 So you know the rules, questions addressing the entire panel or individual members, panelists can comment on each other and wait until the microphone arrives at your place. So my question is for Mr. Jeffrey Tucker. Is there anything left to be said for Hayek? We're going to start the civil war early here, right? Yeah. So well, yeah, I guess I'm sure, first of all I should say that I thought Hans's paper was a brilliant inviceration of this aspect of Hayek and absolutely necessary and fabulous. So, but yeah, there is, and I'm sure everybody else would, and Hans too would say there's another Hayek and I've learned an enormous amount from Hayek and the social theory in particular. I think Joe Salana would, you know, highlight his business cycle theory. For me, uses and knowledge in society is a brilliant paper. It's a great expansion of the Miss Azine idea. And one thing that's really neat about Hayek to me anyway is that he doesn't have this sort of Hobbesian problem that Mises has. You know, Mises always said all the time that the government is the most essential institution. You know, it's the one that we can't do without. You know, he would go on like this. But while Hayek finds himself recommending vast, vast government interventions, his social theory presumes a kind of anarchism that you can read into it. At least that's why I read Hayek. And I think we would be impoverished if we just dispensed with them all together. I guess you could say. I should make that clear. Yes, I owe Hayek something. I did say that. I think Hayek, because he is as well-known as he is, is for many, many people up to this day, that refers also to Friedman, is the first step in the right direction. I also said, and I emphasize that again, that I consider Hayek a very good economist. But I did not talk about his contributions to economics I talked about those areas of his work that made him famous. There are very few people who actually read the economic treatises of Hayek. I'm sure that the pure theory of capital by Hayek has been read by no more than two dozen people alive. And this is by and large also true for other books like prices and production. I remember Friedman saying at some conference that he couldn't understand a word of prices and production. So again, my intention was not to outlaw Hayek, so to speak. My intention was just to show that as a political theorist, he is a disaster. And he can only be useful in the sense of opening the way for people who are on the search for something and they will encounter him long before they will encounter Rothbard or Mises. And in so far, of course, he is of great use. I know many people who experience the same thing that I experienced myself. They read Hayek first and from then they marched on further and encountered better people or at least better political theorists than Hayek. Thank you. A question for Mr. Tucker. How do you feel about the, I must say, no offense Benjamin, but rather silly remarks we just heard earlier that we enjoy our own slavery and we enjoy the state oppression just so we can talk about it. And all of this is just intellectual masturbation because to me, it sounded, your speech earlier, sounded like a call for resistance, at least on a very individual level. Thank you. So you're asking a question to me. Is that right? Oh, so I love Menken. He's just a delight. But his pessimism was also, I'm not entirely sure how serious it was, I think it was also an attempt to delight the reader. And I don't really share it in the sense that, one of the things I think Benjamin's paper left out and also Menken left out is that stateism doesn't work. This is a big problem for the state because it promises glorious things and they don't arrive. And yet people have to live their lives, you know? So just because of the nature of things, there is a tendency for people to fly into resistance mode even if they're not outright Rothbardians or adopting Locky and natural rights or whatever, they just want to have their clothes get cleaned, whatever the thing may be. So yeah, there's always, every intensification of the state gives rise to more of this breaking bad phenomenon, this rebelliousness of the pirate economy. And to me, this is a great source of hope. I don't see Menken really having dealt with this at all. I mean, even if you just walk down to the markets down the street here and walk through the central markets, you can see the place is filled with pirate products everywhere. And it's just fantastic. I mean, it's glorious. I mean, it encourages you because it makes you realize, look, the US, the evil empire is going all around the world trying to crack down on piracy. And they can't do it. They can't get away with it. So the more rebellion we have, the more piracy we have, the more breaking bad that takes place in the world, and it's going to increase the larger the state intensifies its regulations, its taxations and all of the terrible things it does, the more we are able to create a kind of, you know, underground civilization of liberty that's more efficacious and lends itself to human flourishing to a much greater extent than the official world. And eventually, I think we can see a future in which the statist apparatus is absolutely overwhelmed and devoured by this world that we are creating as individuals in all of our little micro-rebellions. I mean, I think there's a very, an almost total overlap between breaking bad and shit-stirring. And just a point about Menken's pessimism, mostly it's pretty rational looking at what's happened in the past and saying that will happen in the future. So it's not saying that things will become unbearably bad and that government will increase constantly saying, you know, they'll continue to be a fight and tension, but there's no reason to think that we'll make any progress. And so it's pretty rational just saying, look what's happened in the past, that will happen in the future. I mean, Menken was more famous than like, than many of us or all of us, you know, he was like the best known journalist in America. Yet, you know, government kept on increasing, you know, that's just, that's just the way it goes. I must say, I just want to say that there is quite a lot of fun to be derived from government. I used to make a small income from publishing in the New Statesman, which is a left-wing magazine in England, the circulars that I used to receive in my hospital. I would just publish them with very little commentary, very little commentary was required. And I've derived, I've written quite a few articles on things, and we received a, in a hospital in which I worked, we received a form saying that asking us for our race, religion and sexual preferences in order that the personnel department could continue to pay us correctly. And there were, I think there were 17 races and 12 religions, or I might have been the other way around, I can't remember. And there were six sexual preferences. So I wrote, sent them a little note saying, surely you've got a very restricted imagination if you think there are only six. And so there is quite a lot of fun to be had from, from the idiocy of government, I must admit, I've had a great deal of fun from it. Don't you think Benjamin, that part of what... I perfectly agree with what Tom was only just said. I also watched a TV on these debates, one smart guy talking to another smart guy being asked by a smart woman. I say, this is just like a comedy show. I also get great enjoyment out of just being able to predict what these guys will say. And what the counterarguments will be and how the whole debate will end. So yesterday, various people came and said, are you an optimist or are you a pessimist? I think it doesn't really matter. I do what I like to do as long as they let me do it. I hope that people will listen to me. If they don't listen to me, then I discontinue talking to them. And I think I'm happy with my life, regardless of what will come in the future, as long of course as they don't incarcerate me. But in that regard, I'm optimistic that it will likely not happen. Hi, I have a question for Benjamin regarding Menken and his pessimism. If I remember correctly, I think the page you created for Menken, Menken Info or something like that, that on that side the main picture is of Menken being very joyous after the end of prohibition. So my question to you is, what was Menken's reflections on the ending of the prohibition, which was obviously a great evil. So did he felt pessimistic afterwards or was he optimistic in his writings? Thank you. He was very active during the calls for prohibition and during the introduction of prohibition. I think I read somewhere in the first 30 days of prohibition every day he wrote an article against it. And he would openly say that he's drinking bootleg whiskey or whatever. And definitely he was drinking all through prohibition. So I think it was just, he was happy, that was a minor victory. But there were still taxes on alcohol and plenty more. On prohibition, Menken in his diaries, which is interesting, during prohibition almost every day he writes something on alcohol. He doesn't write on that before and after prohibition. But during that time period everybody was obviously obsessed about getting something to drink someplace and informing each other where they would go, where the good bars would be, where you would get this whiskey or that whiskey. None of that played any great role before or afterwards. So I think this also applies probably to drug prohibition. If it would be legalized, these things, hardly anybody would talk about it, hardly anybody would notice that they had been permitted. But because of the fact that they are prohibited, lots of people are simply obsessed by getting drugs this type or that type or whatever it is. A question for Hans. There's a very clear distinction between illegitimate force, being the initiation of violence against personal property and legitimate right of defense. Under what circumstances, are there any circumstances in which pre-emptive attack is a legitimate force of defense, particularly if it's in response not to an overt or to a perceived threat, as was the case in Iraq and seems to be about the case in Iran? Those are cases I think that have to be decided one by one. Yes, things like that obviously exist where there is an impending attack and you might react to this impending attack. But you obviously also realize immediately that it's a very dangerous concept because you can always come up with some impending attack from someone and it would open the door to constant aggression. And of course every war or every major conflict that has broken out was fabricated in such a way that it looked like there was an impending attack or you even organized some small skirmish, paid the guys to do the skirmish and then you had a reason to do the invasion. So again, I think that requires very careful scrutinizing of the individual cases. In general, I tend to think that the burden of proof is on those who say there is an impending attack to show that that is really the case. Maybe Stefan, do you want to make a comment on this thing? I agree with that general observation and of course in the case of states the burden should be even higher and in the case of private defense, maybe not quite as high. And then of course you could also argue that standing threats, which is a type of impending threat, someone who's proven by their previous actions they're just a complete menace to society could be dealt with. I suspect that in a free society that standing threats or impending threats like that would be dealt with somewhat procedurally by ostracism or something like that but on occasion you're going to have someone who's going to take law into their own hands if they don't see some progress being made and they might just take the guy out. And then thereafter this guy might be viewed as sort of a little bit of a standing threat because he's not following the rules exactly but on occasion in egregious enough cases you can see something like that happening but I think by and large it would be pretty rare to do it because the burden proof would be high that you'd have to resort to. A question for Dr. Daniels if it's okay to go back and bring up a discussion from two days ago I would love to hear the opinion of a successful author who went with a standard publisher on sort of the evolution of the publishing industry and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each course. Well I'm afraid your question is based on a false premise that I'm successful. I mean as somebody said the rare editions of my books are the second editions. And so I suppose that of course I've always gone through publishers I've had great difficulty actually getting published in England in up till fairly recently fortunately the costs of publication have come down and I had great difficulty in being published at all by any major publisher because I think genuinely it must have been for reasons that they didn't like the content of what I wrote because it was impossible that they would fail to make profit from my books. So I had great difficulty. I've always gone through them I suppose in the modern world now they will act as some kind of filter or guarantee of some this will be their claim drill their some kind of guarantee of quality. In my case of course I I don't think I need that anymore because there would be people if I self-published the 612 people who buy my books would probably buy them and I would cut out the publisher. I haven't really caught anything to say other than I continue to go through publishers because of inertia, mental laziness and inertia. And of course when you sell 612 copies it doesn't really matter how you're published it doesn't make much difference. Will you tell us how many copies you really sell was it not 613? Well there have been books I must admit I have so there are some there are a couple of books where I've sold 40,000 copies but that's over a period of 10 years or something like that or a book that's remaining there are wonderful things for a publisher for someone like me now that all the books that all the books that I've written which would never have been republished and now being republished as Kindle editions and presumably so long as that continues my books which otherwise would have disappeared completely will go into the will be available forever but unfortunately that is true of everyone else's books. Any other questions? I don't really have anything much to say on the subject. Hi, can I ask Professor Hopper about Hayek why do you think he was so unsound? His main teacher was Mises and yet he remains unsound and is ripe for plunder by social democrats. Why was Hayek so mistaken? His teacher Mises was his teacher only as far as his economics is concerned and I think that is the area in which he excelled. His excursions into the area of political philosophy came much later in his life when he had been long separated from Mises and probably fell under the influence of other people I personally do not know who those people might have been but he has in the area of political philosophy he displays a fundamental anti-rationalism he does not think that a reason can accomplish very much but that of course he tries to reason so I think even there in his anti-rationalism constant talk against reasoning there is some sort of muddled mind at work because what is the purpose of writing trying to persuade people of his arguments unless he does trust in reason otherwise he should not say anything but I have no answer to why Mises did not have a greater influence on him also in the areas of political theory than he did he was very interested in John Stuart Mill and he edited the letters of John Stuart Mill to his wife which might have turned his John Stuart Mill was also a very muddled thinker and his wife Harriet was an ardent socialist and that was the least of it tell me more well he was obviously a masochist in the most literal sense and she was extremely nasty to him and he liked that maybe a follow up question to that is it to write that Hayek was converted by Mises' book Socialism and previous to that he was a socialist and isn't it the case that for many, not for all but for many people who convert from socialism to something else they retain some form of socialism the neoconservatives are ex trotskyites and so it may have been the case with Hayek but then Mises was a lefty himself also and he converted himself to something entirely different not all were some of course made the whole transition like Mises but for a lot of people it is difficult, they want to keep something that tells them I was right in some way before they didn't want to dismiss themselves I think we should not engage in too much psychologizing I take Hayek at this word this is what he writes and I attack that or find it good or whatever it is why he did this or so Tony would be more qualified he is a psychiatrist I am not a psychiatrist I don't pretend to know what goes on in the minds of these people all I see is the output on paper Thank you, I have a question to you Dr. Daniels you told us that you consider people in the western world to have a free lunch, to live in a free lunch society to have a free lunch syndrome if I quote you correctly and that many people are rent seekers you as a psychiatrist do you think that people are mentally ready for freedom and liberty now? Well as that famous quotation from Macaulay who said if you wait until people are ready for freedom before they are free they will never be free it is certainly true that a lot of people don't like freedom at least in our society to give you an example of prisoners that I saw in prison preferred life in prison to life outside and that must be so because in order to be caught by a British policeman you must really make quite quite... you really have to bake him to arrest you and I used to take them aside and say confidentially you've been in prison several times before do you like life in prison and they would say yes and the reasons that they like prison was that they wanted freedom actually from themselves, they didn't trust themselves they also didn't want women, it wasn't that they were homosexual but their relations with women were so conflict-ridden that it was a relief to be in prison where there were very few women so there are substantial numbers of people who don't want much in the way of freedom and what that means for society is a whole, I don't know but these are people who have grown up in a generally speaking have grown up in a world without much structure without much love and so on and so forth and they actually find more decency in prison than outside, it's a terrible thing, it's a terrible indictment but that's how they are so I'm not sure what that means in a society of 60 million people in Britain but there are many people who don't want freedom but definitely many, many do not want responsibility because it's very difficult responsibility is difficult I have a question to Mr. Daniels in the works of talking to the microphone in the works of Sacrazas and also Hegel if you might know the main feature which is distinguishing human beings from animals is that the wish to be recognized and respected and also for me it means an opportunity of making a choice and this is something the democracy I would say is an idea that is making an illusion of being respected, recognized and having a choice so I would say that it's rather the illusory choice without consequences and this is exactly where I see the weakest point of the whole construction where the most enormous changes could be made I'm not quite sure what the question is My question is that it is in the very nature of the human being to seek for being recognized and heard and respected so I would say that there is a big chance of pushing on that exactly point in the whole political system as well I suppose it depends whether you mean one is self-consciously looking for respect or whether it's an inherent thing that you wanted the idea of self-consciously looking for respect is disastrous because in my view it ends up in intimidation and respect or otherwise I mean that's what respect has come to mean in the areas where I practiced for example respect meant you will do what I do what I want or you will cringe before me because if you don't I will be violent towards you that's what respect meant that's what recognition meant for them and the other thing of self-esteem is another dreadful quality people would come to me and say I have no self-esteem and I'd say well at least you've got one thing right and the strange thing is instead of becoming very angry they started laughing because they knew the whole concept was bogus there's a huge difference between self-esteem and self-respect and self-respect is a very valuable quality because of social quality and so on self-esteem is actually saying I love myself whatever that actually means I like myself irrespective of what I actually am or what I do or what I mean to other people and unfortunately that kind of thinking has become very widespread talking about self-esteem are you familiar with Nathaniel Brandon for whom self-esteem is the highest goal in life well I pity him Professor Hirstmann recently had an excellent lecture on exactly on the argument of the relationship between Mises and his nasty students so I would very much like that you give us a synthesis of what you said in your lecture in Prague I think it could be interesting for the late on Hayek and Mises the lecture in Prague yeah sorry guys the lecture concerned the role that Mises played in the Montpelerin Society actually that was a talk that I gave here in the Property and Freedom Society six years ago and so a variant of this it is in Prague because it's still not published so that's what economics do if you don't have much time you're just given the same talk or a variant thereof a second time so in that lecture I explained that Mises was very skeptical concerning the future evolution of the Montpelerin Society because it was infused with social democrats in particular Willem Rutke but maybe he also thought of Hayek Hayek had not yet published the Constitution of Liberty so he said well if we start from the outset we're discussing whether the income tax should be 25% or 30% and that cannot be the point of a libertarian congregation so learning from this was precisely one of the reasons why Hans Hopper took the initiative a few years back in order to set up this society in which we would not spend our time on scheming out the best way interventionist policies could be arranged but set out completely free from such constraints discussing all fundamental questions pertaining to liberty and the unnecessary nature of the government and try to have fun doing this Does the panel want to say anything? Any other questions? I have a question for Professor Tanyans There is quite famous on the YouTube internet anarchist philosopher Stefan Molino and one of the things he does and he promotes very heavily is stopping beating children or spanking the children at home so for him it's the key to reach a better world in the future or anarchist world in the future if children don't get punished so they will not grow up thinking that violence is a solution to whatever kind of problems so I would like to hear your reflections on that idea but in a word I think it's nonsense because I don't want to set myself up as a great example in the world but I remember being spanked once or twice and I've never been violent myself and I'm not a saint or anything like that but I'm a particularly bad person and it's not that I'm in favour of violence towards that kind of thing but I think the idea that if only they could stop hitting their children everything would be alright seems to me preposterous because children... unless you regard the state of the world as so catastrophic that all the past is nothing but a sink of misery and so on I don't really think that's true I don't see it as the solution I mean I was spanked too I mean is here... When? Is there anybody here who never got spanked at all by their parents? I mean maybe there are some wondrous cases I will not ask you to raise your hand I think most people occasionally get spanked nothing happens seems to be perfectly normal I think I would be strange as a parent if I wouldn't do it From the libertarian point of view I think the way to analyse it is to view the parent you have to view children as having full rights and of course if you hit someone normally without consent it's aggression even if it's minor you have to view it as the parent is the guardian of the child and because of the natural relationship the parent is presumed to have basically agency powers on behalf of the child he can make decisions for the child so he could consent to the type of surgery tonsillectomy maybe circumcision whether you agree with it or not but the point is the parent has the ability to make decisions on the child's behalf as his agent as a caretaker unless the decisions are so egregious that you would presume that now the parent is not acting on the child's behalf and in that case you would say we no longer have the presumption that the child would grant this person because of the natural relationship the right to be the caretaker of the child such as in cases of child abuse but in my view spanking is one of those optional areas that is within the parent's right to make the decision whether it's a good idea or not and I personally think it is not a good idea but that's not as a libertarian that's just as a certain parenting style as a libertarian maybe you are lucky with your kid I was spanked too I must say I deserved it many times over the course of the last few days we've heard a lot of diagnosis of what's wrong with the state and what to avoid and we've seen what not to do and throughout that we've also caught a few nuggets of wisdom on what to do for instance always use cash make fun of the state show that the emperor has no clothes ask child-like questions of the status break bad and find life hacks restore the law by undoing legislation and now the most recently endorse spanking of children are there any other action steps that we can advocate coming out of the conference try to make a lot of money that's one way to protect yourself from the government it's just one way I'm astonished as a book publisher I receive manuscript submissions practically every day sometimes two and three books a day but seven out of ten of these are introductions to libertarianism or introductions to some aspect like introductions to free market economics and I can tell you that we really don't need any more of these I think we have plenty of these but what I don't see enough of are really well written well researched books on well history of course but I think very crucially on the life of our times you know where's our sort of capitalist book on the group anonymous where's our understanding WikiLeaks and coming to the defense of WikiLeaks where's our book on international piracy there's still not been a very good I think detailed book on what's happened to banking since 2008 you know I could just go through the list and we could just go through the newspaper today and see all the incredible trends or how about a book just tracing the the relationship between the central bank's response to 9-11 and the boom years of 2008 speaking of something you know just purely economic but there's so many topics that could be unfortunately these require a lot of research, a lot of time and a lot of work and some competence as a writer but there's a tremendous opportunity for publishing right now for all of us in this room if we're willing to do the work that's necessary I was at the fishing village last night I looked around I thought wouldn't it be just fantastic to have a really well written and interesting history of this village from the point of view of libertarianism I mean that would just be a great I mean everything is open but it's gotta be concrete and real and it takes more work than just sitting down and spinning out yet another introduction to libertarianism so there's a lot of work Lesley Fair Books is open and ready to do business with anybody who writes serious works that are engaging, factual that actually look out the window deal with reality in our times and explain our times in a way that animates the theory and makes it more compelling and believable those are the books we need so there's a lot of opportunities for writing I would suggest I have a question to Stefan Do you think in a free society something like Gresham's law which says good money drives out bad money for the law itself good law drives out bad law and if yes what kind of law would that be what do you think I think so in a sense imagine a free society with the host of private competing defense agencies or insurance companies or however it would shape out and some of them that tend to form inter company agreements treaties basically like how we settle a dispute if we have customers that have a dispute with each other and if they work something out then they settle it by those rules if they don't have something worked out then there could be war or violence or at least a long projected dispute now the customer shopping for a company he would tend to choose the company that's got agreements with more companies because he knows there's a higher chance of working things out peacefully or of a good resolution or of a lower cost in the long run so in a sense I think these cooperative non-war like types of agreements between companies would tend to be favored but they're not going to get many customers they're going to get the belligerent customers and their premiums are going to be higher and belligerent people tend to be less successful in life and won't be able to afford it so in a way I think basically for the same reason that war is costly and that violence is costly because it's not productive it's destructive these types of economic pressures will shape and drive the types of laws that these agencies enforce that's just one example I think we can think of others too any other questions okay in that case oh there's one a question for Anthony Daniels in what way did your opinion about the interference of government in people's life change after you first discovered the most important things in the first years you worked as a physician how did it change the decades after that well I began to see the effects of a kind of dependency and you couldn't really miss it where I was working and one very interesting thing was that in the ward in which I worked I've told this story many times and I'm sorry if I've said it here before but we used occasionally to get doctors seconded to us who came from Manila and initially when they saw everything they thought this is wonderful everyone is looked after in very well we attempt to help them with all kinds of things but after about a few weeks they would see a sickness in it all and actually come to the conclusion that they'd come from places like Bombay and Manila which are certainly not paradises they would come to the conclusion that from the human point of view actually it was worse than what they'd seen in Bombay and Manila which is saying quite a lot I would imagine so they saw a kind of I described it as a listlessness so it was my observation really of that and trying to see or trying to think about why this developed how this developed in circumstances where people were actually not I mean they were relatively poor by comparison with middle classes of course in the country but they were not poor in any absolute sense and so that's what made me start thinking about it I have a question for Benjamin did I understand you earlier correctly that you said there's not been much progress in fighting for freedom over the history of mankind but this is true the fact that we've had such technological progress since the beginning of the industrial revolution which didn't happen for nothing it was because there was preceded by an increase in personal freedom so there has been success obviously and it's being reverted in the words of Ayn Rand by an anti-industrial revolution so should we be really so resigned that nothing can change in the light of the history well I mean technological progress you know we all as a manifestation of previous freedoms yeah I mean I guess that argument can be made so we're talking you know you can have a big list you can have a one sided list of reasons to be optimistic but then you think of other reasons like the technology the government uses it to track down our incomes and make it easier for them to collect taxes so yeah definitely it's not totally bleak you know yeah so you say be resigned I think I don't think resigns the proper term to describe Menken like he you know he was as active as can be he was like more prolific than anyone but it's you know there's no clear clear you know you find someone you argue with them most likely it doesn't work or if you do convince them it turns out a year later they're arguing something else so yeah I think it's also not correct to say that the industrial revolution was a result of increased freedom they existed as much freedom in whatever 1400 or 1300 as existed in the 18th in the 18th century and the industrial revolution didn't break out there was not there were not dramatic institutional reforms that occurred around 1800 when the industrial revolution broke out there's simply no evidence for this I tried to explain in my book in one of the chapters that that was the growth of human intelligence that took place in the course of thousands of years that made it possible that you had enough smart people who could come up continuously with new innovations and that humans for a long period of history were not capable of doing this sort of thing again if it is true that an increase in freedom brought about the industrial revolution then people should show me what these institutional changes were that occurred around the year of 1800 and I don't see any of that so it must have other causes than this well I wouldn't know to whom to address but I think that the word of collective corruption obviously seems to be a concept that also could apply for us in here or a question how can corruption show up we heard there are doctors who get their salary of governmental funds and how then does it show up corruption in our case or is innocence on the other side of corruption a thing that we can achieve as a goal and how could we as an individual try to gain as much out of this and this having fun as an element of our motivation can we somehow gain something out of it and we will hint as well how can we keep innocence or is this in general something that we should attain as a goal and how does it then show up as a the contrary to the corruption element I don't know whom I could address with this question that's a difficult one I guess the only way you can do it is just yourself to lead an exemplary life and through your own life persuade people to imitate what you are doing I can only improve myself I cannot improve other people so just don't be corrupted yourself try to be an honest man try to be able to say all the things that I did were by and large right I made mistakes here I made mistakes there I see nothing else that can be done just to be to try to be good yourself strive to improve yourself and hope that other people will see that you do it and they imitate what you do the other words of wisdom well I think perhaps Confucius was right when he said that we must insist on words being used correctly and one of the things that's very conspicuous in my country anyway is the constant misuse of words where they have connotations but no denotations or they come to mean the opposite of what they appear to mean and so on and so forth and to try and resist that and also in in Britain I can't speak for other countries people are actually very afraid now and they are in my view unnecessarily afraid or more afraid than they actually need to be so there's a lot of fear which you can try and because nothing much is going I'll give you another example a friend of mine a professor this is very similar to the thing I said before he gave a little talk at London University and he had his expenses he wasn't paid any fee and he was sent a form which again asked him for his sexual proclivities and he before he could be paid his expenses presumably some proclivities are more expensive than others whether they thought he indulged in them on route but anyway they were his travel expenses and he wrote back and said well I want to know your sexual proclivities first so you send me your sexual proclivities I'll send you mine and and and of course they decided that actually it wasn't necessary to know his sexual proclivities before paying him they didn't apologise but I don't I mean this is a particularly absurd thing but we don't resist enough I mean I can remember being phoned up phoned by my administration in my hospital this is a state hospital they said I haven't sent your activity returns and I said no that's true I haven't sent any activity returns I can either have activity returns or activity which would you prefer well that was a bit of a puzzle silence and I said no actually I haven't filled in my activity returns I'm not going to fill them in I'm never going to fill them in and my decision is final and you have no appeal against it and I didn't hear anymore and I don't think enough people do that kind of thing and nothing happens to you another example I mean I gave from my prison the the chief medical officer received a a form every six months which said they wanted to know how many needles had been used in his needle exchange scheme in the prison and we didn't have a needle exchange scheme and we didn't want one and so he taught me a very good lesson he picked this form up like this as if it was something extremely filthy just dropped it in the waste paper basket and said if I I'll get another one in six months time and I'll do exactly the same but if I so much as put a mark on it anything on it we'll hear the end of it so there are all kinds of little things that we can do provided that we are not afraid but I'm not saying that that's going to make an enormous difference but we should not be as afraid those of us who are employed as many of us are in terms of filling in forms Ned cannot have a good line when a bureaucrat would come to him and tell him you need to fill in this this form and he said I don't need to you need to have it filled in and he tried to do that it never worked but you just extend the length of time the form filling took it's not just governments that like this of course it's large companies are exactly the same as governments and sometimes a bank or insurance company or something would fill me up we are the bank and something we need to ask you some security questions and I said are you sure it's not the other way around but you never get anywhere I would add Hans is exactly right about the power of attraction living an excellent life and Albert J. Nock and Leonard Reed have both written a good deal on this in a passionate form I got a blog post somewhere in the Ethernet internet on this and the second thing echoing Professor Dahlreppel's thoughts I would say don't pretend they can tax us but they can't force us to admit that it's not theft you don't have to be a boar you don't have to be rude in someone else's home but if someone asks you a question or they say something that people agree with this status idea if they ask your opinion you can be truthful you can be polite but you can say no I believe it's theft I'm completely opposed to it that's one thing we can do and then finally as for corruption of course corporations these are largely embedded with the state the insurance companies and being bailed out by the tax payers and the banks especially but by and large in the private world so the more private sector activities we have the less corruption there will be because there's a cost in general there's at least a general pressure against corruption inside the private sector so we have to push for more private sector less public sector another point to make you know one of the strange things that the modern sort of civic religion does is it takes it changes our sense of what we should feel guilty about so for example the civic culture wants us to feel very guilty about mixing metals with glass or something in the trash or taking too long of a shower or cranking up the hot water too much or something like that so you have all these kind of civic sins that are imposed on us and it's very successful people have a sense of guilt about all sorts of things if they anyway secular modern civic life gives us a full catechism that we have to obey and probably confessionals are next so one of the things we can all do as individuals is to straighten out a sense of what we shouldn't feel guilty about like we shouldn't feel bad at all about using phosphates for example or shouldn't worry about swatting swatting down bug bugs or anything else anything that preserves and helps our own lives flourish is a good thing and if the state tells us not to do it we should just say to hell with him and not feel bad about it and actually arriving at this way of thinking can be very liberating for you because you can feel a sort of distance from the official fake moral code that the state gives us and you can feel an alternative authentic robust moral code developing within you and this is kind of a lifetime thing we're having to constantly fight against false phony ethical systems opposed by the state bias so this is a fantastic way towards self-empowerment and self-liberation as a former prisoner I can tell you that it's not all terrible and you do meet some very interesting people in prison that's true a question to Anthony Daniels and Stefan Kinseller Dr. Daniels you said that there's no hope without fear would you go as far as saying that you'd have to instill fear to awaken the hope and what you mentioned as well that sort of prisoners aren't actually afraid of prison they prefer it from life outside what kind of consequences would still be feared given the current mindset and a question to Stefan what kind of consequences would be legitimate in particular given the likely case that the wealth that has been unjustly extorted by political and legal means has already been consumed to take back could you just remind me the first leg of your question do you have to instill fear to awaken hope and what kind of consequences would still be feared given the mindset that you described I do think that fear is necessary and I'm driven partly by fear myself and I don't see how they can be completely if you believe that actually the meaning of actions must be have some connection with the result then obviously fear is built into that idea I think and part of the problem is that people have nothing much to that they know that they have to fear they actually do have things to fear because their lives are not very good as to the as to the problem with the prison the prisoners who don't fear prison I'm certainly not in favor of making prison harder than it is but this observation that people like going into prison some people like going into prison isn't actually dependent very much on the actual regime in the prison so even when it was much harder when I started working in the prison it was actually much harder than it became but even under the harder conditions quite a lot of people like prison as you said they met very interesting people and as to what people should fear I think it must be the consequences of their own actions and unfortunately there is this disconnection I'm not in favor of terribly harsh things that would happen to them but the consequences of what they do it's very important let me restate your question to make sure I have it right you're asking what is the remedy available to the victim of some type of aggression if the aggressor doesn't have enough property for restitution so my approach is this is the idea that we're all in favor of justice means giving someone their due ok what you do depends upon what your property rights are and as libertarians we think that's basically the right to the physical integrity of your body and the things that you own which is why we're against aggression the idea of restitution is one type of remedy in response to an act of aggression is to try to restore the victim to his previous status now in the case of an act of simple theft you can approximate that by returning that item stolen but you can even in that case you can never achieve true restitution because you can never restore the victim to the position he would have been in which is that he never would have had trespass committed so you can never undo any crime which is why we're against it in all other types of crimes like murder assault and battery rape, burglary, etc restitution to me seems to be vanishing chimera I mean it's almost nonsensical to me the primary, so in other words in one sense justice is impossible to achieve once crime has been committed the only true justice is to have no crime once the crime is committed then the second question is what is the victim entitled to do because then that is what is entitled to him so then justice would be letting him do whatever he has the right to do and then the libertarian answer in my view would be the proportionality idea of Rothbard which is basically that or the lex talionis of the Old Testament basically in principle the victim is entitled to do to the criminal what was done to him as a rough measure of justice whether the criminal wants to whether the victim wants to do this or not is up to him as a practical matter most criminals are low lives and have no assets okay so you're not going to be able to count on getting a monetary award from the criminal even if you enslave them and hire them out to some company we know slavery is not that efficient anyway and etc so I think as a practical matter in a free society crime would be low and preventing crime would be what people would focus resources on including their insurance companies and people would have insurance costs broken into and your insurance company can't find the guy or get money from him they would pay you and then that would give them an incentive to stop it but as a practical matter I think in theory you know if someone murders one of your family members you catch the guy in theory you have the right to basically kill them that's punishment my view is that in a free society that all forms of punishment would be more costly as a general matter than some kind of damages payment finding some kind of way that the aggressor can integrate himself back into society find forgiveness try to make amends even though he can never pay full restitution and in fact full restitution is never possible anyway for these reasons I believe that like most private defense agencies would probably tend to resort to physical punishment as sort of a last resort or be a more expensive measure and so ostracism and other measures would be resorted to to keep these marginal criminals at bay