 that in the Stone Age time and at another time there were a lot of people who might have been told of the same but had invented agriculture but the opportunity cost was such a little bit. Until, and this was a point that my friend who was missing in his speech, we had a very long time until a point in which there was a liberty crew experimenting to other, from the gathering, brands that had not previously owned by other tribes so the same would happen then later with other inventions that were just not the right time because the opportunity costs were still too great but it achieved the inventing of the era before people wanted to begin that to be invented I'm not quite sure if I understood what you are driving it the main point that I tried to make is simply that average standards of living did not rise for thousands of years for that they are, there does exist in the meantime overwhelming evidence I think one of the most important books that makes this point is by Gregory Clark, Fair World to Arms who demonstrates I think quite convincingly that you can go back to the very first records that we have of wages being paid and prices for various goods to come to the conclusion that standards of living in Babylonia were not all that much different from what you find in 1600, 1700, 1800 England and then how do we explain the fact that it took such an enormous amount of time to gradually strip ourselves out of this predicament another important thing is the Industrial Revolution did not take place at one specific point in time it is something that occurred in the course of maybe 200 years you could gradually see that mankind improved in this regard so that there is some sort of threshold must have been reached and that economic theory is in and of itself not able to explain the length of this process I think there is nothing wrong with economic theory not explaining this so to speak as I emphasized I'm of course a strong believer that the tools that economic theory offers us in explaining what is required in order to grow are absolutely correct nonetheless the lengths of time that required is inexplicable so to speak unless we find some other mechanism that explains this if this other mechanism is in the course of thousands of years a different kind of man evolved and how that happened the mechanism is economic success is translated into reproductive success so some of these detailed questions or so when the opportunity cost for this to rise or to lower and so forth I'm not trying to answer these types of questions I have a far more fundamental question how can we understand the long run course of human economic history without recognizing that something like an ongoing biological evolutionary process must have been going on and once we recognize that then many phenomena that we know of do make more sense then if we simply ignore this ongoing biological evolutionary process Well the answer is both we must of course continue to attack their legitimizing ideologies and there are many libertarian conservatives who are doing a very good job of that when it comes to labeling members of the ruling class it is necessarily rather difficult because these people are not totally parasitic sometimes they do act within the productive economy and sometimes they act outside the productive economy the English radicals of the early 19th century had a distinction between tax eaters and tax payers and it seems a fairly clear cut distinction until you look at it in the modern context you see I occasionally work as a university lecturer paid by the state to that extent I'm a tax eater I'm also a tax payer now I suppose if I look at my tax return I can say that on balance I'm a tax payer but I'm sure that I receive many other benefits from the state that I don't take into account and so it is very difficult to say in most regards whether somebody is a tax eater or a tax payer and when you look at the wicked Polly Toynbee for those of you who don't know her she is a particularly nauseous left-wing journalist who writes for the Guardian I'm not sure that she gets a penny from the tax payer it all comes from the Guardian but of course the Guardian gets a lot of its revenue from running all those advertisements for aids out for each co-ordinators and walking advisors and parking studies lecturers but it is difficult to pin a label on someone and say you are a member of the ruling class therefore I want to smash him I wish we could do it and in some cases we can but it's not as easy as it seems May I add something to this this is of course one of the great advantages of some Marxists that they could pinpoint who is member of the ruling class and who isn't he who owns the means of production is and he who doesn't isn't with this concept of tax-eaters and tax-payers the libertarians try to accomplish the same sort of simplicity you might be able to figure out who is a tax payer and who is a tax-eater nonetheless this is not a very good concept in order to determine who is member of the ruling class because clearly you would not consider welfare recipients a member of the ruling class you would not consider a plumber working for the state be a member of the ruling class on the other hand we have of course many people who work entirely outside of the domain of the state who clearly are members of the ruling class leading businessmen who can accomplish for instance that legislation is passed that benefits them at the expense of their competitors nonetheless in terms of this tax-eater, tax-payer dichotomy they would have to be labeled as people who are outside of the ruling class and this was one of the reasons why I asked Sean to just present some thoughts on this difficulty that we have and I do not know how we can overcome it and come up with a clear cut statement this guy is an evil guy so he has to be smashed and this one is not we have to just look at every individual case that makes our case more difficult I admit but that's the way it is we are now divided by the constitution trap that we should be suppressed from years ago its current age also has some kind of trap the opium where asked the non-military growth of state is thought of from achieving a new high sort of a new station to develop and I must admit that I'm not quite sure if I got the drift of the question Hunter and gatherers were under Melsusian conditions again and again and again it was not only until the point came when absolutely no land was available anymore it happened hundreds of thousands of times at various locations that Melsusian conditions arose why did nobody ever invent agriculture and animal husbandry as a way out of it and instead it was always people migrating to different places that again we cannot explain unless we have another explanatory dimension that is a growth of intelligence so it's not only that the pressure so to speak to invent a solution to Melsusian trap only arises once the entire globe is settled by hunters and gatherers but it has happened of course before the entire globe was settled by hunters and gatherers thousands and thousands of times before and every time a decision had to be made hunters and gatherers from what we know worked three or four hours per day so they had plenty of time to think of anything they wanted but they didn't again I'm not quite sure if I answered your question but even if I didn't I hope it still made some sense of what I said apart from that and if I could elaborate a question at the end of your state in which people are more intelligent the very time references, the desirable personality policies of self constraints of control and all that and this is a real problem I think this implies that the genetic quality of the populations in the developed world is deteriorating with respect to the disability and visitors that an authoritarian state could deal with its problem through print of this kind was set out by data and the solution is to breathe from the more desirable if they're reinforced by the state or through visitors to the authoritarian state such as for example contemporary China might quote some of the policies into effect but anyway with minor modifications it is a difficult problem I think for the military to deal with this problem two parts of the answer the first one is simply we have to see the effects as they are this is just a positive statement is it really the case that there were eugenic effects at work before and disgenic effects are at work right now I think many libertarians are entirely blind to the fact that these effects exist I'm rather convinced that the facts do exist the second question is what are we about to do it what can we do about it and the libertarian answer would be because the state has to be eliminated as far as possible welfare state policies have to be eliminated as much as possible and then it is of course up to each individual household so to speak to balance the number of people that they themselves breathe with the resources that they are capable of producing and then let the market do its work if I could make a comment on that which amounts to a question to hands I must say that your explanation of the industrial revolution is the first entirely convincing explanation I've seen all of the others appear to leave something out whereas what yours does is to explain in a very satisfactory way why it happened when it happened however what you're describing may not be an upward swing it may be a very very long cycle and the cycle has not yet over it may be a very pessimistic theory in fact you may be another mouthless we reach a certain point in which a combination of circumstances allows an economic take-off once that happens you have the beginnings of government expansion which brings this genetic effect which brings the upward swing to a halt and for the rest of human history we just bump along at a rather flat level perhaps I agree that might well be a possibility and actually I thought I indicated that I consider this a very real possibility and of course a very real danger so to speak that we are have reached to speak the peak of the development and there will be a decline from now on So I think it's a really positive thing to start A, is it well at any time you can ever say that you do some public good and indeed they are very very large and they are not as coherent or as easily identified in the classes as everyone else most of the ruling class is going to be in our state they provide people with new state income the two games of England are quite happy their housing performances are pretty steady these are all kinds of things there will be higher aesthetic quality even though some of these are pretty low capacity moreover the ruling classes in the past they protected their people against armed invaders and there are a few vassals in the state who have some military obligations and are available to the airsoft team the other point that you made is that it is to be a small, coherent ruling class everyone believes that but the past is not quite as small to suggest to a lot of people who are dependent on the ruling class and usually share their sort of consciousness moreover if you look at the American media it is very very small relative to the total population you can pick up in New York Times you can go to the New York Conservatives you can see what is right in the beginning from actual data you can see new crystals or something else and so forth there is a weekend with everybody people who have seen MTV and these popular shows and so on every week you see them you can see Mike Maxman you can see the CBS and so forth so we are talking about at least in terms of the media a relatively small number of people at least we identify them therefore would you anyway modify how the current rule of the class is different in fact there may be much more global access I agree with you that there is a ruling class but where I disagree is that I am not quite sure what the common defining characteristic of this thing is regarding the benefits of past ruling classes I think Henry VIII's musical compositions should be seen more as positive externalities modern ruling classes do operate consistently within the productive economy in ways that past ruling classes usually didn't that being said there may well be certain benefits even to the ruling class that we have at the moment we spend a lot of time as conservators and libertarians complaining about the wicked things being done to us by our ruling class the Henry class, the new conservators the liberals call them what you will but these people did not proceed to see out the limits of exploitation they do leave us with a lot of what we produce so they don't often take us off and piece us into police stations and so where Marxist would say there is the ruling class brothers let us rise up and smash it let us smash them into production we do need to bear in mind that just because a ruling class exists and just because it is doing bad things does not mean that we should on all occasions seek to overthrow it but we need to consider what would replace it if we could be reasonably sure that overthrowing a ruling class would lead to a significantly better state of affairs from our own point of view yes we should become revolutionaries if on the other hand replacing the existing ruling class would bring us something much worse then there is an argument for putting up with these people bad as they are now at the moment our ruling classes are becoming so awful in what they're doing and in the tendencies of their setting that I think there is a very good argument for even the most conservative of us to become revolutionary but again unlike the Marxists I think our class theory is it doesn't have the same diplomatic ring about it workers of the world unite you have nothing to lose with your chains we're not even quite sure who the ruling class is I have two questions about the ruling class I think they're great questions the first one is you know that a society considers something anything without a that makes it a parasite that supports itself and provides what they want to do the people who write and read comic books are not parasites and this is a fundamental tendency of Washington economics value is objective it can be measured by some objectives why an expert says people should want to spend their money on it people make comic books are not parasites because they support themselves by providing other people what they're willing to pay for and they're benefiting from that and providing happiness for their diverse business people who write and act and read and do so far are not parasites they are providing the buy for people who are willing to buy it and once they have entitlements in addition it's not up to a very point to say people shouldn't spend money on an item of comic books people shouldn't spend their time buying it that is totally anecdotal to be honest is the principle that providing and reading are which people can read it's something people want and need and therefore they're not having some they're moving they're exercising and moving because it does seem that they're providing something that people want but a third point I do believe I say people shouldn't want that in comic books maybe people just need an ideology and that's what they want what you say touches on what Hans was saying but let me deal with the parasite aspect I agree that when members of the ruling class operate within the productive economy they are more or less not parasitic those are their productive activities which is part of what makes the whole analysis so difficult but coming back to the question coming back to the point you made about how every society has had a ruling class now that is significant we can talk about legitimising ideologies we can talk about hegemony false consciousness and we can use that to explain any one particular ruling class but every society that has ever existed every settled society that has ever existed has had a ruling class and it may put ordinary people in much the same position as certain bassid wives you often see these prophetic creatures who've been beaten up by their drunk and disgusting husbands and there are people of these women get away from those disgusting men and then six months later they're in an equally abusive relationship that may be what the human race is like with regards to ruling classes you can explain the exploitation of any one class by using all these fancy terms but the fact that people have always had a ruling class may indicate that would it be uncharitable to say stupid I want to make a comment and I do not think it is correct to say that every society had a ruling class every society this leads me to make a distinction what the meaning of ruling class is every society has so to speak rulers every society has people who exercise authority every society has leaders whose word counts for more than other peoples what we mean by a ruling class however is something different from just simply having people who exercise authority what we mean by ruling class is people who have acquired means in illegitimate ways people have established monopolies people who have stolen the property of other individuals and then draw income from positions that were acquired in an illegitimate way in a way that involves the infringement of private property rights so in this sense of course it is incorrect to say that a ruling class has existed as long as mankind exists rulers have existed as long as mankind exists authorities have existed as long as mankind exists but it is not necessarily the case that these rulers have acquired their means their property in an illegitimate way they can have also acquired that in a completely legitimate way and then exercise their authority based on that position we will not do five questions we will do one more question than I want to say and then remarks and then we should retire one more question next in the other half of it correctly so this might be an argument to speak of what a ruling class of different ruling classes not least let's protect maybe in our church to not be served as a close to marxist terminology so this is my first question what do you think this might get you out of some difficulty in this problem we only have a second is are you sure that you find themselves or are they maybe defined by the rules themselves because the law of making this has made them delegate some tasks the ruling classes and the power of the ruling classes is certainly as the rule that it happened I think both your questions come under one heading what you're asking again is the question that I asked but didn't really satisfactorily answer should we talk about a ruling class or should we talk about a cluster of mutually hostile groups who all to some extent have influence with the state I think that we can talk about a single ruling class but there are considerable difficulties in my mind before I can give a clear view of that I think that should end this discussion I don't want to add anything to it I agree with what you said so it is now up to me only to say a few things first of all I want to thank you very much that you attended this conference I hope you enjoyed it my purpose with this conference over the years to create the best, the most educational the most entertaining the most enlightening and also the most fun conference that exists anywhere if there is someone who didn't like the conference he shouldn't come again if you did like the conference please tell your friends about it to most propaganda that this will become a more and more exclusive type conference I do not want to have the conference bigger but I want to be a conference that will be clamorous to get to and the final announcement that I want to make is next year the conference will take place again most likely one week later so at the very end of May maybe a few days into June so if you like the conference please mark your calendar accordingly in due time the exact announcement of the exact dates will appear on our website now let's have fun again