 Welcome back again to the bad Quaker podcast where Liberty is our mission. Today is Monday, September 30th, 2013. My name is Ben Stone and this is podcast number 350. Bitcoin not bombs needs your help to hoodie the homeless. Mass Appeal Inc. has offered us a great deal on 324 discontinued orange hoodies that will be distributed to the homeless in San Francisco. We have until the end of October to raise 47 Bitcoin needed to reach our goal and we're calling on the Bitcoin community to help us make this happen. You can pledge contributions to the Bitcoin starter campaign, you can purchase a Bitcoin not bombs t-shirt or you can donate to Bitcoin not bombs directly. Every t-shirt sold is priced to pay for one hoodie to keep someone warm this winter. So go to bitcoinnotbombs.com and help us hoody the homeless or you can follow the links from badquaker.com. And with me today, the triumphant return of Stefan Kinsella, patent attorney, podcaster at Kinsella on Liberty. You can find his work over at the Center for Study of Innovative Freedom and the Libertarian Papers. And he is the author of one of three books that I will argue are a must have for anybody that is serious about Liberty. Anatomy of the State by Rothbard, little 60 page book. You need to have three or four copies laying around just a hand to somebody. Defending the Undefendable by Walter Block. You know, if you're a regular listener of this podcast, I don't agree with everything with Walter Block. But that is a great book. You need to have it on your shelf and be ready to just hand it to somebody as a gift. And the third book that you absolutely have to have, and again, it's only about 60 pages or so, is against intellectual property. And there, if you haven't read it, follow the links at badquaker.com, pick up the free PDF version. But one way or the other, get it on your shelf and have it handy just to hand to people. It's that valuable. Stefan, thanks for coming back on the show and welcome back to badquaker.com. Thanks, Dan. I appreciate that. And it's also available. My book is an EPUB format for free online. And I have some other books coming out, one on Libertarian Legal Theory and one, maybe an expanded version of the IP theme called Copy This Book in Press right now. So that's the working title. There's other possible titles. And I prefer the title Pat Naterni extraordinaire. So if you could just kind of append that, I would greatly appreciate it. But no, this is great. I like that we're into Bitcoin and all these issues. I'm speaking, by the way, this coming Saturday at Jeff Tucker's Bitcoin-related conference in Atlanta called Cryptocurrency Conference, which you can find at CryptocurrencyCon.com. Lots of great speakers and should be a lot of fun. So anyone interested, I think there's still openings available, but it's filling up quickly. So that's what's up with me. That's great to hear. I saw that and I thought, man, how am I going to arrange to be in Atlanta in that time frame? And it just didn't quite work out. But I wish I could have made it down there and listened to all you guys. You know, though, in reference to your book Against Intellectual Property, I have spent countless hours on the Internet and in person trying to explain, trying to talk to people about IP and trying to, you know, first off, there's so much misconception and there's so much misunderstanding about what's patent, what's copyright, how these laws work and how the state enforces them all on us and everything. There's so much misunderstanding and confusion in this. And I've gotten to the point of where, when the conversation starts, I stop and I say, look, have you ever read the book Against Intellectual Property? And if they say no, I don't argue anymore. I just say, when you read that, then we'll talk. Because if they're not willing to take, you know, what does it take a couple of hours to read it? If they're not willing to... Yeah, it's pretty short. Yeah, it's pretty short. And I feel like I don't even need to talk to them if they're not willing to put out that much effort. Well, what baffles me is that people have these very strong opinions and they seem like they're sincere people. And I understand this is a difficult issue. It's confusing. But if you have very, very strong opinions and you just, you know, talk about things that you really don't understand, and like you say, these people don't even understand copyright patent trademark trade secret or the differences that, you know, they use the word plagiarism a lot in part of their arguments. So look, they're trying to figure this out and I appreciate that. But it's like they're trying to reinvent the wheel while having a strong opinion about the way things should be. They're supporting a regime that they either don't understand or that they're misrepresenting, right? To my mind, you should be a little bit more humble about these issues. They are very confusing and difficult, partly because of the propaganda the state has managed to spread. So if you step back and think about these issues and try to figure out really what's the essence of what they're arguing for here, then the libertarian position emerges. It's a little bit dissonant for some people to accept it because it's contrary to what they've... the way they've been thinking about it for decades. So a little humility is required on this topic. It's one of the most difficult topics. It's not the most important. I'd say it's number five or six on the scale of horrible things the state does. You know, it's behind educational propaganda and the drug war and war and taxation perhaps and, you know, central banking. But it's right up there next to those guys. And it's one of the most insidious ones because unlike the others, it goes under the guise of property rights. And a lot of libertarians accept that it's property right. So I think libertarians should stop asking questions as an argument. They can ask questions that they want. But what you'll see quite often is if you just say, you know, I don't... I think there's a problem with patent or copyright. Then the response isn't a serious question or a response. It's usually a question framed as a response or vice versa. So they'll say, well, how would authors get paid for, you know, rewarded in a free society? And the premise of that question is that unless you can show me a guaranteed way for people to get paid for doing things that I think they need to do, I'm going to have to support statism, which is like welfareism, right? It's like saying, unless you can show me that voluntary charity in a free society would be sufficient to make sure that there's no poor people anywhere, then I have to support taxation and redistributionism and welfare. It's really the same thing, this whole attitude. That's a really good point. And I think it's something that we fall into really easily, not just about this topic, but it can be like who will build the roads or whatever. There's just so many ways that we can fall into that same mental trap where we have to make a complete ground-up defense of every single aspect of life in order to say, well, really, if you just think about it, how does a family interact? Well, how does a voluntary group interact? If you're a church member, you attend a church, are these things, the functions of your church group, are those inflicted by law where they will come and arrest you if you don't do those things? Of course not. Or if you don't attend a family reunion, will they send the family reunion police out and capture you? And of course not. But our minds have a tendency, because like you're saying, we've been brainwashed for so long, our minds have a tendency to demand that every single possible avenue be explained before you step out and say, okay, well, maybe this stuff will work. Yeah, and I think that libertarians sort of lose track of the history of the ideas that got us to where we are. So we're used to framing things in a certain way, and in a way they're unnecessary now. So John Locke was responding to basically defenses of monarchy. So you had these people, they were arguing that monarchies were legitimate. Why are they legitimate? They're legitimate because God created the universe and owns everything and gave the entire earth in trust to the original inhabitants, which is Adam and Eve. Okay, so you could imagine, you could trace that down and say Adam owns the entire earth. Okay, and then that flows from him to the monarchs that existed in the 1600s, let's say in Europe, 15, 1600s. So it was basically this kind of bizarre idea that there's property in common and that's used as a defense of monarchy. So then John Locke, who's sort of our intellectual father for all libertarians, comes along and he's trying to fight this, but he uses similar language. So he says, yes, okay, God gave us the earth, but he says in commons. Yeah, not really owned, he's not really clear about that. So in commons, but it's sort of unowned and unused. And so the first guy that starts using a piece of property gets to own it. But when he says this, he uses the word labor. He says, well, if you own yourself, then you own what you do with yourself, which is labor. And so then you own things that you create with your labor. So his entire attempt was an attempt to have a natural rights or natural rights, you know, defense of liberty. That's my cootles, excuse me. That was a rebuttal to Fillmer and the defenses of monarchy. Okay, but he wasn't really, he was just talking about things owned in common as a counterpoint to the previous paradigm being used to defend basically state as a feudalism. Okay, but you don't really need to literally believe that we own our labor to make this defense. Locke did that because of the circumstances of the time, but we get locked into this mode of reasoning. And everyone starts thinking, well, Locke has shown and the libertarian project depends upon the idea that we own our labor and we own, quote unquote, whatever we create. So if you start thinking in these terms, then it's easy to get confused and to engage in either intentional or unintentional equivocation and come up with arguing that, well, if I come up with an idea that's useful, well, I created it so I must own it because as a general principle, I own what I create. So we have to step back and realize like that was never really the justification for libertarianism. It wasn't about owning what you create. Okay, that was really just an objection to feudalism and monarchy and statism. Really the idea is that the world is unowned and there are things in it that are unowned and that people that first start using these things have a better claim than others. But they don't really literally create this matter that they homestead. They simply use it first, they embroider this thing. That gives them a better claim than others. It's really got nothing to do with ownership of labor or owning what you create. It's owning what you first in order as a scarce resource. And if you get that clear in your mind, this is why when you brought up the IP thing, I mean, this was never my favorite issue, but it's become in a way a very important issue because to understand the IP issue, you have to get straight in your own mind basic property concepts, basic principles of justice and justification, contract, things that are really fundamental to the libertarian project. And those things are easy to do intuitively when you're dealing with physical property. But when this IP stuff comes into it, you really have to step back and revisit and get it straight in your own mind. And that's what the IP issue has kind of forced me to do. And I think it's been helpful to my own understanding of the basics of libertarianism and justice. Whenever I talk to somebody on these topics and the word justice comes up, I always, I try to catch myself and make sure that I kind of examine that word a little bit because it almost is like, it's almost like one of these words that can be adjusted and made to mean whatever the government wants it to mean in a particular time. And that's caused a distortion as to the true meaning of justice. I mean, you know, let's say for example, well, let's put it this way. I think there's a certain intuitive tendency within a lot of mammals because I've seen this with dogs and I've seen this with other mammals as well, not just humans. But we see inequality taking place or we see something that is clearly not fair. And you don't have to sit down with a committee and a series of rules and write it all out to figure out, hey, there's something happening here that's not quite right. And somebody has to have something restored or there has to be some kind of retribution in order to make this right again. And this is where, you know, you start thinking about justice. If somebody robs you, they steal your wallet and they run away. If that person gets caught down the street by a cop, the cop takes them in, puts them in a cage, puts them in front of a judge, they talk to an attorney, they go through the whole process, they go to jail, they spend a year in jail. Was justice ever done in that? Because you were robbed and you may or may not have gotten your money back. But really what experience happened when you were robbed? Did you ever really have the problem satisfied? And I think a lot of times when we refer to justice, I think that brainwashing you were referring to earlier, twists the argument to a certain extent. Yeah, I agree. I thought a lot about this issue. I mean, the original concept of justice, if you think of the Roman times, the idea of justice is giving someone their due. Now, that's a general idea, but it really means what they're entitled to. It sends a little circular, but if you think about it closely, justice hinges upon property rights because what you're due depends upon what your property rights are. Now, perfect justice to my mind means people respect each other's rights. That is, the just solution is reached when there's a dispute over a scarce resource and if people come together in a cooperative fashion and they have a discussion or a discourse about it, and they come up with a reasonable way of allocating who gets to use this thing. That's justice. Now, in a secondary sense, what happens when these rules are breached? Because we have to keep in mind that there's a difference between fact and value, or between descriptive, causal, physical laws, and moral laws. So one is norms or things that you say specify what you should do, what rules people should follow, and the other is factual laws about the universe. Now, it's really literally impossible to violate a causal law. You cannot violate the law of gravity, for example, or even the law of supply and demand and economics. But you can violate the law or the rule that says you should not commit aggression. So because people have free will and they choose, there's a difference between prescription and description. Prescription is a law that prescribes what you should do versus law that describes what is the case in terms of causal laws. So then we have the question, well, if justice is served perfectly when people obey or abide by the exercise of their free will by these normative rules that we all pretty much agree with, you shouldn't hurt other people, you shouldn't even be dishonest or cheat people or invade their property, what happens when they do violate that? Because they can, unlike physical laws, they can violate these laws. So to my mind, justice really in a practical human sense is dealing with the second order question of what do you do in response to an act of let's say injustice or an act of aggression? And I think we have to realize, first of all, that except in very simple cases, it's really impossible to restore the status quo anti. That is to give someone what we call restitution, perfect restitution. So if you are murdered, even if you catch the guy and he's punished or he has to pay restitution, the victim doesn't get his life back. He's still dead. Okay. If someone is severely aggressed against or battered, raped, whatever, that can't be undone. And in fact, this is one reason why it's important to be libertarians because we recognize intuitively you cannot undo an act of injustice. Okay. So in a way, justice is impossible. If by justice you mean undoing the crime. It's really impossible. As a practical matter, the only question is what rights does the victim have in the aftermath of an undoable act of injustice? They're going to be imperfect no matter what we have to recognize that which is one reason we have to first and foremost be against aggression because once it's committed, there's no way to undo it. So any justice that we can achieve would be imperfect. Any amount of restitution paid is always going to be imperfect. Even if aggressors were rich people, which are not, and even if they were able to pay a billion dollars damages for every act of crime they committed, even that would be insufficient to undo the damage in almost every case. Almost every victim of crime, a violent crime, let's say, would prefer for the crime not to have happened. But that's impossible. That's not a choice on the table. So we can't choose a standard of justice that is infeasible, but we have to recognize that it is imperfect in that sense. So then we're left with what can we do to restore some kind of order to get things back on track to maybe give the aggressor a chance to reincorporate himself back in society, you know, to be rehabilitated, let's say. And I think that's why the older systems of paying some kind of restitutionary award, even though the amount is arbitrary, and even though the amount is never going to be really sufficient to undo the crime, is really the only choice that practical humans have if they want to deal with these occasional, you know, voluntary acts of crime. So to my mind, justice is determining what the victim has the right to do as an imperfect remedy in response to a crime. That's what justice is really about, recognizing that it's imperfect, recognizing that there are certain social and practical constraints on, you know, you can't just go kill everyone for every minor infraction and what good would they do anyway. So we have to work with the community, what neighbors want with, you have to have some measure of mercy. There's just no way around it. You know, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the parable with Jesus and the, the prodigal son right in a sense the people that cause the most problems always get the most break. But that's the way it has to work. You know, charity has to go from the people that are successful to the people that are not successful for whatever reason, whether it's voluntary or just misfortune or whatever. So in my mind justice is trying to make sure the victim can do whatever they can in a social context to achieve some measure of satisfaction, even though we recognize that they will never, never really truly be made whole. And if we contrast that to the current system we have under government, you know, government aggression and the rules of the state and so forth, the, what is sold to us as justice is actually always just more aggression. It's never actually justice. It's always, I mean, there might be some, you know, there might be some fund or you might be able to sue somebody and get some kind of monetary gain back. But ultimately the current system of law enforcement and justice and so forth is all based on aggression because ultimately the victim and people who are completely disassociated with the, with the event altogether are still forced to have to pay for all the processes involved. Yeah, that's true. I mean, look, there are various theories of what's called punishment or retribution and why we have the right or what's the, what's the function of having a justice system, a criminal justice system that uses force in some way against these malefactors, the bad people. And one theory of course is retribution just to get revenge, you know, just to get justice, people call it, you know, so if someone kills you, your family member, you execute them. Now it's not clear what the good that does. Maybe in some cases it gives the family members victim, the victim, the family member of the victim some kind of emotional healing. I don't know. I'm not so skeptical to say that they never get that. But so retribution is one purpose. Rehabilitation is another that is you're trying to make the criminals better. Incapacitation is another that's keeping them from preventing other crimes. Now in my mind as a libertarian, I am very skeptical of the entire idea of institutionalized coercion. I tend to believe that some kind of voluntary ostracism system along the lines of law merchant, let's say, would tend to be more practical and more just in the long run, because really there's a big benefit to being part of society. And if you want to buy by the rules voluntarily, you know, another would be just, you know, pure self defense during the act itself. So I would tend to think that incapacitation is the most justifiable form of this sort of basically slavery. That is, if someone has proven themselves to be such a danger and a menace in society, you only have a few choices. You either let them keep doing it, or you ban them to some coventry as Heinlein called it, you know, basically Australia, you know, a penal colony. Or you kill them. Or you put them in shackles forever incapacitation. So you can actually understand that that's actually not punitive. It's just self defense is preservative. I still agree with you. It's not justified because this whole system is perverse because there's no rehabilitation, right? Criminals tend to gain criminal skills in prison and lose, you know, productive skills. So they just come out as even more violent criminals at the other end. So there's no rehabilitation. And the victims have to pay taxes, along with you and I, to keep these guys incarcerated. So we're being victimized twice. So except for incapacitation, there's almost no good being done by prison. And of course, nine tenths of the prisoners are not even real criminals. They're just people that violated arbitrary state rules, drug criminals, etc. They're not real criminals. If, you know, if the jail is consistent only of murderers, robbers and rapists, we might have a little bit less of an issue with saying we have to use some of our resources to keep these guys in jail just to protect ourselves from them. You know, that's the incapacitation function of prison. But to delude ourselves that these guys are being rehabilitated, right, or that there's really any justice being served by taxing the victims twice to pay for the housing of their aggressors, makes no sense whatsoever. It's completely corrupted, quote, justice, unquote, system. You know, this is kind of maybe going off in an odd direction, but you know, you see how the government fails at this one simple task. And then we, as libertarians, we often realize that that's what the government tends to do. They tend to take on something, make it far more complicated than it needed to be, put layers and layers of bureaucrats in the middle, utilize aggression as its only method and then fail in the long run. And so we see that not just in the justice system, but we see it, you know, in whatever, whatever they want to do. We can make the argument about, you know, going to the moon or space exploration or whatever. Sure, the government decides it wants to do something that mankind maybe ought to do, but then it's going to cost 500 times more for the government to do it. They're going to take, you know, way longer and they're not going to really accomplish anything when they get it done. They're not going to accomplish anything that's of any, you know, significant value. And that when we see the government failures on each level like this in a sort of a weird perverse way, in my mind, I think, you know, we need government to do more stuff so that it will display to everybody what a failure it is. And I know that's almost backwards thinking, but in another way, it's kind of like, you know, if we could just give more things over to the government to let them fail with, then would people see? Then would people understand that this, you know, this aggression-based system can't work at anything it tries? I'm skeptical of that because I think that people have, the government has been successful. They're good at a couple of things. The state is good at a couple of things. I mean, it's very inefficient, it's very corrupt, but it's good at two things, destruction and propaganda. Or rather for propaganda, it's good at going along with the modern trends spread by certain, you know, people in its corner, certain intellectuals. So the state relies upon the confusion of the people who after all have lives to live and jobs to work, and they don't have a lot of time always to analyze these things. So the state plays upon the decent intuitions and values of the people. So, you know, most people think that crime is bad, and we have to stop it as much as we can. And if they accept the idea that it's either the state or nothing, you know, either the state is the way to do this or nothing. Yes, they understand that the state makes mistakes on occasion and convicts an innocent guy on occasion. But what's the alternative? To never put anyone in jail? You know, so they're thinking it's either chaos or nothing. And the state is there, it's imperfect, but that's the only way we can address this big problem in society. So the state is successful in distracting people and making them think that the big problem is private crime. You know, I don't know the quantity, I don't know how to measure this. Maybe private crime is a bigger problem in the state in some senses, or maybe it has been in times of the past. But the state is also a criminal, and it uses people's fear of private crime to gain legitimacy and to take control, right? So if it looks like it's doing the best it can, given realities, to stop private crime, people will let it get away with a lot of public crime, which in the end is, of course, much worse in extent and in magnitude than private crime. It's more insidious, it's more inescapable. I mean, Lysander Spooner has a great quote about this. He talks about, he contrasts the distinction between a highwayman, like a robber on the side of the road, and the state. And at least he says the highwayman is honorable in the sense that he doesn't pretend he's not robbing you, number one. And he leaves you alone after he's robbed you as a one-time thing, right? And he really doesn't want to kill you, usually. He just wants to take your money, and he goes on his way. The state is completely worse than almost every dimension, because the state is pervasive. It follows you around. It imposes harms on you that don't even benefit the state in a lot of cases. This is what Rothbard talks about and his distinction between triangular intervention, right, and bilateral intervention. Some things the state just imposes costs on you, not for its own benefit even, just because they want to control what you can do. So the state is much more of a serious enemy, but people have bought into this idea that it's the only organized way for society to counter private crime. So this is a major problem that we have to face. We're not confident of what some of us call the worst is better strategy. Like, the worst things get, the better they'll get, right? Like, let's let them fail, and then finally the state will be revealed to be the charlatan fraud that it is. I mean, you've had the collapse of communism. You've had so many state failures, and yet people still cling to it because they have no option in their minds. They can't see any option other than the state. So until that changes, and I'm not sure how that can change, I don't think that we should hope for this kind of worst is better strategy to succeed. I need to cut us off there and throw in a commercial, and folks stick with us. We'll be right back. Get over to SonsOfLibertyMint.com right now. Secure your wealth. By trading in those pesky Federal Reserve notes for Sons of Liberty Mints, find Silver Quarters. These one-quarter ounce bars square in shape and stamped, trust in yourself, are unlike any other traditional round. With four pieces per ounce, you'll not only be investing in sound money, but you'll also be purchasing usable, divisible silver. Don't get stuck with ferns or bulky silver bars. Visit S-U-N-S of LibertyMint.com today and invest in silver you can use. Energy, vitality, clarity of mind, and incredible immune support. The awesome power of nature is now in your hands. Hi, this is Sean from One With Nature. Our herbal formulas contain some of the greatest botanicals from around the world, and they are ready and willing to help you achieve your goals. Visit us at OneWithNature.com. That's W-O-N with nature.com. Thanks for sticking with us through the break. Ben Stone with the Bad Quaker podcast and Stefan Kinsella. Before the break, you were hitting on something over and over there that is near and dear to my heart because it's just the opposite. It's something that I detest, but it's something that is on my mind a lot and I think about. Just this morning, I was doing a little bit of looking around on the internet and I saw a story that Wired is carrying that the state of California is going to start teaching, essentially it's going to teach anti-piracy propaganda to elementary schools starting with the second grade this year and eventually going out from kindergarten to sixth grade. This is being backed up by the California School Library Association, the Internet Keep Safe Coalition. Ooh, that just makes me shiver. And the Coalition of the Center for Copyright Infringements, whose board members include executives from the MPAA, the RIAA, Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, and so forth and so on. And really it is, you know, it is propaganda given to us from the earliest ages and it's getting, if you can say it this way, the state is actually getting better at brainwashing and at propaganda and so forth. And that's really the scary part in this, I think. I agree and it's a mystery to me why the, because the state is incompetent at almost everything it does, right? So the question is, why is it good at destruction? Well, it's good at destruction. And I say this because in my mind I always think there's only two things the government is good at, the state. I should say the state, not the government, because in my mind I distinguish between government and the state. Government to me means the governing institutions of society like law, justice, order, defense, which have been co-opted by the state in which we now identify with the state, just like we identify roads with the state, but which don't have to be part of the state. So you could be an anarchist or against the state without being against government or order or liberty or justice or law or roads. But in any case, so the state has infiltrated itself into these areas, right? And it has, for some reason, it is really bad at everything except for destruction and propaganda. Now, it's good at destruction, I believe, because destruction is easy. It's easier to destroy a building than to build it. I mean the people that took down the towers in 9-11, it costs a lot less money to do that than to build them, right? So even if you think George Bush did it, which I don't believe, I think it was, you know, crazy Muslim terrorists called me crazy, but whatever. But propaganda, I think the government is good at it because it just piggybacks onto an inherent tendency of humans to specialize, right? And to focus on what their interests are and they leave certain areas to the experts. So the government piggybacks upon this. It takes advantage of it. So it is sad that people buy into this. I don't know if the government's getting good at it or better at it. I tend to think they're getting better and worse at it over time in some ways. I always think that the fall of Soviet communism in 1991 or so was a big teaching moment for humanity. People haven't really read a lot more Haslet or Bastiat. They're not a lot more economically literate than they used to be, but there's a lot more awareness now, even among, let's say, Democrats in America, that we need capitalism, right? We need it as the engine of growth that Soviet centralized communism cannot work. So just the fall of communism, just empirical evidence, just history, just experience can lead to the evolution of knowledge despite the state's attempts to co-opt it. So my only hope for humanity, to be honest, is that gradually over time, the success of freedom, right? And liberalism and technology and capitalism will gradually leech into people's minds and they will... I mean, yeah, there's going to be people that will learn it systematically, right? But I don't know if I can blame the state for people's ignorance. I just think it's apathy or it's specialization or it's just a natural situation where they just don't need to learn this, so they have no incentive to, so they go with the prevailing trends. So my hope is that over time, technology and the market prevail despite the attempts of the state to quash it. And the state diminishes in legitimacy and in scope over time. That's my only hope as a somewhat cynical libertarian. I can't remember exactly where I read this. I'm fairly certain that the first time I encountered it was in something that Rothbard was, you know, one of Rothbard's works. But the thought is that if you have... and it's kind of along the lines of the economic thing that's called regulatory capture. It's where you have one group, let's say a corporation or one group of corporations that have a vested interest in the government doing a specific thing for them. And it may be that like 98% of the public might be against something like this. But because this tiny percentage of people that work for this group of corporations, or maybe this one corporation, or maybe this just one billionaire or whatever, because it's so important to them, they're able to put a lot of resources into getting the government to do what they want. Whereas most people don't want that to happen, but they just can't take time out of their daily life because it's not really... that one issue is not really that important to them. Yeah, I think that's the public choice idea that vested interests have an incentive to pool their resources into focus on a given issue. Whereas the opposition may be larger, but it's more diffuse. And so there's no organized opposition, so these things, you know, get passed. But there seems to be some loose feedback in the other direction because of democracy or because of public opinion, because of increasing economic literacy, or just because the internet makes people aware of the blatant hypocrisy. So there are certain limits on this. And we have to remember too that the government, the state is a big fiction. And even the people that work with the state are deluded by its lies. So, you know, politicians and bureaucrats, they're somewhat deluded, they don't want to think of themselves as members of the mafia, right? They don't want to think of themselves as just complete naked agents of state power. So they buy into the myths the state propounds to justify and legitimize itself. So, you know, that's why a cop might give a break every now and then or might try to be fair in a certain occasion when pure economics would say, why is this Nazi goon giving me a break? It makes no sense. It's because he's not a completely bad person and he has been deluded himself into the myth of the state. And I think most government functionaries have been, right? That's why we appeal to the Constitution, even though I'd say you and I probably don't believe the Constitution is even legitimate. But we might say, listen, if you're sitting here lording it over us and you claim that your authority is based upon your adherence to this Constitution, this holy document, then if you're not adhering to it, then you're violating what you said and you need to do it. So you're appealing to their own declared set of norms. So I think that's our strategy going forward. We have to appeal to the basic human decency of people that the state appeals to when it ensnares them into this delusion, right? Because they cannot just ask for goons. They can't say, if you're a goon, sign up here. We're going to shoot innocent people. No, they don't do that. It's more insidious than that. So it makes it more of a challenge, but it gives us an opening to, which is, or at least that's my hope. Yeah, I think if you keep what you just said, I think if you keep that in mind too, it becomes easier to not just turn to blind hate toward people who work for the government in one sense or another. I think, you know, there's so many people right now that are frustrated with all of the oppression and frustrated with the TSA and frustrated with the NSA and frustrated with all these different things that are going on or whatever the one thing is that's oppressing them in their life. And a natural, well, maybe not natural, but a quick, easy reaction to that is to blame a whole class of people, to blame all those government workers, to blame, you know, the mailman, the bureaucrats at the Licensed Bureau, whatever it is in whichever state. And it's a little harder, but it's more realistic to realize that that mailman or that bureaucrat down there that's just stamping papers and hates their job as much as anybody else. There is much victims of this whole myth as the rest of us. Yeah, no, I agree completely. I mean, we have to have some sympathy for these people. I mean, look, if push comes to shove and people take certain jobs, you know, border guards or Guantanamo guards or concentration guards or, you know, the guards at prisons that keep drug people in. I mean, you can have less and less sympathy for that. And if the push came to shove, you know, if you're in jail and you had a way to escape and you had to kill someone to escape, if it's between you and him, you might have to make that choice. But at a certain point we have to realize that there's a big popular delusion that's being spread by the whole state and by the whole state apparatus. I'm reading right now a really good book by Martin Van Kruveld called The Rise and Decline of the State, and he argues that the state is a modern institution. It's only been around for, say, three, two, three, four hundred years. Before that it was not, it didn't have its corporate status that it has now. It didn't have a personality that was independent of the functionaries or the administrators of the state. So, and, you know, at a certain time in the past, in a certain region, you actually had a chance of killing the sovereign and changing policy because there's a king, right? Or at least you could say, I'm going to be a supplicant of the king. Would you please do the following? And maybe you succeed, maybe you don't, but if you succeeded, he actually might change the policy. But nowadays in democracy there's no chance of that because Obama and these guys are just temporary. They come and go. The state corporate survives despite these guys. These guys are trivial and insignificant. The state has a sort of momentum of its own, right? An existence of its own. It exists independent of the people who come in and out and fulfill some of its duties. And in fact, I would say politicians are just window dressing for what's really going on. The bureaucracy and the administrative agencies really are the bulk of what's going on with the state. And they're going to continue their existence no matter what. So we have to be the state as an entity that has its own interest. And we have to stop deluding ourselves that you can affect its nature by electing a new politician like Bush instead of Obama or whatever. It won't make a difference. I mean, these guys are no different anyway. And even if they were, they're only in for two or three or four years, right? I mean, and the next guy's going to come in next time anyway. If you're too radical, you're going to be killed or eliminated or just weakened. So we have to focus on the state as an entity that is our enemy, but not only individuals that fill some of the temporary positions that it makes available to buy support. That's really interesting that you said that about the modern state because I felt like the modern state as we know it today was birthed in a three-part birthing process in around 1600 when the birth of modern corporations married with government and began the whole corporate marriage with government. And then around the time that the United States was born, this whole idea began to catch on of having, well really before that with parliamentary actions in the 1500s, but really in the 1700s and early 1800s, this idea of democracy and that a multi-headed government, not a single headed government, was the answer. And then I think the third aspect of the birth of the modern state was when the corporate banking interests finally got a hold of the monetary system completely around the turn of the 19th to 20th century. I think that one of those interesting things is to analyze modern history and to see that something happened around 1800. We have the Industrial Revolution, things start advancing rapidly. And the problem is we have this correlation versus causation problem. And that is we have a strange phenomena that exists to this day. We live in vastly greater times in terms of material prosperity, et cetera, than in olden days. And the question is what caused this to happen? Was it just inevitable? Was it just our time in history? Or did something cause it? So you'll hear some people say that, well, it coincided with the rise of America or the West or the Enlightenment. Some say that property rights increased, although there's little evidence to show that property rights really got stronger after, let's say, 1800. They've been there for hundreds of years in kind of the same form. Some say that it was the patent and copyright system, the intellectual property law of America that drove the Industrial Revolution, although there's no strong evidence of this other than correlation. So we have to find a way to explain this and to explain the state's role in it. Is the state causing it? Is it a cooperative partner or is it hindering things? I think our view is that it hinders things and that things would have been even better without it. But that's a hard case to make when people see what we have now compared to the way it's always been. They just assume certain things about the infrastructure that led to what we have now. And they associate the state with infrastructure. You're talking about the way the state co-ops banking and these things. Hans German Hoppe has a really good article from the 90s on banking states and national politics or international politics. He talks in detail about how the government of the state systematically co-ops different institutions of life, civil life, money, banking, law, justice, defense, roads, education, and how it gradually becomes the guarantor of all these things in people's minds. Which is why I mentioned earlier that if you think of a road, you think of the government. That's how people think nowadays. And the road is the most unpolitical thing of all. It's just a piece of property with pavement over it. This is a way to pass from one place to another. But everyone thinks that this is a government function. So it's no surprise I think of law and justice and order and things like this as government functions. So this is our challenge that we have to debunk the myth of the state. That the state is competent. That it has our interest in mind. Hoppe told me one time, he thought that one of the most important things you can do is to laugh at the state. Like have comedians, you know, people that joke at the state's expense. They don't take it seriously. So in a way, comedians and irreverent people are among our biggest allies because they are the biggest challenges to state rule. At least in a non-totalitarian society like we have now. I've seen a tendency among people who are very, very, very serious statists who really openly and blatantly believe that essentially the state is God. Without it we would all be just sitting in the mud eating worms. Among people like that, my personal experience is very few of them have a sense of humor. A sense of humor is really, I think, more related to a certain level of activity in the brain that enjoys freedom and enjoys the ability to think in ways that we're told not to think. I was just going to add because in a sense all humor kind of has a naughty aspect to it or some kind of a surprise to it that you're shocked by or you didn't expect or something like that. Yes, it's irreverent. It's not just humor, it's also tolerance. I've always pointed this out and I've never gotten a good answer from a statist and the question is why are statists so upset by us? If you think about it, I think you and I would switch positions tomorrow with statists if we could. We would be part of the dominant majority of society, like let's say 90% of all humans were libertarians and there's a small carping minority of socialists and unionists and welfareists who are bitching about it but they can't impose their will on us. I think you and I would accept that deal. All I want is a free society. I really don't mind if these guys complain about it because they can't do anything with force because that's the dominant mode of society but the tables are turned now. They have actually in a sense won, right? So you and I are arguing with some typical welfare liberal or mainstreamer and they want the government to be in control. Well, the government is in control. They want the government to be able to tax. Well, the government can tax. They want the government to be able to throw people in jail for violating laws that a Congress passes according to certain procedures. Well, that's our situation. So basically they might carve about the details. They might squabble among themselves or which type of medical care they want or whatever. But the government is in control and the government has won. It's seen as being legitimate. So they'd actually won. They were getting what they want. The government controls 40% of the economy. It's heavily regulated. There's always debate on political terms. There's always votes for the next law that's going to be passed. Legislation is dominant, et cetera. So they've actually won. Yet it still bugs the crap out of them that people like you and I, who have to pay their taxes, abide by their property tax rules and their property regulations and their business regulations and send our kids off to their prescription wars, we have to do everything they want. We have to abide by their drug laws, by their prescription, you know, regulations, everything. And yet they're still not satisfied. It bugs them that we complain, right? So they focus their attention on us minor league losers. We basically lost. And all we're doing is complaining about it. We're complying, but we're complaining. They don't even want us to complain. Now, what does that tell you? There's some kind of annoying feeling they know that they're wrong, right? And because they're wrong, they don't want to think of themselves as evil people. They think they're on the side of the good, but they know they're not really. And when they hear people like us who are sincere and not hurting anyone, criticizing their basic schema, they go completely crazy. And they want to shut us up. And they become not intolerant liberals, but they become intolerant censors. So they want to dominate us with their laws, but they also want us to be forced to shut up and not complain about it. Now, what does that tell you? I mean, I'm telling you, I would switch places with these guys in a second. I would let them be in a museum of communism. They can sit there and give lectures to the students all day long on this bizarre, antiquated view that some people used to have. That's okay with me, but they don't want to make that deal. They want to dominate us and shut us up. That really says a lot, you know, especially if you're talking about somebody that's more right-wing and they claim to be a supporter of, you know, I'll put this in air quotes, free markets and so forth. And yet you say, okay, well then why are you offended at a free market in thought when it comes to whether or not we absolutely have to have a state? Can't there be a free market in that and just let the market bear whichever that will eventually, and they can't do that. They can't play in their mind with the idea that you could abolish the state and still be able to survive. They are hyper offended at that and demand that not only that you obey and you pay your taxes, but it's just like you're saying, they also want your mind. They want you to believe what they believe that this is all good and they'll be really angry if you don't. Yeah, and you know, I'm an ex-random. I mean, but there are some things Rand had glimpses of that were brilliant and she saw this holistic desire of this controller mentality. They want to snuff out everything. They're really nihilistic in a sense. They hate it. They see a reflection of themselves in us, I do believe. Not a reflection, but they see we're exposing where they're evil and they just cannot think of themselves that way. They're do-gooders, right? They're tolerant. They're liberal minded. And yet they're using the force of the state, not only to get their way in terms of law and regulation, but to snuff out dissent even. So they become jackbooted leather jacket wearing Nazi thugs, basically, to a certain extent. And that's uncomfortable for someone who has a self image of being a tolerant secularist liberal. I mean, look, I'm not religious then myself, but I think that modern traditional religion is sort of a primitive distillment of a lot of common sense, intuitive, moral ideas. That's how it spreads because you have to incorporate that to make it spread. But at least it's natural in a sense. But I view statism and the worship of the state and related ideas like environmentalism, etc., scientism as a type of religion that's even worse than real religion because it's not rooted in any kind of connection to natural norms. It's basically people that have persuaded themselves that they're rational, they're scientific, they're modern, and they don't have anything to do with superstitious old religions. And yet their worship of the state is as religious and irrational as anything that they criticize and even worse. Because at least if you're going to worship God, you know, you could understand that God is supposed to be a good thing. You could imagine this hypothetical entity that was good, right? Or at least that you're appealing to or hoping for, have faith in. But the state, there's no reason to believe the state is God. And yet they believe in the state as a God. So to my mind as a secularist libertarian, I have a lot more patience for religious libertarians of my friends than for the alleged atheist secularists of statism. Because they're more religious than regular people are. And they're more rational and they're more collectivist. Yeah, and the level of fanaticism is shocking sometimes. I've known some really fanatical religious people in my life. And they're kind of distasteful to be around them. But when you get somebody who is a status to that level, it's the same fanaticism. It's really distasteful to be around them. I guess that's one of the great successes in my life. As far as my career and retirement and everything is that I've been able to isolate myself on a personal basis from almost everybody who's fanatically religiously statist. And so that's like a great accomplishment to me. On the other hand, I don't go to a lot of parties. I don't go to a lot of events. I don't do a lot of stuff. So I have to deal with my isolation as the result of that. But still that fanaticism is just, it's just shocking sometimes. Yeah, I would almost rather that they just be openly admit that they're fascists, right? Their status. They're willing to use the force of the state to compel you to do what they think is good. But then they wouldn't have this smug sort of superiority, which is totally undeserved in my opinion. But yeah, so I think we're in agreement on this issue. Well, let's bring back up your websites here. We've got Concella on Liberty. Oh, that's your podcast name. And isn't your website just stefanconcella.com? Yeah, that's it. I have an IP sort of devoted one called C4SIF Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom. C4, the number 4, SIF.org, which people can use, look at for just post and resources focused on the innovation, technology, intellectual property issue. And then you also have libertarian papers. I am the founder and executive editor of Libertarian Papers. Matt McCaffrey is the current editor. He's a brilliant PhD Austrian economic student from Auburn and other places who is the current editor. So yeah, I'm the executive editor of Libertarian Papers, just one of the few libertarian related scholarly journals out there. And folks, if you want a quicker link to that, get over to badquaker.com. I'll have links today to stefanconcella.com, to libertarianpapers.org, and for the C4SIF.org. And I also have links in today's show notes where you can download a free version of Against Intellectual Property, and I'll have a link for Amazon if you want to get over and actually buy and have and hold a real hard copy of it. And that's what I would suggest you do, not only because it puts a couple pennies in my pocket for you clicking on the Amazon link, but also because, like I was saying, Against Intellectual Property, really, I just have to push this sales point that it's the kind of a book that you need three or four of them on your shelf. And when you're talking to somebody about these topics, rather than reinvent the wheel, walk over, pick up this little book, hand it to them, and if they can't spend a couple hours at least understanding the basics, then you're wasting your time talking to them. And it's just such a nice little book that is so concise, it defines terms, and it lays it all out in a way that it just removes confusion from it. Stephen, again, thanks for coming on Bad Quaker Podcast with me, and as always, you have an open invitation to come back any time you want. Ben, thanks for having me on very much. I appreciate it. I enjoyed it. And folks, be sure and get over to badquaker.com where Liberty is our mission. Thank you very much for listening today, folks.