 Jan Narvison I met Jan Narvison for the first time what a year and a half two years ago I guess at at the Ontario Libertarian Party convention and I have to tell you that I just adored him from the beginning because he did his whole presentation in sock feet And I you know it was just kind of neat to see the combination of intellectual and casual and all of this happening at the same time and he just bounced about with enthusiasm over his whole presentation and so we invited Jan to speak at our conference last year in London, and I'm very pleased that Jacques considered inviting him again today and Jan's going to continue the discussion about justice in a stateless society You can read about his his academic achievements in the back of the book But one thing I would like to mention is that he has republished his book the Libertarian idea in 2000 he brought a number of copies they sold out on the second day But if anybody does want to purchase a copy all you have to do is email Jan or talk to him before he leaves Slip the $20 in his pocket and he'll mail it off to you But I take great pleasure in introducing Jan Narvison. Is this working now? Yes, okay Let me say a Couple of things before I start One is that I brought along some copies of the address I don't know if they're any left, but if they are they're right behind Jim on that chair there Are there any left all gone? Okay. I also brought along some copies of a summary in English which are all gone and Some copies of the same summary in French translated by my daughter. I'm afraid I don't speak French And I think there were some of those left a few minutes ago. Are there any of those left there? No. Oh, yes Yes, somebody's raising them. So if anybody can read a French summary, you might find that a little bit useful But then the next thing to say is that none of those are going to be exactly what I will do So Hopefully the overhead projector will will help on this Okay, let's yeah for have the first slide up now The the title of the talk in the the book is okay my other title as you'll see on the Papers there is is the state of mistake Of course the state is not a mistake if as its proponents claim It's the only way that you can provide Justice and so really the two questions are I think Co-extensive or at least they are if you make certain assumptions about What the state is for so for that purpose? I have I have manufactured a couple of extra slides because I think perhaps The talk by by mr. Dejazi the other day went very fast for many of you And I think we need to be a little bit Clearer for the benefit of people who may not have been introduced to all these Concepts so let's put the next slide on but keep the first one in reserve. It's gonna go back. Okay, Marie Thank you Okay, now. I'm sorry. These are not very readable This page points out that there are three theories of government Most of you don't know that These are very natural Theories when I explain them the first one They're all found in Plato actually. I mean as somebody said, you know, Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato But for this purpose Plato has a couple of very useful characters. The first one is a guy named Thrasymachus or Thrasymachus who occurs very early Who occurs very early in Plato's Republic and he comes on and he says remember the topic is what is justice and Thrasymachus says Justice is the interest of the stronger party Now this is a perfectly crazy idea if it's intended to be some kind of analysis of what justice Means it's not so crazy if you think of it as a kind of Diagnosis of what's likely to happen in the state in effect Thrasymachus says if you're in the position of power Then you should use you will use this power to maximize your own Situation to make yourself as rich as possible or whatever And you're a fool if you don't I mean that's Thrasymachus's Political theory So this is what you might call the sort of the bad guy theory of the state The question is is there any way to avoid this now Plato thinks there is He thinks that the state ought to be promoting not the good of the ruler But the good of the ruled so far so good But then the next question is who decides what's good for individual people And Plato's answer is that? Clever philosophers do namely Plato and his friends Finally there is liberalism which came in about two millennia later with Hobbes in particular and Liberalism says that you the individual decide what's good for you Now we all agree that liberalism is the right theory Our enemies are people Main enemies I think are people who think that they know what's good for people better than those people do themselves because if you do think that then In order to do you a good turn I don't have to ask you right I mean I I know what's good for you and you don't so of course I get to tell you what to do and clobber you if you don't do it I mean that's and the consequence of that is that the difference between view one and view two doesn't look quite so So strong after that. I mean what's the difference between somebody who? Admits that he's just out to screw me and somebody who screws me without admitting it right? This is the this is the problem so what we would like to do is have a fully liberal political configuration and This is what I mean Hobbes fought We would start with and nevertheless have a state and the question is whether he was right about that Now let's go back to the next yes Right not back to but forth to the next one. Well We have two diagrams here, which are the basis of all political philosophy and you didn't realize that Number one which Anthony did jazzy referred to the other day But didn't describe and many of you will know this but many others will not is what's called the prisoner's Dilemma and here we have person a here. We have person B. This is a two-person prisoners Dilemma and the structure of the dilemma is each of them has two choices x and y will call them and The problem is that there is a partial But important conflict of interests namely a's best choice is B's worst choice or worst outcome and B's best outcome is a's worst outcome and This is not so good. Alright, so the left hand gives you A's ordinal utility the right hand gives you B's Ordinal utility right so One means first four means fourth in between those two we have An identity of interests The upper left hand corner is better for both than the lower right now. The problem is this I Don't know how many of you heard the classic prisoners dilemma which gives it its name it involves a couple of thieves Who have committed two crimes a minor one and a major one? and the prosecuting attorney can only convict them on the on the minor one unless he has help unless one of them confesses and The major crime has a penalty of ten years in jail and the minor crime has a penalty of one year in jail and The prosecuting attorney Claps them in opposite ends of the local jail Without communication with each other and he goes to each one and makes them a bargain namely You confess and if the other person doesn't confess Then you get off scot-free your best choice no time in prison and he mean well goes to jail for ten years the full penalty if on the other hand he confesses and you don't then you end up ten years in jail and He gets off scot-free in between we have the two cases where they both confess In which case they each get a reduced penalty for cooperating, but still a fairly big one Let's say five years or six years in jail and if neither of them confess then they get the smaller penalty one year in jail Each right now What are they going to do? Well, I mean we're assuming they're completely amoral no no morals here Where they're just acting on self-interest and in particular they're trying to minimize the amount of time they will spend in jail So the question is what are they going to do? Each one will see that what happens to him Depends on what the other one decides as well as what he decides. So what are they going to do? Well? a will say well look suppose that be Confesses what should I do? well, if I confess Then I get five years in jail, but if I don't I get ten years in jail, which is worse if he confesses I should confess Well, what if he Doesn't confess What should I do? Well, if I don't confess I get one year in jail, but if I do I get zero years in jail Hey, no matter what he does. I should confess And the other one will reason exactly the same way because it's symmetrical But the result of this is that each one making his best rational move will end up here Spending four more years in jail than if they had both kept mum So in other words each one's individually rationally best choice Leads to an outcome that's worse for both of them than this one somehow what they need is to cooperate now Having an example with prisoners is unfortunate But because of course we want them both to be in jail for the longer period anyway But if we go back to the state of nature case the case where we're just people bumping into each other And there are no rules no established Society no government whatever Etc. Then what is the situation? Well Hobbes says I think quite correctly that The big question is going to be will you use violence to get your ways or not? Will we feel free to feel free to invade and to spoil now? Suppose that I Decide to make peace on the other guy and I say look, you know, I won't I won't attack you What should he do? Well, if he doesn't attack me We have peaceful cooperation But if he does then he gets the benefits of what I have to give him Plus not having to pay the costs of the cooperation and he might do that as better and vice versa Hobbes thought that in the state of nature things would go very badly Yes, you know, he made a famous prediction that the state of nature would be what he calls the state of universal War in which the life of everybody would be mean solitary nasty brutish and short Now is he right about this? Well, this is very questionable in various ways and of course a lot depends upon whether the situation really is a prisoner's dilemma and if it is what you know Whether it's a solitary one just one-time prisoner's dilemma or not and of course It's recently been discovered that if the dilemma is Interrated frequently repeated with the same players then it's not so obvious that we should go ahead and use force and violence against the other person because of course he can reciprocate and tomorrow We're gonna be on the other end and then the Hobbesian prediction will Will happen, but then we'll both be able to see this. So maybe we will start being nice to each other. And that's the possibility Maybe we will If we are in a very large group with lots of people, however, there's a problem And that is the people that we interact with tomorrow May not be the same people that we interact with today. So if I cheat this person today and Then I go away so that tomorrow. I'm not there Then he will bear the cost and I'll get the benefits and I will have got away with something And I won't be you know detected in this and what do we do about that? now Let me distinguish here between the moral question and what we might call the operationally political question the moral question is what's the right principle here and Here our answer. I think is very clear the right principle is we should go for the cooperative outcome that is our initial move should always be to cooperate with the other person and Only in the case where it's clear that the other person won't cooperate will we resort to individual force? This yields the right of self-defense right now An interesting question is is that all there is to it and a plausible answer? I think is yes, and in fact, that's what libertarianism consists of the view that the right answer to that question is yes We should only use violence to protect ourselves against other people's violence and for no other things So anything else besides that is going to have to be done cooperatively I secure the agreement of the other person to everything I do which affects him and he secures my agreement to things that affect me In lots of cases of course what we do doesn't affect each other and in that case fine do what you like I mean that's the libertarian basic moral postulate now Why isn't society a nice perfect place in which everybody respects everybody's rights all the time? Well, the short answer is the failure of iteration plus of course the fact that people vary now This variation of people is going to be pretty important as we will See shortly, but first Let's Friends was slide this up. No, no, no slide it up a little so we can see the bottom one chicken. Yes. Okay. Now here is another Game theoretic graph which is unfortunately quite different from the first one In the first graph you'll notice. Can you put down just a little we can yeah the third best Outcome is common to both parties there Chicken is a bit different Here's the model of the chicken game. If you've ever seen there's an American movie Rebel without a cause I think it's anyway There's a game of chicken in that you've got two automobiles full of teenagers right and they drive straight at each other on the country road and The chicken is the one who swerves first all right now If you swerve first Then you're the chicken and I win right? And vice versa But if neither of us swerves we both try to be very brave We crash into each other and we all get killed and that's worse for both of us So we have a common worst outcome here Of course the peaceable option where you just don't play the game is this one I mean or if we both swerve simultaneously so that Nobody is the the winner That's fine too, and then we can say we both came out as it were Second all right now. What's the interest of chicken answer coercion basically has the structure of chicken with coercion the situation is Characteristically that I mean if the The hold-up man says your money or your life That departs from number from the second best outcome already He emerges with my wallet And I emerge without my wallet, but with my life Which is better than emerging without my life right now Of course if I can shoot back then our worst outcome will be will be Common here otherwise the common worst will be a little bit different and here's where their life gets difficult for the theorist This worst outcome For me in the case where I'm not armed. I mean for the for the gunman Is it takes him a little longer to get my wallet and he ends up with me lying on the ground dead Which is an extra nuisance to him his worst isn't nearly as bad as my worst because I'm dead and Notice that it looks as though it's going to be rational if you're in a chicken game to be the chicken Better to be alive without your wallet than dead also without your wallet when it wouldn't do you any good anyway, right? so Suppose we've got a gang that can gang up on the individual the individual can't do much to the gang the gang can do a lot to the Individual and that's going to be a problem All right now. Okay. Now. Let's go back to the first printed slide. Yes. Thank you Let's go back to the question of government now Hobbes Famously argued that the solution to the state of nature problem is to set up a government which is a monopoly basically A monopoly of compulsion or coercive force over the community which Hobbes calls the sovereign You'll remember that his great book is called Leviathan and Leviathan is a monster But it's an artificially created monster in this case. We all get together and we create the state That's Hobbes is claim if he's right about that. We are stuck with the state He's right about it. If it's the case that each of us every last one of us now Will agree that we have to have this monopoly of compulsion set up in order to enforce the basic Law of nature, which is what Hobbes thought we needed it for As I say the important question is is he right about this? well Let's go back to the libertarian moral claim which is that the use of aggression of initiating force against somebody who is innocent is wrong But the use of force for self-protection is of course Legitimate I mean if you start it then I get to finish it. That's the sort of moral the moral rule there And moreover I can protect myself not just by myself. I may be too weak to do so But as Hobbes says as to I mean Hobbes Claimed that we are all Basically equal in the following sense that even the weakest has enough strength to kill the strongest and that's roughly true There are all kinds of ways to kill people many of them don't require much strength and of course There's a possibility that we can secure the help of others in resisting aggression now There's also the possibility that we can secure the help of others in committing aggression, right? And this is of course going to be the problem Hobbes thought well in order to solve the problem of Cooperative aggression we've got to have a sort of super group big enough and strong enough to beat up on anybody Any lesser group in the society? That's why he thought we had to have a state with a monopoly Now we libertarians think that compulsion for other purposes is not legitimate And here's where the fun begins How it's the old old question which goes back to Plato and no doubt earlier which Scholars describe as the problem of who guards the Guardian Who is going to keep the artificial monster? We've created if we create one from using force for purposes other than the correct purpose of protecting us that's the question and Unfortunately, the answer is it's not clear that this can be done at all What makes it difficult well What makes it difficult is the experience of several thousand years. That's one way to put it The closest thing there is to some kind of solution to this At the level of political theory status theory is democracy But democracy as we have been seeing has its problems now democracy basically is Majority rule what's natural about majority rule answer the answer was provided by an old colleague of mine long ago What democracy decides is who would win in a fair fight? Or to put it another way This way is ascribed to HL Menken though. I haven't been able to Find the precise source of it Menken says democracy is two foxes and a chicken Sitting down to decide by majority rule what they shall have for lunch Well, there's our problem Democracy assures enough force to beat up on the bad guys It also assures enough force to become the big bad guy yourself and the question is How do we go about avoiding this and that's a very difficult problem to which our feeble answer is well We have a constitution which restricts the operation of the majority The big problem is how do you get a constitution which actually works? What's going to keep the Constitution from eroding as the years go by or even as the minutes go by and the trouble is It's not clear that Fundamentally Anything provides a very satisfactory answer to that Nevertheless, let's see what we can what we can do well This just sort of continues the reasoning to the conclusion that we all agree to which is that The trouble with aggression is that it imposes cost and these are net costs that is to say If we're going to let people get their way by force then that assures that we have an inefficient society Because it means that some people lose In order that other people win, but of course the losers are going to fight against the winners and even if The winners win they'll win by nearly as much as if they didn't have to fight in the first place What can we do to bring it about that? Nobody uses aggression At all or that nobody does so effectively well Bastiat's answer about this and and our answer I think is that the right way to deal with aggressors is to make them pay that is The idea is that the aggressor owes That his victim compensation basically here is the Victim going along peaceably minding his own business Along comes the aggressor and imposes a cost on him In order to get justice What we need to do is to undo this somehow By making the aggressor pay not only a compensation for what he's taken from you But also for the time and trouble it took to find out who did it And track him down and make him pay all those costs have to go to the aggressor That's our idea if we can succeed in that then we're in business and The basic problem with the state as an answer to the problem of aggression is going to be that it really it's going to give Us poor service Okay, let's have the next printed slide now. I've got only 10 minutes left. Okay, right? Okay, so the problem with state protection is that the service Isn't a very good service Its costs are going to be too high because they're compulsory I mean the state has a monopoly as we know when you're in a monopoly position It means you can charge an above market price. You can you can get away with this So maybe the solution is to try to decentralize this Service and how do we do that? Well? we do that by Saying okay each person fundamentally is responsible for his own protection Responsible in the sense that you arrange it and you arrange it by enlisting Voluntary agents to help you eg you buy it for example from a protection agency selling protection Or you form a protective? Organization with some of your your your fellows and you all operate on the principle that it's the aggressors Fundamentally who must pay that is when people commit crimes. What we want is that those people? restore the situation of the victims rather than getting punished in so far as that's a separate separate thing Now I want to hear just note a familiar fallacy of status This is a kind of public service. I'm almost all of you. I must already know this but just in case Let's remind ourselves that the right to liberty is what's called fundamentally a negative right a Negative right is a right which imposes on the other people a duty not to do something a duty not to do something So if you have a negative right against me My duty is not to aggress against you not not to do the thing that would make it impossible for you to do What you have a right to do? The common fallacy says but the right to liberty has to be positive We have a positive right to protection now a positive right means that other people would have a duty to provide the protection Not just a right, but an actual duty to provide this Protection they would have no choice about it so we could make them pay and everybody would be required to pay for protection if that right is positive now my point here is just that the negative right to Protection does not entail a positive right the fund of this fundamental argument Which you'll see all over the literature not quite in those terms, but it amounts to this Among contemporary political philosophers is just wrong Like all the other arguments for the state that I've seen by the way now I'll put in a quick plug here There's a there's a book that Jack Sanders and I edited called Foreign against the state and there you'll find a nice compilation of arguments against the state and in my judgment The against win hands down against the others, but anyway Okay So monopolies problem is that I mean a monopoly protection service provides incentives to use force for the wrong purposes What in effect happens is that the state becomes a gang of thieves the precise thing that Thrasymachus said it should be and Thieves of course engage in plunder as Bosch yet called it the state Undertakes not only to provide protection, but all sorts of other things and often by the way the modern defender of the state will say That we're providing these things because they're really necessary for protection, right? I mean, I've seen this argued all over the place and that's just another Many many ways of committing the same fallacy as this one and if I owe you To protect your right to liberty then I get to force you to go to school So you have enough knowledge so that you can end and all that kind of stuff and it's all wrong, okay? Also Now as we've seen with the chicken diagram I mean it generates the following possibility that the state becomes not just a protection service But a protection racket That is what the state protects you from isn't your fellow man. It protects it from itself It says you do this or I shoot and Since the state has this monopoly and it's you know the united force of the majority Then the likelihood is that I will lose and of course the likelihood is that ordinary people will obey the state for the for the Reason that we've already seen Democracy as I know it merely makes matters worse It will greatly increase the scope for the state to engage in what amounts to theft and it will do this mainly because Nowadays because the state lies to us. I mean it has a wonderful ability to give people wrong information Well, that's a we wouldn't we won't go into that right now. You all know that stuff. Let's go to the next slide Okay, so what about private protection then can it work. I mean that's the fundamental question now Here is I think where Michael's paper about Somalia is so interesting so Seminole Anthony did jazzy Whoops, what have I got one minute? Oh That's oh Okay, all right Let's see. Yeah, the jazzy by the way has written another a really great book Which is wasn't is not the one called the state that's a great book too, but he wrote another one called social contract free ride Blackwell 1991 that's the one to read, but it's it's not easy So don't expect to read it You know in an hour or two it's gonna take a while But he makes a very very important point in this book about the Hobbesian argument, which is one which we have to take Very seriously Why do we think that one-on-one? Transactions in the state of nature are a problem as Hobbes thought he thought the fundamental reason that we need A sovereign is you can't trust each other in the state of nature And why not well because of a contract or a promise has the problem that I Have an incentive not to do my my share if we agree that I'll do X and you do why Well, my doing X is a cost to me. I get the benefit from you and vice versa Well, suppose that you act first you provide me with the benefit first and I don't have to pay until tomorrow What do I do? Well, maybe I take the money and run as in the Woody Allen movie Rather than carrying out my part of the bargain and the question is is it a general problem? The jazzy has a brilliant analysis of this problem pointing out that Hobbes Makes an assumption which is clearly wrong when you think of it Namely, he assumes that one kind of promising situation is that is the standard one for all now Instead there are three different situations One is where you and I exchange the good and service Simultaneously essentially there's practically no time lapse between the two of us in that case We don't have to worry about the other guy not doing his share We can see him doing it and he can see me doing it and it happens simultaneously and there's no real incentive to cheat Another one is where we both agree to do something in the future, but again It's more or less at the same time in the future. Well, if in the meantime We see that the situation has changed and it doesn't happen. Neither of us is out very much, right? It's the interesting case is the case where one person acts first and the other one acts second and the one who acts second Then has any incentive to take the money and run so that's the case that we need to worry about That's the case where for example, we might want to I mean if we don't trust the other person set up a Protection agency a protection agent now the important question here as the jazzy points out Yes, I mean again, you're gonna have the who who protects you against your protecting Protection service, right? But now there are gonna be good answers to this whenever we have a society with any level of sort of social Coherence which we I mean that's a long story, but to make a long story short There are very good reasons for thinking this will evolve Rapidly in any actual human Society in such a society I can hire somebody to be my protector Because he wants my business and he wants your business and the other guy's business and if he shoots me today His potential customers are gonna say this is not the guy. I want to protect me Moreover, I need the protection against him So this this other potential customer is gonna hire somebody else to deal with my erstwhile protector And as you can see this is no way to run a business So if you're gonna make protection into a private business, you have natural market incentives for doing good service now A very very important point about this is that you know one way to Commit violence against somebody is to kill him and this makes it very difficult to respond. I mean once you're dead Pretty hard to get any compensation yourself And that's why it it makes a lot of sense to think well what we need is little organizations like families for example in the Somalia case where There is an insurance function where the people get together and they agree that you know If one person gets for example killed then the other people will collect compensation from the guy They're not gonna just let him get away with it What we not want to know now is can we find Something analogous to the family. I mean I think we all realize that the Somali situation is very limited by the device of the Family being the fundamental insurer. Can we instead of a family have a genuine? Association where you buy into it or form a cooperative, but the plausible answer is yes It does it does look as though that ought to be possible now There are two arguments in the literature that I just want to mention one of them you might be familiar with claiming That the idea of protection agencies will evolve naturally into monopoly the very thing We want to avoid one is supplied by Robert Nozick who argues in his book anarchy state in utopia Which I hope you've all read That That in numbers there is strength I mean the bigger the bigger protection agency is going to have a natural advantage over the little one and Eventually in any given area that's going to be de facto monopoly as he calls it. This is a very interesting argument Which I think I and many other colleagues who have thought about this have seen is wrong It's very important that it's wrong if it were right that would be the end of the matter But it's wrong in lots of ways and the most important one is that bigger isn't better You can see this in the following example Consider the house which protects itself by buying one of these cameras and alarm systems and so forth Here little is better. You get much better protection from this little device Then you do from the police force which is many blocks away and which is going to be a long time getting to your door Much better for you to have a camera there and perhaps a gun To react very quickly to the threat. It's not obvious in other words that there is any kind of natural monopoly here People who want to defend the state of course think so But this is an argument that has to be non-circular if it's going to be any good And I think when you think about you can see that the argument is Basically not right another possibility which is advanced by a guy named Andrew Cowan is That all the different protection agencies in the society will start colluding with each other And eventually they will end up being another one of the nasty monopolies now That's an important possibility to but again It's not obvious that this will have to happen and the Somali examples give us a kind of counter example because you have many Many different families there and they don't end up colluding with each other particularly I mean the situation remains one of Fundamentally decentralized protection except of course against external aggression which has always been a problem I mean if there's an area here with let's say no government and an area over here with a government That government will be of course up to the usual business of forming an army and maybe invading the neighbors And then you'll have a problem. I'm not I'm Addressing that problem here for the following reason that it presupposes that there are states Right, I mean you're gonna have that kind of aggression only if you've got states But if we can undermine the case for the state in the first place Then we can reduce that problem to One of no fundamental significance now. That's a very quick statement and you know, I mean lots of work needs to be done About that one So I would not want to suggest that if Cowan's wrong and given that no sick is wrong when then we would expect competition among different Protection agencies to lead to the conclusion we want which is that each person gets all and only the protection that he wants The problem with the state is you get too much quote protection on quote in some respects and not enough in others I mean we know that Most crimes in modern states are not actually the criminals aren't actually caught Anyhow if you've seen the work of Bruce Benson giving details on this, it's pretty shocking how few of them actually Are caught so the state is very inefficient that providing protection anyway And then it protects you against all sorts of things that you don't want get apart protected against such as yourself Okay, so the general suggestion is it looks as though in principle The anarchist option is a genuine live option, which is coherent I mean that the the challenge of statism is that anarchism is impossible if we can show that it's possible We've got a start mind you it's a long way from there to actuality and this is a big problem It's especially big problem given a democracy because how do you go about persuading a majority of your fellow idiots? That the state is a mistake. Okay granted. That's a problem We have no whoops We have no fellow idiots in the room Yes, I'm not used to talking to people who agree with me I mean usually in an audience this size is exactly one person with my views and that's me all the others are the enemy Let's see if we can find somebody to have a bit of dissension. We have time for a few questions Here comes Neil the dissenter from England hurry. He's racing the other man to the mic and He is Go ahead Neil. I'm not actually going. I'm not actually going to dissent. I'm just going to offer a suggestion. Okay We have all these negative rights, which we know are valid and the positive rights, which we know are not valid and you Very reasonably said the right to protection is a positive right. So it's not actually a valid right But what if we go one step back from that and say what is protection supposed to be against? violence and we as We have a negative right the right to life the negative right is essentially tells people thou shalt not murder If we go back and say we have a negative right to peace Meaning thou shalt not be violent. That's what we do say. Yeah, it is what we do say Why do you not see that particular right in for example the United Nations declaration? Ah, well, you see here's the problem I mean that this is what Hobbs calls the first law of nature seek peace and Resort to violence only when the other guy does first only for defense now. Here is the problem I mean, I whether there's there's one in one half problems here Now problem number one is it's so easy to warp this around in such a way that in order to get the peace We have to have all kinds of positive rights as well, right? That's what the state is all say That's what the UN says And the one half problem is there are all these people out there I mean, it's in a way It's not a little problem who think that we've got some more rights besides this fundamental Right, they claim we've got rights for example to equality in various things including economic and otherwise Now those people we have to show them that they're wrong. I mean, there is no way to avoid philosophy at this point By the way, I have written an article Entitled recent arguments for egalitarianism in which I explore What I divide up as six and one half arguments for Egalitarianism to show that they're all wrong the most important wrong one is found in Rawls theory of justice Which is the most popular book written on this in the English language in the 20th century? Unfortunately, it has had tremendously wide influence and the fact that it's wrong is pretty important this paper by the way I'm including in a collection which is going into a new book which isn't out yet But anybody interested email me I keep in touch and I'll be able to say soon What the publication date is but also I can send you a copy of it by email anytime So anyway, I mean, I think the fact that the arguments for equality are bad is very very important Because there are people out there who think that they're good. I mean that there really is a right to equality And so we have to show them that they're wrong But luckily we can do that Just my view on equality if they have a right to make me equal then I should have an equal right to make Them equal Justice is everybody getting the same raw deal. I mean that's Thanks, Neil. Okay first of all a theoretical problem in a system of protection agencies we can have also just a problem when there is one agency that was very Really stronger than all the others in this case is how to protect the individual rights of the Memberships of the other little Protection agencies and the other one is not really a question But I think a psychological observation because it's very difficult to persuade people to To become Free because I think that all the people feel themselves Protected by the state and have the fear to defend that themselves. Yep, and I think that this is the largest problem. Yep of this kind of I agree with you on the second one Now on the first one. I mean, you're right that we want to discuss this possibility notice that As a as a large-scale social problem, there isn't that it assumes that crime pays Right and crime cannot pay in any sort of long-run large-scale situation. I mean Peace has the advantage Now we have to be able to you know explain why this is true But the result of this is going to be all the little protection agencies are going to point out that the people paying money to The big one that's committing aggression are paying too much They're going to be incurring a cost that they don't need to incur Right and now this requires pointing this out to them You know, we need circulation of information and admittedly that's a problem I mean, I'm just a philosopher talking in the abstract I think we can prove this in the abstract and that's very important once we can do this Then my argument that the market is going to Lead to a situation in which that doesn't happen will then have effect But I mean it is a very important thing We have to argue with the work has to be done in detail and you know, it's a good question as to the second one You're absolutely right about that But there I want to point out that the average person believes this because he's been lied to so much I mean people believe that the state protects them even when there's plenty of evidence before their own eyes that it doesn't Now to those people what we've got to say is you know look there are alternatives At the at the lowest level of course, there's the alternative provided by actual private protection agencies Very few people that I know of are aware that actually most protection in the United States in Canada to is actually private not public Indeed, I think it's more like it's something like 80% of all the Protective servicing done in the United States is done by private hired Little little police forces and then guards rather than by the public ones, right? That's one of the main reasons why the United States is relatively safe a place as it is if we had to depend on nothing But the public believe we'd be in very very bad shape So you have to point out things like this and the state of course doesn't has any interest in not pointing them out to you Indeed the state. I mean the state really just lies to us all the time And there's nothing more important than the state lives by mendacity if it weren't for lying I think the state would really wouldn't last very long. So we've got our work cut out for us As you can see the each of the questions leads to actually a very a need for a very detailed Explanation and we really on that basis only have time for one question, but I think there are three of you standing there Why don't you just look at each other and decide which is the one that gets to ask the question? There's two foxes and one chicken there Since you've been discussing Hobbes It's worth looking into some of his background on this because his It's not just that he considered his neighbors to be nasty British and short But he was where he was living his family had a castle just north of the British Scott or the English Scottish border over an extended period of time and so You've asserted that essentially repeat interactions and repeat business or what promote peace In that environment for a period of several hundred years along the border Essentially the repeat interactions were usually will go steal their cattle and then they'll come and steal our cattle and we'll go steal their cattle again and it seemed to be something that Did not stabilize because there were enough options to go raid your neighbors and make your living that way in addition to trying to do some of this interested in what you do to Help people have the view that the balance is that it doesn't have to always be that way even though it was for him No, notice that that the Scots didn't have much luck establishing a state either No, I mean this is an interesting historical point, you know And I would make one general point about this this kind of observation and that is we always have to distinguish between of what a philosopher claims he's doing and What personal reasons he might have for doing it now the personal reasons? He might have for doing it might be interesting and they might even lead to some kind of adjustment in the theory But remember he's he's claiming very abstractly. I mean Hobbes claims to be writing for all men at all times therefore we need the state and So whatever the bearing of little things like that is and I mean he's he's made a very sweeping statement Which we've got to examine on its own right in the abstract, but I agree with you that it is very interesting It's probably true of almost every philosopher that there's some kind of personal background Which you know gives us some insight into why he says what he says and sometimes it will also provide Part of a refutation of it or a qualification of it and so on but then then we're getting into scholarship And we're not here for that And the qualification of all these discussions is we want less of all that force Anyway, I appreciate that very much Jan. Thank you very much. Oh What one little more self-advertisement? I promised some people I had some brochures about my chamber music my private Chamber music society that they might hear they are anybody wants one. I'll leave those out here, too Thank you very much, Jan Do we do we still need to set up the projector? Okay So there's gonna be a little bit of