 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 20th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Very excited about this week's episode. I'm doing an interview breakdown of the conversation I had with Dr. Bruce Kane of Stanford University talking about democracy. Now, if you've been listening to the show, you know that I am an anarchist, which means that I think all the services that governments provide can be more efficiently and ethically provided by private entrepreneurs. Needless to say, that's a fairly minority position. But I got into a great discussion with Dr. Kane about the foundations for the existence of government and democracies in particular. Before I dive into the interview, I want to give a round of shout outs to some new Patreon supporters and old Patreon supporters. All of you guys are helping make this show possible. I have the deepest appreciation for your support. I want to give you all my sincerest thanks for valuing the work that I'm doing. So thank you to Love Carl Kvist, Mark Govay, Alex Timofeyev, Charlie Davis, Sean Balida, Lisa Gibson, John LeBlanc, the Georgia Freeman, Michael Sedlac, David Richardson, Samuel Robert, and the roughly 25 other patrons that are donating a dollar for every time a show like this is produced. You are all helping to create a more rational world view. And I also want to give a special shout out to a patron who I won't name but you know who you are. My wife and I just got back from travels from California, then we went to Canada, then to Michigan, and we're back in New York now. And while we were in Michigan, a supporter reached out to me and said, Hey, I saw that you're going to be in the area. Why don't we go out for lunch? My wife and I had a fantastic lunch with this guy. We had a great time. And it was so encouraging and really inspiring to meet somebody who was not only supportive of my work but aware of it. And it just gave me really a shot of encouragement in my arm. Plus, we went out to a Thai restaurant that was really delicious. So a special thanks to you for a great afternoon. So if you want to help support the show, if you like the work that I'm doing, if it resonates with you, if you think it's important, please check out patreon.com slash Steve Patterson, where you can become a patron of the show. It means you pledge one or two dollars or as much as you'd like. Whenever I post a show like this or whenever I do some written work or my YouTube videos, you pledge one dollar of support along with all the others and all of that adds up to really make this show possible. Plus, you get a free digital version of the books that I've written in the past, plus all the books that I will write in the future, which I have several planned. Alright, so on to the interview with Dr. Bruce Kane. I love talking about political theory and this interview is no exception. As with every other topic I have explored, I always like to start with basics, with the fundamentals, where if you get the basics wrong, it doesn't really matter how complex or advanced your analysis is, you're going to be advanced based on faulty presuppositions. So we have to start with talking about the basics of government. What is a government and why does it exist? And one of the standard ideas is that in order to protect humans from their fellow humans, we need some powerful authority figure that keeps us in check and keeps us in line. And we all agree to defer to the authority of that powerful person in order to make sure that we're safe from having our person or property harmed. This is kind of the standard idea in political theory and he agrees. Is it the case that that desire for peaceful cooperation is ultimately where we get government from? Is that kind of what the underlying cause is, this desire for peaceful cooperation? Yes, I think that's right and it's mirrored somewhat in the history of political philosophy. One of the original writers that thought about why people would enter into government was Thomas Hobbes and Hobbes' notion was that people gave up their freedom in order to get security. That the state of nature was nasty, mean, and brutish. And that the only way you could get out of that was to hand over your power to a leader or a government. And in Hobbes' notion, that government would have full authority. And if you look at the way societies have developed, they often developed around warriors or leaders of armies, etc., that were able to secure a particular area. And oddly, we see in the Middle East, the history of the early development of democracy being played out in the Iraq strategy that we had to develop in order to take back the country in Iraq. And with the surge, we had to give power to tribal leaders. Similarly in Afghanistan, we've done the same thing. And so that's just a reminder that when all else falls apart, the one thing that people are most looking for is security of property and security of life. And if a state fails in providing those things, the economy will fail, the trust in government will fail, and you simply will be in a state of chaos much as we see in various parts of the world right now. Okay, I think this is a pretty standard idea when thinking about governments, that without them, without that authority figure, everything would collapse into a state of chaos. And therefore, there's this association of civilization itself, of peaceful and prosperous civilization with the existence of some kind of strong government. Now, if you guys are at all familiar with some of my ideas on this topic, you know that I'm not particularly sympathetic to this idea. In fact, I think that government, especially modern-day government, is kind of anti-civilization. It's the opposite of peace and prosperity. But we'll get into that more as this interview progresses. So the next thing we start talking about is democracy. And again, I'm not a big fan of government, which means I'm not a big fan of democracy. You might even say, I'm especially not a big fan of democracy. What I thought was interesting is that even though Dr. Cain and I are complete opposite ends of the political theory spectrum, I have an anarchist and he's a statist, both of us see the troubles with democracy. The idea sounds great that, oh, you have a bunch of people who get to vote on their system of governance. Yeah, okay, that sounds great. Except in reality, it runs into all kinds of problems, some of which I would point out. And he points out the problems from a very different perspective than I would. The common assumption in the reform community, and among a lot of citizens, is that the answer to whatever problems we have with democracy is more democracy. So more participation, more transparency, more elections, et cetera. And the reality, unfortunately, is that if you maximize any of these democratic values, you can soon exceed what the capacity of the citizens are. So we have a good example here in California with the next election, where we're going to have something like 16 measures on the ballot. Some of them very technical, some of them less so. We're going to have in some counties, in addition, San Francisco County could have up to 30 local measures. So, and then you add maybe a half dozen to a dozen, depending upon where you are in the state, state and local officials, and then on top of that, federal officials, you're talking about an extremely long ballot that would require a lot of study and thought before you go into the ballot box because you'll see that the ballot pamphlet we hand out is like a phone book. I might say, hey, democracies tend to run afoul of minority rights, and there's no check in place for controlling the tyranny of the majority. And he's coming at it from a perspective of, look, it doesn't even make sense in practice to think that you could have all of these political issues voted on by the general public. There's just too many issues to vote on. You might even say there's too much knowledge out there, which is too dispersed in society, to have a silly idea that somehow every voting citizen is going to have all the prerequisite knowledge on hand to make the correct decision at the voting booth. And the natural result is something like necessarily ignorant citizens on any given topic voting for policies that they probably can't even understand, which does not seem like a very ideal type of government. So Dr. Cain talks about this and said, look, yes, you have to have some kind of checks on democracy, but when you even utter such a thing, it immediately makes you some cold-hearted outsider. I have found myself being an unpopular person at the picnic, so to speak, when I bring this up because when I talk to journalists and reform groups in D.C. about how there have to be some limits on transparency because we have to protect ourselves from enemies and we have to protect the privacy of individuals and that maybe we have to provide deliberative space for individual officials to have frank discussions and if we try to make everything transparent, we may be pushing things to a lower level of transparency ironically. I get a very unreceptive response from people because it's so ingrained that more democracy is obviously good. They can't think of it as being a nonlinear relationship that hits a point and then stops. So he's saying, look, in practice, you have to have individuals that are making decisions on behalf of the general public. It just doesn't even make sense to think that the general public is going to be voting on every single topic. Therefore, you need specialists and if you're going to have specialists, they have to have some kind of protection, some kind of insularity from the general public to make their decisions. Now, if you accept a bunch of premises about why governments should exist, which I don't accept, but if you accept those premises, then that argument makes a great deal of sense. If you can't have the general public voting on everything, you have to have some kind of representation. To the extent that's the case, it's reasonable to assume that there needs to be some protection or privacy or sheltering from the will of the majority. So this is another way of putting that. So could I phrase this in an unsavory way and see if this is part of the criticism that maybe you get? Are you arguing that what we need is some class of individuals who are less accountable to the public and who are making decisions on behalf of the public without the public's direct consent? Yes. In fact, I write about this. I call it the delegation paradox that what happens is that we get frustrated with our representatives and so we look for other forms of participation. But what happens is that other people become your unofficial representatives. So for example, in the many studies that show with respect to direct democracy, it seems as though the people in the grassroots will be putting these measures on the ballot. In reality, that's not the case. It's either funded by groups or it's funded by wealthy individuals, some of them well-meaning like Tom Steyer. Sometimes utility companies, etc. And they don't get their way with the representation that they get in the legislature. So they then put the thing on the ballot. And so there are very few measures that are now done by the people in a grassroots way. You have basically delegated this task to a group of policy entrepreneurs and interest groups that hire lawyers and put their measures on the ballot and then ask you to do it. So I find this really interesting because I tend to agree with him descriptively. But I couldn't more strongly disagree with him prescriptively. So descriptively, yes, I think this is what naturally is going to emerge in a democratic system. Some group of elites that are making the decisions on behalf of everybody else, they're naturally going to be kind of sheltered and insular. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's more of an inevitable thing. And let's just acknowledge it as fact rather than somehow thinking that more democracy, more direct democracy is always a good thing. However, that doesn't mean that there's no alternative to the democratic system. In fact, I find it utterly nauseatingly repulsive to think that because this is what would emerge in a democratic society, we have to simply accept the fact that there needs to be elites who are sheltered from everybody else who are making the decisions on behalf of the general public without their consent, without their knowledge. That somehow, because that's what emerges in a democracy, therefore we have to accept that. I think that's a terrible system. I think that's an unjust and immoral system. It's an inefficient system. And I think honestly, it should piss a lot of people off that there are lots of individuals right now, whatever country you're living in, if you have some kind of loose democracy, that there are elites who are creating rules for society, for you and for your life, without your consent, without your knowledge, without really caring about you. And they do it because somehow they think themselves elite enough, important enough, smart enough to be capable of making the right decision, that there is this implicit belief that the general public, they can't take care of themselves, therefore they have to be taken care of by the enlightened elites. I find this idea repulsive. What I do not think is coincidental is that you hear these ideas at the elite institutions. You hear these ideas at Stanford, you hear these ideas at Oxford, you hear these ideas in Washington DC precisely because it's made up of people who already have stronger and tighter connections to power. And go figure they think to themselves, well, you know what we need? We need a group of elite intellectuals who can plan out society and take care of everybody. And I guess I'll be part of those elites. I'll be part of the advisory toward the central planners. I don't think it's coincidental that people in academia who, as I've already talked about, view themselves as the enlightened minority think that they should take care of forcefully the rest of the people in society. The idea that people should be able to take care of themselves and associate with other human beings on their own volition and play by their own rules is anathema to the elite intellectuals. They think that chaos would break out without their brilliant minds around to navigate and placate and be diplomatic about how we should structure society. Another way of putting this, it should not surprise anybody that the elites at Stanford and elsewhere are arguing for political elitism. So the next question I ask him is about protection of minority rights in a democracy. So you can imagine a circumstance if you say, look, when 70% of people in a particular society get together and vote on a law, that shall be the law and everybody has to live in accordance with it, even if the 30% vote against it. Well, it's not too hard to imagine what happens if the 70% say that all people who are over the height of six feet tall have to give up 75% of their income to the rest of us. Well, that wouldn't be a very fair law. You can imagine countless examples of where the majority could extort and exploit the minority. So I ask him, look, what are the protections in a democracy for those kind of circumstances? And the usual answer as well, we have checks and balances. We have something like a constitution which is supposed to restrain the behavior of the majority. So we have some kind of a court system that is going to protect minority rights and make sure that the will of the majority isn't unbounded. In the case of judiciary, in the world of philosophy, it's the equivalent of saying utilitarianism is somehow bounded by deontological principles. Okay? And so in essence, the institutional expression of that is that the court, you know, reasons from principles that are set out in the Constitution and puts limits by applying, say, the First Amendment or the 14th Amendment or the Fifth Amendment to things that could get passed through the Congress or by state legislatures that might violate minority rights. And so right from the beginning in the United States, we've always had this balancing between majority and minority tyranny in the federalist papers and the expression of that is found in the courts. So in other words, oh, there's a system for that. So my question is, well, okay, so we're talking about let's structure society such that we have these documents saying government shall act in this particular way and right shall be protected because of this amendment and that amendment, which is just words being written down on paper that some people say, okay, yeah, let's live in accordance to those rules. My question is, well, how can we actually protect minority rights when the majority says, I'm not going to follow the rules anymore? Yeah, that Constitution, that's old 18th century stuff. We're going to make a new Constitution that we say everybody with brown hair has to do such and such. What are the actual rules in place? And the only answer I get is, well, there's protections for that. Well, we have a court system for that. Well, there is a system in society that protects from that, which I think kind of misses the point. I'm saying, yeah, what happens when those individuals who populate the court system, who populate the general public, who populate the executive branch, who populate the police system, what happens when those people say, hey, let's make a new Constitution? Let's all agree to change the rules to extort some particular minority. And of course, the obvious answer is, in a democracy, there's no actual constraints on that type of behavior. By definition, if enough people get together and agree to do something, thus that thing becomes politically legitimate, even if it's changing the Constitution or changing the Bill of Rights or whatever. So when talking about this, we ultimately arrived at something like this conclusion that in order for the Constitutions or the Bill of Rights or the constraints on the will of the majority, in order for that to work at all, really in order for the whole system of government to work at all, you have to have what he calls a commitment to democracy. You have to have the general public committing to that one particular form of government, which is really, really interesting and it has really big implications, which I'll talk about in a minute, but so this is what I ask him. When you were describing, I think the term he used is commitment. There's a commitment that people have to make to democracy. This sounds very much ideal in a metaphysical sense. It sounds very much like an idea that people have to actively hold on to in order for the whole system to work. People stop accepting that idea or stop trying to live in accordance with that particular idea, then the whole thing might fall apart. Would you feel comfortable saying something like, if we're going to try to be precise about what government is, it's something very similar to a lot of people believing an idea? Yeah, I mean. Was that too woo-woo? No, I mean, I think it's true, but I think how people believe in an idea varies very much. So for some people who study it all the time like me, they can think about it in an abstract sense. But I think for a lot of citizens, they learn about the idea by practicing it. And so a lot of political scientists believe that what happens at the local government level or what happens in terms of community organizations or even in the Little League and the League of Women Voters or all the different organizations, if they're practicing principles of collaboration and they're using principles of majority rule and with respect for minority rights and all that, that you learn democratic habits at that level, you get confidence that that's the way to operate that is most inclusive and most likely keeps the society from essentially exploding into a warring faction. So I think it's an acquisition of democratic habits. It's a socialization. It's not always thinking through from first principles and deciding, yeah, this is the best form of government or this best way to do it. I think for some people that's what we have to do. But I think for a lot of people, it's learned to practice and recognizing that this works in a lot of different levels and it needs to work at the highest level as well. I feel like I could talk a whole episode specifically on that little segment. Isn't this interesting that in order to make the system work, you have to have a belief in the legitimacy and the effectiveness and the bindiness of the system in the first place that has to do that belief. How does one arrive at that belief? He says, well, for a lot of people, it's practice. What does that mean? Well, it means when you participate in the Little League and the League of Women Voters and you participate in democratic systems. You learn that this is how it works. It kind of gets ingrained into your psyche that this is just how things work. It's kind of a de facto belief in the legitimacy of the authority of some particular political structure. Again, I find this repulsive. I find this dangerous and really insightful that if you were to try to manipulate a particular populace into going in accordance with a political structure, this is a little insight in how to do it. Have them practice democracy. Have them in their regular social interactions. Act in such a way which implicitly states that democracy is a legitimate way of doing things. He even uses the term practicing the principles of collaboration as if what collaboration is is democratic collaboration. This is how deep this fundamental idea and the legitimacy of democracy and majority rule is. That's how deep it goes. In our social interactions, if we want to collaborate, it must mean we must collaborate in this democratic way, in the micro scale, and that's the same kind of collaboration that's happening in the macro scale. I.e., the democratic participation when we're in community organizations is the same kind of democratic participation that happens when we're electing a president of the United States. Now, descriptively, that might actually be what's going on, prescriptively, I again find this very disturbing. I feel like if I were to open up a book, something like The Prince by Machiavelli, how does one manipulate a general public? I get the scent that this is kind of a way to do it. If society can be structured in such a way where you act as if small scale collaboration somehow is the same justification of large scale collaboration, i.e., voting, that that seems to be a very good way to subconsciously plant the seed that government is legitimate in the minds of the general populace. Okay, so now we've transitioned into one of the more revealing parts of the discussion, which is kind of the latter half of our conversation. So you'll hear in the next few segments, I'm trying to ask them, okay, in this political structure, what happens when, let's say, 10% of people don't like the will of the majority? 10% of people, they vote and they say, no, I don't want to support policy X. What happens in this society that he's proposing to those 10%? And you'll find it's very difficult for me to get a very straight answer. It takes all the way the rest of this conversation, which is like 30 minutes or so, to finally, at the end of our talk, get a straight answer. But here's how it starts. That is very compelling from an abstract level in terms of the general public will vote out people that they think they're not being represented properly. But what about on the individual level? So let's say there's even, not necessarily even individual, but sizable minority. So 10% of people, a lot of people, say, I think this function of government is terrible. I wish it didn't exist. You know, they're doing things, they're doing things with their money that I think is actively bad. And the rest of the majority say, no, this is a service that we want to have happen. Isn't there something really distasteful about the idea of an organization existing which has access to taxes, meaning I don't have a choice whether or not I'm going to pay them. And they're doing something that I think is totally completely wrong, completely wrong-headed. Well, if you're committed to a democracy, you're going to win some and you're going to lose some. And if your demand is that you always have to win, you've got a problem. Because as soon as you, I mean, it's like a marriage, right? You talk about your wife, I doubt that you always win, okay? And if you're lucky, you win more than she does, but most of us don't these days. And so the reality is every time you add another person into your collective action problem, you're going to lose on some issues. How interesting is this? Is this not something that you think people should be talking more about? Hang on, our political structure is like a marriage. That's the analogy that the political scientist at Stanford is using. When you add more people to your collective action problem, things get messy. You win some, you lose some, and you just have to suck it up. What? Have we not explored other possibilities? So I asked him about what seems to be a pretty big difference between democratic political structure and a marriage. But those circumstances are all voluntary. This is something which is totally involuntary. Well, that's not clear that they're always voluntary, right? I mean, you know, there are a lot of situations where you have a common problem and you got to do something about it and you have to work with your neighbors, right? Working with neighbors is different than saying, I'm going to tell my neighbor what to do or he's going to tell me what to do. No, it's not different because let's say you're trying to solve a problem of crime and 80% of the neighbors want to do something and 20% don't. Well, good luck with trying to make sure that the crime is only concentrated on the 20%, and all the 80% who pay get their crime taken care of, but the 20% don't, okay? So the reality is that the problem, the reason that we have collective action problems is we have non-excludable public goods, okay? That means that there are things like cleaning the air or providing safety, et cetera, that you can't sort of parcel out to this individual and that individual. And so you have this problem that there's an incentive for people to shirk, to say, hey, I don't have to pay. I want to get you to pay. We'll come back to this issue. This is another little key insight into the way that I think people mistakenly think about political theory. He's talking about the incentive to shirk, the free rider problem. He's talking about economics. What he's claiming is for economic reasons. Now we need this political system. Usually it's not so explicitly expressed, but in fact, I think that's precisely the argument that people are making, whether they realize it or not, that ultimately their claims for why government, as we understand it, needs to exist comes from economics. And yet the majority of people, the vast majority of people I've spoken to about this topic, they don't understand economics. It's this assumption that there are these things that are non-excludable public goods and therefore we need to have government intervene to provide those goods. It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, maybe. I mean, maybe that's the case, but if it were possible to provide for the goods and services that government provides with private entrepreneurs, wouldn't that be kind of a really big deal? Shouldn't we really sort that out and dive as deep into economics first before we start talking about political theory? The shirking problem is a real problem with collective action. They want the benefit, but they don't want to pay. And so, yes, you have to have coercion because that's not fair. That's not right. If you want protection, you got to pay for the national defense. You can't exclude yourself from that, even though they can't, you know, if we put good defense around the country in theory, you're going to enjoy it and you don't have to pay any taxes. So, yeah, every libertarian says, hey, I don't want to have to pay for that, but they're benefiting from it. Same thing with police. Same thing with clean air. Same thing with clean water. These are classic public goods. Now, are you going to tell me that there are some things that have been classified as public goods that should be private goods that don't provide these excludable, non-excludable benefits? Yes, should those be contracted out and dealt with the private sector? Yes. As long as they're providing efficiency, as long as there are enough firms in that area, because if you're just jumping from one monopoly to another monopoly, you're not any better off. If you've got only one firm that collects that trash and they've got a local monopoly in that area and you get rid of your municipal trash collectors and you go to that one company, you're not any better off. Economics. And a great deal of those claims were factually inaccurate. There's a great difference between a public monopoly and a private firm with large market share or even 100% market share. I'll tell you precisely the difference, but I'm not going to dive into it in great detail. With a public monopoly, there are legal barriers to entry, i.e., there is one legal service provider. There is one water provider in this geographic location, period. All other providers of water are excluded from the market. Nobody else can come into that market, even if that firm makes a gigantic loss and delivers terrible water to its constituency, irrelevant because it's a public monopoly. This is not the case with a private company with large market share or even total market share, precisely because there aren't legal barriers to entry. If a company with a 100% market share does a bad job, there are no barriers to entry, preventing other competitors from entering into that market, which immediately aligns the incentives for that company to provide good quality product at a low price because if they don't, they're going to lose their market share to some competitor. There could not be a greater difference between large company in a free market with a big market share versus the public monopoly. We're talking night and day, completely categorically different things, but what's also interesting is, again, we're talking about economics here. There are these goods, police protection, national defense, clean air. The assumption is the, I would say, fairly simple textbook assumption that's foundationally mistaken. The assumption is that, of course, you can't have private companies provide for clean air. Of course, you can't have private companies provide for property protection, whether it's national defense or it's some local police force. Of course, that's not the case. Therefore, X, Y, and Z. What I'm saying is, wait, hang on. You're making an economic claim. Let's examine economics before we so frivolously think that these issues are resolved. And in fact, when you examine them, I don't think they're resolved. I think actually you could have private entrepreneurs provide these services. And if that's the case, you really don't even get to the first argument for why we should have a government in the first place. Okay, but I get back to this question. Well, what happens when that minority wants to opt out? If they don't want to pay because they don't want the service, what happens? Then does that mean, in the circumstance with the crime in the neighborhood, you're saying it would be legitimate for the 80% of people to essentially take the 20% money and just say, look, this is a public good. I'm going to kick down your door and take some of your funds to fund it. Are you saying that's legitimate? Yes, but not, of course, that way. But basically, here's the premise. The premise is if you decide to live in a given community, there's an implied social contract. And that implied social contract is if there are general benefits that are provided to that, like protection. What if they disagree? That's called voting with your feet. So are you saying that the 80% could get together and essentially pay up relief? What I'm saying is that, well, you're assuming that you're imposing it on the, so we have democratic mechanisms for that and we would put it on the ballot. They would get a chance to put their arguments forward. And let's say they say, no, this is a bad idea. It's not actually a threat. I think you guys are mistaken. I'm not going to pay for it. Then what do you do? Then you've opted out of the democratic system. But then what happens? Well, then your problem is that until you convince a supermajority of people to get rid of the democratic system, you have two choices. You either accept the system or you either leave or are non-compliant and get jailed. Yes. Is that what you're saying? For those 20% that have rejected, they went to the town hall and they said, uh-uh, I'm not going to do it. You're saying that what would happen is either you go to jail or you leave. Well, that's extreme. Again, very difficult to have a straight answer. Is that what happens in this? Well, that's called voting with your feet. Well, so are you saying that it's pay up or leave? Well, well, I mean, that's extreme. Well, so what is it? Is it vote with your feet? Is it that's the cost of living in a democratic society? You have to put up with theft or leave all your possessions and leave? Let's get a straight answer. What I'm saying is that we have a general principle. If we're talking about local government, okay, then we have, with respect to municipal services, the opportunity to vote with your feet and... But that's the opportunity, meaning I could leave, but I'm saying let's say they're on their property and they're saying, look, this is a family farm, it's been in the farm in the family for 150 years. I have all these social connections. And I don't want to have any police protection at all. On my property, sure. Let's say they say that. Let's go to the extreme. They say, look, I can fend for myself. I don't want the police services. So I'm not going to pay for them. Yeah. So that comes down to, again, how, you know, could a society be organized that way? No. Why not? And the reason is that you would devolve away from optimal organization because the incentive to shirk would cause more and more people to get down the rat hole of not participating. Because I'm going to say, hey, if he doesn't have to pay, I'm not going to pay. Then the next neighbor says, I'm not going to pay. And then everybody's worse off because... Is that okay though? I mean, yes. So there's a difference between saying, I'm not going to pay, I'm going to get the services, and I'm not going to pay. Don't provide me the services. Yes, but now you've just contradicted the definition of a public good, and I'm not going to allow you to do that. The definition of a public good is that it's non-excludable. So let's take the classic case. Yeah. Let's take clean air. Yeah. Once again, for the third or fourth time, I'm not sure now it gets back to economics. Oh, well, well, with police protection, that's something that, oh, there's this thing that's a non-excludable public good. Therefore, such and such and such is the case. I'm saying, wait, what? Why would the default assumption be different for police protection than it would be for the provision of shoes or the provision of food in an economy? In the real world, meaning outside of academia and outside of government, you have private property protection all the time. It's called private security. When you go into a denny's at four o'clock in the morning in a sketchy area of town, then you're going to see some really big dude with his arm crossed, who's functioning as a kind of a bouncer. That's the service of property protection being provided. When you go into a mall, there is mall security. What is mall security? Well, it's private property protection. Think about this remarkable theoretical scenario. Imagine there's a mall and there's a company that says, look, if you pay me, I'll protect your merchandise from theft and half of the stores say, yeah, I want that and they hire them and they get the service provided by that company. But the other half say, no, I can provide for this service myself. I don't need your company and they don't pay. And as a result, what would happen? Well, the police wouldn't protect those stores. And if theft happens, well, then it happens. Does the whole system blow apart? Oh, my gosh, those people opted out and they didn't get the service and well, okay, they didn't get the service. So what? The people who paid for it got it. The people who didn't pay for it didn't get it. Where's the magic? This system can't work. This reminds me of the classic textbook example of a textbook example. What I mean is this is something that's made up in the minds of academics who may or may not have a strong connection with the real world. They don't even understand how these things work. In reality, you have the private provision of property protection, which is what police is. And it works and it's excludable. This is a made up scenario which doesn't actually apply to the real world and it only convinces people maybe they haven't examined it very deeply. Okay, so we talked for a little bit about pollution in the environment. And my question is look, let's say nobody's polluting. It's somebody literally living on their land by themselves. Can you just leave them alone if they're not even engaging in society or they're not polluting anybody or they're not hurting anybody? Can you allow that to happen? So let's take that example. Let's say that somebody says look, you know, all of the cars that are out there just put all kinds of sulfur in the air and make it all terrible for the rest of us. But I'm on my property. I'm going to keep it to myself. I can fend for myself. Do you think it would be legitimate to let him opt out? No, I don't. Sorry. So what are the options though? If he votes and you said that jail is too extreme or leave is too extreme, what's the other option? No, no, I mean, look, what I'm saying is that he can move to a, you know, he can move to a different place that doesn't have pollution issues. Let's say he does it though. Let's say this is my property. I've been here for 150 years. Well, okay. I mean, property rights are communal decision, right? In other words, we did, they didn't come in the state of nature. They were imposed by society. What? Is this just a statement that this is the case? Property rights are something that's communal? I mean, is this open for debate? And so, okay, but the purpose of these democratic rules and of these rights is to produce a more effective and functioning society that maximizes the general happiness of the population. It's a utilitarian calculus. The public calculus is a utilitarian calculus. You're maximizing the greatest good to the greatest number. That's what you're trying to do. For all the fancy language and economics, that's essentially what's underneath it all. What? No, it's not. I mean, that's one approach. Yeah, I mean, okay. My understanding of economics is not about how to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number. It's how does the world work? And if we discover how the world works, maybe then we could ask the question, how should society be structured? I think when you discover how the world works through the economic lens, the answer is not how should a group of central planners structure society such that utility can be maximized. It's, oh, the central planners and the elites should get out of the way and allow private individuals to create value and wealth for themselves, absent of any kind of third-party intervention from the elites. So you're asking the question, you know, can our notion of right extend to the point where we have no utilitarian calculus anymore? No. Well, I mean, okay, but there's two questions. So what do you do with the person? If they say, I'm not leaving, I voted and I'm not leaving. Well, we have a good example of this, right? It happened in Oregon most recently, right? And we had ranchers that didn't want to pay for the grazing of their cattle. They weren't paying the federal government for it and they were trying to take back lands that have been preserved for the sake of the wildlife in the area. It was a wildlife preserve and they wanted to take it back and have it privately, you know, owned and operated, okay? So what the Oregon example shows is that yes, there are times when, you know, the state has to say these are the rules. If you break the rules, there are consequences. Isn't it interesting even the phrasing of a situation like that? Oh, the ranchers wanted to take back land that was set aside for wildlife. Hmm, might we phrase it differently? There were two groups of people involved in a dispute over the scarce resource of land. You had the ranchers that had been there for who knows how many generations actually working the land and you had disconnected politicians a thousand miles away who have absolutely no connection to the land whatsoever as individuals, yet they claim that they have legitimate authority to use that scarce resource as they see fit even though they have zero connection to it. And I would venture to say 99.9% of all of those federal officials involved in the dispute in Oregon had never visited that particular area of land. Just phrasing things a little bit differently, I think changes your perspective of that particular dispute when you don't somehow think that one group of individual human beings has some absolute authority by virtue of the fact that they acted on behalf of the state, i.e. that select group of elite individuals who claim that they have some legitimate rulership over society that the rest of us don't have. I want to get down to more what do you do concretely because you said jail is... jail or actually leave is extreme and then you said you have to pay the price if you don't go in accordance with the law but concretely speaking, what is paying the price? Well, those are the last resort measures. That's what I meant by extreme. In the case of the pollution I would work to try to put more of the burden of paying things on to the people who actually pollute and so I think the market solution that we had for that is a good one and I think you can often do things like that but you can't always do that and so at some point you have to accept the majority will and if you don't you know you're breaking the social contract again in Milwaukee and once you decide to become a citizen or to retain you know property and live in the area you know you have to adhere to those rules and so to me if you violate that social contract out of conscience fine you're making a statement if you're doing it because you think that you have the right to do anything you want I disagree. Yes, but you don't have the right to do anything you want if it harms somebody else. So like the local example you know there's a some kind of local department of education some person objects they say I am not paying my taxes for this for such and such a reason it's not that they're harming anybody else they're just saying I'm not paying my taxes. Why is it only harming anybody else? What if you're harming property? So what property? So what property do you harm? Well, let's say I have the right to paint your house so whatever color I want but it's that would be my property. Yeah, but I'm not hurting I'm not hurting you personally. No, no, so it will be person or property. Okay, so then what if I decide that I'm going to drop down all the trees redwood trees in parts of Marin Well, who owns the redwood trees? It's owned by it's a public trust. Well, well we can get into the problems with maybe No, no, but I'm getting into the problem of defining harm as narrowly as you're doing. I also think it's interesting and non coincidental that the further we go along these lines the more aggressive and sharp Dr. Cain becomes well, I just want to say that this is a narrow definition of such and such which is really interesting because he's trying to give examples of oh yeah, well your definition of harm is narrow like what if I want to paint your house I was like, well, no, I kind of the idea is it's harm of person or property that way property. Okay, well, somebody decides to chop down the redwood trees in a public park. Well, who owns the trees, right? The trouble is the existence of the public property in the first place. You have a tragedy of the common. So assume that all trees are privately owned and again the same resolution applies. No, no, but I just want to play out the thought experiment. So something we're not talking about like aggressing on anybody or murder or painting their property. I'm saying specifically they don't want to pay taxes for like, you know, their local department of education and they've gone through the democratic process and there's 80% to 20% concretely speaking what happens if they refuse to pay the taxes? Well, again, then you get to the last resort then you get to the extreme. Yeah. So ultimately it is backed up. Right. I would try to mediate and try to find ways to make sure that if indeed the responsibility for harm or resides with a particular group of citizens that they have to pay for it. And so, you know, we do have syntaxes for example that for people who are smokers and undertake risky behaviors which are potentially social costs that they're putting on to us that these taxes are more geared to them to pay for these activities. So I think there's a lot more, a lot we can do to relieve the burden but you cannot be in a society and not in a democratic society and always win. In fact, it would be bad for democracy if that were the case because then you would be violating principles of legitimacy and you'd have dominance which is very problematic for legitimacy. So you have to accept the fact that you're going to be on the losing side and you're going to have to pay taxes for things that you don't approve of. I certainly had to do that during certain administrations and you may have to do it if certain people get elected. So ultimately, would you agree with the statement then that at the very bottom of it, taxation and the results of taxation is ultimately backed up by force? Yes. Every action in the state is, that's the definition of the state is that it has the monopoly of coercion and obviously a thin state relies heavily on coercion, a thick state relies on mechanisms of negotiation and legitimacy that try to make decisions as inclusive as possible but decision making cannot be done by the unanimity principle in a complex society such as ours. And there you have it at the end of the day. Okay, fine, yes. Even the parking ticket, even opting out of the Department of Education, all of it is backed up by the use of force and threats of the use of violence. You can dress it up in a lot of pretty ways and say, oh, this is complex. How do things have to work in a complex society? Ultimately, it's backed up by force. That's just the way it is. What I did think was interesting is he implied, oh, you just can't have any kind of complex society without that entity of monopolistic force. Well, that's just not the case at all. We have all kinds of voluntary social interactions that are very, very complex all the time. The NBA, for example, is an association of millions of people who are watching and people who are playing, people who are paying, people who are hiring and firing, all of it's voluntary. You don't need the use of force in that particular association. You have global trade, for example, is something that involves millions, billions of people that don't actually resort to the use or threats of the use of force. Even in, for example, when there's contract disputes over trade in international waters, you don't have one objective super national entity, which is the objective court system that it refers to. You have private court systems, private court systems that don't have the capacity to go in and force people around, and yet the system still operates and functions a thousand times more smoothly and effectively than this monopolistic one. So all in all, I just don't think that enough thought has been devoted to sorting through the foundations for why we have government, why we have democracy, especially if those arguments come down to economic arguments where I think the economics is pretty clear that, hey, you probably don't even need any particular monopolies in society. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe you have to have some kind of monopolies. Well, can we test it out? I'd like to see some kind of empirical demonstration of a group of people getting together voluntarily and saying, hey, let's see if we can have those services that are monopolistically provided. Let's see if we can provide them privately. And I have a suspicion that actually such a system would not only work, but would greatly, greatly outperform that of the monopolized variety. But that's enough for me. I hope you guys have enjoyed this interview breakdown. I appreciate Dr. Cain taking the time to speak with me. He and I, though we're at complete opposite ends of the political theory spectrum, we both agree that democracy, pure democracy is something that's kind of silly and not a good idea. So it's always good to find common ground, even with those you passionately disagree with. Make sure to tune in next week, which I cannot guarantee, but I think it's going to be an interview with some very exciting philosopher that I'm not going to tell you anymore about. You're just going to have to tune in next week. All right. Thanks, everybody. Have a great day.