 Okay, so thank you for taking part. Stefan, could you introduce yourself? Sure, I'm Stefan Kinsella. I live in Houston, Texas, the USA. I'm an American patent attorney and also a long-time libertarian writer and theorist, primarily in the Rothbardian radical anarchist libertarian Austrian economics tradition. And so, yeah, I edit the journal Libertarian Papers, which I founded, and I'm a long-time associate of Hans Hermann Hoppe, and a long-time friend of the Mises Institute, and that sort of branch of the libertarian movement here in the States. Okay, so we've heard today that U.S. unemployment is down to 7.4%. Is that because Keynes was right all along? I don't think so. I think, first of all, we can't trust government numbers, and even if those numbers are somewhat accurate, I think they're measuring a different constellation of the economy right now. In other words, a lot of people that are registered as employed now or have part-time jobs or lower jobs than they would have had or that they did have 10 years ago, let's say. So the landscape has changed, and furthermore, you know, that doesn't count or that omits people that have given up looking for jobs. And it also could be that we are in a recovery, despite the government's attempts to stop it and to delay it. We could be in a mild recovery. So we could have just suffered through a recession, which is predicted by Austrian economics like Hayek and Mises, who say that you have a boom caused by government manipulation of the financial markets and the economy, and then it crashes and then it has to recover. And if the government gets in the way, the recovery is slower and more painful and delayed and it's going to be ultimately worse. And that may be what has happened or maybe we're putting off the ultimate day of reckoning. It's hard to actually apply these sort of general a priori theories to what's going on. But it seems like, you know, we would have had a recovery already if the government had stood back and let the economy crash as it had caused it to do and then recover. But since it didn't do that, it slowed it down. But we may be recovering now gradually and weekly in the face of the government regulations. So I would say that the Keynesian idea, government intervention idea, that if we're recovering anemically and weekly, it's despite Keynesian policies, not because of them. Yeah, I think interest rates, what are they then to actually 0.25% in America now? Yeah, they're basically zero, that's right. Right. And how would they actually, because I know that some sort of neomunitorist is trying to get them into the negatives. Now, how would that work? Yeah, yeah, so what they're trying to do is, I mean, you have this idea of quantitative easing, right? So the government is basically finding ways to use its various tools that it's assembled over the decades. It's hooks and claws into the economy to prime the pump, they call it. So these people think in terms of metaphors, so they'll talk about the economy is cooling down or there's green shoots, which is a gardening term, or there's momentum. So they use all these bizarre terms, which are supposed to be scientific, which are not. But they want to prime the pump, they want to get the economy moving again. So they have various mechanisms and ways they try to do this. One is quantitative easing, you know, there's various other extremely complicated techniques to do that. And they end up either manipulating the interest rate directly or causing an effect on it. So yeah, if you could push the interest rates negative, it would be even more of a stimulus. It's difficult to do. Some of the terms used in economics are called pushing on a string. So at a certain point, and you'll notice that, by the way, a lot of the hard money types and the libertarian types and the Austrian types have been predicting for, I don't know, five or so years or maybe more, they've been predicting that if the government, if the state of the central banking system pushes a lot of credit and money into the system through their tricks and techniques like quantitative easing and things like this, buying up debts and mortgages, it will cause hyperinflation or at least severe inflation. Now when they say inflation, they mean a visible measured increase in consumer prices or something like that. But we actually haven't seen that. The official numbers on price inflation are fairly low. And there's various theories as to why it hasn't happened yet. A lot of the Austrians are saying, well, it's still coming. It's just been delayed, the government's delaying it. We're exporting, you know, the United States is exporting its inflation to China and other countries, which is partly true. But one day it will come home to roost or the banks are getting the new credit, but they're sitting on it because the government is guaranteeing them some kind of minor interest rate. So they just sit on the debts instead of loaning them to risky lenders. But there has not been the calamity in terms of visible price inflation that a lot of people predicted five or six years ago, two, three, four, five years ago. But it is coming and it is clearly distorting the economy. The magnitude of it is hard to predict. But no, I don't think that the government ought to intervene anymore. I think what they should do is they ought to close the Fed down and they ought to, or at the very least, freeze the money supply in place, get rid of fractional reserve banking, freeze the money supply, let the inevitable contraction take place, let the recovery take place, and then we would be on a healthier setting. However, they don't want to do this because they want to push that off to the next administration. They want to have good times rolling while they're in office and they're in power and they just kick the can down the street and let the next administration take it over. At some point, it may be impossible to keep delaying it any further. But it's hard to predict that because the economy seems to have a real growth component growing underneath, right, that's growing despite the state. So we seem to have real growth going on despite the regulations, despite the taxes, despite the manipulation of the business cycle and the credit system and the banking system by the government. So right now, I see a slow sort of back-behind-the-scenes battle between free enterprise and capitalism and the attempts of the state to parasite off of it, to control it, to mold it and manipulate it. Yeah, like you said, the problem is that there's actually no private ownership of government. That's what HOPPA calls it. There's no private ownership of the government estate, like the wasp and there's a monarchy. So the present government will try to make the situation as bad as it can now or get as much current income as it can now because when it does this, there's no punishment for it in the future. In fact, it's the opposite effect. If it engages in low taxation and fairly minimal regulation, then in the future, it won't have a chance to do this. So that's the sort of incentives we have on to democracy. Yeah, and I think for a monarch, I'm not a monarchist, of course, but if you just contrast and compare, say, a monarchic institution to, and I mean like a parliamentary Western-style, European-style, limited monarchy but not a figurehead monarchy like in England, like in the UK today, say a real monarchy, if you compare that institutional structure to, say, democracy, as Hans-Hermann HOPPA, who's my sermon tour has done in detail, then you'll see that there's various disadvantages to the democracy. I mean the monarch, for example, if he has a long reign of peace and prosperity, let's say 20, 30, 40, 50 years, they're going to be beloved by the people, right? But if you have a Bill Clinton or a George Bush or a Barack Obama in office, they need to have a splash. You know, they need to have a war, they need to have a calamity they can solve, they need to have a disaster they can blame upon the previous administration and they show that they're working to fix it. They need to have signature legislation passed that they can put their names on like Obamacare, Socialized Medicine here in the US. If they just have a boring administration, I mean, you know, I've heard arguments that the best presidents in the US have been people like, say, Grover Cleveland, who's virtually unknown because he did almost nothing. He just kind of maintained the peace. Or even Jimmy Carter, to some extent, in the modern era. They're considered to be boring, right? Because they're not like big leaders brandishing their swords and causing all kinds of crap all around the globe. But they do what monarchs would do if they were good leaders. But if you do that as a Democrat, a democratically elected leader, then you're just boring and you don't cause any excitement for the people. So, yeah, I think there are different incentive structures. And yeah, of course, you're right. Barack Obama is in office for eight years, Max, and he's going to have a chance to do what he's going to do. And if he can get some glory and get some programs passed and the costs or trillions of dollars passed down the road, five, 10, 20, 30, or 50 years down the road, he doesn't pay those, you know, the price of those costs. He just pushes them off to other people and other generations. So, yeah, there's a different incentive structure. And this is fairly revolutionary, really, because even to an extent, Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mies is the two really radical people in the 20th century for libertarianism. Even they were quite in favor of democracy relative to monarchy. And it's only Hocker, quite recently, who is... while not really making the case for a monarchy, said that relatively monarchies were a lot better and that's why monarchical wars tended to be really tiny, relative to things like World War I and World War II, because the monarchy only had limited resources and if he had a massive war, there would be quite a high likelihood that it would damage the property values in his own... what he considered his own property, which was the government and the country. And so, it is quite encouraging that we can now try and make the case for a monarchy of a democracy, but it's only really recent. I agree, I agree. This is one of the progressions in sort of liberal or libertarian thinking that Hoppe has spearheaded, one of many. He's been probably the world's leading praxeologist. That is the kind of most rigorous, rational, inherent of Mises' thought. He has spearheaded a brand new revolutionary theory of individual rights. Not a consequentialist one, more of a praxeological, Misesian, Kantian one. And he also has looked afresh at the idea of democracy. So, what he's done is he looked at what's called the wig theory of history. The wig theory of history is the idea that society is always progressing. There's like an always increasing line of progress. And, you know, he challenges that view and says, sometimes we actually have retrogression, we actually go backwards. So, the assumption is, even among people like Mises and Rothbard, to some degree, who, as Hoppe says, have a soft spot for democracy. Now, I think it's understandable why they do have a soft spot for it, because a lot of this stuff was driven by, say, the American Revolution. And it's sort of, you know, incantation of the original idea, you know, some of these classical ideas of liberty and these radical ideas of liberty from the British libertarians and also harking back to Athens and Rome even. And it looks fairly noble and like a radical experiment and a great thing. You know, but what Hoppe points out is that, you know, democracy is not necessarily an improvement over the previous monarchical situation because they're... Now, look, he's not in favor of monarchy. He's an anarchist as am I. He's in favor of private property society. His point is simply to hold up a model and say, look, we didn't necessarily progress in every way, or maybe in any significant way, when we abolished the old monarchies and we went through democracy. And he's using this as a foil to show that democracy is not the, you know, the nirvana or the utopia or even being an approximation of some libertarian society that we would all be in favor of. Even libertarians nowadays take this for granted. They're so used to the system that they think that the way to make change is to find the right political candidate and vote for the right political candidate. Now, they may be voting for a guy that's not going to be on the radar screen of your average person, maybe not the two big parties, not the conservatives or the socialists, not the Republicans or the Democrats. So they're voting for the libertarians, let's say, or maybe Ralph Nader or whatever. But the point is they buy into the whole idea that this is the way you make progress. We have a democratic western welfare state society. Everyone respects each other. We're pluralistic, et cetera. And we just have to participate in the democratic process and we have to hope we can get enough votes to win the day. But to do what? To persuade 65% of society that we're going to be anarchists? How could you persuade 65% of society to vote to abolish the government? The whole thing makes no sense. Once you're into voting, you're part of the system. So Hoppe is trying to open people's eyes to the defects of democracy to show that it's not this unilateral, unambiguous improvement from the previous state of affairs. Not to say we should go back to monarchy, but to say that it's not an improvement and we should revisit this whole issue and see what the nature of the government is. Yeah, and actually, we're often... We're either not taught about this part in English history or we're taught about it in a really biased way. But there was actually quite a nasty thing that Parliament did to our monarchy. There was a king called James II and Parliament sort of got rid of him because he was in favour of liberalising England to an extent. He was in favour of not discriminating against Catholics or the various types of Protestants. And then Parliament then accused him of... I don't think they accused him of treason, but they accused him of trying to turn Britain into a Catholic state. Right. And so what they did was they deposed him in favour of his daughter instead of his son. And they quite ludicrously said that... Well, maybe not ludicrous, but they said that his son was not his son. And therefore we followed a totally different line of succession since what was called the Glorious Revolution in 1688. But nobody tends to know about that in England. We're always... If we're taught about any old aspects of the monarchy, we're taught about the really gruesome, really nasty parts. Right. So say Henry VIII had six wives and he was a fat old man who was a bit of a lech as well. We're taught about that. But we're never taught about monarchs who were in favour of more liberty and more freedom. And we're also not really taught about some of the nasty things that Oliver Cromwell did. And too many people perhaps have the idea that he's a libertarian hero. I really dispute that. But going back to what you said about Hans Hoevenholper's rights theory, could you explain how that's different to the way Murray Rothbard or even Mises tried to make a case for libertarianism? So the case... So the libertarian movement emerged gradually out of this kind of liberal movement. A lot of it based in the UK and England. The levelers, John Locke, etc. And sort of culminated in the American Revolution in a sense. At least that's how we focus our understanding of it now. And there's always been a tension between the sort of practical and the political and the sort of natural rights or natural law-based arguments for all these things. I actually don't believe that they're all in tension with each other. I think that consequentialism properly understood and some deontological or rights-based case for justice and liberty, they all complement each other because we live in one universe. And the universe... I mean, even Anne Rand was right on this kind of stuff. She said the practical is the moral. Or maybe the moral is the practical, which all makes sense. They cannot really diverge from each other too much. Otherwise, neither side would make any sense. So up till now, you have these movements emerging at Hawke. And then later on, people try to systematize and label them and categorize them. When they emerge, they're not categorized and labeled. People just have passionate ideas and they push them for various reasons. But after the fact, people try to categorize them. And so what's emerged is this view that there are sort of two opposing views. One is sort of practical or pragmatic or even utilitarian like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and consequentialist. And the other is more deontological or Kantian or rights-based or natural law-based even. So these two sides... So one side says that you just do what works. We all have fairly decent goals. We want to have freedom and prosperity and people getting along. And you just have to choose the policies that maximize liberty or maximize wealth or maximize some quantity that we think is important. That's kind of utilitarianism. And consequentialism is a bearing of that. Or maybe it's the other way around that you should judge a policy or even an action's value or justification based upon what it produces. And then the other side is we have these sort of immutable principles that we can arrive from being religious or looking into God or meditating or contemplating human nature or something like that. And we just deduce subsidiary principles from these more immutable basic principles. That's sort of the natural law or deontological case. So to take an example, you know, if you think it's wrong to torture people you think it's wrong just because it's wrong to hurt other people per se or it's just wrong to be such a cruel person. That's more of a natural law perspective. But if you think it's wrong because it's going to send the wrong incentives and it's going to dissuade people from confessing their sins because they're afraid of being tortured, you know, or some practical consideration like that, that's more consequentialist. So that's the basic way you can look at these two sides. Now, Murray Rothbard is in the tradition... Well, let's step back. So we have Mises who is a brilliant Austrian economist in the footsteps of Karl Manger and previous Austrians. And I really think he was the first systematized, truly rational, rigorous thinker. He used a lot of Kantian terminology and concepts in his explaining his theory and a lot of, like, say, Ayn Rand types who are libertarians now to some degree. You know, the spies Kant is a nihilist and is a skeptic and is the destroyer of mankind and all this kind of stuff. I don't think so. My understanding is there, I mean, Kant was a murky writer. He had different interpretations. I mean, on the continent in Europe, there's a more realist interpretation of Kant and he was fairly liberal, actually, in his politics. In the U.S., he was interpreted in more of a skeptical fashion, which is absurd, of course. And I agree with the criticisms by Randians of the skeptical interpretation of Kant. But it really doesn't matter what Kant was, it matters what the ideas are. And so Mises was sort of, he lashed on to the Kantian way of explaining things, but Mises was not an idealist, he was not a skeptic. Idealists in the sense that he believes ideas are the fundamental reality and there's no way we can understand what reality really is, not in the sense of having ideals. So Mises basically took the common sense practical aspects of Kant's ideas and his terminology and he used that as part of his praxeology and his Austrian economics. And he systematized and he made more rigorous the work that had gone before him from Bumbavark and Karl Minger and others. So then you have Murray Rothbard come along and Murray Rothbard is heavily influenced by Ein Rand and Aristotle and he basically took what Mises believed in economics and recouched it in Aristotelian terms. But it wasn't really, in my opinion, a conflict. It was just a different vocabulary, maybe a different conceptual framework but not really a different perspective on everything. But Mises was, because he was so steeped in all these ideas and he was such an economist, he didn't think you could prove these normative facts. He didn't think you could prove, say, right and wrong in natural law because he was really an economist. But he did think that most people happened to have certain values in common, like peace and prosperity. And if you have these values, then economics teaches you that here's the means of achieving it. So he was sort of a consequentialist in the sense that he said, look, if you happen to value human peace and prosperity like I do and like most people do, then here's the way to achieve it. So if the government says we're going to achieve peace and prosperity with a minimum wage or with a pro-union law or a tariff, it's not going to work. So he just focused upon the means. Okay. So Rothbard came along and was a student in Mises. He agreed mostly with these economics although he recouched it in different terms. But he also was a natural rights theorist. He believed there were natural rights. So then Hans Hermann Hoppe comes along. And Hoppe is a student of the Kantian way of thinking from Germany. And he was a very strong Misesian. So he had Mises' sort of terminology and his conceptual way of looking at things. But he became a student of Rothbard. And he was amenable to Rothbard's less utilitarian, more libertarian way of looking at things. So what Hoppe tried to do was come up with a way to synthesize and combine these ideas. Ideas of Kant, ideas of Habermas, who's a famous European thinker. Carl Otto Appel, Mises and Rothbard, Carl Menger and other thinkers. They say, listen, there's a way to combine all these things. We can come up with what's in a way a natural rights way of thinking of human liberty that is Kantian, that is compatible with the Rothbardian, Aristotelian sense of things, but more rigorous. So his argument was that we can extend Mises' ideas, which is called praxeology. And Mises said that you can analyze the economic implications of human action by just looking at the nature of human action. Sort of an a priori Kantian way of looking at things. But it was only descriptive, only in the realm of human action. So I don't think Mises believed that his ideas could be extended to the field of ethics or norms. But Hoppe did, and so Hoppe sort of used his libertarian sentiments, his libertarian awareness, his understanding of Habermas and Appel's argumentation ethics. I know I'm getting a lot of buzzwords here, but I've written on this and people can look it up. The point is we have a brilliant student in Germany who honestly, let me explain this. Hoppe was a leftist early on, like a lot of European and German students in the 60s and 70s would be. And he became a leftist, but then he started thinking about all this stuff. And he basically started rediscovering praxeology on his own. This is how brilliant this guy is. And then he stumbled across, I don't know, Rothbard or Mises and realized that there was a guy out there, Mises, who had already done all this. And so he became an instant Misesian and probably the best Misesian in the world because he was basically on the path of recreating it on his own. Maybe it would have been better than what Mises did if he had not discovered Mises. But he did discover Mises, so he didn't have to recreate it. He could glom on to Mises and then his follower Rothbard. So you have this hyper-brilliant student in Germany becoming gradually aware of the liberal mindset and the radical mindset. And so he naturally devoured Mises' works and then became a student of Rothbard. But what he said was, what he came up with was an argument for rights that was sort of, in a way, in between the consequentialist Misesian argument and the Contine argument and the Rothbardian natural rights. What he said was, the natural rights argument has flaws. It's true. That is that it tries to depend too much upon practical observations of what human nature is, but we know that human nature is very fluid. You know, if you say this is good for this person, it might not be good for that person. So you can see that's sort of a nod to the Austrian idea of subjective value, the idea that everyone has different preferences and subjective values. But he also recognized that there's something that we all share in common as sentient intelligent creatures and that is that we're all communicators and that whatever norm we're trying to justify in an argument that we're doing it as auguars that it's people in a community where we're sitting together and talking about something. And to do that, you have to already have a certain recognition of each other's right to exist, right to listen to each other, right? And as he points out repeatedly in his writings, the key thing is that if you're discussing something with someone that you disagree with, like, I'm trying to persuade you that this is the right way to do things. You're trying to persuade me that this is the right way to do things. The key thing is that we both recognize that we can walk away if we don't agree, that we have the right to agree to disagree. And if you have that agreement, that already implicitly presupposes certain basic norms that imply the libertarian idea. And if you don't have these norms, then you're not having a real argument. You're just having like a slave master bully his slave into malving words to please him. That's not a real discussion. That's not a real argument. Okay, so this is the fundamental radical idea that Hoppe came up with. It's called argumentation ethics. And I think it's revolutionary. I think it's breakthrough. It's sort of a natural rights theory that doesn't draw on natural rights. It draws upon one fundamental aspect of the human nature, which is the aspect that we can communicate, that we do communicate with each other, and that we have to communicate with each other in order to try to justify any proposed value system or norm. Yeah, and I've bribed a load of criticisms of argumentation ethics. Most of them tend to be written by people who just don't understand the concept of argumentation ethics. I mean, one criticism was, I'm not going to, I can't actually remember who wrote it. But they said, what if someone never chooses to argue? Are they there for amoral people? Right. So, but that's not the thing. It's not a totally hypothetical system of ethics. It's, it can apply to all communicators. It doesn't just apply to someone who's, say, in the act of arguing right now, or who, say, who's cut off the tongue. It doesn't really matter in that respect. But what's also quite frustrating is how close together all these great thinkers are. So, Mises, Rand, Rothbard, Hopper, Roderick Long, Stephen Molyneux, they all have so many points of similarity. And if only they could bridge the little errors, if they could sort out their own errors and work together instead of being so sometimes not talking to each other at all. I think libertarian discourse would have come a long way. I agree. I mean, let me give a history of this. So Hopper came to the U.S., I think in 1985, I want to say, mid-80s to study with Rothbard. And they studied together for a while in New York. And then they both got positions at UNLV, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And they were there together for, like, 10 years until Rothbard died in 95. Okay? And so who comes over there in 1986 or 87 or 88, Hopper started publicizing and giving speeches on his new idea of argumentation ethics. And Rothbard became a total inheritor. Rothbard admitted that his previous natural rights theory was very, he called it wimpy in comparison to Hopper's more rigorous formulation. And Hopper published this series of articles. And the big one was one in the magazine called Liberty in the U.S. in 1988, I want to say. He published his argumentation ethics there. And it made a big splash. And he had like a dozen or 15 prominent libertarian thinkers all reply to it. And I'll be honest, I think one or two or three were friendly to it. Rothbard was enthusiastic. David Gordon was cautious. And the others were all hostile to varying degrees. Timothy Verkala, Leland Jaeger, David Friedman, Douglas Rasmussen, people like this. Now, why were they hostile to it? I mean, they took the time to comment on it. Maybe some of them honestly disagreed with it. But I think it's a new idea in the middle of libertarian political theory, which is supposed to be established by now. But honestly, it's not. I mean, we're at the very beginnings of modern human civilization right now. Modern human civilization has only been around for, I don't know, 100 years, maybe? 200 years since the Industrial Revolution. Or maybe you could even date it from the 1950s. And libertarian theory has sort of grown along with that. And it's no surprise that it's still evolving. And that people get suspicious of a new theory that emerges to sort of change the paradigm. So I think that's what happened. I do think it's a revolutionary theory. It's just groundbreaking. So there's a lot of writing on it. If people are interested in looking at it further, they can just go to stefanconcella.com and look on my publications page and look for my article, argumentation ethics, a concise guide. And so I have their links and explanations to all the arguments about it on both sides. And there are also so many things that build upon argumentation ethics. I mean, there's your own concept. Well, it's not your own concept, but it's your application of the concept of estoppel. And there's also the similar moral theory, not really a political theory, but it's the moral theory of universally preferable behavior by Stefan Molyneux. So there are lots of different ways. There are lots of people who built upon it, like Hopper built upon Rothbard and Rothbard built upon Mises and Mises built upon Bonbarburg, et cetera. Yes. And I've got a, I mean, yeah, so I have a theory that's complementary to Hopper's called estoppel. And Stefan Molyneux has one called universally preferable behavior. But these are just, this is not the only things. I mean, if you look throughout history in the last two, three, four, or 500 years, you could find insights by the great thinkers that we all admire or at least profit from, which recognize aspects of this approach to things. And I've got like list of quotations on my website called Quotes of the Logic of Liberty or something like that, which just shows, I mean, if you look at John Locke and you look at other guys, there's sort of an intuitive recognition that there's just something wrong with the idea that you could really in a civilized discussion with another human being try to justify the notion that here's why I get to kill you. Here's why I get to dominate you. Here's why I'm more special than you. Here's why I'm better than you. You really can't do that. I mean, it's sort of contrary to the basic idea of treating someone as an equal, as a discussant in a real conversation where you're trying to arrive at the truth about a certain matter. So it's common sense, and I think Hoppe made it more rigorous than anyone ever had. There were other people like G.B. Madison, a philosopher, and Crocker. I've got these guys quoted. A lot of these older thinkers quoted in some articles. Jeremy Shearmer, another theoretician. I've got them quoted in an article I wrote called New. It was in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in the 90s. It's called New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory. So anyone interested can look that up and follow this through further. Yeah, and perhaps the most unlikely person to sound like Hoppe or yourself or Rothbard was John Locke. In the first, quite early on, in Second Treatise on Government, he says, and I'm paraphrasing, if a criminal commits a crime, therefore he has declared himself to live by another law, the law of a tiger or some animal. And so that sounds like a stop-all because it says that you can't justify crime. Yes. And it's also a bit like Hoppe's argument that we can't treat criminals as if they were a moral problem, they're actually a technical problem. Yeah, I think the problem is that libertarians and others get so passionately bound up in our enterprise, which I appreciate, I understand, and I've done it myself. But they start thinking of these things that they're in favor of as a type of law akin to causal laws. So the Misesian view of things, which is called a dualistic view, dualistic in the sense that we recognize that there are two separate realms of phenomena that we're going to analyze. And Mises analyzes causal laws, which is the physical world, so causality, like cause and effect. Like the laws of physics. What laws can we discern that we can use to predict what's going to happen when we perform certain actions? Like if I want to have an explosion, I have to mix these chemicals together in a certain way or whatever. And then there's the laws of morality and teleology, which is purpose and human action. So you could think of it as description versus prescription or fact versus norm. That is, there are certain facts out there. There are certain norms out there. The norms are rules that you want to follow or you should follow to accomplish certain results. So if I tell you, you know, the law of gravity is such that if you jump off this 10-story building, you will plummet to your death and die. Okay, that's one type of law. And there's a different way to verify that. But if I tell you, if you want to be a moral person or to live a happy life, you should be honest, you should respect other people's rights or whatever. That is a different type of proposition and it's a different way of validating it because you can't test it and you can't falsify it. So if I tell you, if you jump off this building, you're going to die and you take the bet and you jump off the building and you just float above the ground for some reason, you've disproved my theory. You show that I'm actually wrong, you know. But if I tell you that it's wrong for you to murder someone and you go ahead and disregard the advice, that doesn't disprove my advice, right? Maybe I'm still correct. Maybe it was wrong, but you did it anyway. The point is you can violate causal laws, but you cannot violate normative laws or moral laws, right? Or the other way around. You cannot violate physical laws, but you can violate. You can choose to violate prescriptive laws. That's why they're called prescriptions versus descriptions. Prescription is what you're supposed to do. A description is the description of the causal laws that govern the universe. So we have to look at the world in this way. There's just no way around it. And once you recognize that, then you realize there's different ways of arguing about these different important subjects. We can argue about economics and causal physical laws on the one hand, and we can argue about moral or prescriptive or normative laws or natural law on the other hand. Yeah, well, finally, I think there's another debate which has surfaced quite recently. And it can all be viewed taking place on the Libertarian Alliance website. Sorry, the Libertarian Alliance blog. And it's this debate, the Libertarian debate on immigration. Now, I know your stance on this, and you know mine, but can you explain, because there's quite an interesting article you wrote about maybe 10 years ago where you said that there isn't really a Libertarian stance. So could you say why you believe that there is no actual Libertarian stance on the issue of immigration? I mean, this is one of these issues that it's hard to discuss because people are passionate about it or they don't share the same sort of concept. So I think we need to back up. And so if we say, well, if I'm having a conversation with a menarchist, let's say, which is a limited state Libertarian or a classical liberal, it's going to be a different discussion because we have different set of presuppositions. So I think the only way to have the rational way to decide this issue and to kind of settle this issue, like the abortion issue, to be example, that's another complicated one. But it's to say, listen, we have to recognize the reality of the state. The state is a criminal evil institution. It's totally unjustified and in a free society it would not exist. But you would have private property exists in a free society. So then we have the question, we have to distinguish where the question is. We live in a real world today where we don't have a completely free society. We have a state and we have country borders. We have countries delineated around the globe. And these countries naturally set up boundaries and borders and enforcement authorities and they set up immigration controls and citizenship rules. So this is a predictable natural consequence of having states. And so then you have people argue about policy. What should the policy be? Well, the anarchist view is easy. The policy should be the government should disappear. The state should disappear, I should say. Not the government. The state. And if the state disappears, then you would only have private property and everyone could enforce their borders as they see fit, which is what Hoppe's argument is, for example, in democracy and other articles he's written. Now, but when you look at the practical police state world we live in, then libertarians naturally identify certain obviously unjust laws and they say this is clearly unlibertarian or clearly unjust, like a law putting someone in jail for smoking marijuana, for example, or a law putting someone in jail for not paying taxes or for not volunteering for the army, right? These kinds of things. Or maybe a law putting someone in jail for sneaking over the border without permission. So what they do is they identify laws that they hold up and they say compared to the law that would exist in a pre-society, is this law legitimate or not? That's why if someone commits an actual case of murder or rape and the government convicts them and puts them in jail, we might disagree that that's the best way to handle it. Some of us might prefer restitution. We might prefer a private system of handling it. But we don't really go crazy about it. We don't say that you have this actual murderer or rapist rotting in jail for 10 years. We don't think that the biggest problem is that it's violating his rights. Maybe a free society would diminish the likelihood of this happening in the first place. But we don't go crazy at the idea of this guy sitting in jail. Maybe we don't want to pay taxes for the guy. But we don't view it as a violation of his rights, or at least I don't. But what about immigrants and people like this? So then the question is for these policies that seem to be obviously illiberal or unlibertarian, we say they're illiberal because they're not similar to what laws would exist in a free society. So we all think that there would be some kind of prohibition against theft and robbery and rape and fraud and murder in a free society. Maybe the state gets it wrong and how it treats it. But we think that those laws are basically mimicking the just laws that would exist in a free society. But laws like tax evasion and smoking marijuana are not. And therefore we criticize them more vociferously. So then we come to the question of immigration. So the question is how does immigration lie on the spectrum? And the sort of knee-jerk traditional response to that among liberals and libertarians has been that, well, the state in a private society that people would go across borders as they see fit but the government couldn't stop them. So the government is putting people in jail for victimless crimes like if you cross a border. So what Hoppe's contribution to this was he said, listen, and this goes back to his democracy and monarchy stuff because his democracy-monarchy argument is that monarchy, while not legitimate because it's still a state, you can see that it would be closer to the situation that would evolve in a free society because of the incentive structures faced by the monarch. The monarch is there for a lifetime. He can turn the basic ownership of the country and the land to his heirs. So he has an incentive to keep it up. You know, he doesn't have unlimited power. He can't legislate arbitrarily. The only reason he has power is because he's beloved by the people he's seen as their caretaker. There's a bargain to a sense. Now it's not perfect, but there's some kind of bargain like he's protecting them in exchange. They give him enough money to keep his reign going. So there's sort of this uneasy bargain. But the monarch would be acting like a large landholder of the whole land or at least the feet ownership of the land or the basic ownership of the land. He would be trying to maximize the value of his kingdom. So he would, you know, if he had some control over immigration, he would allow people in to do certain things, but he wouldn't allow bad people in that would harm the country in various ways, right? Which might be an invading army or might be some kind of hordes of people that were culturally unsuited to fit with the people on a daily basis, to provide jobs or perform services in the market during the day or whatever. So his argument is that you could see this emerging and this is an approximation, a rough approximation of the way it would be handled if we decentralized everything and we took the monarch's power and we gave it out to the towns or to the people or to the, you know, the estates. And they would all have their own little borders and they have their property rights. And of course everyone else would discriminate against undesirables and people that were low lives and brought the value of the country down. So his argument is that the monarch, which is not perfect, simulates or approximates to a certain extent the behavior that would occur in a totally free market, but that the actions of Democrats do not because they have, they want to get voters in who are going to keep them in power. So they're going to get people in for voting reasons, which is not the same as high quality citizens or worker or trade partners or whatever, right? And they're going to engage in egalitarianism and all these other ideas. So his idea is that if you wanted to mold the immigration policy of the existing modern state, that if you adopted what a monarch would do, instead of what the democratic process drives you to do, that you would be adopting policies that are closer to what would emerge naturally in a free society. That's his argument. Now he's been attacked by this, by the open borders libertarians because they think he's arguing for closing borders. But of course he's in favor of anarchy, which is not open or closed borders. It's just private property, right? So I wrote an argument trying to reframe the debate to defend in a way aspects of Hoppe's argument. And what I argued was that if you imagine that in a country, which is run by a state like UK, let's say, let's take UK. So the UK basically claims ownership of all the land in the country because there's property tax. And property tax alone implies that you own the land you're taxing. Otherwise you couldn't kick the owner out if they didn't pay taxes. And they certainly own outright the public roads and public avenues. OK. And by the way, Hoppe argues you wouldn't have as many public roads and avenues without the government. And these roads provide a way for what he calls forced integration. So it makes it easier for people to get closer to each other that otherwise they might prefer to be a little bit more segregated or at arm's length by community reasons. But in any case, so my argument was simply not to argue against immigration, but simply to argue that if that when you have a state in place, which is unjust and the state maintains actual control of public resources like let's just say the roads in public buildings and public facilities, then the question is how should the government use those resources? Now the obvious answer is they should return them to the owners, which is the people that they took them from or the people that they taxed to purchase them, you know, the money they purchased these goods with, which let's say as a rough approximation is the citizens in the community, OK, of a given road. So the ideal solution would be for the government to somehow return this land to the private sphere to either privatize it or auction it off or to return it to some people, whatever they do is an improvement because if the government just gets out of the business is an improvement. But as a second best solution, if they don't, do we have any preference as libertarians as to how the government or the state is going to use these resources? And I think we do because so let's say the government, the state comes along and takes a strip of land in between this row of private neighborhoods and this row of private neighborhoods and it monopolizes this transportation corridor between, you know, these cities or these towns or these neighborhoods or whatever. Now, it has taken people's property, either by taxes or by taking the land outright, OK, one way or the other. So then the question is if it's not going to return the money, which would never be full compensation by the way because the government always waste things. Even if the government returns everything, everyone's going to be worse off. You're going to get one cent on the dollar. You're never going to get your money back. But the point is it could give some restitution by just ceasing business and returning the property. But if it doesn't do that, is there any other way it can give restitution? And I think there is because if the government, let's say, kidnaps you and tortures you, that's worse than kidnapping you and putting you in a four-store hotel for a week, OK? So if you had the choice, you would prefer the latter, not the former, right? And the same thing is if the government takes your property and makes it a public road. Now, if the government says no one is allowed to use it unless you pay a bribe to an official or if the government says, OK, you all can use it because you used it before, then that is less harm to you than the former actually. So it's what we call in law restitution in kind, OK? So the point is that there are certain objectively preferable ways the government could set rules for the use of property it's taken from the people than others. And that is a more productive use, a more natural use. Let's say 99% of the people want to use this road for transportation and the government says, OK, this is now going to be used for a road for transportation. Well, these people have been robbed, but at least they can use the road for transportation. But let's say the government says, well, we're going to use it for only selected favored government official's friends. Well, then they're adding insult injury or they're adding actually injury to injury to the people that were already robbed and now they can't even use the road that they've been expropriated for. So my argument was simply that if the government sets certain rules for the use of property that it owns, it doesn't, there are some that are preferable to others. And then the second argument is that if you have an outsider who has no claim against the state, like let's say we have someone from Guatemala, OK, who wants to come to the U.S. and he wants to use the roads, which he needs to use these roads to get to employment, to immigrate, he needs to use the public services. So the question is if the government prohibits him with their rules of the road, they say this road is only for citizens, does that violate his rights? And I argue that it doesn't necessarily violate his rights because he doesn't have an ownership claim to the road unlike the citizens who were expropriated to obtain the road in the first place, right? So in other words, if the government were to return the roads, they would return it to the citizens. They wouldn't return it to some Guatemalan guy. So the point is that the preferable uses of the road go back to the preferences of the users. The reason is more of a restitution of kind. The reason that the taking is less of a damage to the people is that the rules that the government sets for the use of the road respect their preferences by and large. It's not perfect. It might respect the preferences of 95% of the people and the 5% of the people are going to be screwed. But there's no way around that when you have a collective use of resources. But I think most people would agree that it's better for the roads to be used in this way than in that way because we don't want to be made miserable on top of the fact that the government's already monopolized the service and taken our money to do it. So my entire argument is just simply illustrating that there is no claim to public resources by people that don't have a claim to it. And if the government denies to certain outsiders the right to use public resources and if the majority of the population that has a claim to the resources agrees with that, then it's not a rights violation. And then that would naturally cause some kind of reduction in immigration. And honestly, I mean, you can't imagine the people that use the roads that have a natural claim to these roads want the government to have no rules whatsoever on the roads. They don't want the government to just step back and have no policing of anything whatsoever. No right side, left side rules, no speed limits, no turn lanes, no decision on who can use the roads. It would just be unusable at a certain point. So they would probably prefer that the government so long as it's in control of these roads to have some kind of reasonable rules of the road. And that might include only permitting citizens to use the roads or maybe useful citizens along the lines of Papa's monarchy idea. That's a long-winded explanation, but that's what the article is about and people can read it on my site. Yes, it's really an issue where people do get quite emotive and quite hyped up. But I think there's one last point we can make on this. And as libertarians, we're in favor of voluntary, only voluntary mutually beneficial transactions and contracts and the like. But what is immigration? Immigration isn't actually one of these voluntary mutually beneficial transactions. It's just the decision of one immigrant unilaterally to in inverted commas invade. And they also inevitably, from the second they do enter the new country, they will use public property from that second. It's almost inevitable. And so on that basis, immigration is not just, again, inverted commas and invasion. It's also an almost inevitable violation of public property. Yeah, I think there's something to that argument. The problem with it I see is that you could use that to argue. I mean, you want to be careful with these arguments because you don't want to give the state a way to add to the injuries doing to the people already. So you don't want to give it an excuse to say, well, you can only have two children because every other child is going to be in a position on our socialist medical system or our welfare system because after all, we already have the system in place. So the government basically imposes a system on us, a welfare system on us, and then they use that as an excuse to impose further controls on human life. So I think we have to be careful about that. And I would always try to take the side of free non-state individuals, whether they're citizens or not, over the state. In the narrow case I was talking about, it was simply an argument, does it violate the rights of immigrants if they're not permitted to use public property? And I view public property as really property owned by a certain class of people, namely citizens, and held in trust by this evil actor called the state. And if you think of it that way, then really it might violate the rights of property owners. Like let's say I'm a businessman who wants to invite a guy from Guatemala to work at my company and I'm one of the 5% who wants the roads to be open to this guy but everyone else prefers that they keep out people from South America, I don't know. And the government follows that rule. Now they satisfy 95% of their users and 5% they dissatisfy. I would say that that violates the property rights of the, well the whole system violates the property rights of everyone but it violates the property rights of this guy because he's not using the property the way he wants and that's a consequence of the fact that there's one controller of the road and it cannot make a decision that will satisfy everyone. The solution is to return it to the people, right? And then they can choose in a free market. But so long as it's doing the second best or third best or whatever you want to call it, it's going to dissatisfy some people. But the point is if it can satisfy 95% of the people more, it's doing less damage to them. So in a sense it owes them less restitution at the end, which means it's done less damage to them. And that's always a better thing. It's hard to sum up these things across people but at certain points we can see that some policies are just less egregious and less horrible than others, even though they're both bad. So I would say that it does violate the rights of a property owner if he's prohibited from inviting someone to his property. But it doesn't violate the rights of the invitee because he doesn't have the right to that property of the road. Yeah, so let's... well, now let's try and end on a high. Okay. So it's the one book, or maybe two, that you would definitely recommend to any single reader of Arthur Libertarian. And don't just say against intellectual property. Oh no, no. I've advertised that so you can do a different one. I guess I'll cheat and give you two answers. One would be my favorite book ever, but I don't know if that's the book I'd recommend. You know, the best book I've ever read, probably my favorite book I've ever read, is Hans Sermon Hoppe's A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. And to be honest, if you just read the first seven chapters, I mean it's just amazing. But that's not for everyone. That's not everyone's cup of tea. So it depends upon what you're looking for. But that book is just the sort of culmination of Rothbardian, Austrian, Nazesian, Austrian, you know, thought. It's just phenomenal. It's just chock full of insights. I love it. I love that book. But that's not for everyone really, because it's very dense. It's very staccato and it's writing style. It's very scholarly in some ways. When I think about the books I've read, when I was younger and being influenced, the ones that ignited my mind and helped me. I mean, honestly, Milton Friedman's Free to Choose was one of the ones. Even though, I mean, that book is just great. I mean, some of his other stuff is more compromising and mealy-mouth, but it's just pure, hardcore, common-sense, economic reasoning. So that's, there are some books I've read that I read, The Law by Frédéric Bastiat. That was another really great one. For New Liberty by Rothbard is sort of essential, but it depends upon your level and what you're looking for. You know, for more introductory works, Haslitz Economics in One Lesson, The Law by Bastiat, and Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, you really can't go wrong with books like that to start with. Great. And also Against Intellectual Property as well. I enjoyed writing that one. Okay, so thank you very much for taking part. Thanks, Kieran. Enjoyed it.