 All right, everybody. We are in another special guest special. I have returning for his third appearance on my show. He is an IP attorney. He's an Austrian school theorist. And he's one of the best anarchist thinkers that I've ever come across. And that would be Stefan Kinsella. So Stefan, great to see you again. Hey, glad to be here. So I wanted to bring you back on, because not only am I getting close to 200 episodes, I thought due to recent events, I thought you can address. It's weird, because so far in all of your appearances on my show, I haven't been able to do one where you do not talk about IP. So, but due to recent events, I think it's important. This comes up. Yeah, so I think you've run into this several times, but I don't think it's ever been addressed on my show before. But I thought, why don't you address why being an IP attorney and being against IP is not hypocritical? Sure. Yeah, so my background is I have been on libertarian since high school and then during college and then in law school. And I started thinking about IP in law school because the argument for it by Ayn Rand never quite made sense to me, even though I accepted most of her other ideas. But like most people, I didn't know a lot about IP law itself, even in law school. I never took a course in it. But when I started writing more on libertarian theory, and especially when I started practicing patent law in like 1993 and I passed the patent law in 1994 and I was thinking heavily about IP law the whole time because it was a it was a it was a that I couldn't figure out. I'm not an adjuster. I'm practicing it and I'm a libertarian and I'm writing on libertarian theory and all the arguments I had seen for IP had been unsatisfactory. So I thought I can be the one who can figure it out, right? Like if anyone can figure it out, it's me because I know Austrian theory. I'm a radical. I'm an anarchist. I'm a Rothbardian. I'm into property rights. I'm a lawyer. I'm a writer. So I thought I could figure it out and come up with a good argument for IP. Just like I did with God, you know, as an atheist, I thought if I could find a good argument, but I never could. So I finally became an atheist. So right around the time that I passed the patent bar, which is 1994, I I just read so much stuff on on economic and political theory on IP. I finally realized the reason I was having trouble coming up with the justification for it was because my assumption was wrong. Like it's not just and I finally saw, OK, I've tried every possible argument. They all fail and they fail because IP is actually unjust and it's not justified. You can't come up with a good argument for it. Coincidentally, right around the time that I started practicing patent law and it wasn't because I was practicing patent law, like nothing I learned as a patent lawyer helped me see what was wrong with it, except to help flesh my understanding of almost purely from libertarian principles and property theory and economic reasoning. So that's how I came to that idea. And it's only strengthened over time. Now, at first around 1995, I think is the first time I published an article tentatively criticizing IP and I was tentative about it, not because my views were tentative because I rear like I thought other I thought my clients or other patent lawyers would or partners in my law firm would think of something weird about that. But I've discovered that no one cares. I mean, clients don't care what your views are any more than they care about your religion or your sexual preference or whatever. And lawyers don't even read this stuff so they don't care. In fact, I can't even count the number of times over the last 25 or so years. I've had people after I do a talk on why patents should be abolished, I've had someone call me and say, hey, I'd like you to be with my patents. I mean, people just want. So I've been surprised at that. And I've also been surprised in the libertarian sphere that more people don't wonder about that overlap, like, that I'm a patent lawyer and this. So your question is, I've gotten criticized a few times by fellow pro patent advocates saying I'm a hypocrite, but they're just arguing tendentiously to make their case or something. Like, I think they're just trying to shut me up. They're basically trying to say, oh, you're a hypocrite, so shut up. But that's, of course, not a good argument for IP. Part of me is that it's an arcane convoluted artificial system. And by IP, I particularly mean copyright and patent, which are the primary big parts of IP. And they're legislated schemes. They're not natural and they're not common law. They're just legislation schemes. And so part of the argument against is that they're unnatural and they have to be come up with, they have to arise through legislation, which as a libertarian, I think you could argue anything that's done by legislation is illegitimate, because legislation is not a valid way of recognizing or making law. It's just the arbitrary dictates of a committee, basically, of a fascist, statist rulers. There's no reason you would expect their decrees to be compatible with natural law. It's just what they enforce by the point of a gun. And it's so arcane, like the tax system or antitrust law, or administrative law, most people can't even understand it. And because most people can understand it, they don't understand what I do as a patent lawyer. So they sort of just have this outsider view looking in. IP law is complicated. They might sense that something's wrong with it. It's being abused or at least they don't understand it. They might see some of my arguments as intuitive that are against it, but then they also think I'm practicing it so maybe I'm a hypocrite. So the first thing I would say to that is it doesn't matter if I'm a hypocrite because even if there's a patent lawyer, can you hear me now? Yes. Oh, now it's breaking up. Okay, I can't hear anything. Can you hear me? So I would say it doesn't work. Test. Testing one, two. Yeah, okay. Yes. Can you hear me now? Yes. Oh, I don't know what happened. I got a phone call and I just put it on. Do not disturb. So it shouldn't happen again. Though, though, though, I just want to say real quick, it's kind of been flaky throughout. So it's like, hold on, let me turn this off then. Let me just do it from the. Yeah. Okay. How about now I'm just on the iPad itself. Okay. Yeah, it should work just fine. Let's just do that. Okay. I hate it when people don't use a direct mic, but I always have trouble. So I have no way I tried. What I was going to say is it doesn't matter if I'm a hypocrite, because the arguments to stand on their own. Like just because there's a patent attorney in Houston, who's a hypocrite doesn't mean that patent law is justified. So we have to keep that in mind. And. Second of all, I don't think I'm a hypocrite because of the way patent law works. There's a legal system in force, which, which means that people can obtain patents. And because people can obtain patents, a lot of people obtain them and use them aggressively. That is, they go after innocent people with these patents. Just like, just like you can sue someone for any trust violations, even though any trust law is wrong, right? Or you can sue someone for defamation, even though defamation laws wrong, these laws exist and therefore the patent threat exists. And therefore companies, even if they don't want to be aggressors and offensive users of patents, they need to be aware of the system. And so they need patent lawyers. If only to give them advice to help navigate this and to defend themselves against this. And that defense often includes obtaining their own patents. So they can use them defensively. Okay. So in a sense, the obtaining of patents is like buying bullets or buying guns. And if you buy bullets or guns, you can use them for good purposes or bad purposes. You can use them to defend yourself or you can use them to hurt other people in an aggressive or offensive way. So for example, if you have a company that has a product and they're sued for patent infringement by a competitor, one defense can be to try to invalidate the other company's patents, which they would need a patent lawyer like me to help do, which is not endorsing the patent system. It's just a sad fact that they need to hire these people to defend themselves. Just like if you have cancer, you need to pay a cancer doctor to help you fight cancer. Doesn't mean the doctor is pro cancer. He's making a living because there's cancer. And if cancer were to be abolished, he wouldn't have a job anymore, but he probably wants that to happen. Or if you have a defense attorney who defends you from a drug charge or from a tax evasion charge, doesn't mean he's in favor of the tax system or the drug war. And by the same token, if you hire me to help defend you from a patent lawsuit, doesn't mean I'm in favor of the patent system. In fact, I'm actively trying to get it abolished. And also if I help you obtain a patent that you can have, you can counter sue someone who sues you. You can counter sue them for patent infringement of your patents. And I don't view that as illegitimate because it's a defensive use. It'd be like if someone shoots at you, you can shoot back at them. So one shooting is illegitimate, the offensive shooting, the aggressive shooting, the initiatory shooting, and the defensive shooting is not similar. If someone sues me for some unjust law like defamation or antitrust infringement or patent infringement or copyright infringement, it's, I think that all holds are often, and it's just in libertarian sense to counter sue them even with a patent suit because they have initiated aggression against you. Okay. So, and I have, in my career, I have steered clear of helping people assert patents in an offensive way. I've never done that. And I refused it. It's never had, it's never hurt me in my career because there's so much specialization in patent law that I've been able to only do things that are either neutral, like helping people obtain patents. So I'm like selling guns or bullets. And I try not to sell them to people that I know are going to use them offensively. But once they, if they do that, that's out of my hands. And when I, when I've helped people in trials defend themselves, it's always been the person that's being sued. That is the defendant. And I view them as an innocent victim. So I don't think I am a hypocrite. And on the third, the third thing is this. All these pro patent people, like fellow patent lawyers who are pro patents because it butters their bread, right? They're totally interested parties. They, they attack me for. For, for, for opposing patents, even though I practice patent law. But, you know, it's, it's a complicated, arcane system. Let's suppose the patent system is unjust in the copyright system as well. Who would you expect to know that? Other than someone who understands the law. So it's like they want to muzzle people. Like your average critic of patent system would be an engineer or just a libertarian who doesn't know the legal system very well. They might have a good argument against the patent system, but they wouldn't know it. The ins and outs of it very well. Like I don't know. So it's like these patent proponents want to muzzle anyone who has any credibility on the issue. I think that. Someone working inside the system. Has a better. Capability of understanding why the patent system is wrong. And I think it's a good thing that people that actually knows. And by the way, I know lots of patent attorneys who agree with me. A lot of them keep their mouths shut, but lots of them don't agree with me. I know lots of patent attorneys who agree with me. A lot of them keep their mouths shut, but lots of them know that it's a bad system. So that's all I could say about that issue. What do you think? Well, I mean, if you, if you're there to actively get rid of it, which has done much more harm and now they're trying to empower it even more. You know, there's been some legislation that has been pretty sly and sneaky. You know, they're just throwing it in along with a whole bunch of other crap, you know, just, you know, just to, just so they can sneak things around under, under our noses, then, then yeah, it's, I got no problem with anybody who's against it, you know, actually practicing it. In fact, I don't find that hypocritical at all. In fact, I would, you know, if I was, I would want, I would probably want you as my defense attorney. Cut into trouble in regards to patent and copyright, essentially. Yeah, we, interestingly, we just formed a group, a group of us, six people around the world who I think half of us are patent lawyers and half of us are libertarians and tech guys, Bitcoin tech guys. We just started something called the open crypto alliance. I think that's the website open crypto alliance.org or www.com. I think it's.org. And we're trying to defend, we're trying to defend the Bitcoin system from the patent threat from, from like in chain and Craig Wright and others. Now, not all of the people on this group. Well, I would say most of the people in our group are anti patents, but a couple of the patent lawyers are not completely abolitionist, but we all see the threat from the abuse of patents. And so we have a narrow commonality of interest. I might be the only patent lawyer in the group that's totally anti patents, but the other three non patent lawyers are all with me, I think. But, you know, we can band together and fight at least the egregious ones that are harming or threatening the Bitcoin and the crypto ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah, if you didn't have patent lawyers on the group, it would have less. It would have less finesse and credibility. And we're trying to do everything we can to help preserve the Bitcoin and crypto ecosystem from this horrible patent threat. Yeah. Yeah, I, there's one, there's one absurd argument that I would hear that could be applied to pretty much any government. Policy or whatever you like to call it. You know, people would be like saying, well, there was a recognized need for it. You know, I don't know if you've run into that argument before or for like, for like patent and copyright, or it could be like for the drug war or the war in Iraq or laws against prostitution or, or quote unquote, victimous crimes. Well, to my mind, like as a radical libertarian, I would think of like, what are the, what are the big bad things that the state does that we libertarians oppose the policies or the laws or the practices? It would be things like war, taxation, central banking, government education, the drug war. And I would say an ultra property and of all of those, I think that two of them are unique and that there's really no good argument whatsoever. And that would be the drug war and Pat and IP law. Now, unless you're a complete radical anarchist like I am, you could have some argument for taxes and for, for war, right? War sometimes you have to defend your country. The government needs taxes to have a minimal state, all that kind of stuff. But there's really no argument for the drug war, right? You can even come up with an argument for prostitution, I guess, laws, but there's just no argument for the drug war. And likewise, there's no argument for the patent system. And the, the, the problem in a way, I think the patent system is the most dangerous and insidious and the copyright system of all the evil things the state does because all the others, even menarchists see them as necessary evils, like even if they grudgingly admit that we need taxes, they admit that it's kind of like theft or we don't want too much of it. And ideally we can get rid of it. But in the same thing with war and with government education and welfare and chair private charity and all that kind of stuff. Like, even if they tolerate some degree of it, they admit that it's sort of an uneasy alliance, right? Or like you don't want too much of it. But the IP goes under the banner of property rights. So unlike all the others, it's seen as a good thing by at least a large number of free market and libertarians because of the, of the way that the advocates of it have propagandized it and they call it property, they call it intellectual property as a way to, to make it more palatable even though it arose as monopoly grants of privilege. And so no, they didn't arise to fill a need. In fact, they arose historically in two ways. The patent system arose from the practice of monarchs granting monopolies to their cronies, right? Had nothing to do with innovation. They would just say you're the only guy that can, it was, it was type of, it was a type of protectionism or mercantilism where someone would be granted a monopoly to be the only one who could sell or deal in this type of good in an area. That's called a patent and the word patent means open. So it was like an open letter. You could show everyone, hey, the king says, I'm the only guy you can sell cheap skin or whatever in this town. That's of course not free market at all. It's protectionist and it's monopolistic. And that resulted eventually in the statute of monopolies in 1623 in England, which was the basis of our, the American and the modern Western patent system. So it didn't arise to fill a need. It arose because of the practice of kings granting monopolies. And then it was narrowed down by the statute of monopolies to eliminate most of that, but it kept in place the ability to grant these monopolies if you have an invention. Okay. So it didn't eliminate it all. It kept one little remnant of it, which led to our patent system. And then the argument that arose was what we needed to incentivize innovation, which is, which is nonsense. You don't need the government to fix the market failure of too little innovation. The government hampers innovation with its laws and regulations and taxes and FDA process, all this kind of stuff. And the patent system itself hampers innovation because it dissuades people from innovating in a field where they can't sell a product because someone else has a patent on it already. You know, if someone has a patent on this field, you can't even sell a competing product. So you don't bother to improve it in the first place. So patents hamper innovation. And the copyright system arose from the practice of the state centering freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Because in the beginning you didn't have the printing press, you had scribes who would copy texts like the Bible and things like that. And the church and the government, the crown together would only authorize the scribes to make copies of things that they wanted the people to see. And then when the printing press came about, you had the church in the state got afraid of the ability of people to get books that were published that they couldn't control. So they first put it under the stationer's company, which had 100 plus year monopoly. But when that expired, it was renewed with the statute of Anne in 1709, which sort of is the basis of modern copyright law. So copyright law is rooted in state censorship. So in fact, it works to censor speech now because you're literally unable, like if I wanted to write a sequel to or a parody of or a commentary on a book that's still in copyright right now, I wouldn't be able to. It would be banned. You can't publish that book. There's lots of court cases that have done just that. This is book banning. And that's in the name of copyright. And that is a violation of freedom of the press. So it's literally censorship and people are in favor of it because they call it a property right. It makes no sense whatsoever. And by the way, lots of books are still in copyright because the copyright term used to be 14 years in 1780 and 1790 extendable once to 28 years. Now the copyright term is the life of the author plus 70 years, which is over a century. In most cases, it's crazy. So if you write a book tomorrow, it's going to be in copyright for over a hundred years. So no one can make a copy of it. They can't make a sequel to it. They can't build upon it without your permission or the permission of your heirs. So it's a huge. It distorts culture. And it hampers the spread of ideas and knowledge, which harms the human race, because the way the human race progresses is by the advance of knowledge. That's why we're more richer now. Not because. Well, we're richer because we have more information. We don't have more stuff. The earth is still the same earth we had 3,000 years ago. But we know how to manipulate it better because of our knowledge. Right. So anything that slows down the spread of knowledge and learning and free market competition, which is what patents do. Patent slow down competition on purpose. Copyright slow down the spread of knowledge on purpose. Both of those hurt the wealth and the freedom of the human race. There, there, there, there, I think it's in a way, the most insidious and the worst state thing that we have, if I could only get rid of one thing, I mean, maybe it would be the drug war. Maybe it would be taxes, maybe be central banking, but it might be patent and copyright. You know, because copyright threatens freedom on the internet. Because websites are taken down all the time by ice. Yeah, you think of ice is in protecting the immigration and customs enforcement. You think they only stop illegal immigration. They also shut down websites that violate copyright law. So, and then you have YouTube taking videos down because of the DMCA, the digital millennium copyright act, right, which is again copyright taking down content all the time. Documentaries can't be made because there's a scene of a, of a freaking statue in the background that someone has a copyright on. It's just crazy. The horrible, horrible effects copyright and patents have on society. And these are the things that every libertarian should be 100% against, not just for reform or getting rid of abuses, but against them on principle. So that's my, that's my elevator speech. You see where we're on IP again, we can't help it. Yeah, it's just, it's like it never ends. Pretty much. Oh yeah, that reminds me of the latest legislation. They're trying to have it set to where if you are quote unquote illegally streaming, you'll go to jail for like 10 years. If I've got that correct. Yeah, that was in. I don't think it quite made it into the recent federal wall. See what happened was a few years ago. In the 1990s, okay. Under Bill Clinton, surprisingly, there were two laws passed, which inadvertently helped the internet thrive and survive. And one of them, Trump and lots of senators on both sides and congressman had to abolish that's the section to 30 thing you keep hearing about. What happened was you had, you had two laws, one's called the CDA and the communication decency act. And then you had the DMCA, the digital millennium copyright act. I think the CDA was 96 and the DMCA was 1998. And they were both signed under Clinton. And the CDA put an exception in their section 230 it basically exempted the rights providers from liability for defant death of acts of defamation of their, of their users. So for example, if you had a blog, or, or a bulletin board or something like that, and some user just posted something that was defamatory, they're they're liable for defamation, which they shouldn't be because defamation laws are unjust as Rothbard as explained, and Walter block and others. And the fear was that the, that the website would be viewed as a publisher of that and they would be liable, vicariously or secondarily for the liability of their user. But the fear was that that would, that would throttle the development of the, of the internet, which was just this 1996, like basically a year after the internet got became public. So they put an exemption, they're saying that a passive publisher is not liable for what a user does, which I think is good. And now you have Trump and these other guys trying to because they hate Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. And I do too. So they want to impose, they want to get rid of 230 the safe harbor, so that they're liable for defamation of their users, because they're acting like a publisher now because they're, they're exercising more editorial discretion and what they allow on their platforms. But all that means is they're trying to impose defamation liability on these companies. And it wouldn't just follow them would follow on all of us anyone who's got a website that has comments and let someone comment. So I think it's a horrible idea we should not expand the scope of what defamation law falls on. And likewise the DMCA, the digital millennium copyright act said you're not liable for copyright infringement of your users. As long as you take it down if you're given notice. So that's why the takedown system arose. So that's why YouTube automatically takes down a video if they get a complaint is because they don't want to lose their safe harbor exemption. So I don't blame YouTube for doing that that they're doing it because they have to stay in business. But if you got rid of that and you got rid of the 230 safe harbors, then you'd have all these platforms out there. That would be potentially liable for millions and millions of dollars for copyright infringement and defamation liability of their users. Which would stifle the whole internet. Right. It's a big threat to free speech and lots of business practices on the internet. I forgot where I was going with this, but about four or five years ago, there was a law called SOPA, the stop online piracy act, because with the advent of torrenting and all this stuff on the internet, you have lots of music and movies being pirated. Right. And so this drives the content producers nuts. And the DMCA helps the drives them nuts too. They've been trying to get the DMCA safe harbor overturned and the 230 harbor overturned for years. Now they failed with SOPA because the internet rose up and stopped it. But it's an inexorable thing. They keep trying to put it back under different guises and just recently they were trying to do that by amping up the penalties for streaming of illegal content by imposing federal criminal penalties. So I think that probably will be adopted before long because these lobbyists never stop pushing for their interest. So primarily the lobbyists is Hollywood, right? The movie industry and the music industry. And that's for the copyright lobby. So they lobby the US Congress to increase, to keep expanding and increasing copyright penalties and copyright terms and also to push other countries to do it. And the pharmaceutical industry in the US keeps pushing for strengthening patent law and patent penalties in the US and to get the US to use its hegemonic power to twist the arms of other countries to do the same thing with their own patent systems, which is also echoed in this continual, mindless refrain that China is stealing our IP. When people say that they don't even know what they're talking about. China is not stealing our IP. The only thing they might be doing is a trade secret issue, but that's a local domestic issue. It's got nothing to do with patent and copyright. China literally cannot steal American patent and copyright because those are domestic legal systems. And by the way, China has their own Western style domestic copyright and patent system, which is enforced just like every country has one and they all enforce it. Communist countries, fascist countries, dictatorships, Western democracies, they all have these American style copyright and patent systems already. None of them enforce them perfectly 100%, just like the drug war, it's not enforced 100%. And that's a good thing, but they all enforce them to a certain degree and they all harm innocent people and impede innovation, impede competition, infringe on the free market, the free market activities and censor speech and distort culture. They're all horrible. So it's coming. It's coming. It's always coming. And Trump wanted to put a frickin' 230, he wanted to get rid of 230 or tone it down in the recent Defense Appropriation Act. And that's why he was pissed off that they didn't do that when they overrode his veto, that they didn't add that. All right, in this stupid obsession with Confederate statues, names or whatever. So, yeah, it's a tide that's coming. I do think that possibly that the copyright term extensions have stopped because they finally, they kept adding 20 years here and there. We finally reached the point of absurdity where it's life of the author plus 70 years. I don't see them getting any more extensions beyond that, but they might keep adding criminal penalties and things like that to make the enforcement of it more draconian. Yeah, definitely. I fear the worst as we keep going down the road we're going. There is one thing that I have noticed in some of the, in some movies that we have been buying lately, and that is the, you know, you see the FBI warnings and all the, yeah, and there was one thing that they added, which where it, which is where it says piracy is not a victimless crime. So, yeah, you got any comments on that? Well, I hadn't seen that, but I guess they're trying to, they're trying to amp up the propaganda. I mean, from a libertarian point of view, so this is the argument that's made quite often from the kind of mindless ignorant advocates of IP, they'll say something like it's that. Okay, they'll say, if you, if you copy, if you copies what someone has, like if someone sells a product in the market that has a new feature that's innovative and helps it sell, then you're going to draw a competition. That's how the free market works. And you're going to copy to some degree, the innovations that you learn from, they're making public by selling a product. Or if someone, you know, I think the most recent one I heard was on the copyright front was, it was a Dr. Seuss thing. Someone wrote a guide to Star Trek. And they, it was like a guide to the Star Trek universe, and it was called, Oh, the places will boldly go. So it's sort of a mishmash of the Dr. Seuss thing, Oh, the places we go or something like that. But it was using that kind of humorous way of, of talking as a way of explaining the Star Trek universe. And of course they lost the copyright suit from this, from the state of Dr. Seuss drives the, or drizzle, which is ridiculous, I think, but anyway, that's what happens. So if you say that, so they'll say that it's, it's theft or stealing or ripping off, they'll say, or piracy, all these terms they use to describe an act of copying. And if you say, well, it's actually not copying because, I mean, it's not theft because you're not taking anything from the so-called owner of the copyright. You're just copying. They still have their copy. Like if I steal your car, you don't have your car. That's why you don't want me to steal your car because you're deprived of it. If I make a copy of your car, you still have your car. Right. That's the difference. So likewise, if I make a copy of your book, you still have your book. So I'm not taking anything from you. So then the advocates will, they'll say, well, okay, you're not taking the book, but you're taking, you're taking the profits I could have made. Aha. But that means you had a property right in these profits, but who has a property right in future profits? No one, because future profit is just money that's in the hands of potential future customers that they own. They have this money. You don't have a property right in your future potential customers money. That's why if you sell, if you start selling pizza and someone has a pizza joint across the street and they so-called steal your customers, they didn't literally steal anything from you because the customers own their money and they can spend it on someone else that they want to. Or you could say I stole his girlfriend, but you know, you didn't own your goddamn girlfriend. So I didn't really steal her. You know, she decided to go with me instead of you. She has a right to her own life. It's just like your potential customers have a right to their money and they can spend it on whoever the hell they want. So what they really mean is it's a, it's not a victimless crime because the victim is the copyright owner who has some kind of property right in a future stream of revenue that he could get if he had a monopoly on it. Like if the monopoly was, was enforced 100% by the space draconian laws, then they could make more of a monopoly profit. Yeah, that's true. But I'd say it is a victimless crime because they're not victims because they don't actually have a legitimate property right in future money streams. Right. The money is owned by their, by their potential customers. If they want that money from the customers, they need to find a way to persuade them voluntarily to give them their money instead of giving it to a competitor. Right. I mean, if, if ideas were actually legitimate property, I would have to open someone's head and see if I can steal it, which I can't. Exactly. I mean, if, I mean, basically I would have to become a brain surgeon to somehow try and do it, but not going to happen. Not going to happen at all. Yeah. The fundamental mistake here and we don't have to get too much into this. I've talked about it and a lot of other forums and I have articles on this. Yeah. The basic mistake is that people think of creation as a source of property rights, which is wrong. It's not to put down intellectual creativity or labor, which is essential to doing something of value in the world, but creation is not a, so people say, well, I created this new idea. So I should own it. But they, they missed a step of, is it, is it a type of thing that's ownable? Right. So creation is never a source of ownership because we don't create matter. So there's only two sources of ownership and that is, you're the first human actor to find and start using a resource in the world that was previously unowned. So that's called homesteading or original appropriation. Okay. So that means you take something that was a thing that existed, but that was not owned yet and you started using it. So then you become the owner. Or you acquire it by a contract from someone who was a previous owner. So like you get it from that guy. He gives it to you or sells it to you. So now you're the owner. So there's only two ways to become an owner of a thing. And that is original appropriation of an unknown thing, a resource in the world or a contract. Creation is not a source of ownership. Creation is a source of wealth. What creation means is production. It means you take a thing that you own or that someone else owns and you, and you, you, you reshape it, you rearrange it into a more useful thing. Like you grow a crop or you take, you take a hunk of marble and you make a statue out of it, or you take a piece of metal and you make a plow, a plow out of it or a spear, you know, or an axe or a horseshoe. Or you take wood and you make a cabin out of it, something like that. You're already just manipulating things that you already owned. Because if you didn't own them, then you don't own what comes out of it. So creation increases your wealth because it makes the things that you already own more useful or more valuable, but it's not a source of ownership. That's the fundamental mistake libertarians make when they say, well, creation is one source of rights and you're the creator of this idea. Therefore you own it creation is not a source of rights and ideas are not the type of things that could be owned anyway, because they're not scarce. That means they're not rivalrous. So I thought, you know, of course, people could go and read about it as Stefan has said, I can provide it in the description box so that way you all can check it, check it all out. So what I thought about doing, of course, so we're, I believe we're over, we're around 45 minutes, I believe in. So what I thought about doing is transitioning to, you know, talking about the basics on property ethics and what, and in my opinion, when it comes to property ethics, it's always important no matter what the situation is. And I think IP is one of, is one of those that actually demonstrably proves that, or the issue related to that. Okay, tell me, tell me where you're, what are you thinking, where you want to go with this? So, so, so, so what I'm saying is that, you know, IP is destroying property rights. And so we cannot violate property rights at our own convenience. If I'm, if that helps. So basically we cannot pick and choose, essentially. Well, I think it's true that if what you're getting at is this. There are a set of natural property rights that we have. And they can be justified and defined by say libertarian legal theory, or economic analysis of what property is, things like that. And you can't just create new ones because if you create new ones, it always has to come at the expense of the other ones. And the reason is because the set of rights that exists is, it's comprehensive. And it's possible. All rights are. Compossible or compatible with each other. That is, it's impossible to have a conflict of rights. But every possible thing that can be owned. The legal system has to have an answer to who owns it. And it does. It's just that the libertarian answer is based upon those two principles already mentioned original, original appropriation and contract. That answers the question who owns or given resources, possibly a dispute between people. So if you have, let's say you have a sound money system or a money system and, and the, and the government takes it over as they have done. And they replace sound money system of a commodity like gold with a fiat money system with a central bank that can just inflate the money supply. Most people who don't understand economics think, well, why doesn't the, you know, what's wrong with that? Why doesn't the government just make everyone rich by printing more, more, more money? Right. Now the reason is because that would cause inflation. And that would cause prices inflation. Right. So it would reduce the value of everyone's money. It would dilute the purchasing power of existing money. So it's not for free. It's just a way of shifting, shifting resources around. Same thing with like a welfare right. So libertarians say they were in favor of negative rights only. That is the right to have people not do something. But there are no positive rights because a positive right means someone else is basically your slave. They have to provide you with something. So you can have a right to not be aggressed against, which just requires people not to do something, not to infringe on your property rights. But if you have a positive right, like a right to education or right to food or right to a job or right to welfare or right to education, then someone else has to provide that for you. So if you all of a sudden have a welfare right, that takes away from other people's property because you have to take some of their property to give it to me. It's like a welfare right, but it's not a welfare right. It's a welfare right. So it's not a welfare right. It's a welfare right. It's a welfare right. It's a welfare right. So if you come up with these, like intellectual property rights, they're never free. They always come at the expense of other rights. And you can see that in the case of. Patent and copyright that. What they really are. Because it's literally impossible to have. A property right in ideas. It's not just that it's unethical or unjustified. It's impossible. Because all property rights. All property rights are enforceable. That is enforceable by the use of force by either the owner of the right using physical force to defend it or by his agent, which is the state. Or some agency, right? That uses force in the, in our case is the state and their legal system, which is backed up by physical force. But physical force can only be applied to real things in the world that exist physical material things. Right. The people's bodies or the things that they own, you know, they can only be someone for not obeying by law by putting them in prison or killing them. Or I can physically just take their stuff from them, like their gold. Or their house. Whatever. So all rights are always enforced by physical force against some physical asset. So in the case of copyright and patent, what that means is like the patent holder who has an exclusive right to an invention. What that means is he can go to court and get. The court is telling other people that they can't use their factories in a certain way. So the court's saying. Threatening with the threatening a factory owner. With physical force like imprisonment or a fine, which will be enforced with physical force. That they can't use their own factory to produce a machine made in a certain way. Now in the law that's called a negative servitude or a negative easement. Okay. And that's done all the time in neighborhood associations where there's a legal and criminal evidence. And that's perfectly legitimate. If it's contractually agreed to. Just like. If a girl consents to someone having sex with her, that's not. Rape because she consented. But if a guy does it to her without her consent, it's rape. So. A negative servitude that's consented to by the owner. Is, is perfectly legitimate. And fine. But the state just takes it from him without his consent. It's a property right. You know, if a person is not consented to a person. They take it from him without a consent when it grants a patent to someone. The same thing with copyright. So in a, in a, in a sense. Patent, a copyrights or redistributions of property rights. It's a taking of property from an owner of a, of what we call a burden to state. His net, his estate's now burdened by a negative easement or a negative servitude on behalf of the owner of that easement. So patents and copyrights are just a disguised way of taking That's just a way of hiding its true nature. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, that's one big piece of the puzzle that I was trying to think long and hard about. So I was wondering, and I've read, and I've actually read through what Hoppe wrote about on property ethics. And I think I've got the right PDF that I managed to find linked on the Mises Institute website. I was wondering if you'd like to give like a, kind of like just the basics of property ethics or what Hoppe was trying to theorize. Well, so the way I look at it is, first we have a definitional matter, right? Like to define what libertarians are compared to other political philosophies. What's the essence of what we believe? And I think that that can apply to Menarchists and Anarchists and it can apply to utilitarians and consequentialists as well as to people that have a more principled or deontological approach. So the first thing is to clarify what we believe in. And then the second is maybe why we believe it. And then the third is what's the intellectual justification for it, okay? So I would say what we believe is a set of property rules that is every legal system, every political system, basically is characterized by a certain property rights theory. Like everyone believes in property rights. That's not what makes this different. What that means is in any legal system, in any state system, in any political system, there's always a regime that specifies who is the owner of a given resource when there's a dispute over it. Now, in our system, in a mixed welfare democracy like we have, the owner is primarily the Lockean or libertarian set of views, which is the original owner or someone who got it by contract is the owner, but they make a lot of exceptions. So they'll say, unless there's a law passed by the Congress which is inhabited by people that were elected by the vote of the people, blah, blah, blah. And that law says that they're taking some resource from someone like in the form of taxes and giving it to a new owner, which is the state or whoever the state distributes it to. So the default view is you determine the owner of a piece of disputed property or resource by asking who got it first or who got it by contract or is there a law that changes that, right? So that characterizes everyone in the world except for libertarians. Libertarians stop at the first two. We just say, look, the owner is determined by original appropriation and by contract, that's it. We don't make any exceptions, right? So that's our property rights theory. That's what we believe. And the more consistent you are on that, the more likely you are to be an anarchist libertarian because you recognize that even a minimal state violates those first two, okay? Now, why are we libertarians? I think it's because most human beings including libertarians, we evolved as a social species primarily because as we got more intelligent, our brains got bigger and that gave us a survival advantage when we were evolving. But that meant that women had to give birth earlier before the baby was fully formed. Like a horse comes out ready to run, but a baby comes out feeble because the woman has to give birth to the baby very early because the head is bigger because of the evolved brain. And if you let the head get bigger and bigger and bigger to the point of maturity, it would kill the woman giving birth. So when we give birth early, and that means we had to evolve these maternal impulses and social impulses of empathy, right? We're a group, we're a social species. So we all have empathy, which means we value other people as well as ourselves, our narrow self-interest. We also value well-being of others and we become a social species and society develops. And because of that, most of us who are not misanthropes or sociopaths or psychopaths, which do exist, we call them outlaws or criminals, but most of us want prosperity and well-being for ourselves, but also for our family and our communities and other people in general, right? That's just empathy. So we value peace and prosperity for all and we tend to prefer peace and prosperity to violence and conflict and strife. And if you have a little bit of economic literacy, then you realize that if you want to achieve those things, the means to do it is to have a property system based upon the two principles I mentioned, right? Which is what arose naturally. Like that's what Locke was talking about. That's what the common law and the private law systems of the Roman law and the common law recognize. Now, again, lots of exceptions were made because of state intervention and because of inconsistent thinking, things like that. But generally, that's why we have these laws and that's why most of us prefer a libertarian-like system and the libertarians are even more consistent about this. Now, when you think even deeper about what's the justification for this, there's two types of justifications primarily. One is a more pragmatic or consequentialist or some say utilitarian justification. That is they just want a system that works. But what I just described is what works, right? And the other is more philosophical or principle justification, which we call deontological, like reasoning from first principles that are maybe axiomatic or self-evidently true and deducing from there, okay? I think those two approaches are compatible actually. I think they dovetail and they support each other. Some people think that they're exclusive and you have to choose one or the other. I don't see a reason to do that. I think the utilitarian case is flawed because of the reasons Mises points out in human action and elsewhere, the economic flaw of utilitarianism that you can't measure value cardinally and interpersonally or even inter-temporally. But often the word utilitarian is used as a synonym for consequentialist, which I think is not a problem. That just means that if you favor a peace and prosperity for the human race as a whole, then you ought to favor the free market as the means to achieve it, right? And the more you think about it, the more consistent you'll be in that application. Now, what Hoppe tried to do was come up with a more deontological or principled case, which is more the natural rights approach. The traditional natural rights approach is that by the nature of man, God gave us a certain nature, he gave us ownership of the earth because of human nature, certain things follow. But as David Hume pointed out, there's a, I think it was Hume, there's an is-ought gap, that is there's a logical problem with deriving norms or aughts, right? That is rules that say what we should do, what rules we should have. There's a problem deriving that from factual statement about what human nature is, because you go from an is domain to an ought domain. That's been one criticism of natural law or natural rights thinking. I think there's something to that. Hoppe recognized that as a more Kantian type of thinker. So he said, well, let's start from some unassailable normative premises, which is what he said was that, instead of going to the standard natural law approach, which is subject to the criticism that it violates the is-ought gap that Hume pointed out, we're gonna start with some ought statements and build other ought statements on those. But the ought statements he builds on are basically the normative presuppositions of all argumentative discourse. That is, whenever you are discussing what norm or what right should be the one accepted and followed by our legal system, for example, or our property rights system, that has to be done in the case of a discussion among people, discourse or argumentation. And that's always a practical affair with certain presuppositions. That is certain characteristics. Any discussion of what law should be, for example, or what rights should be happens between people who have to respect each other's space, because you can't have a discussion that's not peaceful. If I'm trying to coerce you to accept my claims, that's not an argument. That's just me coercing you. So to have a genuine discussion, to try to figure out the truth of the matter, we have to respect each other's property rights in our own bodies. So that is something you could never deny. If you try to deny it, then you're doing that in the case, in the course of a peaceful argument. So you're denying the necessity of peace while you're admitting the necessity of peace by engaging in a peaceful activity. So what Hoppe tries to identify is that there are sort of proto-libertarian norms or proto-Lachian norms at the base of all discussion per se. And therefore those things could never be challenged or denied. So they can be taken as a priori true. So you don't have the is-ought gap problem because you're not starting with is, or put it this way, you're starting with an ought that isn't is in a sense, like it's an ought that's unassailable. So then you build higher level norms on top of that, like the political norms or the property rights norms. So basically his argument is a type of filter. It's a filter that says that if you argue for any socialistic norm, that that argument is contradictory because it contradicts the basic norms that you had to assume is true by engaging in peaceful discourse in the first place. So if you advocate for socialism, that higher level norm is incompatible with the peaceful Lachian norms that lie at the base of all argumentation. That's kind of a summary of his, what he calls argumentation ethics. And I have a similar theory, which is branched off of that and related based upon the legal concept of a stop-all, which is the idea that in court, you're not permitted to make a claim that contradicts something that you claimed earlier because that would be you, but you're stopped or stopped or prevented from making that because you're saying two things that are contrary to each other and they can't both be true. You're forced, you're required to make only coherent statements because we're trying to get at the truth in this court setting, for example. So that's sort of one approach to a deontological basis of rights, which I think is, which I think shores up and backs up the consequentialist argument for a free society. All right, so I'll link what Hoppe wrote about in the description box, so that way you all can read all about that. So I thought about transitioning into the Q&A since we're, I believe, past the one hour mark. So I only got a few questions that I was able to gather up. I was a bit surprised that the questions didn't pour in, but I think it'll be fine. So anyways, here's a good one from T. Douglas Macintosh. T. Douglas Macintosh, what do you think about the first nation reserves in the U.S. and up where he is in Canada? I'm currently learning about that issue in my Canadian law class, and since you're a lawyer, I wanted to ask for your perspective on this. So in principle, I believe that property rights are permanent, okay? That means that you can't lose your property right by an act of theft. Now, this does not mean that the only just owner of a current resource has to prove his title back to Adam, which is what a lot of people think. They think that if you believe in the locking idea of original appropriation, then the entire libertarian property rights thing falls apart because almost every piece of real property, at least, that's land in the world. There's been some kind of act of aggression or conquest or theft in the past, which taints that title. But that's actually not true because unless the current owner, let's say the possessor of a piece of land was the one that stole it from someone previously, they still have a better claim than anyone else in the world unless they don't. So I believe that let's take a tangible of his property like a watch. So let's say that a hundred years ago, my great-great-grandfather had a watch and it was stolen by your great-grandfather and he passed it down and it passed it down or he sold it at an auction or it was sold by a pawn shop and someone else has that watch now. I'm the descendant of that guy. I believe that if I find that watch, I should be able to take it back from the current possessor, even if they're a good faith possessor and then they're out of luck, right? Cause they wasted money on it. Now they lose the watch. Now I think that problem will be handled by in a private society where this was possible by title insurance. So you would have title insurance just like people get now in their homes, by the way, when you buy a home, especially if you take a mortgage out, the mortgage company requires you to have a title search done and to get title insurance. So someone does a title search, make sure that you have a good claim to it and there's a very low risk that some other person will come along and take the property away from you with a better claim. But if they do, they have insurance to make, like if I buy a house and someone else later takes it from me because they have a better claim to it, I can go to the insurance company and get reimbursed. But if someone did come up with a better claim, I think they should get it. So in the case of these native peoples, if you can show a concrete act of theft and you could trace the title to a concrete person who has a real better claim to it, I do think they should be able to get that back. The problem is that in most cases, the older the claim, the harder it is to find sufficient evidence to do that. But if you could ever do it, I'm in favor of it. I do think you should be able to do that. So if you have a native, like a descendant of African slaves in America or the descendant of Native Americans who could show a good claim to some particular piece of property that they have a better claim to, they should be able to kick the current possessor or owner out and take it over. Oh, that was it? Well, I don't, there's a lot more to say about it, but you could say that that's also the case for just modern people, like I'm taxed to pay for the roads. So I think I'm the natural owner or co-owner of the roads. The state is just keeping me from owning it. So if we ever got rid of the state, I think you should sell the roads off and give the proceeds pro-rata to all the taxpayer victims who had to pay for it. The thing is aggression is always destructive. So there's never gonna be enough to compensate everyone fully. Now, and let's take a case of imminent domain. Let's say I have a house worth a million dollars and the government takes it from me tomorrow to build a road and they pay me a million dollars, fair market value. Now they pay me with taxpayer funds. I've already been compensated. So I don't think I get my house back. I think that that house is now an asset that it could be sold in the future and the proceeds give it back to the government. That it could be sold in the future and the proceeds given to all the taxpayers who were forced to pay me for the house, you follow? So it's a legalistic way of looking at it, but I don't see any other way you can look at it. All right, next question from the same guy. Oh, this will be interesting. What is the argumentation ethical solution to the flagpole problem? I believe in argumentation ethics, but I'm really having a hard time thinking about it. Well, I think that I've got a post on the perils of armchair theorizing. So the problem with coming up with like a solid answer to a hypothetical is that the hypotheticals are always very sparse in details, but in real life, whenever you have a dispute, you go before forum like a court and you have a trial and the court can get other information that could be discovery. The lawyers can come up with arguments. You know the context very well. You know the tradition, the customs, et cetera. So these answers are always very broad and you never know if they're going to apply. But so I would say that argumentation ethics basically is the grounding for a libertarian set of principles of what aggression is and what property rights are and how they're determined. But it also implies you can have contracts and you can have agreements and things like that. So the flagpole thing would imagine like a tall building with many people living there and someone's got a flagpole and someone neighbor upstairs falls off and he's clutching onto the flagpole sticking out of your window and he wants to crawl inside to save himself. So first of all, there very well may be an agreement between the owners of the apartments for emergency situations. I mean, you can't assume there's no agreement that in an emergency case you have to let someone use your property to rescue and save their lives. Or maybe the building is owned by a third party and they're all just renters and the owner of the building has certain rules. I don't see why we would assume that everyone would have, you have to die to save my window panes. I mean, it's ridiculous. So I don't think it would even be a problem in most cases. I think there'd be a set of private rules that would already allow the guy to crawl into your apartment to save himself. And then even if you don't, all the property rules specify is that you have a right to defend your property, but part of that is always the requirement of proportionality. That is, you can only use force that's proportionate to the offense being done. So if someone steals a candy bar from your grocery store, you can't blow their head off with a gun because that's disproportionate punishment. So I would argue that if someone has to break into your window to save their life, it would be treated like the common law treats it right now, which is the case of emergency where the person that has to use your property temporarily to save their life has to pay you damages for the damage they did, but they're entitled to do that. And the reason is because if you were to prevent them from using your apartment for that, you would effectively be killing them. So you'd be basically executing someone for a relatively minor crime of a minor temporary trespass, which is disproportionate. So I think that would be the, so if you basically made someone fall to their death instead of helping them, you would number one be ostracized by society. You might be in breach of the community of the property rules or the contractual rules that you already agreed to. And it would also be seen as possibly disproportionate and forced and maybe an act of aggression. So that would be my stab at it. All right, let's see, next question. I don't know if you'll have much of an answer because remember when you first appeared on my show, we're not that big of a promoter of it. I'd be interested in hearing the agorist approach to dismantling IP. There's piracy, of course, in supporting content creators directly through places like Patreon, but what else can, should we be doing as long as anyone who draws enough attention can be litigated to death? It seems like there's not much room for individual resistance. Okay, that's a good question. I'm not hostile to agorism at all. I've been more hostile to, I'm not even hostile to it, just not interested in activism that much because I think it's largely futile. But I'm in favor of it to the extent you can do it and it does you good or it does anyone else good. And I do think that, luckily, the advent of the internet and technology actually is helping us to, well, so first of all, I think anyone should evade any unjust law anytime they can without putting themselves in too much danger. So I think it's perfectly moral to evade any unjust law. I don't believe there's any obligation whatsoever. And I disagree with some libertarians on this who think that there's a, like I think even Randy Barnett argues this, there's a prima facie obligation to obey laws, even if they're unjust, so long as they're generated by a generally reliable process. I don't believe that at all. I think that any law that's unjust can be disobeyed. Now, I think that there's a, there is a prudential aspect of that in a society where you have as just of a society as possible, even if you don't agree with a particular rule, you probably should obey it to show us the respect for your community and to show that you're not some kind of loose cannon. But it's like if you agree to an arbitration with someone and you both agree to abide by the outcome of the arbitration and the private arbitrator decides against you, even if you don't like it, you need to respect that result because you're in that system and you agree to it. In the case of IP, I think luckily the internet is helping to undermine the ability of the state and the evil content holders from enforcing copyright. And I think that copying the internet is the world's biggest copying machine and it's never going to get harder to copy things in the future. So, the monopoly, the ability to stop people from copying movies and information is gone. And I think that's a good thing. All they have left is draconian sentences of the people that they can catch. But that's not gonna stop copying any more than the drug war stops people from doing drugs. So, the internet itself and encryption technology and torrenting and all this is going to make it harder and harder to enforce copyright law, which is very good. In the field of patents, I think that 3D printing is eventually going to do that. So, if you can have an advanced 3D printer, now I'm talking 50 years from now, however long it takes to have a 3D printer that can make really sophisticated products, food, medicines, iPhones, things like that. That may be a long ways off, but I think it's coming. So, when you have that, everyone's got a 3D printer in their basement or in the neighborhood, and you can get an encrypted file over the internet that gives you the recipe or design of some product. You can just print it and even the patent holders won't be able to stop you. And so that hopefully will end the patent monopoly too. So, I'm all in favor of the dark web, Bitcoin, anonymous currencies, encryption, 3D printing, all these techniques that people can use to evade copyright and patent law. If that's agris, then I'm in favor of it. Next question. I particularly wanted to ask you about your quote-unquote debate with Jan Hellfeld. How do you feel about it looking back and how in the world did you get all mixed up with a clown like that? I have two or three debates that I think were actually kind of funny. Probably the funniest was the one with Wenzel. Yeah. And the other was one with Hellfeld. Also the one with Craig Wright. Well, that was more civil, but Craig Wright's another character. I don't remember. I think Hellfeld, I used to like him because he was sort of an annoying, he would annoy the status like Nancy Pelosi and people like that. Although he did it sort of in a little tedious way. It was a chronic method, I believe. Yeah, but it's almost like a little autistic way talks but so he goes around pretending to be some kind of radical libertarian, but he's really not because he's in favor of IP law and he's a menarchist and so compared to us real radical libertarians, he's just another status and I wanted him to admit that not pretend like he should get better. If he's going to make fun of status, he should not be one himself. So we ended up having a debate and I refused, look, I refuse to, I guess I just refused to think that being in civil to someone who wants to violate my rights is a worse crime than what they're advocating, right? I think we should always have a priority. Like if someone's going to sit there into my face in a allegedly peaceful discussion say that he's in favor of putting me in jail for not paying taxes, right? Or for copying something, then he's not being civil to me. So I don't know, it was fun. I just thought it was funny to not pretend, I don't like to pretend like these people are civil when they're not civil. I think the one part that made me laugh on the floor was the part where you said, I'm a real lawyer unlike you. Isn't he a lawyer? I mean, he claims to have a law, he claims to have a law to agree, but I've never, I've never had any confirmation that he's ever actually practiced law or understands law on a sophisticated level. Yeah, I find it really strange that he's, I'm watching his opening and he's just jumping all over the place. I mean, he's always, he's like, what is this debate about? It's about this and then he's going on about irrelevant stuff and then what is this debate about? It's the title of this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, get to the point already. Yeah, I think he does these got you try to do gotchas. Now, look, when I talk, I'm pretty confident about what I'm talking about because I've thought about it for years and I've debated people on it 100 times. I've debated people on it 100 ways. I already know the answers, but I'm always willing to change my mind. I mean, I've changed my mind over the years on several things. I've changed my mind on anarchy. I've changed my mind on intellectual property and on other issues. But these people don't seem to argue that way. They argue tendentiously. Like they have, they just want to come up with a lawyer's argument for their case. So they try to come up with the gotchas. So like, help though, if I'm in a desert and I have only one thing of water and you wanted to, would you take it or something? I'm like, why is he asking Cancela whether he would take a bottle of water from someone? I mean, what has that got to do with what the law should be? Do you know what I mean? It's like, he's trying to catch me in a gotcha. Like it's like the hypocrisy thing. He's trying to get me to say, yes, if I'm facing death, I would steal someone's bottle of water. Okay, let's say I would. So what? Yeah, I would commit an act of, I would commit a crime maybe if I was desperate enough. Sure. Does that mean that it shouldn't be a crime? No, it's a whole different issue. So let's stick with the issues, but they don't want to do that. They want to come up with gotchas. Yeah. And plus, they never specify the context. Like I said, these armchair scenarios are never specified. So it depends upon the context. Like two people are on a boat and it's about to sink. And I mean, it's gonna sink unless one dies or something. One has thrown overboard. What do you do? It's like, well, first of all, how did they get there? You know, what's the full context? You never specify. And second of all, let's suppose there's no good answer to that question. Well, so what? I mean, how would a social system or your minimal estate fix that? There's gotta be some answer to who goes overboard. If you don't like what my Rothbardian principles would say, what would your principles say? You set up a situation where someone's gonna lose where peace is not possible. It's a tragedy. Tragedies are possible in life. That's not the fault of libertarianism. And communism and socialism and theocracies and totalitarianism and monarchies, they won't solve the problem either because you've set up a situation where there's always gonna be a loser. So what does it prove? It proves nothing. It proves that tragedy is possible in the world. Congratulations, we already know that. That's really just, that's an outcome of the fact that we're not omnipotent, which means that there's scarcity in the world. But because there's scarcity, we libertarians want a set of property rights rules that allow us to live in peace and cooperation and prosperity as much as possible. So if you come up with a scenario where it's not possible, that doesn't prove anything. Yeah, I laughed every time he mentioned a gang warfare. It's almost like I have to get a bowl of beer or something and drink every time he said gang warfare because he said it so many times. Well, and all these idiot objectivists, they never confront the issue of the logic of their position, which is that if they're opposed to anarchy because you're gonna have gang warfare, then that means ultimately, they have to favor a one-world government because if you have 200 or 2,000 states in the world, they're in a state of anarchy with respect to each other. So what's to stop them from having war with each other and gang warfare? So you have to have a one-world government and some of the more consistent ones admit that, like Robert Benonado, but they'll say something like, but I wouldn't wanna favor that right now in today's world because it would be even worse. Exactly. So it's just a matter of degree. You're in favor of decentralized anarchistic solutions. So wait, we just want 7 billion sovereigns and you want 2,000 sovereigns or whatever. There's no difference in degree now. So they've lost their principled fundamental distinction. Yeah, and there's just one last thing that just made me bang my head on my desk, which is where he denies that he's a statist. You keep calling me a statist, but I'm not a statist. I'm like, bro, you believe? Yeah. Yeah, it was a bit of a cheap shot on my part because, but the way to answer that is to say, okay, let's have a definition. So status has two connotations, right? Usually we libertarians use it to mean someone who's for a significant state or a big state, right? Or invasive state, intrusive state. But literally speaking, it means someone who favors the state. And not only that, we anarchists believe that if you have any state whatsoever, it will necessarily be or become intrusive because as Hopper wrote in his democracy book, there's no logic stopping the expansion of the state. They always get bigger and they always go up. And not only that, there's never been a, they accuse us libertarians of being idealistic and unrealistic because we support something that's never existed, which is wrong. There have been anarchist societies for hundreds of years, but there's never been a anarchist society. That's the problem. They're in favor of something that's unworkable. They want to have a state that doesn't follow its own self-interest and expand, which has never happened. And even the early American republic, which they glorify, was not libertarian at all. I don't know why these libertarians have the Statue of Liberty and worshiping Liberty Bell and the Constitution and the Founding Fathers and all this crap. They weren't libertarians. Blacks didn't have rights, women didn't have rights. The Native Americans didn't have rights. We had democracy, we had taxation, we had conscription, we had war, you know? It was stated from the beginning. Yeah, yeah. The Constitution means to constitute, to make up something. It was to form a central state, which has become the biggest state in world history. I don't know why they reveal the goddamn Constitution, like it protects our rights. It doesn't protect our rights, it invades our rights. A piece of paper will protect us. But it wasn't even meant to protect us. It was meant to establish a new government, which it did. Yeah. All right. It looks like I'm out of questions. So, all right, so that's pretty much it. But you know what? I think I'll do a closing question, which is do you think that in regards to IP, it's going to get worse before it gets better? I think that, like I said, I think the copyright terms probably are done. I don't think it's going to get any longer. I think they will gradually make the penalties worse, like the screaming thing you were talking about. Patents, I think, are probably, patents probably won't get any worse. So I think the laws will most basically stay the same. I don't think they'll ever get any better. But I think that technology will gradually, over time, reduce the sting of those laws. So I think over time, they'll become more and more irrelevant, hopefully. All right, well, we're just about the 90 minute mark. Stefan, it's always fun having you on, and you're always very informative. Please keep doing what it is you're doing, and hopefully, it may not happen in our lifetimes, but hopefully, IP will finally be abolished completely, because it's a mess, and it's continuing to pile up, or they're trying to. I just hope we can get more libertarians to oppose it. I think more and more are. I've been trying to get the libertarian party to put it in their platform. They almost did it earlier this year. And hopefully, yeah, they had Karen Ann Harlos, who I communicate with, had it on the platform committee's resolutions or whatever you call it, and they had voted for a plank calling for the abolition of all IP law, but then the full LP national committee or whatever didn't take it up for some reason, but we're getting closer, at least getting libertarians to see the problem with it. Oh, that's perfect. All right, well, that's pretty much it. People want to ask Stefan any more questions. Hopefully, I'll save them for a possible fourth appearance. So, Stefan, as always, thank you for coming on. Thanks a lot, appreciate it. And I wanna thank you all for tuning in, and please come back soon.