 Hey everyone, welcome to Triple V, a show dedicated towards advancing the message of a free society. I'm your host, Mike Shanklin. Usually, we're only broadcasting on Liberty Movement Radio, 8 to 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time every Tuesday. We're also adding in Google Hangouts this week, so a few different ways to join us. Just remember, if you do come into the show, to please mute up your mic. Obviously, this is a round table, so there's going to be a lot of people in here. And sometimes we have to continually repeat the fact that we need people to mute up their mic. We need to handle that. We're all adults. We should be able to at least handle that one minor rule, not that I'm going to come tackle you and throw you in a cage over it. Anyway, today we've got Stefan Kinsella coming on for the first hour, and then the second hour we've got a mixture of a couple of different topics, Zeitgeist, Peter Joseph versus Malinu Debate, which is really something that's kind of been played out before. But I think obviously we need to rehash this since it's being rehashed. We need to go over it at least. But yeah, Stefan Kinsella is going to be on Zeitgeist's discussion. We have a few current events. Before we do any of that and bring on Kinsella, I first want to say hi to James and Robert Kruger. How are you guys doing? Hey, guys. James Couchwood, PacerProsperity.com, and it's great to be back from here. Doing well, Robert Kruger from We Were Deceived, and supposed to be here. Yeah, and it looks like Matthew. Are you here? Can you hear us? Oh, he's muted up, I think. No problem. Hey, good to have you here, man. I was going to say that. It's a strange looking Stefan Kinsella. Kinsella grew a beard, huh? Yeah. Good stuff. No, no, no. All right. So anyway, we actually have a show. So Stefan Kinsella will be coming on here any minute. I want to first, as a little intro to the show, kind of break it down with a little talk about the government shutdown. So obviously there's a lot of hype. People talking about the government shutting down. And really, to me, when I think of the government shutting down, I still see these politicians up here doing stuff. I still see people blocking off people. The government's still in some capacities operating, although it's not in another capacity. We kind of had this discussion last week, too. We kind of came to a consensus that, you know, it's, I guess, as good as anybody's going to take it. That's how good it is, right? So it's all about perception anyway in life. But one thing I'd like to highlight is that, you know, people that were supposedly forloaded and they were going to have no pay, now, at least some of them, a lot of them, are going to be getting back pay, right? So it's just like a long vacation for some of these people that are up in the government jobs. And you know, this is the thing. You're going to see some of these government jobs. It's not like Detroit, right, where Detroit doesn't have their own printing press. Detroit can't go into as much debt. It doesn't have the petrodollar backing up. So it doesn't have the monopoly control of currency like the U.S. federal government does. That's one important key I think we have to address right here. So in many cases, like with Detroit, where there was, they ran out and the pensions couldn't be funded. Well, this is a little bit different scenario, right? Because the debt ceiling limit, obviously, they can't take it to just, you know, if we took this reductive out of absurdum, they couldn't just take it to one gazillion dollars tomorrow, but they're going to continue to increase the debt enough to where they can fund it and justify it to everybody else and continue to drain the future and all of our grandchildren and the rest of the sadness that comes along with that unfortunately. But my thing is, you know, some people like, who was it, Corey just sent me an article about some firefighters in Belgium and how they were going on strike. And supposedly they had a strike. And I'm going to be making a smaller video on this tomorrow, but during the strike, they basically sprayed this foam on the police officers, the riot police officers. And the next day, supposedly the protest worked, they weren't going to have to come back and protest because the government was going to hear out their union or whatever. It's funny how government, you know, institution has to have a union in the first place, a little hypocritical, a little silly if you think about their economic reasoning for a government in the first place. But my whole premise on this is that it's a show because there are certain things that are going to work and certain things that aren't. So in other words, the firefighters in Belgium were going to get funded, right? They still have a good line of credit over there. They haven't ran out their grandchildren's credit cards nearly as much as, well, they have actually, they are living on a credit card in many Scandinavia regions. But my point is they are going to continue to get funded and what it does is it makes it look like a protest was actually successful, you know, like we had this one government thing. And my concern is that other people for a bunch of other tasks that will of course just be a waste of time and will never come to fruition, they'll end up wasting a lot of their time trying to seek some kind of political protest and thinking that it's going to help when really they could have been diverting their attention in a whole another manner outside of the system and educating people, I think on a deeper level, much more philosophical in my case at least. And obviously, you know, this is a distraction. So this is going to take away from people's, what I believe, what I believe obviously, you know, subjective theory of value states, you know, I obviously don't have the right answer per se, at least not for everybody. Maybe I do for myself, maybe I have wrong for myself, but right for somebody else. But I don't see any protests, literally the protests that we've seen politically come to fruition, they just usually don't amount to much. The people in charge of government are just going to continue to do what they want anyway. I don't think we're going to see a default on the debt on the 17th. They'll come to some agreement, you know, to make it so government all of a sudden come back together. This is the whole silly thing, though, is, well, look at the government is actually going to cost us more money stopping the government and shutting it down temporarily, and instead of just allowing it to go on, all the transitions costs that are going on inside of the system right now from telling people not to go and then having more people go out to guard memorials instead of just the regular guards who would have been there for when the memorials should be open anyway, right, and they're blocking off the beach and the rest of this nonsense. Anyway, I want to come back to that discussion, but when we come back, it looks like Kinsella just joined. Actually, there you are. How are you doing, Stefan? Good. Hey, good to have you on the show. So, listen, you know, we wanted to have you on the show because we have a variety of viewer questions. I want to give you a chance, and first of all, thank you for being here tonight. Obviously, you're taking time out of your own life, but I want you to kind of go over what you think maybe people need to hear. Obviously, we don't need to go through your whole life hood like we did on Triple V, you know, six months ago. People can always go see that first interview, but I'm more interested with anything new and current that you want to hit on before we get in to the viewer questions tonight and let alone not just the viewer questions I've recorded from Facebook, but also from live viewers tonight. Kinsella, can you hear me? I can't hear you. Can you guys hear him? I can. Try unmuting or change around your settings. Kinsella, you're not that old. I'm picking on you, buddy. All right, guys. Well, until he gets that fixed, let's talk about this. I don't think they're going to default on the 17th, just like I didn't think they were going to taper, you know, now in one case, you could say it was more politically advantageous than the other, but at the same time, I want to hear you guys' opinion on this whole government shutdown. Maybe somebody who didn't speak up last week and speak this week. Go ahead. I'm leaving the table. Kinsella, speak up whenever you get a chance and see if we can hear you. No, still can't hear you. I just want to say something that, you know, was brought to my attention today, apparently, in some park or something, this road that runs up to this hotel and the park was closed down. Did you hear about it, Mike? Yeah, I did. Wait, wait. Can you hear me now? All right. There's Kinsella. All right. Go ahead, James. All right. That's my fault because of the number of participants. So, sorry. Go ahead. All right. So, there's this hotel or something in the middle of this park or the side of this park and there's a road that runs up to it and they shut the park down because the hotel owners have a contract with the park, the hotel has to shut down. Even though people can get access off a road and there's traffic going up and down this road, they can't pull into this park because the government can't pull into this hotel because the government has shut down the park. I mean, it's absolute stupidity because the stupid contract, because the government is closed, it's stopping somebody that has a business, although they have a so-called contract with a so-called superstition, that they can't operate and they can't make money. And I believe that the owners of the hotel originally did shut it down but then decided to open it back up. Well, you know, this happens on another case, too. Some people actually, what does it mean, Lake? I forget the exact location or the name of the lake. These people basically have lake houses that are on federal property supposedly and I guess they have, you know, they bought the houses but the federal government supposedly claims, some claim at least on the problem. I mean, they try to claim everything but in this case, they literally took more of a claim in the deed and so these people can't even go back to these, what they viewed as their homes that they had bought outright until the government reopens. You know, it's just trying to make people's lives, you know, it's trying to make more trouble in their lives so that they want the government to be there to open up. Really, they don't, I think that they're trying to make this thing so it's, you know, a distraction in their lives and added pressure and waste of time but I think it's backfiring. I think a lot of people see right through this and they're like, we don't need you guys to close the beach and keep us out of fishing areas. You know, like, this is absolutely ridiculous. We never needed you in the first place and I think most people are starting to realize that. Cancela! All right, buddy, let's go into you tonight. So, my, maybe you didn't hear me earlier, I want you to kind of go over anything that might be new and current to you that you want to get off your chest before we go into the viewer questions and the live questions tonight. Interesting setup. Well, I just got back from Atlanta on Sunday. I was there for Jeff Tucker's Bitcoin conference and let me just say this. I found it very interesting as a long time 20-plus year libertarian that people were walking up to me saying, how long have you been into Bitcoin? Okay, they weren't saying how long have you been into liberty. They were saying how long have you been into Bitcoin. So, there's something going on here with Bitcoin, which is amazing to me. I'll just leave it there. People want to open the floor. That's fine. But I was at this conference and the enthusiasm of the crowd was amazing. I say 70-80% of the people were already libertarians. So, a good 20-30% were people that were not. And they were surrounded by people that are enthusiastic about libertarian ideas. But because of the common Bitcoin interest, they were being inundated with libertarian ideas. But just for people to come up to me and say, hey, how long have you been into Bitcoin? Which is the question I used to get about liberty kind of struck me and shook me a little bit. How long have you been into Bitcoin and do you dabble in Bitcoin and if so, how? Yeah, so that's the point. I was a speaker at a Bitcoin conference and honestly I'm not that much into it. I mean, I have some Bitcoins. But I was speaking on legal tender. That's what Jeff's idea was, Jeff Tucker's idea. And I even lost a bet about six months ago. I had bet a Bitcoin enthusiast, a friend of mine, that Bitcoin would collapse by now. But it wasn't because of my skepticism of the idea. It was because of my thinking that the state would have cracked down by now. So maybe I'm wrong that the state is more efficacious than they are. I don't know. Let's go ahead. What do you think about the regression theorem and Bitcoin in relation to it? Obviously, Bitcoin doesn't have an industrial use. But at the same time, somebody could argue that at one time gold didn't have an industrial use either. And so although I do think it makes more sense for gold to be money, at least as of right now from a historical standpoint, there's empirical evidence to back up gold and silver in these tangible precious metals such as those, not necessarily copper and iron or the rest of those, but specifically gold or silver. But why is there so much fuss over the regression theorem and Bitcoin? Is it that big of a deal? Because obviously it doesn't fit the regression theorem, correct? Okay, so this is – well, I talked about this with other people at the conference and in other contexts. So Mises's regression theorem is the idea – look, this is how I've always understood it, and I stand to be corrected. Mises was trying to show how it's possible to trace the current value of money, which is based upon a commodity, gold or silver, something like that. So he was just trying to break the infinite regression. So he showed that if you go back, back, back, back in time, it has an incremental sort of value, and you can reach a point where it has a non-monetary value. I do not think I have never been persuaded that Mises meant his theory to show that money can only be – that money can only arise from a commodity. I don't think he meant it to be a proof of that. At the time – this is in the early – I don't know – this is the mid-1900s. We were talking about commodity money. So I don't think he meant it to be anything else than a discussion about what was being used for money at the time. Rothbard later said that Mises had proved that only a commodity could be money. I don't think Rothbard's right. I don't think Mises meant to prove that. I don't think he did prove that, and I don't think he's correct. Now, I asked Hans Hermann Hoppe just two or three weeks ago, when I met him at a conference, about what he thought about Bitcoin. He had a Bitcoin panel at his PFS conference. I read the article. I read the article, you know. He had Roman Skestkoot speak, who's a great Bitcoin expert. He had a Q&A panel later, so he's aware that there's a debate. He is open to hearing about it. But I said, what do you think? He says, well, I don't think it's money. He didn't elaborate. I think he just meant it's not popular enough yet to be considered a main money. And he said that it doesn't violate the regression theorem in any case because it sort of had this collector's item type of value. Now, I don't know if he's right or wrong. I think he has a good point. But my view is that the theory has to fit reality, not the other way around. And if we can show that there's some monetary phenomenon that doesn't fit existing theorems, like the regression theorem, then we have to revise theory, not reality. So my view is that we have to always follow reality. And now I don't know if it violates it, but I do think it may need to be tweaked a bit to take into account phenomena that Mises and his contemporaries wouldn't have even thought to take into account when they were formulating their theories. So that's my take on it. I'm open to others. And if anybody wants to jump in, do so immediately because if I don't hear anything for a few seconds, we're just going to move on to new topics. So does anybody want to talk about Bitcoin before we move on? I can't hear you. Go ahead. I think you're having a problem with the mic. Yeah, hit the unmute button. I had the same problem. Hit the unmute button. Look on your screen. Yeah, it might be on the screen. Over the little video windows. Yeah, forget about it. I have the mute button on my... Anyhow, yeah. Sorry. No, I can't remember. Yeah, I remember what I was going to say. So if we define money as a medium of exchange, wouldn't Bitcoin follow under that definition? Because it is being used as a medium of exchange. People that wind up using it use it for that purpose. So maybe we should comment on that. Or should I say it's being used as a money, as a currency? Well, I mean, look, to my mind, money is a practical concept, right? The idea is that you have something that can be exchanged, so then it can be used as a medium of exchange, and then it can be used as a generally used medium of exchange in a given economy or region. So the question is, is Bitcoin being used as a medium of exchange? And I think it clearly is. Now, what it is is a question of debate. Like, what is the it there? What is Bitcoin? I mean, to my mind, there's been a little shell game played by the Bitcoin purveyors, and I don't mean that in a bad way, actually. I mean that in a good way. They call it a coin. They call it a Bitcoin, and they call it a currency. And so people start thinking of it in that way. But it's really just a ledger system, right? It's a distributed, encrypted, online ledger system. It correlates one thing with another. It could correlate any number of things. It doesn't have to correlate dollars or money. It could correlate anything. Stock ownership of a company, ownership of, you know, land, whatever. It could correlate a lot of things. The first use happens to be correlating owners with units of a given limited number of numbers, which is 21 million bitcoins, so called. And everyone assumes this is a money, and that's fine. So Bitcoin to me is just a ledger system, and it just correlates people with imaginary spaces that everyone agrees upon. It's part of a scheme. And again, I don't mean a scheme in a bad way. I mean it's a schema. It's a way of doing things. It's useful for people, and there's a network effect there. It's like Facebook. You know, Facebook is more popular than Google+, because more people are on Facebook than Google+. It's just the way it works. I want to say something here too, because I truly believe that for it to be a characteristic of good money, it has to be widely accepted. And as of right now, it's not... I mean, that's a subjective statement in and of itself. Like, what is, you know, like penetration? When do you hit this gray area? When is the gray area through? Is it 5%, 10% market share? I mean, of, you know, medium of exchanges. So I don't think it's got enough medium of exchange-ish characteristics to it, or enough people taking it to where I could personally classify it as a money. Although I don't know where it's going to go. It's a good experiment, right? Yes, it's not only that it's a good experiment. It's, look, I have friends that are into Esperanto. Do you know about this? Esperanto is a traditional language. But everyone misunderstands the goal of Esperanto. It's not to become the dominant language of the world. It's to become a dominant second language of the world. And I could see different monies becoming monies and being like Esperanto. So everyone says, well, only the geeks or only the libertarians or whatever we're going to use Bitcoin. Well, that's not really a detraction from its selling point. If only a certain, you know, 2% of the world's population use the given currency, that might be enough for it to exist. It could serve an Esperanto-like role in the background. So I wouldn't dismiss a currency just because you don't think it's going to displace the dollar or gold or become worldwide. It just has to be widely used enough to be a currency. All right, good stuff. All right, let's move on to a different topic here. I have to give a shout out to Juan Sebastian Ortiz Sebastian. He asks me to ask you, what are your main disagreements with Hapa, Rothbard, and Mises? Oh, that's a good question. Well, let's start with Mises. Mises was not, you know, a pure libertarian or a pure anarchist. So I guess I would disagree with Mises on his... Well, I would disagree with Mises on his belief in the state and the conscription, things like that. Well, he never called for the abolishment of it, did it? I don't think so. So, yeah, he's a little bit mainstream on those issues. For his time, he was great. Rothbard, it's hard to find things to disagree with him on because I'm an anarcho-capitalist in his mold. I probably would disagree with Rothbard on his political activism, that is his love of politics, that's in his private life as an activist, his involvement in the libertarian party. I don't vote, I don't believe in politics. I think it's pointless. I can forgive him of that. I can understand why he did that, but I don't agree with him on that. I also disagree with Rothbard on a couple of technical issues in political theory. I would disagree with him. I'm a little bit more Kantian influence than he is, a little bit more Misesian and Hopian, but that's more of a terminological issue, I think, than a substantive issue. But I don't know if I would agree with Rothbard on some of the way he put his inalienability views, that is his argument for why people cannot get out of contracts that they've agreed to. Actually, I think some of his writing is contrary to his other writing. So I agree with Rothbard 1 and not Rothbard 2, as you might call it. So I agree with Rothbard that in his contract theory, but I don't think he applied it properly himself. And this comes out most forcefully in his inalienable property views. Rothbard was correct to denounce patents, but in his attempt to justify copyright, I think he deviated from his own views on defamation law and contract law. So I would disagree with Rothbard on copyright and contract in that brief passage that he went into there. Papa, it's hard to find any disagreement with Hans. Hans and I are very kindred spirits. I don't have the same paleo-conservative emphasis, let's say. That's never been my specialty or my forte. I agree in theory with his immigration stuff, but I don't agree ultimately that the government ought to be empowered to do anything at the borders, because the government is ultimately evil. And I actually don't think Hans disagrees with that. Papa, excuse me. So other than that, I'm pretty much in line with Papa and then Rothbard and then Mises and their economic and political views. All righty. I remember if anybody wants to say something, just jump right in. Julian Ancap wants me to ask you, what are your plans for when things hit the fan? Expatriation, second citizen or sustained? Do you think there's going to be some kind of a big economic downturn? What about succession? Do you think that people get enlightened and accept property rights and volunteers after something happens to the monetary system? Well, I've never been a fan of the idea that the worse is the better. That is that we should hope for a big collapse in the hopes that the phoenix rising from the ashes would be some kind of libertarian order. I don't think that would happen at all. I think things would get worse actually in the aftermath of some kind of calamity. So the question really is, do I think or what's the realistic probability of some kind of calamity? I don't know. I don't think anyone really knows. People that pretended to know I think are full of shit. I think my guess is that it's going to be incremental. I don't think bad things are coming. Actually, I think good and bad things are coming. So I think that we're better off now than we were 100 years ago and 200 years ago in some ways. In most ways actually, not in every way. And I think actually that we can expect that to continue for the future even though things are getting worse in some ways. So I don't expect a mad max type collapse of society to come anytime in my lifetime. It could happen. It could happen and I wouldn't be too surprised. I wouldn't be happy because the day of reckoning could be coming and the argument is that it's better to come earlier than later. Well, I don't want to see it myself. I have friends that are survivalists. They have stockpiles of weapons and food, goods and survival skills. I just don't think that your goal in life is to live in a world where you can survive for four or five or six more weeks in a collapsing society than your friends. If society is collapsing and we're having roving bands and, you know, martial law and the collapse of Western society, I just don't see that having a bomb shelter with weapons is going to really be the difference between you and everyone else. So I guess I don't get into that philosophy. I understand people do. But I'm hopeful that technology and capitalism itself, the prosperity that we create is going to continue to outpace the government's attempt to stop it. I'm hopeful. I don't think it's a Pollyanna sort of wish. I'm not confident that it will happen, but it's my only hope and I don't think it's completely unrealistic. I mean, when I look at things like the quantitative easing and the stock market is basically being propped up, I mean, they're buying at least $40 billion in financial assets every 30 days, 31 days or so, you know? And that's really what's been pushing the stock market. It's been carrying a lot of the stock market's load recently. And, you know, what do you think about the Fed not tapering? Doesn't the show assign to you like they were bluffing in some respects? Or what do you think about like Peter Schiff and what he says about all this? Because I tend to agree with a lot of what Peter Schiff says, that it might not be a collapse, like tomorrow we're all just going to be in nuclear waste and drinking brown water. But I think it is we're going to take a pretty big hit in our standard of living. I think America is technically over. And that aspect where people think of that kind of freedom and prosperity, I think that kind of era is gone. But what do you think about the Peter Schiff scenario? I mean, people like him have been calling this stuff for a long time and the housing bubble happens. He called it years previous, just like other Austrian economists like us. I mean, you had an idea that there's all these bubbles going on. You've known that for a while, right? So there's got to be some thing at the end because the government can just come in here whenever they want and basically clamp down on almost any activity that they want. And it's getting to that point more and more and more. When I look back in history in the past, I see a lot of bad stuff, but I don't see quantitative easing like we are seeing now is astronomical. I mean, this is a practice they just started up in 2001, 2002 in Japan. And now it's happened to go to a lot of Western countries and it's really had a lot of detrimental effects. Even Japan's central bank at the time called it a failed policy and it hurt their economy and basically had a net effect of negative interest rates. And so it completely non-vested a lot of resources and I see the same thing happening here. I mean, don't you think that there's going to be some great loss of standard of living, I guess in the least? I actually don't know. I think that there are two trends going on. I think that you have the trend of the erosion of the standard of living by the government and you have the trend of the increase in productivity in the market and technology. Now I have a good friend named Vijay Boyapati. Vijay is a retired early Google success. And Vijay wrote an article which I published in my journal Libertarian Papers and he argues that the conventional Austrian view of inflation and deflation is there's something a little bit off with it because despite the dire warnings of the Peter Schiff types over the years we have not seen in our daily lives a significant price inflation and we have not. We have not seen in the last two, three, four, five years hyperinflation, which a lot of our contemporaries are calling for. And you can explain it away if you want to. You can delay your predictions but there's something wrong with the doom and gloom predictions of deflationism from the doom and gloomers. There's something wrong with it. I would just urge people to take a look at Vijay's article. It's an Austrian oriented retake on monetary phenomena and the way deflation works. I'm sorry to interrupt you there. I really want to talk about this for a second because a lot of when the government comes back and says the inflation rate is only 2.2% this year. They're not looking at the same. When they get the numbers for the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, they don't always take realistic numbers. I forget the exact categories that they were trying to take but then you look at the numbers today and what it costs and it doesn't cost anything like to what they're trying to say. When we just look at the CPI or even GDP as a whole, which is really not a good indicator, usually CPI right here for inflation, how do we trust the numbers that are being put out for us? It does seem to me that things are getting more expensive. I just paid $0.28 for what used to cost me just 10 years ago, $0.11 for a raw noodles packet. It might not be happening in gas but I think that has a lot to do with a lot more political pressures in OPEC and stuff like that. My concern though is I do see things somewhat increasing in prices around me. I'm not saying it's hyperinflation or anything like that but do you see at least stagflation coming down the road, a mixture of high unemployment with some type of inflation? Yeah, no. I don't disagree with anything you said. I do agree that the numbers are manipulated by the government. They're under-reported. We have more inflation than is being led on but the point is that the doom and gloomers who are claiming hyperinflation is coming, I just don't think you can argue for that. I mean it's not here. Now maybe it's coming but it hasn't come yet. There are five years behind the times. It's been since 2008. It's the last recession and the last great period of government pumping of the money supply and that followed on the previous one from about seven or eight years before that. So there's something wrong with the predictions of hyperinflation. I don't think we have hyperinflation now. We have inflation. It's maybe more than the government reports but I don't think we have hyperinflation. Hey, go ahead and mute up for us. Thank you, sir. Here's one thing too. Let's say they put some money into Bank of America this month for the financial assets. It's not that the money is technically getting circulated in the economy, right? So technically the helicopter drop hasn't really happened yet and that's what they're doing. They're actually creating things in a balance sheet to make it look like the company has assets because they're too big to fail or need to be stimulated or given some kind of financial backing to give them some kind of implicit trust, right? So that's what I see happening is that the dollars really haven't flooded through the economy. They're just kind of propping up a few companies here and there and they have not been dispersed per se out. They're supposed to be just sitting there, money that they can't use supposedly, in some cases, as like a bubble. Anyway, we have a lot of other topics and I only have you for about 25 more minutes and if anybody, remember, once again, wants to say something, please jump in. Try to make it quick. Quick explanation as to why the inflation problem is sometimes not clearly understood is the level of innovation that occurs in technology for the, in the case of oil, the innovation of fracking and so on has maintained lower prices than what we would have seen had the oil supply been coming from the same methodologies that they've been using, additional oil reserves and so on. But if you look at just a standard method that they used prior previously, I think it was, I don't know, it's 1982 or something like that, or before where they measured, how they measured inflation, we're somewhere between 8 and 11% of inflation per year, not two. I understand. Maybe that's somewhat explains though why it is that the numbers, I mean that we're not having the hyperinflation as much is the fact that we're getting more efficiency in the areas like certainly when it comes to the technology of computers, we saw price drops, price drops, price drops because of incredible innovation, but we could have seen much larger price drops in that particular sector, the same thing being said for oil and in other industries. Yeah. All right, Chase, no good stuff. Chase, volunteers, Rachel wants me to ask you to, and we have to have you kind of summarize this, I hate to have you rush through it, but explain the private production of law and order and contract enforcement in a free market society. Probably somebody who hasn't heard this before, this video is going to be viewed for all of history. Maybe you could espouse a little bit deeper on to that so that they could get a little bit better understanding. Yeah, I've seen him, he's on several of my Facebook pages so I'm not sure exactly what topic he's aiming at here, but in a general matter, you and I, I think, and most of your listeners, I would think, are anarchist libertarians. So we believe that the government, the state, the state should not have a monopoly over law and justice. So the idea is that in a private society, where you have a sufficient number of people who respect private property rights, then you could have a private property order. If you don't have enough people, then you just have chaos and you have death and destruction and mayhem and a war of all against all. So any society that's going to survive has to have a sufficient number of people that respect each other's rights and order and value each other in a certain sense. So the idea is simply that we have a critical mass of people that recognize the importance of private property rights, justice, fairness, and the basic libertarian principles which come into play there, which is the lucky an idea that the first person to own something or to use a resource that's unowned previously has a better claim to it than others, that you have the right to claim your own body, self-ownership, and that you can contract with other people and you can give these rights away by contract. If you recognize these two or three or four principles, then you get to the libertarian society which is a totally voluntary society of contract, association, commerce, interaction like that. Law would emerge as a more and more organized body of rules or principles that are useful in addressing conflicts or disputes over particular resources. So when two people, two or more people, have a dispute over the control of a given resource, including people's bodies, but primarily external resources, who owns this resource? Who gets to control it? Then we would settle the dispute by resort to the spinning out of the lock in rules on original appropriation and contract and trespass and legal rules would develop to answer these questions in more and more fine cases. So that's my view of the interaction between law and justice, let's say. Law is the application of abstract rules of justice to concrete situations. In the beginning, you would have to just ask a trusted expert like a judge, give us your best attempt to allocate who owns this resource. There's really nothing else you can do except that in those situations. But over time, you have more and more precedent arise, more and more legal rules develop that answer these questions that people start relying upon. Yeah, absolutely. President, right? Alright, so let's move on. Peter Mborski wants me to ask you, according to a stop-all theory, how long the duration of time is allowed in which to seek retribution for criminal trespasses? May it be sought out by third parties and or for all types of crimes, given they involve a victim, of course? So he's referring to a theory I've tried to adumbrate earlier on in my career called a stop-all, which is related somewhat to Hanserman Hoppe's argumentation ethics. And the idea is trying to set forth a theory of how we could justify the basic libertarian framework, which is the non-aggression principle, which means force is not permissible unless it's in response to force, but it is permissible in response to force. Okay, so that's what the question relates to. So I would say, first of all, there's no hard-and-fast rule in any kind of armchair, theorist scenario. You can't say you can only enforce retribution or even restitution for 10 years, 15 years. You can't come up with a hard-and-fast rule. You could say that in a given community, rules will develop. You could see why over time the attempt to enforce an old claim would be faced with more and more skepticism in the community, because, number one, well, why did you wait? Unless you have a good reason, why did you wait? Number two, the evidence is staler and more stale, right? I mean, the testimony of witnesses gets older and older, the witnesses are dying off, et cetera. So at a certain point, you could see that if you wait too long, your community is just going to be unwilling to participate in helping you to enforce this claim because you waited too long to enforce it, and with no good reason. I mean, if you're kidnapped for 50 years, you have a good reason, right? When you get out of kidnapped status after 50 years, then you can enforce your claim. And you can't be accused of waiting too long if you were kidnapped. But in most cases, there's a good reason to act quickly. So I think that a natural rule would emerge that the longer you take to a search or claim, the more difficulty you're going to have in enforcing it, either as a practical matter or as a matter of just the application of principles of justice. So I guess I can't answer the question. I don't agree with the Statutes of Limitation, which the questioner is asking about, I believe. That is, I don't believe in a government legislature passing a statute saying 30 years, 15 years, whatever. No hard and fast rule. I could see a number emerging as a result of custom or as a result of actual agreements. So let's say that you have two or three or four or five dominant defense agencies in a given territory of an anarchist society. You could see that they would say, listen, you sign up to be our customer. We will only protect you for claims that you assert within a certain timeframe because we just can't guarantee we can even do a good job at enforcing really old claims. So you could see these numerical standards emerging on the private market, either by custom or because of regional defense agency agreements. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And this kind of moves us on to the next topic here. When we're thinking about communes and defenses and communities and stuff like this, Brennan Shields wants me to ask you to have you at least discuss the difference between anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-capitalism, the way you see it. And why do Ancombs always blame everything the government does wrong on capitalism? Ancombs, well, I mean, I'm a libertarian, so I'm an anarchist libertarian. I don't claim to completely understand anarcho-communists. I think... I don't think you can. I don't think you can, honestly. Well, like they think of us, I think that they are inconsistent. I don't think an anarchist-communist is really... I think you have to choose. I don't think it can be both, because if you're a communist, you really ultimately support some kind of status organization. So I don't think that communists can never be true anarchists. Now, they may think the same thing about us. They may think that capitalists cannot be true anarchists, but that's fine. I'm happy to be an anarcho-capitalist and to represent that strand. So I guess I don't understand... Maybe I don't understand what question there is to answer, because I just don't think that... I don't think communists or socialists of any stripe are consistent or coherent. They don't have a coherent methodology to really respond to. They believe in something that we regard as evil and immoral and unjustified in various forms. Go ahead. I'm still trying to figure out what the hell the difference is between an anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalist. I don't see any difference. I don't either. They change their terms all the time, as far as I can see. They're not very clear in their definitions. Hey, whenever you're not talking, just go ahead and... Oh, that's Consellor's phone. Okay, never mind. No, good stuff. Sorry. It's alright. This is 2013, right? We have technology, it happens. Yeah, yeah. People ping us all the time. Yeah, sometimes you got to ping, right? Alright, so... You got to ping. That's right. Alright, Kyron Pearson. He should be joining us. I don't know, maybe later on the night, he's supposed to be here earlier. He wants me to ask you what the mechanisms for the validation and enforcement of property rights are. So what are the mechanisms for the validation and enforcement of property rights? Okay, so a couple of thoughts here. First of all, I will say that my thought on this has changed over the years. I am much, much more sympathetic and open to the idea of some kind of private ostracism-based system than I used to be. The reason is because, look, if you talk about using force to defend rights, which I do agree with, I do believe people have the right to use force, ultimately, to defend their rights. The problem is one of efficacy and one of justice and one of knowledge, right? I mean, if you actually... In the middle of an act of crime, you really have no choice, unless you're a severe pacifist, you have no choice but to use force to defend yourself. And there are very few humans who would disagree with that. But after the fact, what do you do in the aftermath of an act of aggression? Trespass, rape, murder, robbery, whatever. You can try to restore the victim using restitution. Even that requires force. You have to actually seize property from the criminal. Now, if it's the actual property he took from the victim, that's pretty easy to justify. But let's face it, in most cases, a criminal is a complete loser who has no resources to take. Okay? Even if you enslave criminals, you put them in jail, try to get money from them, you're not going to get much money back because these guys are basically losers. So the question really is one of retribution. Can you capture a criminal and is it legitimate to torture and kill and maim him just to get satisfaction, even though you don't get anything back from it in terms of restitution? And I think that you can make a case for that. You can argue that you have the right. The problem is, number one, it's expensive to do this. Number two, you could be wrong, right? So no matter how good our justice system is, there's always the possibility that we're making an error, a mistake. We have to recognize that. And I find it hard to believe that you're going to have a future advanced, civilized, peaceful society that has institutions organized to kidnap and literally torture and kill people against their will. Because if nothing else, there's a chance that they're making a mistake. I just don't see that happening. I see that happening on a more ad hoc basis. Someone just can't get over the damage done to their family by some bizarre criminal and they just go off the reservation and they just go crazy on their own. They go kill the guy. And everyone turns a blind eye and says, fine, we're not going to penalize this guy. He violated the rules. I just don't see it being institutionalized. From my study of history and human nature, a much better system would be one where we have restitution in a enforced by ostracism. That is, you have social rules. It's very valuable to be part of society, right? And if you just don't follow by the rules and you get ostracized because of that, that's a big penalty. And that penalty is not unjust like it would be to, you know, literally impose an eye for an eye type punishment on someone who may be innocent. So even if you're wrong in a given case and you say this guy did this, you still give him a way to integrate back into society. And he knows that that's part of the game of being in society. So I guess I believe that in a future society that's advanced, you would have very little need for self-defense because you'd have very low crime. On occasion, you would have self-defense employed for the crimes that happened. And for the other crimes that happened or for the aftermath of the crimes that happened, that some kind of ostracism system, sort of like the Law Merchant or like happened in ancient Ireland or ancient Iceland as explored in works by David Friedman or Murray Rothbard or Gerard Casey in his recent book, Libertarian Anarchism, would be the most feasible system of workable human justice. Well, didn't you know that ostracism is structural violence? Sorry, I had to take a sting, it's that guy's there. Alrighty, so no good answer. I completely agree with you. Lars Goren Anderson, really good friend of mine over on Facebook, he wants me to ask you, is the government propaganda less effective these days or is he just fooling himself with wishful thinking? I don't know. I think it's going in two directions at once. I guess my slightly optimistic take would be that it's less useful than previously because people sneer at, make fun of the government, they know the government's full of SHIT. When they see government propaganda at the beginning of movies like, you know, you wouldn't steal a car so why would you steal this movie? People make fun of it more and more. On the other hand, government education is more and more entrenched and that's probably the primary source of government propaganda is government education, government schooling. So I don't know where the trends are. I do sense an increasing cynicism. I also sense, in my personal experience, an increasing appeal of libertarian ideas, pro-technological, pro-liberty ideas. Let me look at the Ron Paul movement, for example. There's some reason that we have an order or two of magnitude more appeal among young people now than we did, you know, a generation or two ago. There's a reason why the war against Syria and Iran, maybe, is much less popular than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan just to have a generation ago. So there seems to be an increasing cynicism on the part of the people, which I can only think is a good thing. Do you believe that the non-aggression principle applies to children? Absolutely. Absolutely. I have no compunction whatsoever to say that. I do not believe. I think that children are self-owners in a certain sense as soon as they're born, maybe even earlier if you want to get into the abortion issue. I think that parents... This is one disagreement I have with modern libertarians is that we say that we are totally opposed to the idea of positive obligations because there's only negative obligations because of any monetary conduct. And I think having a child is a type of action that is voluntary in most cases that gives rise to a human being who has certain natural needs and the parent is naturally responsible for the needs of the child. And those include food, shelter, education, love, caring, and non-abuse. Now, I do think that parents have wide latitude and should have wide latitude in making decisions on behalf of their child because they are presumed to be the agent for their child. But if it gears off into some area where we can presume that the child wouldn't consent to it like abuse or genital mutilation or whatever, at that point in time, the parent has abused their role as a caretaker for the child and they lose that right and someone else could homestead or start taking care of the child for them on the child's behalf. Yeah, I completely agree. I wanted a quick comment on that. Wouldn't you say that it's essentially an implicit contract similar to going into a restaurant ordering a cup of tea if you're going to pay for that cup of tea even though they didn't have you sign a contract ahead of time? If you're going to go into the process of having a child, you have signed an implicit contract that you're going to make sure that that child is not going to die. It's like quasi-homesteading, in my opinion. Well, I'm not sure I can get where your point is there on that, Michael. I think it's a different point. But if the parent, say, takes the child to the orphanage, for example, they've fulfilled their obligation as it was necessary for the implicit contract to see that the child is cared after. But they don't necessarily have an obligation to feed, clothe, love, shelter the child. They do have an obligation to make sure that the child is fed clothes through whatever methods that they do by the orphanage thing because of an implicit contract. So I can only go so far into detail on this tonight. But let me quickly say, to my mind, contract technically means the transfer of title to property. And it's not exactly... I do agree that it's analogous to the situation you're talking about. But a contract should not be viewed as a binding set of promises. A contract is just a transfer of title to property. The analogy actually to the case of a child is who has the right to consent. Because contract is about consent. Who gets to use a piece of property? The owner gets to use it. In the case of your body, which is the ultimate property, in a sense, the person himself gets to make a decision. But in some cases where the person himself is incapacitated or doesn't have the capacity to make a decision now or in this given state, the question then is, who do we assume that he is designated or allocated the right to speak for him to, right? Which would be his guardian, his caretaker. And in the case of the child, I think the natural answer is that the parent is presumed to be the guardian of the child. In the case of contract, what that means is the parent is presumed to be the one who speaks for the child on the child's behalf and can consent to things the child could consent to if you were more aware or more functional, whatever. Like, a parent can consent to, you know, a tonsillectomy for the child if it's necessary for the child's health, which would otherwise be a type of invasion, right? In other words, cutting someone's body open would otherwise be a type of aggression. The child could consent to it, which means it's not aggression, and the parent can consent on the child's behalf. Now, if the parent consents to something else, genital mutilation, or starts actually hitting the child, committing aggression, at that point in time they may vitiate the presumption of consent, the presumption of guardianship. So it's like an implicit contract, except that it's not a transfer of title. It's more of an ongoing consent to certain things being done to the body and the parent stands in a relation that it's the guardian for the child. All right, if I may, can I? Go ahead, Gordon. I have a question. So you were talking about contracts here as well. While we're talking about contracts, in order for contracts to be valid, doesn't there also have to be consideration, or if there's lack of consideration, then contracts wouldn't be valid also? Okay, so James, what you're talking about is the English common law evolved view of contract, which says that you can only have a contract. In general, I'm talking about understandings. Both parties have to understand fully and then be in agreement that what's about to transpire before agreeing to it, that everything is brought in to the equation of how these things are coming about, what's actually happening in the background, and things like that. I agree with you on that. Consideration is the doctrine that you have to give something in return for a promise to be binding. And I actually don't agree with that. I think the common law is wrong on that. I don't think there's any basis in the Rotarian law for that. The idea is that, in fact, it's become a mere formality. So if you want to promise to pay me $1,000 in a year to make that promise enforceable, I need to give you something back. So I might promise to pay you a dollar. Now, it's basically zero in comparison to what you promised to pay me. The law calls it a mere peppercorn. Literally, they use the word peppercorn. But what they say is a peppercorn is enough to give consideration. So they're trying to go through these formalities that the common law is imposed to make the contract to be something given for something else. Otherwise, it's a mere donation, a mere gift. Now, I see nothing wrong as a libertarian with a gift. I see nothing wrong with the unilateral transfer of title, with the civil law, the other great legal system, the Roman law, the civil law, the European law, the continental law, we call it, doesn't require consideration. It does require what we call cause. You have to have a reasonable basis for entering into this obligation. I take, as opposed to the civil law and the common law view, I take the Rothbardian and the Evers' view of contract as being basically a consequence of the right to own title to alienable material resources. And the owner then has the ability to transfer that by consent to someone else. So to my mind, contract is simply the exercise of power of an owner over a scarce resource to either give someone temporary or permanent right to use it. So for example, if I invite you to my home for dinner, I'm giving you license or permission to use my home. If I lease an apartment to you for a month, in effect, you have ownership of that apartment for a month. You can live there for a month. I've given you temporary ownership for a month. If I give you a life easement or a life estate or a servitude over the property you're on for the rest of your life, you have a life servitude. You have the right to use it for the rest of your life. So there are different ways of dividing ownership by contract. So to my mind, contract is about that. It's not about consideration. It's not about reciprocal promises. It's not about binding promises. It's only about the transfer of title to alienable material resources. Good answer. All right. Hey, we got one more question. That last one was asked by Savo Gajic. I'm sorry if I pronounced that wrong. This new question is by Anzac Joseph Trevor Marier. And they want me to ask, what are your views on free trade agreements? Well, of course, I'm generally in favor of anything that moves us towards a more free trade society, including incremental reforms. I'm not opposed to incremental reforms. I'm not someone who says all or nothing. If you want to lower income taxes by 1% tomorrow, I would be in favor of it. I don't think it's enough, but I'm in favor of it. I'm also in favor of anything that unambiguously moves us in a more free trade direction. I would not be unambiguously in favor of a change to the tax law or to the free trade law that penalized some people and helped other people. So for example, if we lowered taxes tomorrow by 1% on the bottom, 80% of earners, and it raised it by half a percent on the others, you'd have to say that's good and bad. It's not all good. It's not all bad. The problem with free trade agreements like NAFTA is that they are not unambiguously good. In fact, there's a recent example of this, which is that there's an American pharmaceutical company. I forget their name. It's just the news a day or two ago. They have sued the government of Canada under the NAFTA provisions of investor state disputes because they were denied a patent on one of their pharmaceuticals in Canada, and they're suing Canada for $500 million because Canada didn't give them a patent. Now, what does this mean? This means that there's an agreement that the United States foisted upon Canada. Which forces Canada to submit to this potential liability of up to a billion dollars because Canada didn't grant a patent, a monopoly to an American company who wants to be protected from competition in Canada. So because Canada refused to grant them a monopoly to protect them in competition, they're going to sue them under the so-called free trade agreement called NAFTA. So I guess my problem is that I don't actually believe that these free trade agreements or really free trade agreements, just because they're called free trade, they're basically mercantilism and they're managed trade instead of free trade. If you really want free trade, you can do what the United States government has in our Constitution, which is a single sentence outlawing discrimination between states. You can have a one-sentence NAFTA which says that there's free trade between Canada and the US. You really do not need a 1,000-10,000-page document to do it. It's very, very, very easy and simple. You just basically outlaw discriminatory taxes and tariffs and trade embargoes and you have free trade. It's very simple. Obviously, they don't want that, which is why we have these long agreements. Absolutely. Great answer. That's exactly my thoughts. I've expounded on that same ideology numerous times. This is literally the last question so I can tell. We've got a lot of people. Willie G. Chino wants me to ask you, how does the growth of technology fit into a libertarian society and why not apply human and behavioral sciences to social concern? If we apply human sciences to society, we would quickly agree that competition is bad, right? That's the question. Go ahead. Michael, why don't you take this one? It's a little bit odd to maybe Robert can take it, someone else. Absolutely. I don't agree with the premise of the question. The premise is completely wrong. I agree with that. I'm the messenger, so don't shoot me. Go ahead. Let's just go ahead and look at the idea. We've got two different things. We've got cooperation and competition. Those are the only two things that you can really have, right? Am I missing anything there? Is there anything out there that exists besides cooperation and competition? Well, you have violence, right? I mean, you could have actual violence. I don't know if that's competition or cooperation. That would be competition. You'd be competing to see who's more violent or capable of violence. Okay, fine. Now, the question comes then, well, let's go ahead and cooperate. Great. Well, what's the best way to do that? I don't know. I think we should hold a competition to see how we should cooperate. That's what capitalism is. It is a competition between different groups that find ways of cooperating with each other to provide a product or service in an efficient way. And the ones that do it who cooperate better are the ones that people support and the ones that cooperate less efficiently do not get support. And if you don't have a competition to see which cooperation method is most effective, you'll never know which one you should be using. And so much more efficiency is made by having a competition to see which cooperation method you want to use than you would if you just said, well, let's just go ahead and cooperate in a willy-nilly whatever fashion you would like. I like Robert's answer. I endorse that. No, I mean, that's definitely the way I would answer that as well. Does anybody else want to say anything? Anybody? Cox? How about you, Cox? No. I'm not getting Cox tonight. Alright, anyway. Yeah, me? No, I mean, I agree. I mean, there has to be volunteer mutual, you know, consent between the people. And if it's, you know, if it's not productive to do something, then there's no point in doing it. I mean, it's like, do you take a spade and dig a, you know, a acre of land? Or if there's an alternative way of somebody being able to do it, you know, a lot quicker and less labor intensive, and you still, you're going to get, you know, something out of it, you know, just the same thing, you know, do you opt for that? It's, you know. Here's my answer, too. I think that because we're individuals, right, if we're going to argue from argumentation ethics anyway, let's do this from a practical logical root, we do have, we know for a fact that people do not do the same thing all the time, right? So, in other words, the Action Act seem to be stating that we believe that we're all doing things differently because we believe that's the next rational thing in our lives to do. It might not be, but we're perceiving it that way at least, or at least subconsciously. And that natural difference between people, we are all unique individuals, we are all free autonomous individuals. The very fact that we think differently and act differently I think lends to the ideal that you're going to have differences in opinions, and because of those differences, you're going to come to this point where you're going to have to have this divergence and people are going to take their own different routes, and there's nothing wrong with that. And nobody is saying in capitalism, you can't work together either, right? I've always argued that you can have an anarcho-communist inside of capitalism, but you cannot have capitalism inside of an anarcho-communist society, so I think that's one important point to at least take away from that. I think anything anybody wants to add on that before we get off that topic? Yeah, I think the confusion of the question has to really do, the only way the question makes sense, I think the question of confusing the economic definition of competition with more of a definition that you would find like in a karate class or something where you have two people competing, sparring against each other directly, and in economics companies aren't directly competing with each other, they're almost indirectly competing with each other by providing services, providing products and services for an exchange of prices. And what's nice with that is as we have more substitutes in the economy, it makes it so that one company might be able to do other things, and so you're having a bunch of different products by a variety of different companies, so it's not like just one company is doing one thing, and I think that even though there is a good side of division of labor and specialization, that we also have that other aspect where you have all these substitutes out there, and that they kind of all overlap each other, so it's hard to just fight against one thing out there. You can't just fight against laser printers, there's also ink jets and everything else, right? So let alone writing paper and digital notepads and stuff like that. So anyway, Kinsella, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. I don't want to let you go, honestly. You're kind of like my hostage, but if you're going to run away, you can. We have 45 minutes left in the show, and we do want to go on to other topics. Do you plan on sticking around or do you have to take off? I can stick around a little bit longer. Hey, take off whenever you have to. How's that sound? That's fine. Awesome. So the topic I want to go over next is obviously, Stefan Malno and Peter Joseph had a pretty big debate the other day. Pretty big if you're into one of those two camps, I guess I should say. And I want to first start off with my opinion of what happened with that, and then we'll kind of spun off there and see what you guys have to say on my side notes. But I think that Malno did a really good job. Obviously, I'm going to defend Malno. Obviously, I'm an anarcho-capitalist, so don't underestimate my bias, but at the same time understand that I do think it comes from a rational perspective. Now, many times throughout the conversation, Malno was trying to pin down Peter Joseph into definitions, because if you're going to have a debate, before you can debate somebody, you have to be on the same etymological base, right? So if you're going to go into an argument with somebody like an anarcho-communist, you have to agree with what the word capitalism means coming into that before you can progress off of that into a debate. And I think Malno, maybe not at the very beginning, but he slowly realized he was going to have to do this. Understand this about 10 minutes, 15 minutes into the conversation, and really take a big turn into trying to at least get some definitions out there that are solidified. And Peter Joseph was unable in my analysis to come up with strict definitions that are actually going to be definable by numerous people and shared by other people. So to me, when he comes up with words such as structural violence, it is so vague, it's kind of like the labor theory of value, right? Well, the labor theory of value is debunked because of the subjective theory of value, which states that we don't know. Everybody else's preference values and utility. So because of that, we have to understand that there is no one set quantitative number, right? And I think it's important to realize also that when we're looking at Peter Joseph, it's always attacking the market and trying to bring the market back into the realm of the state, right? Always trying to just conflate the two and saying that there is no dichotomy between a free market and a state, and that the free market is the state and the state is the free market, and that one breeds the other, and even though they are somewhat different in his mind, that they come back and have the same group. Well, I completely disagree with that whatsoever because a free market by definition is no state, is no government, and it doesn't make sense that it would lead back into, this is kind of like the fear mongering that you hear from people when you say, well, there really is no need for a state. Well, they say, well, there's going to be one. There's going to be another one that pops right back up, don't you know? We're always going to be centrally planned. Really, even in the year 50,000, even in the year 1 million, what about on planet Mars or other planets when they start developing those, right? So to me, it seems like a pretty bunk argument from the zeitgeist perspective. The whole time, it really comes back down to battling scarcity and the reality of the world, right? There's only a certain amount of resources, and that's why people I consult call them rivalrous, or economists call them rivalrous goods is because there's only a certain amount of these tangible items out in the world that we can share or use or utilize, whatever you want to say. And because of that, there just happens to be some hardship, right? We can't just blink our eyes and boom, we have a ham sandwich just sitting there with all the mayonnaise put on top of it and everything. So we're going to have to have some form of production, let alone before we produce the, you know, put the meat with the bread and the dressings, we have to actually grow the wheat and harvest it and all the rest of that, right? And we can go into the whole pencil discussion here and how spontaneous order helps people interact, people that might hit each other if they would have met each other, different religions, different races. Not that it matters to me because I really don't care what race you are or religion you are, but some people who might feel that way, getting a Muslim and a Jew to work together would be impossible, but somehow they work together all across the world to make a number of pencils, right? So my whole point is that spontaneous order actually breeds not really this hated competition like we were just talking about, but more of that cooperation competition in which you're not trying to attack any one direct industry, unless you obviously have an oligopoly and then you're only fighting against another. In that case, you might try to form a cartel through a government or some legislation, but in essence that you're going to try to just be a better company and try to bring more people into you than the thousands of open competitors that are not only active right then, but that could spawn up the very next minute in a free economy, obviously, other people could just join into the market whenever they want, right? So in theory here, Peter Joseph, I think, because he conflates the free market and the state, he can't understand all the varying differences in the dichotomy between the two, which we obviously clearly understand. I want to hear anybody's rebuttal to that, and we can take it from there. Well, I'll be happy to do the Peter Joseph rebuttal position. Oh, you, Robert, no way! Although I completely disagree with Peter Joseph's overall ideas and so on, there's so much to disagree with. I would say that Stefan definitely did not do a good job. His responses were based upon his cookie cutter version of what it is that he kind of like believes that RBEs are about and that he was responding to attacks that he hears from other groups. He uses his standard response to those arguments. What he would see is possibly like maybe a liberal, modern liberal or Democrat coming at him with some sort of argument against the capitalistic system and making a very big claim about it, and then he would come back and say, well, no, how is it in any way a warlike argument when your goal is to plead, he specifically responded with, you have to be concerned about your customers and what they want in order to maintain a successful business in response to Peter Joseph's position that it is a fight type of scenario. Realistically, Stefan's not exactly looking at what the understanding was behind it, which is let's say that you're going to hire a plumber. Well, you're going to want to get the best plumbing services that you can possibly get for the lowest price possible, but then also if you're the plumber, you're going to try to get the most money you can possibly get without putting in possibly the least expensive materials that you can while still gaining a referral for doing a good job. You want to do as good a job as necessary to make the customer happy, get as much money as you possibly can, but not put in more effort than is necessary to do that. So it is kind of like a competition between the buyer and the seller. And then you also have the fact that a company that is selling androids, let's say Samsung, and a company who is selling androids, let's say Motorola, both of them are in essence fighting it out over which customers they can bring in to buy their products. So in the case of Stefan's response to that, it was not really addressing his Peter Joseph issue. And I think what Peter Joseph's issue primarily was is that if we live in a universe or a world where people when they're born, at some point they stop getting given food and sustenance and shelter from their parents and they start to move into a world of, well, you're going to have to fight to stay alive. And especially like if you are a parent, you've got to make damn sure that your kids are fed and that's the most important thing to you that your kids are taken care of. So you'll do whatever it is that you have to because you're in this oppositional world where you believe that in order to succeed, you have to do better or get the best that you can deal out of an arrangement with somebody. And it's this competition fighting, infighting kind of thing that occurs there. And he says that it's not necessary because we can change the environment such that you will have excess food, excess water, excess shelter, excess X, Y, or Z with 3D printers and all this other stuff, which is all good, fine and dandy, but realistically there's going to be one super mega hot girl which every guy wants to have. And then you still have that competition goal, that competition oriented response that occurs. And not only that, the land also, you're only going to have one half dome and time is relevant too, we only have a certain amount of time. Right, if you're going to go to a music, let's say you're going to go to a concert, there's only so much space that you can stand in to cheer your particular artist. So how are you going to eliminate that? Well maybe you create 3D virtual concert stadiums, but then you can't shake the hand of the person that's there. Well maybe you create holograms that have photonic whatever that they do in the holodeck on Star Trek to create that, okay. No matter what you do, you still can't get time to not be scarce. I guess theoretically if a person is immortal, then perhaps you have time not being a scarcity, but then it's this time that's the scarce thing. The thing that you're going to do in this very moment, you can only do one or two or three things. You can't do that other thing at the same time. So when Stefan did not respond to that, he really missed the mark there. I think he could have gone into that. Agreed. Let me ask. I actually only saw myself the beginning of the response by Peter Joseph, and then I saw the beginning of the original debate. I haven't heard the whole thing yet. So what exactly, what is that, guys? What is this guy's social, what is his basic... Communism with robots. Communism with robots. I mean, that's basically it. What it is, I mean, there is a little bit of confusion I think even with that, say communism with robots. What they're saying is that with the resources that's available today, that we can use computer systems to see what's available in like a warehouse and system, and that these goods can be transported as and where needed as an exchange, right, to make sure that there is no famine that everybody's taking care of in the world, that, you know, in this context. I mean, when the Venus Project, when Peter, I believe it was when... I liked Zeitgeist 1 and I liked half of Zeitgeist 2 until he got into talking about the Venus Project, and you and I spoke about this, Mike, when we were discussing Venus Project and, you know, Zeitgeist 2, and we said, you know, you and I had a discussion, we said, this is central planning. This is where you put everybody, you know, into a, you know, city and, you know, you have, you know, you have schools and everything's done and it's all done by computers. And at that point, yes, robots did things in the Venus Project. I don't think it's so much in RBE, in resource-based economy, I believe if you go and look on the web that there has been a fallout between Zeitgeist and Jack Fressel, which is the architect from Venus Project, you'll see that there's been a separation of... Right, right, but the thing is, you know, the people who believe in the computer system, they're basically trying to say, we want interco-communism, but without any rulers, the computer is going to be the ruler, but the problem is who creates the writing of the software? Who controls the software? Who controls the computers? And, you know, you and I have always said this from the beginning. I've said that, no, I want to be able to control, you know, if I want to grow food in my own yard. I had a radio show and some guy who was part of Zeitgeist or Jack Fressel's crew, when it was together, who was a scientist over in Florida, from NASA, came on and said, so you're saying that there's no cars or anything like that? What do I do if I want to go into the country? I want to drive into the country. Oh, well, you would put an order in for one and somebody would deliver it and then you would drive out to the country and when you come back it would be returned. So, basically, my independence is determined on putting an order in. My independence is putting an order in to borrow something, so I can go out. To me, it's kind of two control types of things. What I wanted to say about the actual discussion between Peter Joseph and Marlon Ewell, and I want to agree, you know, with some of what Robert said, that what he said, I think as well there should have been a moderator. I think sometimes throughout the conversation there was cross-purpose talk. I guess Joseph is talking about the here and now and this whole thing about a free market, it's the free market that's created this. No, I'm sorry. Anybody struggling in a free market should be able to drag a grill to the roadside and start cooking food. And we know that that ain't happening. You can't even go downtown and feed homeless people. You can't even give them food because you'll be arrested for it. Let alone drag a grill. If you don't have money to pay the enforcers for a license and go through all the bullshit regulation that they want you to do, you can't even do that. There's nothing free about that. And that's what a free market does. A free market allows somebody to take care of themselves and let others have choice whether they're going to exchange goods with you on a voluntary, mutual consensual basis or give you money in order to purchase things. And so this idea of the state, the capitalism that created the state, I totally disagree with that. I think in the debate, and I'm going to finish it with this, in the debate, Joseph was talking about the here and now with the state and stuff, which, you know, yeah, there's a lot of shit that's going on in the world. And Malinu, everything Malinu was talking about was a state or society which has not happened. So coming across like that, anybody that doesn't understand voluntarism or RBE, that have never, you know, they're just watching this, it must come across really confusing to them if you go back and watch the debate. It must be talking like, what are these two people talking about? Because it's not, they're both not in the same time frame. It comes back to the definitions not being defined. Exactly. Poor communication on both sides there. Sometimes Peter Joseph gets into the word salad thing, you know, making up to his own definitions and so on. But the thing is that Stefan has actually made arguments that are basically kind of following the same logic that Peter Joseph did. That he says that if you have a society that's built upon violence and accepted violence by your children who they grow up knowing that the big mom, big dad can hit me and tell me to do stuff and I must follow that gives you a predisposition to understand your world as a violent environment. So anyway, Peter Joseph's suggestion on that same thing was, you know, that if you have this need-based society where you're always trying to come and get it and take it in order to survive, if you're in fear for your life, for your children's lives, that you're going to create whatever institutions that are necessary to make sure you're provided for and that your children are provided for, such as government. And so, it's the same kind of argument. Anybody else want to go? Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, whatever. Federal, what I seem to get from Peter Joseph at the end was, or more toward the end of the debate, seemed to hint at more of his idea that of a democratic socialism with computer. But it could be the same damn thing as communism. But anyhow, what I care to have the problem with the debate, or Peter Joseph, and number one, you can tell, he makes up words out of his ass that nobody's ever heard of, but he does it specifically to bamboozle, and it's odd that he thinks he's intelligent, it seems. But he keeps on going through the debate, he keeps saying, well, the problem with capitalism is that it, based on the idea that stuff is on scarcity, and he said that this, and it's needless, the idea of scarcity is needless, it doesn't need to be scarcity, it doesn't have to be. But he never goes into how or why it is needless, or why it doesn't have to be the way he said it is. He thinks capitalism, he thinks that nature just creates scarcity, but that it's not supposed to be that way, right? So it's like, well, the free market is going to create scarcity through planned obsolescence. Well, it doesn't say it's not supposed to be that way, okay, fine, but it doesn't have to be this way, or that people are, that we have famine and all of that, all needless, needlessly happening, things are scarce, needlessly so, but he never actually makes an argument. He just makes statements and just moves on. He doesn't tell you why his statements are true whatsoever. There's no rational basis of why I should take an argument as an argument. Who else wants to respond to that? Go ahead. Okay, sure. So I was going to say that, of course, Joseph goes on to make all these assumptions that we're already in a state of post-scarcity, so that he thinks that we're living in a world of post-scarcity where there's all these resources and there's all these people, so therefore we should move the resources from here to here. But like you guys mentioned, it's just the aspect of time that isn't scarce, right? We're never going to achieve a situation of post-scarcity. We're always going to be in scarcity because of the fact of time. And I was also going to say that he thinks that just that it's human nature, like it is human nature to be competitive, but he believes in this idea that capitalism is just this exploitative market system, right? That one person can gain at the expense of other people. Well, that's just not the case, right? It's a win-win situation when people trade, and he just clearly just doesn't understand that the only way that you can exploit someone is basically through violence or fraud, right? Whereas if you make an exchange peacefully, both sides are winning in the exchange because they both value what the other person has. So I think that's one of the main points that, I mean, Malano could have easily brought that up, and I was a little frustrated watching it how there were so many of these arguments that you could have made about post-scarcity, time, and capitalism not being exploitative. It was just frustrating to see Molly and you're not bringing them up, but yeah, that's it. Yeah, no good stuff. And here's my question, right? When we look at the economic definition of scarcity, scarcity technically says when the price of something, even Mista said this, when the price of something falls to zero. Now my question is, you know, obviously there is a scarce amount of sand in the beach, right? Because you might not be able to count it all or even divide it up, but there is a finite amount. It doesn't go on forever, right? We haven't beaten metaphysics or physics that much, right? So my question, I guess, to Kinsella here, if Kinsella is still with us and listening, I think you are. I'm here. All right. I have a question about scarcities by definition. How do you define scarcity? Well, I think that in the, in economic reasoning, scarcity basically means the same thing as what's called rivalousness, right? It means some kind of resource that the consumption of it means someone else can't consume it at the same time. Or that there could be conflict over it, rivalry. You can think of it as the limit of the lack of abundance, right? When we have plentifulness in a given resource, like let's say bananas. We have a lot of bananas. Even if you have a virtually infinite number of bananas, you don't have a non-scarcity in bananas. But you have basically plenitude of bananas. But at the limit, if you have so many bananas that you can just reach another banana whenever you want one, it's the same thing as having an infinite number of bananas because you're never without one, right? I mean, that's the purpose of a resource is to satisfy human need to be used as a means in some action. So I think there's a, the common sense concept of scarcity, which is lack of plentifulness, lack of abundance. It blends into the economic concept of scarcity or rivalousness at the limit. So I guess I would say that the essential normative purpose or social purpose of property rules is to permit us to use resources in the world that are scarce, scarce means, rivalous means by assigning property rights to them that specify who gets to use these resources. Okay? So it's really simple. If there's anything that could be conflicted over, then we could have a conflict over it and we want to have the answer to the question, who gets to use this resource? That's what property rights specify. Who gets to use a resource? In every system, whether it's Peter Joseph or someone else's, every system has an answer to the question. The question is what's the right answer? In other words, what's the right way to answer that question? And we have a particular way of answering it. We go by lock, homesteading, appropriation, contract, and tort. That's how we decide the answer to the question. Other people have a different answer. They go with majority rule or with stronger guy gets it or whatever. We regard those as a type of theft or a type of injustice. So the question is always we identify a given resource which could have more than one user over which the conflict can be possible. And we simply have an answer to the question, who is the rightful user or owner of this resource? Yeah, good stuff. And you know what, I think when we go back to this whole scarcity argument, we have to look at what has been reducing scarcity, right? Only the market answering to the subjective, I want to mention this real quick, subjective wants and needs of the individuals, only through that can they reduce and has reduced scarcity. So government can only redistribute wealth, right? It doesn't really, in fact, it will destroy wealth, let alone not even making it. Usually at the best it can only redistribute wealth. So when people think that, oh well, without government we wouldn't have mail services. No, what they've done is monopolized a lot of things and made a lot of laws so that you can't compete against their systems. What about, well, it's the same thing, right? And now with healthcare takeover, we could have healthcare without government. Yeah, but don't argue against the state, you know, when we're trying to discuss the Peter Joseph thing because that's what he did to Stefan. So let's not... I agree, I agree. I mean, it's going to be against, you know, talking about his model. Yeah, and his model is... What is his model? Yeah, what is his model? How does it work? Why is that wrong over... His model is to allow a central plan system of some type, whether it's going to be resource-based economy or computer TVP, the Venus Project. Something is going to central plan the wants and needs of others. What I'm saying is that the market should be a central planning. You don't know that. Because in me talking with Neil Keenan, Keenan, whatever his name is, in their thing, I'm saying, so, you know, in a Zeitgeist thing, I wouldn't be able to own guns, and he's like, no, you wouldn't. And he's like, well, would I be able to have land and grow my own food and be independent? And he's like, yeah, you would. So I'm not quite sure what this is. Yeah, they don't say that. They say that it's top-down control. That you're mistaking that. No, that's not true, because they say that they don't have control of all resources of the world. No, that's not what it's saying. That is not what it's saying. That's what one of the movies has said, and I have seen that in the movie. That's the Venus Project. That's the Venus Project, not Zeitgeist. Now, here's the thing. It is somewhat... It's basically democracy through science. And it is the mob rule of science. And you have basically a variety of scientists that are getting together and determining the max efficiency of a resource in its use. So... And how is that different from a centralized system of a state? It's kind of like a centralized system of the state, yes. But it's done by an evaluation of the scientific usefulness of a resource. Not by political power, but the problem is that even if you have, let's say, you do a totally Wikipedia version of the mathematical models in the computer programming where it is open source where anyone can go in and put in their own two senses to how it should work, you still run into the same thing that you run into with mob rule. Who owns the resources? The resources are basically allocated based upon orders put in by the potential consumer and then also the provision system of those orders and that provision system would be based upon a scientific model of the current environment that we live in and the evaluation of all of the resources that we have to work with. So let's say that we are on a spaceship a small spaceship and you had a certain amount of let's say you've got a replicator like they have on Star Trek but you have a certain amount of energy that you can get out of the war cork and so the amount of energy that is assigned to the creation of such and such item is determined by a computer but the programming for that and the allocation of what is the highest priority is determined by in the zeitgeist movement basically anyone who wants to be a part of the decision-making process thus mob rule. Can I interject something here? Please. Absolutely. I'm pretty ignorant as far as the whole zeitgeist thing goes, I mean this is the first conversation I've ever been a part of that deals with it at all but it seems to me like it's coming from a whole false premise that there is such a thing as post-scarcity. For some things there is. Well, for ideas maybe you know. Air. Air is not scarce it might be economically scarce right now but that doesn't mean it's scarce like as in we could someday run out of enough air to make everybody breathe if everybody just replicated all day long. But as Stephen was saying as long as you can just go ahead and breathe anytime you want and you could always take a breath and never run out of air it's essentially non-scarce. So a natural resource like air that we have plenty of right now we may not one day so if we're colonizing other planets or whatever that could become a pretty scarce resource. But here's my point as far as the banana example, if there's plenty of bananas around that's only because somebody put the effort into making sure that that happened. So even if you're allocating a resource that appears to be non-scarce you're essentially stealing that resource from those who made it non-scarce to begin with. So it seems to be coming from a false premise that there is such a thing as an overabundance that's coming from nature for instance. So I think the only thing that can create a post-scarcity if you will is human effort. I mean that's all we see in nature. There's nothing that's really not scarce. Right now perhaps the air analogy but as you look around in nature every animal is fighting for territory and food and everything right and it's only human effort that has created certain things to be non-scarce. So even if we have so much food that we could feed the entire world ten times over it still took some human effort to create that. So by redistributing that food forcefully essentially you're stealing the labor of somebody. I mean labor is scarce. Well the idea I guess that they would say is what we're going to do is we're going to have some people temporarily come together put together a communal robot manufacturing facility that are going to make AI developed robots that can bake themselves and make new robots and each one of these robots will be able to deal with all the mundane bullshit that people have to do on their day-to-day basis. And so now we have robots that will clean our cars, wash our windows do our laundry all the menial tasks that human beings have to do will all be handled by these robots. In addition to that all the food is generated by these robots in vertical farming buildings that were built by robots that you will have water purification systems that will be run and be even built by robots and that by creating all of the necessities of life and ridding ourselves of all the irritating things that we have to do in our menial tasks if we eliminate all of those then we can certainly avoid all these negative things that he believes are really causing the conflict and all the problems that he says come from capitalism. I still have an issue with them. I think it's going to experience the coordination problem. I don't think because of the subjective theory of value that they can these things and wants. So the needs and wants that they're going to try and assess how are they going to give them any kind of value little in marginal utility? The big thing I always say to them is what are you going to do with all the all the cow carcasses because nobody is going to want to eat anything except for maybe flank steak and top sirloin and you're going to have prime rib maybe but nobody is going to eat rump roast Hey guys my friend Jeff Tucker just joined so I don't know how much time we have left but if you guys have any questions Jeff he's online too now. Absolutely. Let's unmute him. I muted him when he came in because it was Oh yeah. I can't unmute him. Can you do it? Let me just see here if Jeffrey can you hear you? Hold on. He's walking around somewhere and over and was in a car. Look at this. How about we have him try to unmute himself. Jeff you have to unmute yourself dude. Yeah you're going to have to unmute yourself somehow. Okay how about that? Why can't you unmute him? Yeah we got it. So I'm just driving that road here like some sort of insane Jetsons world. Don't get another ticket Jeff. I just drove by a cop giving a guy a ticket and it was all I could do to discipline myself to keep going and not just you know. Random? Yeah. We're talking about Zeitgeist and the Venus Project and how Malin knew how to debate with Peter Joseph and we're kind of talking mostly we've really been I guess you could say talking about post scarcity the last 15-20 minutes. What are your thoughts about a post scarcity world and what is your definition of scarcity itself? Scarcity is bound up with the physical world and it's our plight that's why we have to have prices of private property and capitalism and all that stuff it's glorious. Unfortunately scarcity also gives a great excuse for the state they can pretend to intervene and do all these things to rule our lives. The beautiful thing about the great migration that's occurred over the last 10 years is that we're migrating to a digital space where scarcity is not an issue and that's where chaos enters into the picture and that's also the source of our liberation the more we can migrate to the digital world the more beautiful anarchy results. So and that's the unique privilege of our generation hold on a second ask for a 39 regular. Hahaha Hahaha Let me drink it again Jeffrey I need to have you back on for a one-on-one interview. No but seriously you know when we look at this what do you think about Zeitgeist as a whole do you see it being unplausible I mean what are you thinking about Well I mean here's the thing and we just I mean Steffen Kanzel and I have done a lot of work and we've thought very very hard about this issue and the issue is is there really a clear distinction between the scarce and the non-scarce world and can you migrate from one to the other and can we conceptually distinguish these things and the conclusion is that yes you can and I think that's a seminal article um for in both of our in both of our lives that there is a clear distinction between these these two realms so um and it's the unique privilege of our generation to be able to you know push ever more into this surprising realm of digital media and the more we can do that the more we can not just escape the constraints of scarcity but also constraint escape the state because the because what we're talking about here is migrating to the realm of ideas right and and and ideas are cannot be controlled uh by by any force of nature um that's that's where human beings can really thrive as never before and that realm of ideas has always existed but now it incorporates not just the things we think the things we write but also the things we make um and and you know we don't know what the future holds I mean uh the more we can push into this realm the more spectacular our world can be and the more so we can surprise each other and the more we can outrun the coercive totalitarians who are trying to rule our lives as Viva Vendetta would say uh ideas are bulletproof yeah that's that's what he said and and that's exactly right so the more we can push into this realm and that's exactly what's happening in our age thanks thank god for technology right I mean we've seen an exponential increase in technological uh advancement get a ferriet regular it longs too long uh the more we can log these two log yeah I'm coaching this guy um but uh but you know you're seeing this exponential increase in creativity right I mean the more it's unleashed the more it unleashes you know and um I think for the most part libertarians are too I think we're too obsessed with the evil the state can do and it's a decent obsession because I mean like every single hour of the day every man at the state's doing horrible things on the other hand on the other hand the brilliance of of human creativity unleashed in a digital world crowdsourced open sourced peer-to-peer um there's no describing the miracles that can emerge from this realm jeffrey I'm sorry to interrupt you I gotta hear if we were talking about how you know there might be some big financial trouble coming down the road obviously we had housing bubbles and a lot of other bubbles and now we're seeing the stock market coming propped up through quantitative easing and purchasing of financial assets we were talking about is there going to be uh some kind of a collapse or at least a huge decrease in standard of living and we were we were kind of I guess debating between whether the state uh can actually hamper us as quickly as the free market can expand so do you what do you see coming down the future do you see the free market being able to outpace the government uh or do you think the government can clamp down these markets well enough to where they stop us from having an increased standard of living I think maybe blue there we go sorry there's no there's no way to predict this in particular but but look in every totalitarian society that's ever existed and we're quickly headed that way everybody understands that to thrive and to grow and to be spectacular you have to break the law the law is your enemy and Americans are going to learn this lesson very quickly it's like you either have to break bad or you die and that's what we're dealing with I mean and this this we're dealing with this every day I mean just the imposition of Obamacare alone has shown average American families that they are being looted and destroyed and people are going to ever more start thinking outside the system more and more of life is going to migrate you know both to the digital world and also to black markets I mean I that's what I see I see a future of disobedience and rebellion you know it's not going to be battles in the streets you know it's going to be it's going to be it's going to be you know ever more people migrating to the dark net you know it's going to be battles in cyberspace you know but as far as civic loyalty is concerned no I mean that is on the decline and it will continue on the decline I mean you're going to have to if you want to be loyal loyal to the nation state loyal to our civic religion then you will embrace poverty and a meaningless life I mean that's where we're headed that's what I believe so yeah I mean there will be increasingly difficult and trying hard financial times in the future but this is going to test us as a people and teach us a lesson don't depend on the masters who claim to be protecting you don't obey them don't believe them don't rely on them and in a way guys this is a good thing right I mean every great society must learn this you know guys we got to go for the night that's the end of the show no you did great thank you so much for being on the show thank you for showing up I want to thank you guys for being here Voluntary Virtues Roundtable as you guys know I will see you next Tuesday 8 to 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time here on Voluntary Virtues with Liberty Movement Radio I'll talk to you guys soon see you guys next week bye