 All right coming up interesting take David Letterman, right? And you've got Now Tiger Woods, right? One is you're paying off someone Legitimately the other one is blackmail. So what's what's the difference? How does that work? We're gonna talk to someone who says blackmail should actually be legal It's a very weird take and it's a legal argument which you may agree with. This is the bill handles show KFI is on a need-to-know basis. And boy do you need to know KFI AM 640 more stimulating talk radio Back to the bill handles show bill handle here and Thank you for joining us Now I'll do another take on the Tiger Woods and incorporate the David Letterman story Radar online reported that Tiger was actually negotiating a deal To pay Rachel Yucatel first mistress mistress supposedly More than a million bucks to keep quiet about their affair and not to release Hundreds of emails and text messages that they exchanged Tigers representative is Being either accused of or reported that a that he offered $200,000 to pay off a witness with the detailed knowledge of the affair with Yucatel Now assuming that's true. Let's contrast it with the David Letterman story. Remember that CBS producer Robert Halderman Either offered or threatened Letterman with a deal Pay him money Otherwise he is writing a script revealing that Letterman slept with female staff members Well, he was arrested and charged with larceny And was described as being a blackmailer So in one case The person staying silent theoretically gets rich Because there's been no accusation against Yucatel for blackmail on the other way The other hand the person gets indicted and faces serious jail time one's a bribe the other's blackmail And why is there such a huge difference? And maybe it's because who does the approaching? if someone comes to me and says you have some information and Will offer to pay me a chunk of money if I stay silent That's not blackmail You're offering me money to shut up if on the other hand I go to you and say if you don't pay me I Will then reveal the information and that seems to be a difference Is that Stefan Canella? Thank you so much for joining us here on the show. Glad to be here Bill a pleasure Stefan is an attorney and Knows a little bit about this you either Have been the victim of or you actually do blackmail people, correct? Neither one luckily. Oh, okay Just just wondering senior fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which is an interesting place dedicated to libertarian economic social theory He also found in Ed's the journal libertarian papers and practices in the Houston, Texas. All right And it's Stefan correct. That's correct. All right, so you heard me describe One as being legal and the other one being criminal And is that simply the difference between the two if I approach and say pay me or I shut up if pay me to shut up Or someone comes to me and pay me to shut up. It's two different things. Yeah, there's there's sort of two basic differences here And you've hit on one of them They're known as paradoxes in the in the in the blackmail law and legal scholars have for a long time tried to explain why these different treatments of two similar things would is justified and Their explanations are all over the map and they really don't make sense and the reason they don't make sense is you're right They shouldn't be treated differently You could think of it as there's two paradoxes to blackmail the first one is that Basically, it's all right to leak it to leak a secret as long as it's true or even too threatened to do it And it's also legitimate to ask someone for money But if you do them together then it's blackmail. So basically we have two rights to make a wrong which makes little sense to most people It's similar to prostitution theory. It's a prostitution makes it illegal to pay for what you can give away for free Which also makes little sense But the second paradox is the one you're hitting on and that's the idea that it matters who institutes the the transaction so basically bribery is legal but blackmail is not and a good example of this about 10 years ago if you remember The alleged daughter of Bill cause the autumn Jackson Was a convicted of a extortion which is similar to blackmail For you know threatening to reveal that he had followed her out of wedlock if he didn't pay her a lot of money Yeah, I was like 40 million bucks right something like that But the irony isn't a lot of commentators pointed us out at the time You know she had just filed a paternity suit and then settled it in exchange for her silence That would have been perfectly fine, right and paternity suits are sealed anyway, right? They can be and that's correct, right? So there was no public document. I mean she just she was just stupid Yeah, and so of course this happens in law suits all the time, you know a lawsuit is filed and then it settled Confidentially right courtesy Courtesy copies. I mean I've been practicing law for a while and a lot of lawyers that I know when we start talking Especially our litigation attorneys will we'll send over a courtesy copy of the the complaint Before the filing exactly and that's sort of a subtle way of letting you know wink wink nudge nudge legal blackmail Yeah, it's not so subtle, but let's you mentioned blackmail and extortion And and you said they're they're similar, but not the same. Would you describe the differences? Yeah, the difference is extortion technically and the reason I said they're similar is a lot of the state laws In in the United States, it's hard to find the word blackmail sometimes used like in Texas for example There's a statute called theft and theft Sort of incorporate the blackmail and extortion into it sort of indirectly So they're both considered to be types of theft because you're getting something of value from someone In a sort of illegitimate way Extortion basically is when you threaten to harm someone unless and that includes harming their reputation Okay But blackmail is basically just threatening to tell the truth About something that the the so-called victim doesn't want non publicly And let me ask you you you one of the things that you you alluded to is that you're uncomfortable In that the law treats what appears to be the same thing very differently Yeah, and there's a couple ways to look at this number one It it seems paradoxical again But the actual victim of blackmail is in a way worse off if blackmail has made it legal because the person holding This sort of dangerous or this embarrassing secret has no reason not to reveal it in a world where blackmail is not legal I mean, he you know, he might as well just go gossip about it at least with blackmail is legal at least there's a chance that the Person who would who wants to keep the information secret can keep it secret by paying the blackmail of ransom or fee But the basic problem is that look government is dangerous laws are dangerous It's a dangerous for the government to use force to back up law So we libertarians believe that force should only be used by the government or the legal system in response to a violation of people's rights Or the use of force I mean, you shouldn't go passing a law If you just think the behavior that you're trying to prohibit is not is a bad idea It needs to be something worse than that It needs to be basically a threat of force or crime committed against the victim Let me let me throw the paradoxes at you in an area of law that I've been involved with for a long time And this is the law looks at exactly the same procedure or incident or Aspect completely the same but a baby when is a baby a human being well for purposes of abortion Not till the third trimester. Do you have a living being there for purposes of reproduction? In terms of declaring paternity for example, I want to declare a paternity suit right after the woman's pregnant I have a right to do that for purposes of inheritance The umbilical cord has to be cut and the kid has to breathe before that's a living being For purposes of murder No murder in the first or second trimester if you kill the child with a woman third trimester you got murder That's correct. And I think that some of the abortion rights advocates opposed strongly Federal law or other law and that would like add an extra offense to say a murder of a pregnant woman Counting the death of the a child to be a separate harm Not because they're against that happening obviously everyone recognizes that's wrong But they're afraid to admit that you know, there's an actual life being extinguished Before birth because that would be contrary to some of their abortion rights theories Well, it's you know, it's fascinating in terms of the way the law looks at all totally differently And yet it's the same process and and we've accepted that I think one reason is I'm a big advocate of a decentralized legal systems like the common law as opposed to artificial law made by Legislatures in Congress because when the when the Congress just sits down and Writes up a law on a piece of paper that they decree to be law There's no guarantee that it will be consistent with other laws previously passed Whereas in the common law the judge has to try to reconcile precedent and case law and try not to Rule in a way that overturns or overrules previous precedent or case law So it grows more organically and with less inconsistencies How did Halderman then get nailed if he said I want to be paid for a script that I'm not going to write Well, I don't know if he's been nailed yet I mean, I think I think he tried to do it in a subtle way. I mean he obviously was aware that he It was somewhat dangerous to ask for blackmail, you know outright So he just said I'm gonna write this script if you want to keep it private But I think the reason is blackmail is actually a crime although it should not be and he could have been involved in some other activities Which were illegitimate? I'm not sure if he broke into the car or did something that was you know Legitimate crime and quite often these things are mixed up together So your position is that blackmail is Should be not a non-criminal activity, but extortion threatening to harm someone should remain criminal Extortion should be criminal Assuming that the underlying harm that is counted as a harm is a legitimate crime And in my view it is not completely for example in the case of reputation rights because by the same token that we would say that Prostitution should not be illegal and blackmail should not be illegal. There also should be no Lival and slander should not be illegal. You should be able to say what you want And even destroy and even destroy someone's reputation With a lie with a lie for example if I get off the air and now I literally go on the air And I'm a zillion people are listening and I go Hey, I've got pictures of Stefan on his and his pet sheep correct And let me tell you and I have some good photos and I photoshop your picture on a film that I've just seen Okay, I shouldn't be nailed for that one. Yeah Well, the theory is that to make defamation and libel and slander illegal you have to say there's a right to a reputation But the problem is a reputation is what other people believe about you And you don't really have a right to what other people believe about you And so if the if the listeners want to choose, you know to listen to what you're saying and to trust your word That's their right to believe that about me. And so I don't have a right to them thinking something about me So yes, I think defamation law is also problematic Even even even tort law you're talking about even civil tort like you would not allow a lawsuit for defamation defamation Correct. I think there's I'm an I'm a patent attorney. I'm also against intellectual property law for similar reasons There are no intellectual rights and immaterial things like reputations and inventions and things like this And so the problem with extortion is that it counted as Extortion if you threaten to harm someone's reputation, right? So but otherwise extortion as in general makes sense as it's basically a threat to harm someone Yeah, Stephanie ever run for office. I actually did in 2002. I ran for a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on the Libertarian Party ticket And you got nailed I got 74,000 votes, which was a near enough Just just wondering. I mean, you know, if you're if I ever I've heard any legal scholar out of the box You're right there at the top of the list Very much. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you. The website is Stefan Kinsella.com Stefan is STPHAN Last name Kinsella KIN SELLA.com that I get that right. That's right like Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams. You got it. Take care. Thanks much. All right What a fascinating I mean, I find that just I mean if that's not an interesting way of doing it. All right when we come back death penalty once again they refuse Refuse to kill the people and I'm getting sick of this. It's time. We start putting them down I'll give you that story as soon as we return. This is the billhandle show