier use or title to the, to the resource, he has a better claim than B. It's extremely simple. This is the entire libertarian case. And if you understand that, now there's a lot of reasons for this, which we can't go into here. But if you understand that, you understand why intellectual property is completely incompatible. And let me explain briefly why. If the state decrees that B owns A's home, when A did not make a contract for it, that is a type of taking or condemnation or expropriation or theft. Or if B takes A's home from him by an act of violence, that's also an act of theft. But if the state helps him do it by decree, just decreeing that A is the owner of this land, but now we decree that B owns it, even though A did not contractually agree to it, even though A did not harm B, then that is theft. Okay. This is also the case in the, in the situation for lesser or partial transfers of rights. So for example, if I own a home or a piece of land, and I agree with my neighbor not to use my land in a certain way, and he agrees not to use his land in a certain way, this is called restrictive covenants, right? Some neighborhoods have this, where everyone agrees not to use their homes for a pig farm. They agree to use it only for residential use. Everyone has contractually transferred partial ownership of their land, their resource, to their neighbors in exchange for something else, in exchange for a monetary payment, or in exchange for a similar transfer from their neighbors. This is called a negative servitude or restrictive covenant or a negative easement in the law. And there's nothing wrong with that, because it's done contractually or voluntarily. Just like if I sell you my car or my land outright by voluntary contract, that's perfectly legitimate. But if the government takes it without my consent, it's not legitimate. What intellectual property does, and we'll take the two paradigmatic cases, copyright and patent, and it's not clear which one Baker supports or he doesn't support or he even understands what these legal systems are, or even what legal system, ideal legal system that he thinks he supports would look like. Patent and copyright grant, or they're grants by the government to holders of these patent or copyrights that allow them to use the state courts and physical force of the state legal system to prevent some other person from using their property as they see fit. It is equivalent to, and in fact, it is exactly the same thing as a negative servitude. It's so it's effectively a transfer of property rights from the owner of a resource to a third party, but they did not contractually agree to it and they did not commit a tort or a crime, which gives rise to a rectification claim on behalf of the IP owner. And therefore, it is simply a redistribution of rights. It's pure theft. It's completely antithetical to the free market. Patent and copyright are among the top six most evil things the government, the state does in society today. I think it causes civil rights violations. It causes, it gives rise to the increase of the police state and surveillance. It reduces internet freedom. It threatens internet freedom and it reduces innovation and it reduces human economic well-being and welfare probably to the tune of trillions of dollars a year in the case of the patent system. It's completely horrible, completely abominable. There is no good argument for IP. I've heard several attempts at arguments for IP. None of them make any sense whatsoever or sincere or coherent. Baker did not even give an argument at all. So I can't even say it's inco it's not even an incoherent argument. It's not even an argument. He just gave kind of a stream of consciousness type recitation of some of his impressions, I guess, as of tonight. So I would like to hear what his criticism of my argument is since I actually gave an argument and I've given an argument. I'm a libertarian. I believe in property rights. I believe in the free market. I believe in competition. I believe in learning. I oppose the state and I oppose any imposition on the ability to learn, copy, emulate, or compete. And so I totally oppose any conception of intellectual property whatsoever. And if Baker wants to rebut that, which is his job now, because I'll stop, he needs to actually confront that on those terms. So I'll stop here. Thanks. Thank you so much, Steph. Concella, Alexander Baker. You now have 10 minutes to respond to Concella's remarks or you're welcome to elaborate on your initial statement, if you'd like. I my time is showing 42 minutes after the hour. So I'll stop at 52 minutes exactly. OK, thanks, Alexander. I'm not hearing you. I'm not hearing you. Right. The the argument that I make in favor of copyright is that creating an intellectual work is creating a thing of value by transforming previously unowned raw material into a state of higher usefulness so that another person is willing to pay for it. In other words, it has all of the characteristics of goods such as like what Karl Manger laid out. So so long ago. So in creating intellectual goods, we're we're doing just that. We're creating intellectual goods and has all an ant. OK, so intellectual property goods are rival risks. And I'll I sort of explained how that why that is in my in my bicycle example, but to restate it. So I've created a productive capacity that allows me to mass produce these consumer items. And that productive capacity did not exist before I homesteaded that factory into existence. And as homesteader, I am entitled to 100 percent of the use of the thing. Now, you might say that for you to make a copy of my song, does not interfere with my use, but it most certainly does when you think of it in terms of a percentage. Before you started making copies of my song, I had 100 percent of the productive capacity of my factory. After you started making copies, it was something less than 100 percent. Now, you might think that, well, that's not the right way to measure. But let's take the example of my home. OK, my house is like 3,000 square feet. I cannot use all of my house at one time. I can't even actually use a small fraction of my house all at one time. So you could make the argument that a person coming into my house as long as he's not using the kitchen when I'm using the kitchen, he's not interfering with my use of the house. Well, that's wrong because once I homestead and I own my house, I'm entitled to 100 percent of the use, regardless of how much I actually decide to use. OK, so that's why we have to look at it in terms of a percentage. OK, so that's how we know that interference in my intellectual property is, in fact, interfering. That's how your use, your copying is interfering with my use of this thing, of this object. So Mr. Kinsella basically made, I think, three arguments against intellectual property. One was called IP is not libertarian. His second one was IP is merely a creation of a state. And the third one is just IP is evil. So this thing on IP is not libertarian. Mr. Kinsella, you're absolutely right that when I try to enforce my copyright and I tell you that you cannot copy my song, that I am placing restrictions on the use of your physical body. I'm placing restrictions on the way that you can use your paper and your ink. Absolutely correct. But that's the very essence of property. OK, when I own my physical body, this places restrictions on the way you can use your gun. OK, you can reach out and punch the air if you want, but you can't reach out and punch me. OK, so this is absolutely in the nature of property itself to place restrictions on other people, people that you have no contract with, people that you don't necessarily even know. OK, that's what property is. It is the right to exclude. That's what it is. And what does exclude mean except placing restrictions on other people? That's all it means. OK, that's all it means. So, you know, if that's not enough to invalidate physical property, why would that argument invalidate intellectual property? OK, and you're going to see that this is going to be a recurring theme because clearly what my esteemed adversary is doing is applying this just total double standard. And what I'm doing, what my doctrine of intellectual space allows us to do is to compare the two forms of property side by side. And that's what I've done very systematically, is looked at how these things behave. And I show that intellectual property and physical property behave exactly the same way under analysis. The second thing, IP is a state creation. Well, I mean, it is true. I mean, there are copyright statutes and so forth. But I mean, the argument is that if the state has taken over enforcement of some particular type of law, that therefore the philosophy behind the law is wrong. I mean, that just doesn't follow, right? I mean, you know, the state has taken over, you know, in 1933, they passed a law making the possession of monetary gold a felony. That was clearly an abusive action by the state. But, you know, does that mean that gold is not rightful property? Of course not, you know. So of course, the state is going to use intellectual property laws for its own purposes and be abusive in its own way. The same way it does that with physical property laws. So if that's not an argument against physical property, then it's simply no argument against intellectual property either. And the third thing is IP is evil. Well, OK, no, it's not there. I mean, that's about the only response needed for that. And you really didn't address another point I made, which actually is an argument. And that is to wonder why it is that people act as though there's intellectual property. I mean, am I really supposed to believe that it's simply because the state has intervened and passed a legislated statutory law? I don't think so. I think the common law evolving from the people up absolutely would support copyright, right? And one evidence that I would offer for that is just the fact that people, including Mr. Tucker and others that I've seen in other discussions that I've seen. I just have this sense that copying somebody else's stuff without permission is just wrong. I mean, we've had conversations about plagiarism in that. So, you know, I guess I would ask you, you know, why do people act as though intellectual property exists? You know, in particular, how are they able to contract for its delivery? I think clearly if IP was abolished, right? Well, then you cannot contract for the delivery of intellectual property. I mean, I'd like to hear, I'd like to hear Stefan, you know, respond to that, you know, how can we how could we possibly have an entertainment industry? Computer software, video games, music for television, these kinds of things without a property right in the patterns of information. OK, wonderful. Thank you so much, Alexander, for staying in time and for giving such a vigorous and very interesting challenge. So now, Professor Concella, we have 10 minutes for you to respond. If you'd like to use the whole time, you're welcome to. And then we'll immediately go into questioning each other, which we'll have to set some ground rules for that. So you're welcome to go ahead. Well, I think Baker's first 10 minutes, he didn't present an argument, so I don't really know what to ask him. And the second, when he's supposed to ask me questions, he tried to summarize it, but he didn't do so there either. He seems to indicate that he's got this idea of intellectual space, which I know he's written about, but he did not elaborate it here. As far as I can tell, the argument is this with a copyright system and a patent system, I suppose, which he hasn't defined either one yet, with a copyright system, you have the ability to prevent competition, and therefore you can extract a higher stream of revenues from customers in the market because they're not able to go to a competitor. And you have some kind of property right in this future revenue stream. That's what I think he really means. He doesn't want to put it that way because it would be transparently obvious that that's ridiculous because no one has a property right in the money in future potential customers' hands, which is basically what they're arguing for. Hans-Hermann Hoppe and others have explained quite clearly there's no property right in value. There is no property right in the value of your resources only in the physical integrity of these resources. Baker's free to respond to this whenever he likes, even right now. I will note that he just rattles off a series of questions like how is entertainment law supposed to work and why can you contract for intangible resources or goods if there's no property right? Why do people act as if there's IP if there's not IP? Now, I want to first note that these are just questions and Baker's free to have questions and obviously he's confused about this whole area so he's inquisitive so it's natural that he has a lot of questions but a question is not an argument and everyone needs to understand that. Just because you have a question about something is not an argument. If I were in Soviet Russia in 1982 and I said you need to abolish the state control of toothpaste manufacturers and the grocery stores and everything and someone says but how many brands of toothpaste would there be if we abolished communist supply of toothpaste? Okay, that's a legitimate question to ask but the question that they ask is not a rebuttal to my contention that we should abolish communist control of toothpaste supply, okay? You can have a question but just because you have a question is not an argument. Quite often what's going on is there's an implicit assumption smuggled into the question which is an amateur or dishonest approach to arguing because instead of stating your premises outright and either defending them or assuming that your audience or your opponent agrees with it and just making it clear what your premises are which I have done explicitly here and which I always do in my arguments. You smuggle it into a rhetorical question which is not clear if rhetorical or not. And if I answered these five or 10 questions he rattles off he'll just come up with the 11th question. So if he says, well, how would novelists make money in a free market? And I say, well, A, B, and C. Well, what about a poet? Okay, well, I can come up with some ideas about that. Well, what about the inventor of a new procedure for software? How would they make money? I mean, you know, they're just gonna, there's a never ending barrage of questions that will never be satisfied. It's just like the socialists and the war for our state liberals who are never satisfied with our answers about how the poor are going to be taking care of in a free market. The real answer is more of a Randian type of answer. It's whatever happens happens. Respect property rights and whatever happens is the just result. Okay, what's going to keep people from forming monopolies on a free market if you don't have any trust laws? I don't know and I don't care. I mean, I have some ideas but basically people have the right to form cartels and price agreements if they want to. That's the bottom line. That's the consequence of property rights and respecting property rights. So I guess I would ask Baker if I could come up with a coherent question that would fit within his, the things he concretely said. Do you favor existing state copyright and or patent law? If so, which one? Or do you have some other idea of copyright law in mind? Because you said you're in favor of copyright law. I have a feeling that you're in favor of patent law maybe you want to squish it into the copyright law doctrine like Rothbard tried to do because he didn't understand these laws either apparently. So I would like to know exactly what system you do support. Is it like modern copyright law? Is it like patent law? Or would you abolish both of those and have something new called Baker's ideal intellectual space law? So I guess that's my question. What exactly do you favor and how is it compatible with existing property rights? Let me intervene here before you. Alexander, before you enter, before you answer, let's go ahead and start the Q&A back and forth. I'm excited about the section. I would just propose a couple of ground rules. We have 10 minutes for you to question each other. That now Stefan has asked you a question. You can answer it. It would be ideal if you could keep your answer to under a minute and then you respond with a question of your own. Stefan can keep your answer to under a minute and respond with a question of your own. And let's try to keep this sort of tit for tat going for 10 minutes. I show 658, so we'll cut it off at at least my time, 708 and move to questions from the audience. So thank you very much. Go ahead. I'm sorry Alexander, you can go ahead now and answer. I'm sorry, were you not able to hear my response? My suggestions? Okay, you're frozen now. He looks frozen. He's to my camera. He looks frozen. He looks frozen. Let's see if we can get him back on camera. Let's see if we can get him back going. There's some pretty heavy bandwidth going back and forth here. Alexander, can you refresh your camera or at least turn yourself off and on? Here we go. Did that work? Did that work? Hello, hello. Can you hear me? Hello, hello. Yes? Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, so I favor copyright and not patent and not trademark, except to the extent that those two things are like copyright. A copyright, the right to prohibit others from copying a finished work, something like a song or a movie, computer software, things like that. A patent describes a method by which some kind of invention or machine could be built. The reason that I think copyright is valid form of property is because it represents an act of homesteading. As libertarians, we agree that homesteading is the way that unowned things come to be owned in the first place, original appropriation. And transformation is the essence of homesteading. If you find a piece of unowned land, it's not enough to simply say, aha, I've discovered this piece of land, it's now mine. Because actually if you could do that, you could just look at an entire mountain range or an entire continent and just own it immediately. No, it's transformation into usefulness. So when I write a song or when somebody makes a movie, they're taking this raw, unowned intellectual matter and transforming it into something which is objectively useful. We know that because people are willing to pay for it. So that's why copyright is valid. It's valid because it is homesteading, period. That's it, that's the argument. And that's why patent is not valid. A patent is a method, it describes a method by which an act of homesteading could take place, but it is not itself an act of homesteading. So that's why it's clear in my mind why copyright is valid and patent is not. A trademark could be like a copyright. If you have a logo, let's say, that is like an original piece of artwork that's unique, a unique creation, then sure. I mean, that's like copywriting a painting or some other original work. So the idea that I could not name my company the same name as yours simply because you have an ownership of this particular word like Ford motor. Like I would not be allowed today to start a car company and name it Ford because Ford owns a trademark on that. I don't think you can own a word like that. I mean, it has to transform into a finished work. The actual copyrighted object must function as a finished work like an original painting or an original picture. So copyright, yes, patent and trademark, no, except to the extent that they're identical to copyright. So copyright's all we need. Well, okay, can I speak now? Yeah, go ahead, try this. I don't think you understand what you're saying. I really don't think you understand how patent law, I don't think you understand how patent law works at all because your argument would clearly include patent law and I don't think you understand trademark law either exactly but you can have opinions and not understand the law that you're endorsing, I guess. You say that homesteading is about things, owning things. It's not about owning things. Homesteading is about, is a libertarian, locky and doctrine which identifies the owner of a scarce resource which is contestable. It's not things, it's scarce things. So you're doing an equivocation here. So you're saying that just because I can own a contestable resource by being the first user of it, you can be the first owner of some other kind of thing and then you slip into this transformation thing about the nature of homesteading is transformation. Well, it's not really transformation, it's use, it's in bordering, it's showing that you've used it. Transformation really is the use of a resource that you have already appropriated and homesteaded and owned and when you transform that resource into a more useful configuration then you own more wealth because the thing is more useful but you don't have any more property rights. So the entire idea that property rights arise from the act of transformation or creativity is completely false. It does not arise from that whatsoever. Property rights arise from being the first user of an unowned scarce resource or from acquiring it from someone by contract and that's it. That's the only way to acquire property rights. You can acquire wealth by transforming resources that you already own, but that's not a property right. You already own the property in the underlying material resources, okay? Then you say something is useful let me make one more point then you can respond to this one, okay? You say that if something is useful then it's an ownable resource and you give no argument for that and I would like to hear it and then you say if someone's willing to pay for something with a monetary payment that shows that it's useful and therefore it must be property. That's a completely non sequitur because you can have unilateral contracts where you're willing to pay for lots of things that are not ownable. I could pay you for a kiss, okay? I could pay you in a bet. I could pay you if the sun rises tomorrow I could pay you if it doesn't rain tomorrow. That doesn't mean you or I own the weather tomorrow. It's just a way of specifying a contractual transfer of title to the money following Rothbard's title transfer theory of contract. So you've got to think about contract in a very properitarian clear sense to get this stuff straight and otherwise it'll muddle your thinking as it has yours. So I want to know why you think usefulness means you can own the thing and why if you homestead a quote thing it can be ownable. What is the thing you can think of? Go ahead Alexander. I mean, we're actually really kind of saying the same thing when I talk about transformation and you talk about use. I mean, what does it mean to use a piece of land? Suppose I come to an unowned piece of land and I say I love the way this land looks. It appeals to my aesthetic sense. It's beautiful. My use for this land and I'm talking about 1,000 square miles that I can see from the top of this hilltop. My use is simply to be inspired and to gaze upon its beauty. Now, did I homestead that 1,000 square miles? Was I the first to put that to use? Well, I don't know. I don't think so. I think what's really meant by put to use Locke's phrase to mix one's labor with the land is to make it useful to others. And that really requires some sort of transformation to do something. I can't just find the land. I gotta plant some crops. I don't disagree with that. I don't disagree, but it's not because it's useful to others. It's because the function of property rights is to put up a public notice that this is mine. That's yours. You have to have borders of property so that people can respect them. So you have to do something that shows that you have made a claim to it. You can put a fence around it. You can transform it. You can kill the field, whatever. But that is all in the case of a scarce resource that we all agree is a resource that people can own. The problem is you want to argue that there's another way that the property rights in those things can be transferred. So I own this piece of land because I'm the first one to use it, and then you come up with a way to write a novel or a song, and that gives you some kind of right to tell me how I can use the resource I've already previously homesteaded. So what gives you the right to tell me how I cannot use my resources? Now, you argued earlier that all property rights restrict action. But that's not an argument. By that argument, you could say anyone raping a woman can say, why can you complain? I mean, I'm just restricting how you use your body. I mean, all property rights, this is not nonsense. You have to have a good reason to restrict someone's property rights. Property rights say that there are no property rights. You were breaking up there just a little bit at the end. Go ahead. Also, several points there. Gosh, that seemed really confused. I might want you to go back through some of that. First of all, all contracts involve property and only property, period. Well, technically, they don't involve resources. They don't involve property. We have to stop using the word property in a traditional way. Property is a property right between an owner and a resource. No, no, no. Stop. No, stop. Stop. In order for me to legally contract with you for anything, I have to be the rightful owner of that thing, period. Yes, but the resource, yes. You have to have a property right in the resource. That's correct. The resource, like a car or a bicycle or a chunk of gold or a new song, right, a resource. No, the song is not a scarce resource. No, this is your equivocation. This is your mistake right here. Of course, a song is a scarce resource. Of course, it's totally scarce. Let's not. OK, let's see. OK. My favorite example of a truly non-scarce, super abundant resource is atmospheric air. Atmospheric air, first of all, pre-exists man and is also everywhere, up here on the land anyway. And it's delivered right where it's needed to all people. So that's not scarce. How is a song anything remotely like that? A song does not. What's your argument that a song is a scarce resource? It's got nothing to do with air. What is your argument that a song is a scarce resource? Scarce is that it does not just simply exist, that it must be produced. And then once it's produced, once the factory is produced, then copies can come off of the assembly line. Hold on. You're mixing two things together. You're talking about the origin of a resource or a thing. The origin of the thing has nothing to do with its nature. How a thing came into being is irrelevant to whether it's scarce or not. So you're talking about the origin. So you're getting into incentives and things like that. That's exactly where you're wrong. No, it's exactly where you're wrong. The scarcity of all things comes from our limited ability to go get it, to manufacture it. And that's the point that I made in my opening. You're confusing abundance with scarcity. Hold on for a second. Because I'll make this point again. The quantity of physical stuff in the world is infinity. We are never ever going to run out of aluminum, or iron, or oxygen, or any other physical. Gentlemen, one of the problems. Hello? Hello? I'm sorry. I don't know if you guys can hear me. I was just saying that scarcity comes from man building things, making things. The limiting factor on everything, on all resources, on all goods, is not the quantity of stuff. It's our willingness and our ability to transform it, to homestead it. But that's just not an argument. That's why things are scarce. It doesn't matter why they're scarce. It's irrelevant why they're scarce. If you have a possibility of conflict over a given means of action, there's a scarcity. There's a possibility of conflict. And we need rules to decide who can use the thing. That's it. It doesn't matter where it came from, or why it came from somewhere. Baker's frozen, so. And Jeff, you're frozen too, I think. OK, actually. Baker, Alexander was doing just fine. Yeah, you're doing just fine. You know what I might suggest? One of the problems we have, I mean, this technology is amazing. But it's not quite perfect, so we don't have simultaneous. We've got a delay, in this case, like three ways. So I think what we should do in the next 10 minutes is go ahead and go to questions. I show a couple of notifications. I'd kind of like to answer. I'd like to ask one of my own, actually, of Stefan Concella. Is everybody with me? Can you hear me OK? Is it good? Yep. Stefan? Yes. Can you hear me, Stefan? I didn't hear the question. Yes, I can hear you now. I'm not sure that Stefan can hear me. OK, you can. So let me ask this, because Alexander is making, OK, it's because I haven't asked it yet, OK? So Alexander is making, I think, fundamentally a point that seems intuitively plausible to people. Namely that when you create something, you want to be able to make a contract that's remunitively advantageous to you over some long period of time in which you can somehow license out your creations to other people. And they use it with your permission and only with your permission. Obviously, I'm on the pure abolition side of this. And yet I hear arguments along these lines. And I get why they tap into a certain intuition that people have about their own creativity. Is it not Alexander Baker's right to license out access to his works to people who might want to use them and pay him for doing so? And if it is his right, can you imagine this being done outside of a state-based system of enforcement that excludes third parties? I just want to put that to you, Steph, if you don't mind. So let me have a couple of quick responses to that. First of all, Baker was not clear whether his argument for IP is a contractual-based argument like Rothbard's attempts. So I don't know if we want to give him that anyway, but fine. And it was more the intuition of stuff you mentioned. People do have that intuition, but they also have the intuition that if someone steals their girlfriend, they've done something wrong to them, or that if they're the first one to open a pizza joint in a little town or a drug store and they have a good revenue stream, then how dare someone compete with them? And they would love to have some way to stop people from competing with them. So I understand the desire, and also I think there's a confusion, which I mentioned earlier. People confuse the source of property rights with the source of wealth. Transformation and intellectual labor and other types of labor are sources of wealth because they transform resources we already own into war-productive rearranged shapes and uses, but it's not a source of property rights. So there's a confusion there, and that's why people make that mistake. So does he have the right to try to make a license, a contract with individual people? Yes. Will it work? I think absolutely not. It's completely impractical, infeasible. It would not work in a free market for a number of reasons, which I could elaborate on, but I don't wanna steal too much time. But I would say even if it would work, it would only work against the people that signed a contract with him and not everyone else. It could never bind third parties, which is his apparent argument, since he supports copyright law, which does bind third parties. So the contract argument does not get you to copyright anyway. So even if you could have a contract, it would only bind a particular finite number of people that it's foolishly signed this agreement. Which might be enough. Alexander, do you wanna say anything about that? Yeah, we're talking about contract law and tort law. I think Rothbard, notwithstanding, I envision copyright as a property right, and just like my right to exclude others from my land extends to not just to people that I may have contracted with, but also to every other human being on earth. And if they come on my property, then that is a tort violation, and I would have an action against them at law. And the fact is that all rights are property rights, certainly under libertarian theory. And as Stefan mentioned earlier, beginning first and foremost with our rights to our own physical bodies, but all rights are property rights. And from that it follows that all wrongs, at least all legal wrongs, represent property violations. And so if there's no property right in patterns of information, then it is simply impossible, it's legally impossible to contract for their delivery. So, that's your mistake. Well, okay, and I wanted to get back to this because we didn't get to talk about this before. But before you were bringing up examples like what if we make a wager about this or that? Or what if we bet on whether it's going to rain tomorrow? Does that mean that I own the rain? Oh, come on, that's, come on, Stefan, that's ridiculous. It's not ridiculous. No, lots of contracts are unilateral. They're not bilateral. I do not own the rain. And when you and I make a bet about something, what we own is our money. You own a sum of money. Yes, exactly. I own a sum of money, and we are agreeing that we're gonna transfer that sum of money to one person or the other person based on some condition that might turn out this way. Exactly. That's right, exactly. Nobody is claiming to own the rain. That's just, that's asinine, stop it. Okay? But it could be just, what if I give you a gift? Like I say, I'm gonna give you $100 tomorrow if it rains. It's a one-way gift. There's no two-way transfer, okay? So that's a contract. That's an alienation title. That's under long-standing principles of common law, and I'm surprised you don't know this because allegedly you're an attorney, but a gift is not a contract, and a contract is not a gift. So stop it. There are gift contracts. What are you talking about? Of course it's a contract. No, no, no, a contract requires consideration to find. Please don't argue with me on this, and please, you're gonna embarrass yourself. Oh, okay. No, stop. Okay, everybody just. That's what I'm taught. I'll tell you what, I'm taught in law school, okay? That a contract requires an offer, an acceptance. That's common law. That's common law. That's common law, and the civil law, you can have a gift contract, which is enforceable. And in libertarian law, certainly it could be enforceable. Let's clear the deck and ask, let Liam actually ask a question so that I won't have monopolies on the questions. Go ahead, Liam. You hear me? Okay, so first I kind of have two things. We actually had an argument in the chat room about trade secrets, so I wanna clear that up after, but this is more important. So Alexander, I really like your analogy to the bicycle situation. I think it perfectly demonstrates what's going on. So do you know how hard drives work? Like more or less? Okay, well, just like a little summary. Like basically, let's just say it's a hard disk because it depends on what type. Let's say you have a hard disk, right? So you're gonna magnetically encode little bits on this disk, okay? So you own your hard drive, right? And so like Santa, you are a musician, okay? And so this is analogous to the factory situation. I hear a little feedback. Someone can mute their microphone, that'd be great. So anyways, so you are like a factory, right? So with a factory, you take materials that you either legitimately acquired from other people or you homestead it or whatever, right? So you take these materials and you transform them into bicycles and you own 100% of the bicycles, right? Is that what you're saying in that situation? Okay, good, awesome. So now let's just apply this to songwriting. Okay, you are the factory. You use your creative capacity and you make a song. This is a great like innovative new song. It's amazing, everyone likes it, great. Okay, so now you have the right to infinitely produce it. I agree. Well, as much as your hard drive can handle, you can make copies. There's limitations, but you have the right to infinitely produce it. Okay, so what does that create? Well, that rearranges the electrons on your hard disk, and that creates a physical representation of the song every time you make a file. Does that make sense? So that is the bicycle. Nobody can go into your hard drive and pick a knife and cut out that little chunk of it. That is how property rights applies to that scenario. It's not like a song is just floating around in some tubes or something. It's like actually on your hard drive and there's an actual physical representation for a file. Now, if someone copies, like if someone else without using their own productive capacity, manufacturers of a bicycle, you can't exclude them from doing that. If someone somehow can carbon copy your bicycle, nothing you can do about that, under normal property law, is totally fine. Similarly, if you give the song to someone, or they can have that song, and if someone copies their song or they give it to someone or whatever, you have no claim to, you can't do anything about that. You just have your little bits of magnetized metal in your computer. That's your property. I think that was, that's pretty much my analysis of your analogy. Okay. I guess what you're saying is that because a little thing like a song has to be fixed into a tangible media, like a hard drive, that therefore only the physical thing can rightly be owned. I think that's what you were getting at. The way I conceptualize it is that the original song that gets written is like a factory and it exists at this place in intellectual space. And if in order to then make copies of that song, it is necessary to enter this factory and use it, which of course was impossible before the factory was built. And if somebody else makes copies of my song, that is like them sneaking into my factory and using my factory. Even if, if they're using their own computer, that would be analogous to using their own raw materials in the factory or their own labor. But it still doesn't change the fact that they're using my factory. And the factory makes it much, much cheaper and easier to mass produce songs for people. I mean, if you want to, you can sit down and write and play your own song. I mean, you don't have to copy mine. But the fact that I made a song makes it much, much cheaper and easier for you to get a song to listen to. And that of course is not anything new or anything different between intellectual versus physical property. It's just simply mass production. We've learned to mass produce intangible goods just like we've learned to mass produce physical goods. Let me say once something really quickly here and then we can let the next question come up. I thought Liam was going to ask something about trade secrets, but I'm not sure what it was or if he can post it later, I'd be happy to address it. I'll say quickly, trade secrets are like the fourth type of IP. And in my view, they're completely illegitimate as well. I can explain why. You don't need trade secret law to keep things secret. What trade secret does is on top of that and it's completely unlibertarian outside of contract and disproportionate. I can explain that if someone wants to read that, go to my blog, c4saf.org, I have posts on trade secret. And if Baker gets a chance to answer this later, he can, I'll quickly just ask you. You say you support copyright law. I would be curious if you support the current statutory copyright law with the doctrines of derivative works and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and whether the term should be finite or infinite or if it's finite, what should it be? Because right now it's about 120, 30 years. And what about statutory damages, which is $75,000 per infringing act? I mean, do you support the existing copyright system, which I suspect you're going to back off on these things in which case it's not clear what you really do support? So you support copyright, but you say you don't support copyright law as it exists, but you don't want to abolish it. And if we ask you what copyright law you do support, you won't say, you'll just say you support it and you'll support patent law to the extent it's like copyright law, which nobody knows what that means and you apparently don't know. So I don't even know what you support, just like I and Rand and the other advocates. So if you could answer what copyright law doctrines under statutory law you do support, when you get a chance later, I'd be curious to hear that. And now maybe Wesley can go. Let's wait on that. I think if I understood Alexander correctly, he completely agrees with Rothbard on issues of patent. I may be wrong about that. Let's get Wesley in here and have him go ahead, Wesley. It looks like he froze, am I coming through? Yeah, it's a little soft. Okay, I mean, because my question is kind of for Alexander in that if we assume that, and we agree with your idea that a song is a property in the sense you say it's a factory, other features of property are that you can transfer it and you can rent it out and that you can give it to your children and they can own it later on down the road. But there's also a feature where you know, here is on this, but you can also lose your right to property to abandon it or basically leave alone and don't use it long enough. So I mean, in your conception, how do you lose your ownership of this song you created, this work you created and how long will it last? Is it such that, you know, that a company can own the happy birthday to you song indefinitely or will, after a certain period of time, does that claim degrade or go away or can you lose it? Is that clear? Alexander, your camera has not frozen. So, yeah, and I hope you heard the question. It was a little bit muddled to me, so I'm gonna go ahead and, yeah, you are back. Did you hear the question okay? Yeah, I think he was asking. Yeah, I think so. He was asking what the duration of ownership of a copyright should be. And I mean, if it is legitimate property, then it should be for, pretty simple. I should be able to transfer ownership of that object to somebody else. I should be able to will it to my children and them to theirs just like a piece of land. Why not? So you don't agree with copyright law? No, I don't agree with the way that it's been taken over. No, no, I think it's- Well, it was never happened, I mean. If it's going to be philosophically clear, then really the form that copyright should take is really it should just mirror property laws in general, just like a piece of land or a physical object. So you don't support current statutory copyright law, so you support some other baker's version of copyright law? Sure, let's call it that. In fact, let's only call it that from now on. So what are the other differences? Because Jeff thinks it covers patent law, which it doesn't, because Rothbard thought it did, and you apparently don't. I'm sorry, is that a question? Well, I'm just saying nobody knows what you're really in favor of. You say the word copyright, but it doesn't mean what copyright means, so I don't know what it means. Copyright means that if a particular intangible good like a song or a movie or computer software or a video game or a book, if some object like that, and I'm talking about the pattern of information, not the physical thing, but the pattern of information, and if it is sufficiently complex enough such that the borders where it ends and the rest of the intellectual world begins are sufficiently clear, and if it has all of the characteristics of goods such as Carl Manger has laid out for us, then- Okay, I think we've got Liam come on. I think this has to be our last question. I'm so sorry, if we were in the same living room in real time without technological difficulties, this would be a lot easier. Let's see if we can get Liam on here. Liam, are you there? Well, we'll do that next. I just want to, if you guys can hear me, I just... Okay, I see Alexander is frozen. He's not. I see him fine. And I am the only unfrozen one. I think you're frozen, dude. We're all good. I see Alex fine. Am I back? Liam, can you try again? Yeah, Stefan wanted to know how I define copyright, and a copyright is an ownership of an intangible good and the legal right to prohibit others from using it. But that's not what copyright law is, and under today's law. It's not even an approximation of that. Okay, well, all right, that's what it should be. Well, then you could say patent law should be that. I mean, so you don't know if you do or do not support copyright and patent law under the U.S. statutory system. And yet you say you support it? No, I'm not stopping it. You have to define what you're arguing for. Well, I have twice at least now, but I support it. Right, why do you call it copyright? Copyright has nothing to do with that. Copyright has always been a finite term. It's never been a perpetual term. It's basically just like what it is now, which is the ability to prohibit somebody else from copying it. Come on, stop this. Well, copyright also has, what about derivative works? That's in the copyright. What about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, preventing anti-circumvention technology? Okay. Stefan, can you reflect the digital millennium act? I don't know the details of that. Just turn your mic and your camera off. I'm sure. You know, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is to intellectual property, probably. That's very good. I think we're gonna have to go to final statements, if I could allow each of you to have two minutes. I think that would be the perfect solution here. Go ahead. Let's see, we began, we began with Alexander's. Yeah, can you guys hear me? We good? Thumbs up? Okay. I think one of the callers a few minutes ago was talking about containers. And that's another- Okay, Alexander, why don't you finish this off with a two-minute statement and we'll end with Stefan Cancelo with two minutes. Is it okay? Everybody agree to that? Is it good? I'm sorry, I don't see the questions in the question tab. And I think that's my own failing. I'm so sorry about that. But Alexander, why don't you go ahead and I'll shut off my camera and my mic and you can make your final statement. Right, one of the earlier callers brought up what I call the container argument, which is another anti-IP argument. And it's this idea that intangible goods require some kind of a physical container to be delivered, otherwise they're useless. And of course, that's not an argument really at all because there are plenty of physical things like orange juice, for example, is completely useless unless it has a physical container. So if requiring a physical container doesn't make physical property invalid, why would it make intellectual property invalid? And that's really the way it is with this entire anti-IP case. Over and over again, Mr. Kinsella just simply said, well, property is for scarce contestable resources. Well, he's just assuming that that means they have to be physical. I mean, he's simply assuming what he's trying to argue. Mr. Kinsella's argument basically is, first, number one, property must be rivalrous. And I completely agree with that. That's the rivalry is the essence of, is the necessity for property. But then number two, he's basically saying, rivalry must be physical. That's what he means. When he talks about it's not contestable or it's not rivalrous, he means it's not physically rivalrous. Well, of course, that's obvious. Physical property is physically rivalrous. Intellectual property is intellectually rivalrous. I mean, that would simply follow. So, of course, if we're free to just define terms the way that we want to, we can prove anything that we wanna prove. But I just don't think there's really much of anything to this anti-IP argument. And I would ask all of you to just kind of go deep a little bit and understand that by abolishing intellectual property it's really an act of communism. It's really going to be no different than abolishing the property rights in farmland like what happened in Bangladesh or in the Soviet Union or abolishing the rights to factories in North Korea. The results predictably will be exactly the same and that is economic ruin for exactly the same reasons. That's the incentive problem and the calculation problem, Austrian economics. So, I just want you to stop and consider that your policies, anti-IP, if implemented would harm, would hurt real people. And I just wanna leave it on that level to just please give it some thought. Besides harming the libertarian movement and everything else, we're talking about property rights here and property rights are essential. And I'm gonna give up my song when they pry my cold dead fingers from around it. Thank you. I would say a few things. First of all, we debated before this is more civil so I appreciate that, but I think you illustrate the fact that what I've maintained before that there are no good arguments for IP. You just had a hodgepodge of kind of ad hoc, connected assertions, most of which are false, not connected together. I think you're sincere pretty much, but to be honest, I think you're just like my fellow patent lawyers and the movie industry, you make money off of songs and so you want the system to be perpetuated. So you're desperately trying to find an argument for it which is what I did. I'm a patent attorney. I make money off of it too and I've made a lot of money off of publishing and books as well, a lot of money. Maybe some of it would be there. It wouldn't, I don't know. If there were copyright, I don't know. I think it probably would, but even if not, I'm still against it because I have principles and I think you're just doing what everyone who is on the gravy train of copyright does, you're just trying to come up with an argument for it. It makes no sense whatsoever. I sincerely believe that copyright and patent are among the most evil policies the state has ever foisted on us and are becoming worse. I think the patent system costs about a trillion a year of just total dead loss in innovation and costs on the economy and the world and I think that it causes monopolies and cartels and I think the copyright system causes a lot of distortions of culture and is reduction in freedom and is reducing people's individual freedom on the internet. I think the case is not the case against intellectual property. The case is the case for property rights which you allegedly agree with in which most of my opponents pretend to agree with. The case against IP is simply to observe that there's no room for anything else just like if you're against, if you're for negative rights you can't be for positive rights because positive rights always come with the expense of negative rights by the same token, intellectual property rights which are not really property rights. They're basically negative servitudes. There are claims on existing property rights and physical resources. They always come at the expense of the existing physical resources rights, property rights. And so they basically are theft and invasions of property rights and trespass and are basically socialistic. So for you to call me communistic is some hootspah. What you're advocating is a type of socialism. So that's why it's evil and I totally and 100% oppose it. That, I think you're muted. I'm gonna finish off the moderation here because Jeff is having internet issues but thanks so much both of you. I think that you both done a great job and thank you everyone for coming tonight. We've got some great stuff lined up this week at Liberty Me You. Our next session is tomorrow night at 9 p.m. Eastern. It's the future of Liberty with Zachary Caceras of the Startup Cities Institute. He's gonna be talking about startup cities, what's going on in Honduras with those and they're kind of free trade zones. And we've also got on Friday night, Alexandra Padilla is going to be talking about the benefits of immigration. And then Saturday at 4 p.m. we've got Walter Block back on defending the non-aggression principle. So thank you so much. Thank you, Alexander and thank you, Stefan. This has been, it's been entertaining and hopefully enlightening. Take care everyone and have a good night. Thank you. Thank you.