 I think we're good to go. So how are you doing? Pretty good. I am recovering from broken ribs and things like that. Yeah. So I've been there with the ribs, not with alone, but I, uh, at least I, I partly share your pain. I've partly shared your pain literally and I entirely share your pain metaphorically. Anyway, guess I'll introduce you. Um, welcome back to the Agora Cafe. I'm Roderick Long and today I'm happy to have with me, uh, Bruce Benson, that's Bruce L. Benson. Uh, I should specify because there's also a famous Bruce D. Benson and that is not our Bruce. Uh, Bruce Benson is a professor emeritus of not of economics at Florida State University, a research professor at Appalachian State University. If recipient of the Association of Private Enterprise Education's Adam Smith Award for 2006, the recipient of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation's 2000 Sir Anthony Fisher, International Award, not, not a fishy award. Anthony Fisher. I just realized it's very much like Anthony fishes, which is aligned from Anthony and Cliff Petra. Um, he's a senior fellow at the Independent Institute. He's also served as visiting research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. Julian Simon fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center and, uh, beautiful Boseman Montana close to my heart. He's a distinguished visiting. He's been a distinguished distinguished visiting scholar at Texas Tech's Free Market Institute, a full bright senior specialist at the Czech Republic, a visiting professor at the Université de Paris, Pantillon Assas, and numerous other honors that I will, uh, not attempt to enumerate. Uh, he's also written in addition to over 200 articles and book chapters and so on. He's, uh, published a number of books, the two that are his chief claim to fame in the free market anarchist anarchist circles I run in, uh, because we anarchists like to run in circles are the enterprise of law, justice without the state and to serve and protect privatization and community and criminal justice. He's also the co-author with David Rasmussen of Economic Anatomy of a Drug War, Criminal Justice in the Commons, co-author with Melvin Greenhut of American Anti-Trust Law and Theory and Practice, co-editor of Property Rights, Eminent Domain and Regulatory Takings Reexamined, co-editor with Paul Zimmerman of Handbook on the Economics of Crime, and co-editor with Terry Anderson and Tom Flanagan of Self Determination, the other path for American, for Native Americans, which I hope we'll get back to you because of all the things I haven't read by you. That's one of the ones I'm most interested in looking at. So, uh, you know, the way these things should go is I ask you to tell me a little bit about your background, where you grew up, your education, and then all the way how you got interested in economics and in the economics of stateless law and all this kind of thing. That could be a long answer. I'll try to keep it reasonable. I grew up in Montana and really just stumbled into economics. I started out in pre-law and got depressed, I guess, would be a good word for what I was finding out about it. And so I actually dropped out of school, got drafted, went into the military for a couple of years, went back to school and just tried out introductory courses for several different areas and just economics just was an immediate appeal. The logic of it was so powerful, at least for me at that time. So I switched to economics as a major. This was at the University of Montana. I went on and got a master's there as well, in part because I wanted to go for a PhD program, but I had avoided math and statistics, which PhD programs and economics expect you to have. So I did a master's and picked up some extra math and statistics along the way. Then I went to, pardon? A well calculated move. Yeah, I guess it, I think today that the mathematics of economics is gone way overboard and we've forgotten what economics should really be about. But at that time, the economists say no, although, of course, yeah, the economists say no, are like Austrian or Austrian leaning. So yeah, there's a, yeah, there, but the mainstream in economics is still highly technical mathematical. In fact, I got my t-shirt. I don't know. You can't see it, but it shows a, an individual writing on the blackboard series of equations and then he writes and then a miracle happens. Oh, I know that cartoon. That's a, yeah, and then it goes on from there. That's my comment on my chosen discipline. The after Texas A&M where, I mean, in terms of my sort of free market or libertarian leanings, they were in sort of developing, I guess, when I was younger. As a, an aversion to authority. I didn't like people telling me what to do and probably my father was the main one at that time. But then when I went in the army, that aversion broadened to include many other people and institutions. And so that was there in my background. When I went to Texas A&M, it was a very much a free market institution at that time. And I was fortunate to have a number of fellow students who were very much in the libertarian camp, free market economists and so the people I interacted with sort of led me into that literature. I, my first position was at Penn State. I actually was promoted the last year I was there, but I got an offer from Montana State. So I got a chance to go home and I took it. It's probably a mistake. The Montana had no budget to pay faculty with or anything like that and I had some really productive years and no raises and and so after three years, I went on market just hoping to get Montana State to raise my wage, but that didn't work as well as I'd hoped. And so I ended up at Florida State where again, I thought I'd be there three, four years and go someplace else. I ended up being there for 30 years and so that's sort of the overview of my academic career in terms of my development developed interest in free market policing, free market courts, justice without the state. That I can probably attribute to David Thoreau at the Independent Institute or Murray Rothbard, one of the other, David was putting together a an edited volume on sort of free or edited volume on gun control and he wanted a sort of libertarian perspective and so he called Murray and asked if he knew any libertarians or who were working on crime and those sorts of issues and Murray gave him my name. David called asked if I wanted to contribute to the volume and back then he offered me a thousand dollars. So that was enough to convince me that it was worthwhile. It turned out, I mean, my argument essentially was that if you look at the data where people are arguing guns are a cause of increased violent crime. There is a correlation, but my argument was but at least part of that correlation is due to causation in the other direction. Essentially, violent crime is causing people to buy guns for protection. And I backed that up with a bunch of evidence about private sector activity in law enforcement, law crime prevention, those sorts of things. And I found so much material that at one point I called David and said I can shorten this to be a paper in your your volume or I could write a book and he said, well, do both. And so I ended up from that the Enterprise of Law developed and as I worked on the Enterprise of Law, I became more and more convinced that the state is not required for criminal justice or for law in general that the private sector can do it. They have done it historically. They're doing it today in substantial to a substantial degree, even though we generally don't know it because we don't all we hear about as the public sector stuff. So that that got me into the sort of libertarian anarcho-capitalist kind of group of scholars that have been my the people I correspond with the people I read and that sort of thing now. I just close out. I retired from Florida State in 2015 and we've moved up to the mountains in North Carolina to be closer to our kids and grandkids. And I'm still doing some work, but the incentives are a lot weaker. I'm not trying to get raises or anything like that anymore. So I keep active, but not as active as I used to be. So a lot of what you do is sort of at the intersection of economics and law and history. So you've had some background in law. You mentioned you had to be pursuing a pre-law degree. How did how did you get interested in pursuing the historical angle? Because a lot of although sort of you know, it's maybe more common for a lot of sort of libertarian economists now people like Peter Leeson, you know, building into the, you know, the misty past, but I guess some people were doing it earlier too. People like Joseph Beaton looking at counterclaw and so forth. But how did you discover the, you know, the Kapa Huku, if that's the right pronunciation of New Guinea and all these all these folks? But part of it was Thoreau sent the enterprise of law to a number, a large number of reviewers and they were very helpful in directing me towards stateless law information in anthropology primarily. And of course, I read Murray's, Murray Rothbard's work and he does some history there. I read David Friedman's material on Iceland, which is a fascinating example that deserves much more attention than it's gotten, I think. That was probably my first thing I read of that kind. Yeah, he writes very well, of course, and he makes very logical, powerful arguments there. So, and I read his book, The Machinery of Freedom. And so I saw that, you know, so much of the work on private law at that time was sort of ad hoc theory, no real evidence that it might work. Just theory saying, yeah, this looks like it could work. Stuff like the Montana Hills and the Perkinses and so on. Yeah, that's right. And so Murray and David and a few others, Peddon or how we say his name, we're looking at historical material and showing that in fact, what the way I envisioned a private arrangement in law actually has existed at least in part and in cases entirely for a community. So I started reading the anthropology stuff. I started reading, especially history of the common law and you know, you get back into pre-common law, Anglo-Saxon law. It was very largely stateless. Tribal law has been primarily stateless throughout the world. You look at anthropology, one thing I have done is just read a lot of different descriptions of stateless systems and noticed or looked for the consistencies across those systems. The same sorts of institutions and arrangements arise in New Guinea as arise in Comanche in the plains of North America. And similarly, what's called a law merchant, the medieval period was a system essentially of private law arrangements for merchants trading throughout Europe. And again, institutions all look very similar. They evolve similarly. The rules tend to be similar across these communities. So it's in recognizing those consistencies in these kinds of systems that inspired me to do some writing, trying to make that point. And then, of course, you write things in our disciplines for academic journals and the journal article has to be so short that people say, well, what about this and what about that and lead you to write more and write books that help expand on those ideas. And I sort of actually, in terms of my academic career, I started out as a mathematical price theorist out of Texas A&M. And I published a lot of stuff for about five or six years in that area. But I was also, I had Randy Holcomb as an instructor at Texas A&M, who's one of our friends and leading public choice economist. And so I was also interested in public choice issues that started writing in public choice. Then David Thoreau got me into private law, sort of the theoretical mathematical stuff fell to the wayside and my public choice and private law stuff rose to the top. And my theory papers got me AER, my anarchy papers don't get me AER, American Economic Review. But I've placed those papers in some very good journals along the way, and so it's caught some attention. A friend of mine, Ed Stringham, you know, has said that in his mind, the enterprise of the law sort of legitimized the study of private law because it was full of examples of how these offered sort of theoretical explanations, but then with examples to back them up and that led a lot of other people to move in that direction. So if I've had any impact, that might be the one that has been useful that people like Stringham and Powell and Leeson and those guys coming out of George Mason or were influenced by my writings at least. Ed, so it was I though I'm not in economics or in history, but that's certainly the book certainly had an impact on me back in the 90s or whenever I read it. So the two objections one often hears. One is that this kind of private law system only works for relatively small and culturally homogeneous communities. I don't know whether law merchant would quite count as that, but anyway, that's what the objection, but often, you know, so a lot of the examples like the Comanche and the couple of the Iceland and so forth. The other objection is, you know, basically, well, if these systems are so good and why did they get out and competed by large centralized states? Do you have any thoughts on either of those? Oh, many. I thought you might have one or two. Yeah, the first one is small community argument is appears to be very powerful. When you had that was Thomas Jefferson's argument. Thomas Jefferson had a letter to Madison in which he said, you know, sometimes I think that having no government at all would be the best system. He talks about the three possibilities. That's basically, you know, rule by one person or a few democracy and and having no government at all. And he says, sometimes I think the third one would actually be the best, but and a lot of a lot of Native American tribe we didn't say Native American, but anyway, a lot of our Indians seem to have that system, but he thinks it only he says I think it'll only work for small community. So even he was. Yeah. Part of that is that people who have looked at those kinds of communities look typically pick a community and they look at it and it looks like, you know, it's close-knit community. All our rules work internally pretty well. Their institutions, that sort of thing, but they failed to recognize that there's interactions between these communities or members of these communities and American Indian tribes are spending all the time. Their only interactions were warfare. Yeah. Yeah, I am actually working on paper right now about warfare on the Great Plains among the tribes there. And and it turns out that, yeah, there was a lot of warfare, but there was a lot of cooperation as well. You know, it also applied to like late medieval and early Renaissance Europe. Yeah. Time of the law. Merchants actually a lot of warfare. There was a lot of commerce and trade. Yeah. So you get among the Native Americans, for instance, you get commerce and trade. They're when horses were introduced into New Mexico in the 1600s, I think it was. They quickly moved up the west side of the Rockies through a trade network of the youths and Shoshone and these various tribes who also had the same language or very similar language. And so they could communicate and they traded. And they quickly moved up the west side of the Rockies and most significant probably invasions of the Plains then came from the Northwest into the Plains as people got horses and became much more adept at hunting buffalo and so on. So you have these trade networks. If there's no law, if there's no rules, how does that work? Well, according to game theorists, it wouldn't it would be a there wouldn't be credible promises and so people would be cheating and all that sort of stuff. But in fact, these people develop relationships across communities and so traders, for instance, are developing a different set of rules dealing with their activities. They're not dealing with all that stuff that local community is the violence or the that sort of thing or dealing with trade and and maybe some other inner community activities. And so you get planes. What's that? A law merchant of the Plains. Yeah. And and so you get rules and institutions that work across communities in relatively narrow areas of activity and over time you build a hierarchy of these communities linking each other in various ways. So the the Anglo-Saxons, they had their local institutions in the hundreds they called them. But below that there were there was another set of local institutions, even smaller communities. The hundreds, but then the hundred court. Handled most stuff, but there was also typically a shire court of some sort that would handle relationships between people in different hundreds. And so you get a pyramid or a hierarchy of institutions that they call these small communities in various ways in ways that matter. If it if it's not something they're doing, they don't have law about it. But if if they're trading or cooperating in warfare against a common enemy or doing various things like that, they're going to have institutions and rules to deal with that. That that that hierarchy is very different than the one we're familiar with within the government. Of course, it's not an appellate system. You don't appeal from the local community to the next court up because the next court up doesn't even deal with whatever was going on in the community. The the local community deals with its own issues may have very different laws than other communities that their network with through that next higher tier of activity. So I think I think that argument about the requirement for a close knit community in a way is right. But it's not that it doesn't follow that those close knit communities are isolated. Sort of next year up close knit communities can form and do where now you've got interaction between different groups and those interactions can expand in in many ways as as cultures advance and so on. So I mean if we look at law today. We've got local governments creating law and we've got county governments creating law and we've got state governments creating law and federal government creating law. The common law in the United States. There's essentially 50 common law systems. Each state has its own common law. So this idea of a sort of unified centralized monopoly of law being required to have widespread cooperative interaction simply is is not valid with even careful look not even a very careful look frankly at actual illegal arrangements. Of course also we have cooperation across borders where you know exactly there may be some you know treaties and things but they but you know they're not really so unified that they count as part of a single centralized legal system. Yeah but you know you go to Canada and you know buying things there is very much like buying things here except that they use different money and that you know the idea that you need to centralize monopoly of law even if you make that argument how big should it be I mean you've got Iceland with what 120 250,000 residents is a country and you've got China with billions. What's the optimal size for a legal system it depends on whether it's an authoritarian system probably or a more based more on individuals and their their interaction views and views. So I I guess part of it that argument also probably goes back to no sick because he his model essentially was independent communities spread over space kind of bumping up against each other but there was never any cooperation between them and and so if the earliest model of that kind of multi system law. He concluded was not going to work because one ultimately takes over the other or something like that. Yeah, I mean either they either they have conflicts in which case either one of them conquers the other and you get a state or they're equally matched and so they divide the territory between them and you get two territorial states or if they cooperate through arbitration and so forth. The only what they become a single unified legal system. But you know what it would be in the like the Anglo-Saxon system you're talking about the unified legal system wasn't even it wasn't even authorized to deal with the particular disputes when people in those communities it was totally it was entirely about the disputes among the the kind of it's today if you look at an international trade how widespread arbitration is in international trade is actually not easy to determine and I don't know if anybody could because a lot of arbitration is within trade associations and it's secretive they don't want outsiders knowing what's going on. But somewhere estimates suggest somewhere 90 to 95% of the contracts written in international commerce have arbitration clauses and they're not all going to the same arbitration tribunal there's hundreds of arbitration tribunals. The typically with arbitration you can even specify the law that you want to apply. And so you don't have to be in the United States to apply US law if that's what you want to do you write an arbitration contract and and specify somebody else's law. So the idea that systems are isolated in independent at least simply isn't empirically valid I would say what was your second point. If it's private law systems are so great how well how do they all get out competed by big centralized states. Well that's my argument there is that what we think of as law can at least what most people think of as law there's certainly debates about what we mean by law still going on but law can be used for two functions. One is to facilitate cooperation by enforcing property rights and and encouraging people to live up to their promises in contracts and all that sort of stuff and the other is that law can be used to transfer wealth if somebody is powerful enough to create a rule that says well consider go back to England Anglo-Saxons some of the earliest codifications of Anglo-Saxon law were simply codifications of local custom. The king wasn't making up new rules about contracts or or property rights and things like that he was just having his scribes write down what they observed out there but in addition to that there's always some more stuff about who got the money. And so if there was a trial historically they would it probably be local or it would be a prior essentially private it be a local hundred truck quarter shire quarter something like that but then the king started sending out his his judges and claiming jurisdiction over more and more stuff and then he could charge fees and then instead of judgments based on damage awards or or restitution or whatever you want to call it. They turn these start turning these laws into crime so their crimes against the state. The state gets to collect fines and confiscate property and all sorts of things and and so a powerful entity like the king if he left the locals alone they'd handle their law just fine. If he decides that that might be a good source of revenue if he gets involved in those local disputes and things like that he moves in and so in a way I mentioned Randy Holcomb before he argues that well private law might work in theory in practice it's impossible because there are always going to be a state and once you've got a state they're going to start imposing new rules about distribution and that sort of thing. He might be right. On the other hand there are many examples where the state has historically tried to impose their rules and and failed. So you know we have a vast international market in illicit drugs. They don't operate that market without some sort of rules and sanctions and things like that. It's kind of an underground law merchant probably but and certainly the state has been trying to suppress those underground markets the trade that occurs that the methods they use for resolving disputes and all that sort of of course violence is always a method for resolving disputes and when the state prevents people from using something peaceful it usually they end up violence is the solution. Yeah like producers of alcohol don't shoot each other. Jim suited their competitors anymore for some reason they did during the 1920s and it's a mystery. Yeah. Of course they were also had we're paying off the police and for support and all these other things that the state provided them with by making something illegal you create the opportunity for an entrepreneur to move in and supply what people want. And you've given the price up we've also made it so that people who aren't too risk averse to the ones who are going to go into it and people who are comfortable with levels of risk and violence. Yeah and people who have low opportunity cost they don't have an education or they don't have particular marketable skills but they can sell drugs or transport drugs or create make drugs or something like that and and so you create opportunities for people who otherwise may not have very attractive opportunities. So anyway the in when I mentioned before that in England when it was actually under the early Normans they started essentially creating crime turning what had been tore into crime where prior to that the issue was always if you harm somebody intentionally or the otherwise you you owe them restitution compensation but the King's turn those kinds of activities or those kinds of issues into crimes increasingly. You know that I you know if I attack you the primary victim turns out to be not you but this guy on the throne somehow that I've injured. Yeah and so the King's sort of diverted all of those restitution not all but many of those restitution payments into fines and confiscations for the King. That didn't go very well. I mean it it took probably at least a hundred years before people sort of gave up resistance many people and just sort of fell into lockstep but the resistance to that idea continued for a long time. People simply went to their own dispute resolution processes and paid restitution collected restitution and that sort of thing. So it's we see lots of authoritarian kinds of legal institutions but that doesn't necessarily mean they're very effective. At doing what they are supposed to do theoretically or doing what they're intended to do which is usually to take wealth and give it to somebody else like themselves. So I think much of legislation probably most of legislation is about transfers not about the things that lost in my mind should be about about encouraging cooperation and that sort of thing. I've seen it argued in fact I think I think David Friedman gives this argument with respect to ISA and I've heard people you know give it more broadly that the that one factor that made going on was cultural that there was a kind of cultural ideology about kingship that go drawing partly on the Bible and partly on ancient Greek and Roman sources. The idea of the King is like the supreme source of order in society which didn't describe medieval society at all. The kings are fairly weak and didn't didn't have that much over most areas of life but there was this inherited ideology the sort of pastoral model I think for co-calls of of the you know the king as the shepherd who is guiding the flock of sheep and so forth. And you know as as Herbert Spencer said you know we we passed from the you know from the the superstition of the divine right of kings to the divine right of parliament. So nowadays there's a kind of similar idea about democratic institutions as having this glow of authority and legitimacy to them and that you know even someone like you know like Thomas Payne who could write so so perspicuously about how most order in society is the result of of voluntary social order a combination of self-addressed and moral sentiment and and the state is necessary for hardly anything and the kings are all a bunch of crooks and so forth but he had this you know he he he didn't you know he thought that the democracy has been great but he didn't even think you need checks and balances is why do the people need to check and balance themselves doesn't make sense. Yeah. And you know so I think that you know that might be a factor in both cases so when this this inherited ideology of kingship that didn't really match the facts on the ground nowadays we have an inherited ideology of democracy this idea that the people are doing the governing even though most of the people have no idea what's going on and don't have time to educate themselves on the special address there the ones who are you know who have the time and the money and the energy to direct legislation the direction so although a genuine pure democracy would would not be that great any way we don't you know we're no danger having that but you know there's you know sort of culture traditions can create a kind of illusion that can lend legitimacy to institutions that act in the name of that. Yeah at the people we think or most people think well our Constitution created a democracy and it's lasted couple hundred years done pretty well but the Constitution didn't create the kind of democracy they're envisioning I think now today it created a Republican system with checks and balances between different levels of government and different branches of government and it was it worked not because of the the democracy so much as because of the limitations that these checks and balances put on government. Of course other places have tried to do that too and it doesn't work because the government's too powerful to start with or something like that. We sort of fell into an opportunity I guess by revolting against the government that was in power and and starting fresh or reasonably fresh and but today talk to people in the political science department and or in the public administration or something like that and and you talk about some sort of institution that might limit the power of the experts that they have think should be doing things. They think well that's not very democratic. Obviously if you're going to have pure democracy and nothing else it's going to be a disaster. Of course people say well the United States has lasted such a good amount of time so most people system. You can find lots of systems to start off the various flavors last a long time on the Atlantic system lasted longer than than ours has yet. The Roman Empire different system lasted longer. Democratic Athens lasted about about as long maybe a little bit less long and we have the they had a catastrophic break break down halfway through but then of course so did we 100 years after the founding there was a slight failure of the system. So you know just but anyway just longevity you know if we're going to go by longevity then the Egyptian Pharaohs would be the best system. Not that that was complete uniform over time but still it was it in something probably somewhere system lasted for way longer than you know I think we're recently reading that the the time between the between the building of the pyramids and Cleopatra's reign is longer than from Cleopatra's reign to today. Give us a little bit of perspective. Yeah, I think I didn't check it up on it so you know I wouldn't bet my life on it because that would be a dumb way to die but but that certainly is possible because the you know the G Egyptian system goes back. You know thousands of years and you know Cleopatra's only a little bit more than you know in 2000 years ago. Since you obviously around of the final days of the Roman Empire. Now I mentioned that the enterprise law to serve and protect of the two books of yours that are served most well known among pre-market anarchists. I think the enterprise of law is quite a bit better well known. I know a lot of people read that but haven't read to serve and protect. So you want to say a little bit about what's going on in to serve and protect. Well, the enterprise of law started out I mean evolved into a huge amount of material. Way more than I could put in a book. In fact the first manuscript I sent to Thoreau and he sent on to reviewers. The response was cut in in half and I'd already cut out tremendous amounts of material. So I've I wanted to do more than what I did in the enterprise of law and there were two or three different areas that I really wanted to flesh out one was crime and criminal law. The I mean in the enterprise of law I talk about civil law or common law whatever you want to call it. Property contract or those sorts of things. And crime and so they're all sort of a mishmash there. But I wanted to focus on crime or so called crime and criminal justice system. And make the point first of all that the criminal justice system as we envision it already is so dependent on the private sector that it wouldn't function without the private sector. I mean if if witnesses and victims didn't report crimes there wouldn't be much for the police to do except create crimes like drug use that they could go out and chase people or observe people themselves. And so and then so I went through what we think of as the criminal justice system. Emphasizing that it is a system that what you do at one level of effects the other levels. Police decide they're going to rest a lot more drug offenders a lot more drug offenders end up in the prisons and you get overcrowding that sort of thing. So anyway I did a sort of public choice kind of description of the criminal justice system. Trying to emphasize government failure in that area rather than market failure. And then I have material on private responses to that government failure like private security private arbitration. Well now that's I guess I did mention that a little bit but I focusing on crime. You don't are arbitrate many crimes. The but alternatives to public courts which do exist in the criminal justice process. And I looked at the incentives created by a restitution system as opposed to a a punishment system. And I had I have a chapter on sort of the history of the development of crime concept of crime and criminal laws in England to illustrate that people function quite well without criminal law because it was torn and they cooperate cooperate and pursuit and prosecution and all sorts of things. So they had a system without having crimes crimes are offenses against the state. Initially they were things like treason and so on. But now it's practically everything you can think of the in I think it was 2008 someone at Heritage tried to just count the federal crimes. And essentially it's impossible because they're they're stuck all over the federal law but he came up with 45,000 federal crimes and then another 300,000 regulatory rules that had criminal penalties attached to them. So crime went from being a very small part of law to a huge part of law and I wanted to emphasize that and then I guess the last couple of chapters essentially asked what could what would the private sector do if it could if it wasn't prevented from moving into these various stages of the criminal justice process and arguing that essentially the private sector has historically or is doing it all. It's it's limited in many cases by law that says private security can't carry guns or private security can't arrest people or things like that. There's all sorts of rules that limit what the private sector can do. You take those limits off and I think you see well it's estimated that there are about three times as many private security personnel as there are public police in the United States today. So there's a big chunk of activity especially in crime prevention that the public sector is not dealing with effectively. And so I looked at the private prisons alternatives to punishment like prison work programs that could raise restitution. All of the things I looked at have at some point been dealt with by the private sector or they are today. And so that was that book essentially was let's step back from the big picture look at crime by itself. What could we do to fix it and privatize privatize I would say today I say we need to decriminalize get rid of all a lot of these crimes and turn them back into torts. And we need to privatize get rid of all the restrictions on the private sector at least make the public sector compete. And I think they'd lose and we'd see a very different system. If you ask people what do you think would happen if private security forces ever came to outnumber government police and they usually think oh some terrible thing would happen. It happened already a while ago. Yeah. Yeah. Round. It was estimated around 19. 60 I think roughly equal number of private security and public police man. Public police. Have grown much slower than private security since then. So. It's. And private security, of course. I do discuss private security and. The misconceptions about it as well. It's not a bunch of old. Potbellied. Security guards. Kind of strolling around the mall or something like that. It's. It has them. But it has. Potbellied cops strolling around various places too. Well, usually driving around. Yeah. They don't walk nearly as much as private security. But they. And so you have. A whole range. The thing about the more private sector, the market is it. Encourage a specialization. So you get. If you need just someone with eyes. To cover. Cops if, if somebody. Is doing something wrong. They're pretty cheap. But you. They're not. They're not supposed to do anything. But, but that. On the other hand, if you need a, you know, someone. That can set up. A security system for private security. For private security. You need a, you know, someone. That can set up a security system for a corporation. Including its buildings and it's, it's. Internet activities and all that sort of stuff. You need somebody. Pretty competent. And he's probably going to get paid. Lots of money. And so you get the whole range of private security. And then you get paid. And then you get paid. And then you get paid. And then you get paid. And then you get paid. And then you all get the same training. There's some specialization within police forces. You know, you have a homicide division and a burglary division and things like that. But not nearly as much as. Right. Yeah. Mostly stuff. So. Yeah, it's. It's a very. It's a very different kind of thing. It's not as widely perceived to be. Exist. But. Today. Half. Probably. 10 to 20% of the ads on television. Are for various kinds of security cameras and things like that. That are giving. Private individuals the power to. to a degree and so it's not just private security personnel. The security market has mushroomed in terms of technology. Because the police get paid whether they protect you or not and obviously you would prefer preventing the crime to chasing someone afterward and if they are chasing someone afterward you prefer that they catch them to them or they not catch them but you know they get their paycheck whichever those things happens. Yeah so they'll often do whichever is either easiest for them or most gratifying for them which isn't always the same thing. Yeah I think public sector policing has perverted incentives they've got things backwards you know police budgets historically the negotiating points have been how many arrests you make and how quick your response is to a reported crime. Well if the crime has already been committed then as far as I'm concerned the process has failed. You want to prevent that crime from occurring and you do that by patrolling and you know the public police sit in their cars and wait for a call to respond to a crime. The patrol. I think the places around here in Auburnville they'll just they'll have a parked car a parked police car with no one in it just I think you might be crying I think that's kind of like they think that the criminals are like birds and they see a scarecrow and they notice that the car contains no police it's just a little bit scared of the car. Well that's overstating the effectiveness of that. There's a small town in Wyoming where the highway goes through it and it's a straight line you know so people are traveling probably 80 90 miles an hour when they hit the city limits and down just past a couple blocks down there's a curve in the highway and they have a police car sitting there at that curve and so people coming in they see that police car and presumably they slow down of course the locals don't slow down or because the town doesn't have any police just as police cars. So yeah it's probably a deterrent for people traveling through until they you know I mean if you're just driving by in a car it's um you know of course you're driving by in a car the um the only uh you know it's only you know traffic violations that are likely to be deterred which I think that these cars are scattered around we're not for traffic violations but like to permit other kinds of crime uh at least in some cases given the places where they were parked and um it just struck me that that so it was likely to be like trying to deter people on foot and those people on foot and ones are most likely to notice that the car the car contains no occupants. I want to talk a little bit about the um the uh American Indian book which I have not read uh the one on the self-determination can you say a little bit about that I know you have a chapter in that and some of the other people as well but can you say a little about what's going on now? Terry Anderson uh who co-edited with me it was uh president of uh Perk at that time uh and he got uh he was contacted by uh a foundation who wanted a book with papers about alternatives to uh Native American policy both in Canada and the U.S. and so uh then Tom Flanagan uh is a political scientist at the University of Calgary so we had the three of us uh edit uh invite and edit a series of papers uh and the idea was to stress institutions and property rights uh as opposed to uh you know what typical policy is how do we start a new industry well we give them a bunch of money or how do we uh get uh improve their education we give them a bunch of money uh the uh what we uh wanted to do then was look at institutions that appeared to work like uh you know uh private uh well they're in the United States Indian reservations uh there's three kinds of property rights in land uh within the reservation border there's private property uh because it was allocated under the Dawes Act uh up until 1933 when they ended uh the allocation um and there's uh tribal trust land which is essentially common property for the tribe and then there's individual trust land which is a weird sort of category because under the law uh the Indians had to hold the land for 25 years before that was allocated to them before they actually got fee simple rights so it was held in trust by the government so in 1933 they say we're going to end all this uh privatizing the land so we got uh tribal trust land bureau of Indian affairs is trustee individual trust land bureau of Indian affairs is trustee and we got private and so uh Anderson uh and a co-author took a look at the impact of these different because there's a whole some some reservations are virtually entirely tribal trust land and some are virtually entirely private property uh there's a whole mix of of uh different property arrangements across reservations so they did some empirical work to see uh what what reservations appeared to be the most productive in terms of agricultural output um and it's not going to surprise you that the reservations that had the most private property were the most productive more product came off those reservations controlling for as many things that affect production as possible like weather and and so on um and uh uh that the trust lands were uh much I think I should the tribal trust lands were maybe a little better than uh the individual trust lands because this is another aspect of that law the law says that a holder of individual trust land can't designate an heir if he passes away the property has to go to uh what be divided up however the um state law says so some states you know you if if you don't have an heir goes to your brothers or your cousins or whoever usually several different people get a chunk well you can't break up those individual trust lands so what it happens is that each individual gets an ownership right uh to part of the land and and uh so you get this fractured ownership with hundreds of people today uh owning 120 acres of land how do you decide what you're gonna do on that land who cares you're only if you even use it effectively you're only gonna get a few cents a piece uh from uh from production and so uh the the uh this decision most of that land ends up being leased to non-Indians uh the so anyway they looked at the benefit of private property um now there's different possibilities there and we discuss for instance do you privatize completely so the owner can sell it to wherever he wants to um that's the preferred solution in terms of economic productivity um or do you privatize but it has to be sold to another Native American or it has to be sold to someone on the reservation or whatever uh you know so there's all sorts of nuances to that question um and we looked at institutions like governance institutions um uh there there's some pretty good governments out there on reservations none of them uh none of them break even they they're all let they all require subsidization but some of them are relatively effective um the uh and there's really a couple of different models of governance on the reservations once more a corporate model where you sort of have a CEO and a board of trustees and and a relatively small decision-making body, hierarchical individual responsibility for various things and so on and they tend to be pretty good the Flathead Reservation Montana is one of the better ones of those there's some that essentially have a strong chief authoritarian leader they can be good or bad depending on the individual I suppose and there's some that have set up various kinds of uh democracies uh like uh the Crow Reservation everyone on the reservations a member of the sort of the board of trustees so they vote on everything uh and they you know they're forming coalitions and they're trying to get my family some goodies from some federal grant and prevent some other family from doing it and and uh it's uh it's a disaster um and so we looked at governance institutions um what other kinds of institution we looked at the casino movement um and uh Ron Johnson wrote a very interesting paper there I think um he sort of described casinos the casino uh wave as the new Buffalo essentially there's a common pool out there all these people who want to gamble and their money and so you start opening up uh reservations to put in casinos and they're all gonna rush in to get into that pot but then you see uh the states start seeing all that money going to the reservation and they're not getting their cut and so the states start doing uh lotteries uh or start opening up uh gambling in certain towns like um Deadwood, South Dakota and uh so you get uh the riverboat gambling uh in Missouri you can't gamble on the land but you can gamble on a boat and so there's boats tied up to docks before people go to gamble uh Mississippi that way too so you get uh all this entry into the gaming market um and uh the uh Johnson says it's essentially gonna be like the Buffalo you're gonna deplete the resource uh and uh and of course you got reservations now some make huge amounts of money the Seminole and and some up in uh Michigan and New York I think but uh the uh you've got lots of reservations in places like Montana uh and uh where in Alaska where there's no market for gaming uh essentially and they all have spent money building casinos uh and uh the money you know they're starting to close down casinos it's been a uh a total uh disaster for some reservations um and uh so um you know uh I personally if they want to have gaming that's fine they should be able to have it I don't have any objection to that but the idea that it was going to be the savior for the uh Indian reservations is simply um not panning out it groups like the Seminole who have made lots of money and then invested it in non-gaming activities buying uh Seminole owned in the hard rock uh hotels for instance there are restaurants and stuff like that um then those are the ones that are going to come through this looking good those who are spending the money as fast as it comes in uh are probably uh going to end up uh not getting much out of it in the long run uh so those are the kinds of things the book looks at I uh my own contribution was essentially uh we had a couple of introductory chapters trying to dispel the myth that Indians don't believe in private property and uh just explaining you know that where where Indians engaged in agriculture they had private use rights to land where they were hunting buffalo where buffalo migrate over huge areas they don't have private individualized land doesn't make sense it wouldn't be worthwhile to even try uh so uh the uh issue then is what's the cost of privatizing the land relative to the benefits uh and Indians recognized that quite uh well back in uh the pre-reservation day they privatized land where it was appropriate uh and didn't where it wasn't uh so um you know it it uh the other thing I should say is we had uh half the authors were from Canada half from the U.S. so we get some discussion of both Canadian and U.S. policy and alternatives uh Bruce Johnson from George Mason uh did some stuff on privatizing the uh salmon rivers on the west coast of Canada and uh some of that's actually being done they're turning those rivers over to the tribes so uh you know it was essentially saying let's look beyond just giving them money let's look at uh institutions that we've settled them with change them if we can let's look at property rights arrangements uh try to alleviate those problems so on. One feature of reservation economic life reminds me a bit of the situation of Jews in the Middle Ages so that most professions were barred Jews but on the other hand they were the only ones who were allowed to land at interest so if you allow them to go into something that that most people aren't allowed to go to but you forbid them from going into most other things suddenly you get this large percentage of of Jews involved in money lending and you get a whole bunch of people upset you know what you know what is it about Jews and something inherent about Jews that they've got this money when they think nowadays we've got the situation where um for all these restrictions on what people could do on reservation land but they are exempt from a lot of uh laws of high interest lending so now you've got this explosion of of high interest lending that's all located on uh Indian land and uh you know it's the same you know same thing as before as before of course it's led to a you know of course there was already prejudice against Jews for various uh mostly religious reasons but um it's led to further prejudice against Jews for a situation that had largely been created by the people who were saying you can do this you can't do that so they do this and not that and then you know that so I know I'm sure that there's there are building prejudices against against uh American Indians now for a lot of these uh high interest loans that uh people have difficulty uh repaying but of course you know if you feel if they if they aren't you know there is not much competition for the you know for them in that area and then there's lots of other things that they're not allowed to do if they land alone they'll be moving to that area big surprise the respondent incentives yeah uh yeah I think that's a interesting example too uh it uh and a lot of that uh money that's being loaned out of course is is not uh Indian money it's not money from the tribe or private uh individual Native Americans it's money coming from big banks and stuff like that I would guess um a lot of the same with the casinos the a lot of the big casino gambling establishments have joined with the tribe to build the casino on the reservation and and get uh a substan oftentimes manage the casino as well uh and uh take a big cut of course from the revenues that are coming in uh so uh even even those examples like that uh where it looks like the Indians are have an advantage uh it well one problem again is property rights Indians with tribal trust and individual trust lands those lands can't be sold so you can't use them for collateral I mean they can't be transferred so bank gives you a loan uh and you put up your land is collateral if you don't pay they can come and get the land uh but not uh not on the reservations typically uh except for the private property on reservations um and so uh for years and well since reservations started forming there's been a tremendous uh capital shortage on reservations they can't get loans uh and then so they have to invite outsiders to come in and provide provide the capital and and let them uh then uh capture at least some uh of the revenues from it and uh so that's also been a an issue and then the courts have screwed things up some too uh for instance uh the uh it was one of the Apache reservations I can't remember which one but they had a contract with a an oil gas exploration company to come in and and explore for oil and gas and part of the deal was if you find it you you pay a royalty and you then it goes to you to sell um and so what happened uh and and so this is a contract this is the the cut that you have to give to the tribe uh well after they found oil and start shipping it out the tribe says well we're going to impose a next size tax on top of that uh so the tribe has uh used its governance authority to essentially break the contract by adding charges uh that weren't anticipated and and as a consequence it's hard for tribes everywhere now to get people off reservation to come on to the reservations and make investments like that um and so uh by making pretending that the tribes are sovereign nations uh and giving some of the authority of sovereign nations to them uh they have created this kind of distrust both I mean the Indians don't trust the non-Indians and vice versa uh because of the incentives that have been created in by the government essentially in setting them up uh with your like 200 plus articles you've obviously got a lot of material that hasn't made it into your books have you thought about collecting any of those articles into into books or they'd be sort of more accessible uh not really uh I'm uh I'm working I guess what I did in the past uh was uh to as I was working on books I pulled articles from the material so that I had a steady stream of articles going out that were complimentary at least to the book that I was working on and so a lot of the material for instance in the enterprise of law and to serve and protect has been published as articles uh the uh the idea of compiling more papers into articles uh it's it's more work than it's worth I guess to me now that I'm retired I am working on a book on the enterprise on the on the medieval law merchant yeah I've been hearing rumors for a while about a law merchant project it's a very criticism so yeah people have said about the law merchant yeah and I've been working on that off and on for quite a while uh much of it will consist of papers essentially of papers that have been published in journals uh sort of bringing all that stuff together but it's not a compilation of published papers it's uh it's an attempt to provide a relatively detailed description both theoretically and empirically of the law merchant and I don't know it was it started out also to include an attempt to refute the various criticisms of the law merchant that had popped up in the last 20 years or so yeah I've heard the title is yes Virginia there was a law merchant just to walk yeah that was the title that that was the that's the working title yeah I don't uh I don't know if that's a good title because uh uh probably the Europeans won't know about that uh movie anyway you could always make it a chapter title uh can you say a little about what the criticisms were and what your response to them is um well of course the there there are people historians legal scholars who don't believe anything unless it's been written down and uh so if you're going to look at the medieval law merchant a lot of the stuff was never recorded the disputes you find a few disputes that have were recorded but compared to the mass of disputes that were probably dealt with not very many there's no uh real compilation of rules there's partial compilations like maritime rules compiled by uh the uh well the first well the first one was from Rhodes way before the medieval period but um there's an island off the coast of France uh that was heavily involved in the wine trade and they a compilation of customs dealing with maritime wine trade was put together by them uh Barcelona had a compilation there was one up in in the Baltic and so on so there is some written record of things but uh and and there are uh depositories of records that have been used to try to get an an idea about the law merchant or if they don't want to call it that about commercial uh law and um um so they uh uh but there's big gaps uh and I and others uh over the over over history have filled those gaps essentially theoretically you know um you got this set of rules and institutions in in one period and sometime later you see this other set they're not the same there's a lot of similarities you sort of uh hypothesize about how they might have changed and why they might have changed to get to the new set uh that sort of thing um I I think if you're going to look at history you have to use some theory because the historical record is incomplete and if you just say that doesn't exist because there's no record of it or there's no detailed record of it um you're throwing a lot a lot of insights away I think um yeah I'm calling that he was one of the major philosophers in history he said there was a big advance when people realized history was not just what he called citizen base history where you you just collect what various previous people have said and you arrange it and you pick which other things are most plausible when they came and they advanced past that and came to think that cable understand that it's more like being a detective solving a solving a case and documents are one piece of evidence yeah although they're you know you don't just accept the document as an authority you don't accept anything as an authority yeah but the documents are evidence I remember that David Friedman talking about how the the um the contrast he found between you know Icelandic law is written down on the you know in the Gragas law code versus the description part worked in the sagas he's inclined to think that the latter is is actually more accurate yeah I think the column would say you know you've got to get past thinking of documents as your authorities and therefore a way there's no document there's nothing for the historian to do except shrug their shoulders versus thinking of a historian as a detective where when you've got documents that's an important piece of evidence when you don't have documents you've got other kinds of evidence and you come with the best you know explanatory theory that makes sense of what these people were doing and and why they were uh yeah doing uh but yeah I think you know some historians may still be you know a little too attached to the scissors and paste theory that you've got to you've got to find your documents and then they are the authorities that will tell you what happened yeah another uh critical uh uh it's pretty strong criticism I would say is that uh many people including me to a degree focused on the universal nature of the law merchant rather than recognizing that it really is a polycentric system with lots of overlapping influences and so on uh it's universal in the sense that it was everywhere in Europe it was an identical everywhere and so those like Harold Berman emphasize universal characteristics in part of course because Berman's book was a a sort of a yeah he was looking at different legal systems how they interacted with one another and how they might be characterized and one of his criteria that he used was universalism and you know he didn't say the law merchant was universal it had some universal characteristics it was tending toward universal uh ism and so on so uh some some of it's uh that another course source of criticism uh is just the uh the statists who say there can't be private law you're not uh and then they go looking for is an empirical claim or or is that an empirical claim or definitional claim well uh yeah it's a definitional claim that they try to support by finding uh indications of how the state might have interacted with merchants and law merchants and so on uh the and so you can always find I mean every legal system is influenced by other legal systems there uh there's more influence going from the law merchant to to state law I think than vice versa but that doesn't mean there were no influences from the state law in the law merchant we law merchant didn't have a king they didn't have an authority an army or something like that to prevent other uh institutions went from interfering with their activities uh so if the state if the king said you got to do this um and you wanted to trade in his kingdom then you probably had to do it it was a law that affected merchants uh but uh and and that's one criticism is you know merchants had lots of laws that affected them not and and so say the law merchant ruled the merchant the commercial process is wrong uh but you know they uh fail I think to uh on a couple of points uh to when they're making that argument one is that merchant wealth was mobile much more so than wealth based on land and and that was the two kinds of wealth really in the medieval period and so if the local law gets too harmful for the merchants they move uh they start trading someplace else and and so you can look at the court of the dusty feet yeah uh yeah it's so that and then uh uh the other I mean the other point it is okay you you find say a local government or um perhaps even a kingdom I uh I can't think of any uh but that where they had recorded a bunch of uh merchant custom as part of their local law and so they can say well the merchants might have had these rules but they had to have the local government force them see I mean why would they write them down if they weren't if that wasn't the case and so they make those sorts of arguments I'm not convinced by them obviously but uh I've been in the process of uh trying to find counter evidence uh if it turns out to be pretty easy to refute most of the arguments because they simply are superficial uh don't go really into the historical record the way they should and so on um but uh um I in fact when this stuff started these criticisms started coming out I read a couple of them thought this is ridiculous and this guy's making stuff up he's not using uh the evidence that's out there uh or he's misinterpreting it he doesn't understand the historical situation uh that existed at the time he sort of thinks commerce was like it is today you know things like that and I just pretty much ignored it uh I didn't think there was any need to refute it uh but then uh after a few years uh I started getting questions even from friends who bought the long merchant story asking what I think about these various criticisms and you know if it's if it's making them think about about the criticisms then those who are uh anxious to disprove uh or reject the long merchant story they they're going to buy into those things very easily um and so I thought I started thinking about refuting uh at least some of the more powerful ones or apparently more powerful uh written by prestigious law professors or published in prestigious law reviews and that sort of thing um and uh but at this point I think I've I've decided that I'm gonna separate the project into two parts I'm gonna do a book describing the medieval law merchant not directly addressing the criticisms indirectly by presenting my interpretation at least but not directly and then I'm gonna write a separate manuscript which probably will be a law review article or something that takes on the critics and directly and and doesn't have to make to try to do both of those as it turns out pretty large projects in one volume so that's the point I'm at now is trying to divide this stuff up into uh reasonable packages uh that I can go forward with because I and most of the material I've got they uh the mercatus center sponsored a manuscript conference where I sent the manuscript to them and they sent it out to 15 or 16 economists and law professors and uh we sat around a table and they commented on the book uh and certainly one comment as most of what I write uh it's too long but um they also thought that there were really two two separate at least two some people said three books in that I don't know if I want to write three books at this at my current age but I think I've convinced myself that I'll do at least one book and a law review article or monograph of some sort to deal with the law merchant um and I you know I'm not I'm not sure why I'm doing this because I don't I'm not an academic anymore I don't get uh uh raises based on publications and that sort of thing but it's just a um a project that uh I've been involved with for several decades now and uh I just kind of would like to top it off and uh have it probably won't be the final word but uh a take a shot at the final word on on the subject I think I'd heard a rumor about that conference because I was at a I was in a mercatus conference that was organized by near at Badoir on abolition abolitionism and emancipation that was either just before or just after your conference I think um I've been hearing uh about it um I was curious and you know and then I'd read some of the criticisms I'd read some of your responses so you know I I knew a little bit about that but yeah uh I haven't yeah I have published a couple of things that respond to some of the criticisms but uh and one of the criticisms of course is is just definitional what do we mean by law uh if it if the law has to be the product of the state then the law merchant wasn't law uh to me that's not a big issue I'm thinking philosophy of law right now and uh so obviously that's a deal topic we're dealing with but you know people like Hayek and and Fuller and so forth got lots of people arguing that the that law has not traditionally met solely or even primarily uh state and and obviously if you've you've read my stuff I uh Hayek and Fuller uh both have had big influences on the way I think about law in fact it was interesting uh when the enterprise of law was being reviewed uh uh one I went to Texas A&M which was sort of a southern branch of Chicago uh at that time very neoclassical kind of program one of the reviewers uh of uh the enterprise of law was Randy Barnett who's a lawyer and he he wrote a very I mean he wrote almost a book at length review of he was taken by the ideas and so on and and one thing he said was one thing he said was this sounds very Hayek-y but you're not citing Hayek and my response was I haven't read Hayek I didn't read Hayek in graduate school nobody ever talked about Hayek in graduate school it was all uh you know Friedman and Stegler and and Becker and that sort of stuff uh so uh then I started reading Hayek and and it really was eye-opening I mean I had a huge impact on the way I think about things um and uh you know I'll be forever grateful to Randy for bringing that up although I probably would have stumbled on yeah well given the circles you were you were moving in you would have you know it would have come your way eventually yeah well I yeah I hadn't really moved into those circles as I was writing the enterprise of law I mean it was maybe on the fringe a few people had heard of me and knew me but uh for the most part uh it was the enterprise of law that sort of opened the doors for me and and uh at that point I certainly would have uh heard about Hayek I'm sure uh or stumbled into Hayek but uh it Randy's suggestion uh made me do it before I actually published the enterprise of law and had a big impact on some of the things that are in that book even though probably don't cite him enough still uh the uh I mean I always found it odd that uh not odd disturbing that I would come up with some idea that seemed worth exploring and I'd start writing about it and thinking about it fleshing the idea out and then I'd go out and look at literature to see if anybody else had been thinking along those lines and I and I inevitably stumble on to something by James Cannon or uh somebody like that who'd already written us the same thing essentially seems like we reinvented the wheel and in economics about every 20 years it we say the same things as we were saying 20 years ago but we say them differently mathematics was a big uh a big impact had a big impact game theory had a big impact saying the same stuff but just uh using different language uh and uh you know we don't read enough so we uh think of an idea we think is original and don't discover that it's not well that's a complaint I've heard from a lot of economists a lot of well our type of people is that economists don't really engage that much with the history of their own discipline uh of course over in philosophy it's very different uh you know the history of philosophy is very much part of the study of philosophy but the history of economics is is less so and the people who tend to be really interested in in what previous you know economists uh 50 years ago or 100 years ago or 200 years ago are saying um they tend to be you free market classical local blue rule uh types who are interested in sort of this tradition whereas uh you know for a lot of economists I think they have this idea that the you know the model to imitate is like physics and physics you know you don't pay attention to what you know Ptolemy said about physics that's all outdated you know all the all the good stuff is is uh you know is new and um and we've got these fancy mathematical techniques to deal with this new information and this and so maybe part of sort of the the physics work worship on a part of a lot of a lot of the social sciences uh whereas I think the mainstream in economics by and large uh considers history a thought to be irrelevant uh it's the sort of fringes the austrians uh and the marxists one thing the austrians and marxists is that they yeah listen what 1960s people were saying uh yeah that uh that's what I was going to say the austrians and the marxists um in fact uh little anecdote there I uh when I was at Florida State we interviewed a guy and an avowed marxist you know nice guy I enjoy talking to him and so on but uh we interviewed him and uh after the interview uh I don't know my department chair said something to him about uh you find any of the faculty to be uh sort of thinking about the same things you are and and uh people you could interact with and so on because we didn't have any marxists on the faculty he said oh I really enjoyed talking to those austrians he said uh and the public choice uh austrians uh because um you know it's uh all about uh what influence on the government by powerful groups like corporations and that sort of thing uh the uh all right one difference of course is that uh public choice uh austrians they think about lots of different groups being influential uh marxists just think about capitalism and labor and conflict it seems like and so uh it brought it broadened his view a little bit but uh and you know in a lot of ways that sort of analysis is complementary across the two disciplines or sub-disciplines conclusions are very different but you know I mean the um I mean marx is sort of uh you know bifurcated on this and that um uh you know on the one hand when he talks about how these um you know how the um the ruling capitalist class acquired their wealth he'll talk about all these violent interventions by the state on behalf of wealthy private interests but they seem to forget about it and talk as though it all arose through you know all this malign power rose to some sort of pure free markets and yeah sometimes the sort of his official line is well in fact it didn't arise through free markets that arose through government violence but if we had free markets it would have arisen eventually um the same way and then eventually that just sort of gives way to um later marxists is treating it as though uh it had just arisen um through free markets and you know whereas when marx is talking about sort of actual details of history as opposed to his abstract theory you know the distance between him and classical liberalism is much less we was talking about for example the the French government as a as a joint stock company for the exploitation of France's national wealth and uh and so on uh you know and you know he freely admitted that a lot of his class theory he borrowed from um uh from the bourgeois economists although he says well I had an idea that that the um that the class uh the convict of classes could eventually uh could eventually end no he didn't marx they they had that idea too uh you read uh Charles Dounoyet and Charles Comte and Augustin Thierry and uh and those guys they also so they class us in some cases even stateless society though not a society free of private property that was one important difference but um you know marx sometimes exaggerated his originality anyway we should probably wrap this up because this is about as long a video as with my system it takes forever to upload these to upload these videos to youtube and this is probably about as long as uh as it can handle without uh uh has uh having my system completely occupied but with uploading for over a day yeah well this is not high-tech land where I am this is not where I am anyway yeah I was wondering uh what that background was that's actually uh Athens this is the acropolis in Athens and so I I can pretend to hear where I really am is um uh see how do I make the yeah I was uh thinking you were sitting on a balcony some place in Europe and probably in the Mediterranean and yeah this is the sorted reality of my my cramped Alabama apartment uh so I prefer uh prefer returning to the fantasy but anyway thank you for the interview uh thank you uh I enjoyed it and uh you had a really nice to talk for not uh for you know originally this interview was going to be the 50th anniversary uh of my 50th anniversary one year anniversary 150 whatever this was going to be the interview for my one year anniversary of my youtube channel but you had a really good excuse postponing you really went to desperate lengths to uh uh to skip our original uh interview but anyway I tend to avoid most of these kinds of things anymore but I figured this would be interesting and it was and uh so appreciate you thinking of me I it I it is good to talk to an academic once in a while to rather than my grandkids and and that's really but uh so questions about the wall merchant what's that your grandkids aren't pestering you with questions about the wall merchant not yet no my grandson has lots of questions about uh chess we play chess together but that's about the most uh intellectual thing we we end up talking about well it ends with the defeat of a king so that's good well all right well the ideal chess game would end with the defeat of both kings but that's another question matter all right anyway so thanks a lot this has been a lot of fun thanks for uh taking time uh to uh to talk to me um and you know good luck with your various projects the um the plains indian project and the law merchant project and anything else you're working on and uh anyway same to you i'm sure you got a lot of a lot of things you're working on too oh yeah i've weighed behind i've done so many deadlines yeah that's uh that's my problem with the law merchant that i've been working on it so long that uh it's hard to even sit down and write it down because i it's i don't i already know it i don't need to study it uh but it's coming together good i look forward to it okay all right bye bye all right