 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is Michael Humer, professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of 2013's The Problem of Political Authority. So let me just start by asking you about the title of the book. I mean, what is the problem of political authority? The problem is basically what is the basis of the state's authority? And what I mean by this is two things. First, why is it that we're obligated to obey the government when they make laws where we wouldn't be obligated to obey anyone else who made similar commands? And the second question is what entitles the state to coerce other people to obey them where it would not be permissible for anyone else to use coercion in similar circumstances. And that comparison is your main strategy there. Yeah. So for example, if I decided to tax people in order to provide benefits for the poor, I would be considered an extortionist. In fact, then the state would come and arrest me and put me in prison and the rest of my society would approve of their arresting me. But when the government does the same thing, it's considered to be praiseworthy. Isn't the answer that, well, they're the state and states get to do stuff like that and non-states don't? Yeah, it seems like we need more of an answer to that. That is, we need an answer to, and why do states get to do things like that? Now, as far as I know, nobody has actually proposed that there's no further answers just because it's a state. Usually they try to say something about the state that means that it gets to do those things. And it seems to be required if, generally speaking, normal groups of people are not allowed to do certain things and there has to be some difference between normal groups of people and the state if they're allowed to do it and normal groups of people aren't allowed to do it. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, you could say, oh, the difference is just the property of being a state. As far as I know, nobody thinks that that's an adequate explanation, right? You begin in the beginning of the book, you have a section about this hypothetical of someone going around locking people up in his basement. Maybe you can go through that to kind of tease out a bit of why it's weird when we think about people doing the sorts of things that states seem to do every day. Yeah, so the story is there are some bandals in the neighborhood and for whatever reason, nobody's been doing anything about it. So you decide to just, you know, get a few people together with guns and go out and look for the vandals and periodically you find one of these vandals and you kidnap them and lock them in your basement. And then after you've been doing this for a few weeks, you go around to your neighbors and tell them that they have to pay you for the services that you're providing. And unfortunately, if they should decide not to pay you, then you will have to label them criminals at which point you will also kidnap them and lock them in the basement with the vandals. Now, I think people would have maybe mixed feelings about kidnapping the vandals, but definitely if you kidnap the neighbors who don't pay you and lock them in your basement, that would not be okay. Right, but this does seem to be like the behavior of a government. Right, so they make rules and then they decide the people who violate the rules that they made are subject to long-term confinement in very unpleasant conditions. Well, it seems like at least one initial obvious objection to that is that you didn't provide them with due process and rules that were sketched out beforehand and things that we think are good for governments to have. Yeah, so you could say that, so we could imagine that you write down some rules that describe the conditions under which you're going to lock people in your basement. Right, and you know, you can make the rules whatever you want, but that doesn't change most people's reaction, right? Just because I wrote down a description of how I'm going to proceed when I kidnap people, that doesn't really make it okay. And if I provided a trial too, I might seem like if you added enough protections in there then just the justness of what you're doing ends up giving it legitimacy in some way. You add protections of a trial, you add protections of rules, you give them an opportunity of appeal, and now you're just pretty much being like a just state. Right, or if you're super principled enough, because I mean, Sans, the part about asking for money from your neighbors so far what you've described looks a lot like say Batman, and we all kind of applaud when Batman does his thing. Yeah, well, so as I say, you might have different feelings about locking up the vandals. If the vandals are really bad, and if the punishment is fair and proportionate, some people would say it's okay, and provided that the mechanism for determining people's guilt is really reliable and fair and so on. Okay, but really almost no one would say that it's okay for me to demand money from the neighbors for my services and then lock them up if they don't pay. It really matters what the rules are that I'm making, right? Imagine that I decide that my neighbors are not allowed to consume certain substances because I decided that they were unhealthful. And then so I kidnap people who are consuming the unhealthful substances and I lock them in the basement too. Right, and notice that the people who believe in the authority of the state do not believe merely that the state is allowed to make correct rules. They believe that you're obligated to obey the law and that the state is entitled to enforce the law even if the law is not so great. So like there are very few people who think that because the drug laws are not just that a police officer who enforces them is equivalent to a kidnapper. Let me ask, because you've been saying in a lot of what you've said, you've said things like some people might think or some people might not think and we're talking about moral questions here and so these are these things that people might think or not think are our opinions about moral matters. So let's maybe take a step back and talk about the moral system that we're operating within. You have an earlier book called Moral Intuitionism. Yeah, Ethical Intuitionism. Ethical Intuition – sorry. So is that what we're talking about here? Are we just talking about – it seems to people so they have intuitions about this because we might have reasons like we could posit a utilitarian system where we say what's morally right is what produces the most happiness and having a state leads to more happiness than not so therefore the state is morally permissible no matter what our intuitions about individual people doing this sort of thing or we could have some sort of natural law rule or whatever. So how does ethical intuitionism fit into this? Yeah, well, I am relying on people's common sense moral intuitions but I don't think that there's any alternative starting point that's not more controversial, right? I mean, so when I say things like well people would not accept locking the people in your basement because they didn't pay you that's a pretty widespread moral judgment among both liberals and conservatives and whatever your theory of morality is, as long as you believe there is such a thing you should accept the value judgments that are pretty much uncontroversial at least as a starting point. But isn't it generally uncontroversial that the state – it's okay for the state to do these sorts of things? Like I mean if you went around and polled people and said do you think that the state's authority is legitimate my guess is the majority of people and especially people outside of philosophy departments would probably say yeah it's okay for the state to lock people up, it's okay for the state to tax people and it's not okay for an individual to do it and that's what my intuitions tell me. Yeah, basically the problem is that people have inconsistent judgments so that is I think people's judgments or intuitions in moral philosophy are incompatible with their intuitions about political philosophy. In just ordinary moral philosophy when you're talking about the conduct of people it's considered pretty much uncontroversial that it would be wrong to do the equivalent of taxing people it's wrong to extort money from people even if you're giving it to a good cause with very few exceptions but then in political philosophy people endorse exactly the same behavior on the part of the state. Now you could render these two positions consistent if you could find some relevant difference between the state and non-state agents but in fact the attempts to do so don't work out very well. And the interesting thing too is that you do not sketch out a theory of rights or property as your starting point as some people political theorists often do. That's right. I mean I think a general theory of rights or theory of property or even more so a general theory of morality like utilitarianism or social contract is going to be much more controversial than the ethical intuitions that I'm starting from. So I think there's no way that for example you could be justified in starting from utilitarianism if you weren't justified in starting from just common sense moral intuitions. Explain that a little bit further actually. Yeah so I mean the judgment that I'm relying on like you shouldn't extort money from people. That's more obvious than the judgment that the right action is always the action that maximizes the total utility of society. Right. They maximize total utility principle is sort of vaguely plausible. You know it's not obviously wrong and you know it seems plausible to many people but it's quite controversial. If you think that that's justified you know things that are even more obvious and less controversial should be more justified. Right. It's hard for me to see how somebody could reject the more obvious on the basis of the less obvious. And so the obviousness the agreed upon this possibly or the obviousness is counts in favor of it being true in comparison with something that is less obvious. I'm not going to talk about it's obviously wrong to torture children for no reason versus a more complex theory that is a because this is something a lot of philosophers would disagree with and it sounds maybe weird to people that the obviousness counts in favor of its truth because philosophers seem to say things that are so counterintuitive and not obvious so many times. Yeah right. Well so you know what could what could be the possible alternative basis for your philosophical views and that's what seems to you to be the case. Right. And you know I've argued in previous work that basically there is no alternative. If you're forming a theory it's based upon the way things seem to you. Given that it would be irrational for you to take the things that less that seem less obvious rather than the things that seem more obvious. Let me ask a bit more about this obviousness before we turn to your takes on the theories that are often given in support of the state's authority because again it seems a lot of people think it is simply say obvious that the United States government has the kind of authority to do these sorts of things locking people up taxing them that Trevor doesn't and that the reason is because the United States government is obviously a state in the way that Trevor is not no matter how much he might you know stomp his foot and insist that he is or that he has these powers and so could could we say something like you know a state a state derives this from being thought of as a state that when enough people just simply see this thing as a state then it gets to do state like things and so that's where the disconnect is just that we can't really analogize back to individual behavior because an individual is obviously not a state and we then would need a story of how states get to be and how they cross that threshold from obviously not a state to obviously a state but that doesn't necessarily apply in the real world where we have lots of obvious states. Yeah so first I don't think that you would really want to say that just being a state gives you the entitlement to coerce right so that would mean that because the Nazi government is a national government they're entitled to coerce. Most people who believe in political authority or almost everyone thinks that there are some restrictions that there are some conditions that the state has to meet before can become legitimate right not just the property of being a state maybe it has to be at least somewhat democratic maybe it has to do at least a minimally good job of protecting people's rights and so on. Okay well that's the first thing but second thing is it's just extremely implausible that merely the property of being a state is explanatory for why it's permissible to coerce people right so what is that what is the property of being a state it's something like the property of being a powerful organization that has claimed a monopoly on the use of physical force in a geographical area something like that really that gives you the entitlement to coerce. If we go to some of these theories though we say let's look at social contract I'm sure some people right now thinking well we have a constitution of the United States society Locke believed and others believe we had a social contract that was created so if we all got together and voluntarily agreed about something so for example if we're trying to decide where to go to dinner tonight and we say well whoever gets to whoever wins a coin flip gets to pick and we all agree to that then that seems to be a good way of governing ourselves so how about that as a theory of why the state is justified. Yeah yeah there would be there would be great the only problem is that it's false right and the only problem with that theory is that there wasn't any such agreement so but if there was it would be cool I mean right in other words no nobody ever presented me with that contract and asked for my signature you know remember that ever happening you know if you want you can try sending the federal government a letter telling them that you don't agree and that's not going to get you out of anything right they're not going to stop charging you taxes. And last I heard it cost something like $20,000 to renounce your citizenship or something like that in fees. I thought it was 2000. Was it 2000? But then there's this you quote the hypothetical social contract that the idea that yeah of course there wasn't this agreement but if there had been we would have all agreed to it or we all behave as if it had existed or something like that so we can kind of posit this social contract even if there never was really one how does that work? Yes sounds a little crazy right. There's some circumstances in which a merely hypothetical agreement can be morally efficacious. Typically this would be when an actual agreement is not possible. So let's say you have this accident victim who's been brought into the hospital and he's unconscious and typically it requires consent from a patient in order to treat the patient even in order to provide life-saving treatment you require consent to the patient. Unfortunately this patient is unconscious so what do you do? And most people agree reasonably that well you appeal to what the person probably would consent to if they were able like if this person were conscious he probably would agree to have life-saving medical treatment so it's permissible to administer the treatment. That works fine. This is not going to work for the social contract though. You can't really make the argument that well we can just rely on the hypothetical possibility that people would agree to have the state. This doesn't work because the actual citizens are not all unconscious. It is possible to ask them if they agree. The reason why the state is not asking them is that too many people would say no. In particular if the result of saying no I don't agree is that you don't have to pay any taxes then lots of people would say no I don't agree right. That's the main reason why the federal government isn't asking them. Well it seems like there's other ways that we can indicate agreement so obviously classic one would be you're here therefore you've agreed like it or leave it right. If you're here therefore you've agreed to the basic principles of the United States government or wherever you are. Yeah that's perhaps the favorite theory of undergraduate students as to how you agree to the social contract and if you don't agree with the government then you have to leave your house and of course you have to leave behind all your friends and family and your job and to move to what? Antarctica I guess. If you don't want to have a government just move to Antarctica and that will signal that you don't agree. Well that is true possibly. That would do it. Imagine that anybody other than a government tried to make this argument right. So you know I just go to my neighbor and I say pay me a thousand dollars. He said no I go well okay you were living in your house so you agreed to pay me a thousand dollars. You don't want to pay me a thousand dollars and you have to get out of your house and move to Antarctica. No, no this doesn't really work. I can demand that somebody get out of my house if they don't want to pay me whatever I say. But I can't demand that they get out of their own house. Similarly the state can't demand that everybody vacate their own property if they don't want to have the state. What if the state is the property owner though in some sense. If you can demand that someone gets out of your house you hear this a lot with immigration for example. I could keep someone from coming into my house or I could keep someone from I could kick them out of my house as you acknowledge but the state so if you the state is just having a house a big piece of property then they can do that too. That's right. Yeah they could do that if they had acquired legitimate title to all of the land. But how would they have done that? Basically their only way of acquiring control over the land would be by force. Now if the state already has legitimate authority then they could just pass a law that says we all the land but we're trying to figure out how they establish their authority in the first place so we can't assume that they already have legitimate authority. If we don't assume that they already have legitimacy then there's no way of accounting for how they would own all of the territory. What about what's often called like an associational account of authority which is this kind of we owe it to each other to obey due to benefits. So this is the philosopher H. L. A. Hart made this argument that if I've benefited from a bunch of people getting together and sacrificing in some way so they all got together and built a really great park or playground and then I went and used it then I now owe them something in return like whether that's helping out or paying for the park or whatever else. And so the government ends up looking like that kind of cooperative scheme. Yeah so this would be plausible under certain conditions but not always. So if a group of your neighbors decide to provide some service and then later they just come to you and say you have to help pay for it well really really strongly depends on what the service was if it was something that you didn't want and especially if it was something that you actually told them you didn't want but even if it was something that you wanted but they just didn't ask you beforehand you know usually it would look like you're not obligated to help right. Now you might think okay but if you then go and use the service then you have to help pay for it right. Maybe but also it kind of depends upon further details. So suppose that your neighbors decided to they decided to open this restaurant that's going to be paid for by the neighborhood and after opening and they didn't consult you and then after opening it they say now you know you have to pay some of the expenses of running this restaurant. Well if you voluntarily choose to use the restaurant maybe you have to pay. Suppose though that the reason why you have to use the restaurant is that they have forcibly shut down every other restaurant using threats of violence right against anybody else who wants to run a competing restaurant. In terms of you using the restaurant voluntarily then you could have to pay only if they shut down all the other restaurants and gave you no other options is that the point you're making? Sorry if you have to use their service because they have forcibly prevented anyone else from providing the service then you don't have any obligation to them right and they're acting wrongfully. And the point here is this is analogous to the government. The reason why you have to use the government is that they have prohibited anyone else from operating like a government. So that is if you try to set up a competing organization to provide the same goods as the government the government will come and shut you down by force. So that's why you have to turn to the government. So if somebody commits a crime against you you have to call the police because the government has prohibited anyone else from doing the services that the police would do. Is this also the case to a lesser extent possibly for public schools and roads and things that libertarians often get accused of being hypocrites for even using? Now we can use private schools and possibly we could negotiate the world without using public roads with much effort. And helicopters. And helicopters and things like that. So would that help absolve the state of that moral culpability that you're accusing it of? Not really, no. So the government is going to charge you money regardless of whether you use the services or not. They're going to charge you the same amount of property taxes for example regardless of whether you send your kids to the public schools. So in essence they're forcing you to pay for the service and then you can either use the service or not. But if in those circumstances you choose to use the service that doesn't mean that you're agreeing, right? If you could get out of paying by not using the service but you voluntarily use the service then we could say that you were agreeing to paying, right? You're not agreeing to pay if you do something where no matter what you did you would have been forced to pay. What about a consequentialist argument? Someone says, okay, sure. You may not need to, it seems odd for us to force you to do this stuff but if we didn't have governments things would be really awful. Or if we allowed for competing governments then things would be awful in terms of there would be strife and war and whatever else. And so we just need you to buck up and obey and pay for it because the alternative would be so much worse than the harms you're suffering having to pay taxes. Yeah, so there are two kinds of responses to this. The first is to explain why anarcho-capitalism would not be so bad, right? And that's basically the second half of the book but that's a long discussion or a long debate that I would have to have. But the second thing is only a very tiny portion of what the state does could be justified by consequentialist grounds. So if you're making this argument that well we're justified in doing things that would normally be rights violations or maybe in fact they are rights violations because some disaster will happen otherwise. Then the only activities that that justifies are the minimal activities necessary to prevent that disaster from happening. But the state does all kinds of things that are not remotely necessary to prevent this collapse of society that the advocates of government are warning us about, right? So for example, how does this justify drug prohibition, right? Like the fact that you need the state to provide law and order. How does that make it so that I'm obligated to not smoke marijuana or is permissible for the government to kidnap somebody who's smoking marijuana and lock them in cage for a couple of years? It seems like any theory of political authority would have to accept that whatever justifies it would be sort of concurrent. It would be limited in scope based on what the nature of the justification is. So if you're saying yes, you're allowed to coerce people when there's an asteroid that's going to hit earth and everyone needs to build a big machine and we got two days and the only way to do it is to put a gun to everyone and say work on the machine. So there's some amount of authority but that doesn't get you all the way. That would be true of almost any theory of political authority. Yeah, this is basically what I'm saying that the concept of authority is not just the idea of having an entitlement to do good things or to do things that anyone would be entitled to do. The concept of authority is that the state is entitled to coerce people to obey it even when the state is actually making a mistake. So that is to some extent it's supposed to be that you're obligated to obey the law just because that's the law, not because that's something that there's an independent reason to do. And similarly, it's supposed to be that it's permissible for the government to enforce the law just because it's the law and not because there's some independent reason why everybody needs to do that thing. Right, and that's the very morally problematic part of the idea of authority. Before we move on to the consequences of not having an adequate theory of political authority, the ones that we've gone through so far you've dismissed very quickly. They obviously just don't work. But are there theories of political authority out there that are stronger than these? Or what do you see? Are there ones that seem to actually get close? Well, I think the consequentialist argument comes closest. That is, it's a complicated and difficult issue whether you actually need a government in order to avoid some terrible consequences. It's not irrational for someone to think that you do. And then from there it's not irrational to think that you justify an interesting range of government activities. But it just doesn't succeed in justifying a whole bunch of other government activities. So that's somewhat reasonable. What about voting? We haven't brought up that one yet, actually. We talked about presence. We talked about voluntary, using a restaurant for example, voluntary use of things. What about giving you the right to vote in terms of a theory of democracy that now gives you a say in what sort of things are going to be out there? So therefore, even if there are things that you don't like or things that are wrong, at least the people ought to say in it. Yeah. Well, it seems like, I mean, if this is an attempt to explain how we actually have consent, it seems like people would have to first have a say in just the existence of the governments. You would have to have had a chance to vote on whether to have a government. And then it looks like you should have had a chance to vote on the general structure of the government, vote on the provisions that would be in the Constitution and things like that, which of course none of us alive were given a chance to do. Okay, but even after all that, really usually the fact that a majority of some group votes for something, usually that does not override what you would normally think of as the rights of the minority. Right? So if there are six people in a room and four of them vote that they want to beat up the other two, that just gives them no right at all. Like the fact that there are more of them, like the group who wants to beat up the other group is larger, that just cuts no moral ice at all. That doesn't give them any kind of justification, right? So it's really hard to see how the fact that a majority of people vote for something gives any kind of legitimacy. What if we lowered it though as opposed to taking an extreme example? We have six people or 60 people or 600 people who vote and 400 of them vote and 200 don't to put a stoplight in the village, which means that as opposed to beating them up, they take a very small amount from everyone, including the 200 who didn't vote for it. Does that change? Does the degree change the moral calculus at all then? I wouldn't think so. I mean, so look at my original scenario, there's four people who want to do something to people who don't. What if the four people just want to take like a dollar from each of the other two? No, it's still impermissible, right? And the fact that there's more of them doesn't, I mean, that's irrelevant. And then the fact that you increase the number from four to 400, that's irrelevant, right? I mean, it doesn't matter that it's 400 versus 200. Now, you might have different intuitions because some other factors are changed in your version of the story, right? That is, you might have the assumption that this stoplight or the street that the stoplight is going to be put on is public property. And so if you assume that, and then maybe there are already some rules in place as to how public property gets disposed of, then it might seem like it's legitimate. Of course, then the question is how the public property got to be established in the first place. There has to be a story about how that land got to be a public property that doesn't involve violating people's rights. It does seem, though, that many people would think the scale does matter, and maybe they're just wrong, but five to one versus five million to one, if there's one person left voting against this, then there is some sort of big difference there that matters. Yeah, I mean, there might be a kind of utilitarian argument. You might think, yeah, if there are five million people, like five million people's preferences could be satisfied versus one person's preferences being satisfied. And then depending on how strong the preferences are, you might think the increase in utility is enough to justify violating what would have been the other person's rights. That's sort of debatable, right? But what in fact goes on in a democracy is you don't need a five million to one ratio. You just need to have 50% plus one, and then you get to coerce the 50% minus one group, right? Yeah, but you had your chance to vote, and it could have been 99% to one. It was the possibility, and who knows whatever came out, but it could have been that, right? Yeah, but I mean, I don't see why that matters. Let me ask about how your views play out among other philosophers. I mean, are you in the decided minority when it comes to saying none of the arguments for political authority work, or do other people agree with you as well? Because we see a lot of political philosophy being done out there, and if political authority doesn't work, that would seem to put an end to it, right? Like, we wouldn't need to spend our time thinking about what the optimal setup for the state is, or what role it should play if it can never get off the ground. So in terms of the philosophers who do political authority type of work, which is a little different, I guess, than political theory, did they just consider you a crazy person? Surprisingly not. Yeah, so there's been a lot of work on political obligation specifically. That is whether you're obligated to obey the law just because it's the law, and surprisingly it has come to be a pretty orthodox position, right? Not by any means universal, but it's a pretty mainstream position that there's no political obligation. Now, there's been a lot less attention to the political legitimacy part, the entitlement of the state to coerce, but the arguments on that issue are really very similar to the arguments on political obligation. Now, the idea that the state doesn't have authority, though, is quite different from the idea that we need to get rid of the state. So the idea that the best society is an anarchist society, that's a very, that's a small minority position. The idea that the state lacks authority, though, it's just the idea that they're not entitled to coerce you to do something just because it's the law, right? So they might be entitled to coerce you to do something because just in general, that's a thing that a person should be, should do, and anyone would be entitled to force the person to do that. They're not entitled to do that, in my view, just because they're the state and they're the law. Can you distinguish these terms a bit for us or just clarify? So we've got political obligation, we've got political authority, and then we also have this political legitimacy. Yeah, so authority is the combination of legitimacy and obligation. So the state has authority if it's entitled to force us to obey and we're obligated to obey. Political obligation is the obligation to obey the state just because the state issued some commands. And political legitimacy is the entitlement of the state to force you to obey their commands. Can one of those exist without the other? What would a situation look like where there was just legitimacy and no obligation or just obligation and no legitimacy? I don't know if there are any such situations. I have to think about that. And so you might think it's okay for the state to use force to try to make people obey, but it's permissible if you can get away with it to evade their command. You might think that. I mean, there's a possible argument for this. Like, if you have a purely consequentialist justification of legitimacy, you can say, well, there would be very bad consequences if the state didn't issue coercive commands, issue commands that were backed by a threat of coercive enforcement. However, for you as an individual, there really wouldn't be any big negative consequences if you disobey a law personally, right? Like, the state has to enforce laws in general, but from your individual standpoint, there are no negative consequences from you disobeying. And you mentioned that the idea that there is some sort of thing as political obligation is not a rare idea in the philosophical community. So I assume the conventions where all you guys meet up, they're all libertarians, I imagine? No, unfortunately not. The field of political philosophy is, of course, dominated by leftists, very dominated by left-wing thinkers. It's hard to think of a conservative and there are a few libertarians. I think there are even fewer conservatives than libertarians. So it is kind of surprising that the rejection of political obligation is pretty well regarded, right? It's probably the most widely held view among the people who actually work on that topic. They're not libertarians, right? They're leftists. And it's just because, you know, people went through the arguments and tried to come up with a justification for political obligation and they just don't work. And that brings it back maybe, though, to the point you made a few minutes ago about how this doesn't actually mean that we should be abolishing the state tomorrow and the difference between philosophical anarchism and political anarchism. That's right, yeah. I mean, most of the people who reject political obligation do not think that we need to dismantle the state. Most of them think that we need a state, you know, to prevent some kind of disastrous collapse of society and everybody beating each other up and so on. But they also think that, you know, if there's a law that tells you to do something that there's no independent moral reason to do, don't do it. You don't have to do it. And then the difference between philosophical anarchism and political anarchism, is that in that distinction there? Yeah, so what they call philosophical anarchism is it's the idea that you're not obligated to obey the law just because it's a law. So it's permissible for you to disobey, you know, provide you're not going to hurt other people by doing so and things like that. Political anarchism is the idea that it would actually be better. The best society would actually be one with no state. These terms are confusing because the terminology suggests that one of these doctrines is philosophical and the other one isn't, and one of them is political and the other one isn't, but actually they're both philosophical doctrines and they're both political doctrines. So the terminology is a little nonsensical. In the political anarchism world, the idea that the world would be better without a state, it seems like we'd have to take into account the fact that we're used to states and we live in a state-centered world now, so at least getting rid of them or changing our dispositions to be in states might take a very long time. That's right, yeah. So in fact, I'm not proposing that we should just abolish the state tomorrow. Basically, there has to be a lot of change in people's beliefs. There would need to be a shift in values, so there would need to be more suspicion of authority and more people would have to understand how the anarchist theory works, because if the state were abolished tomorrow, the next thing that would happen is the next day somebody would set up a state again. And that's because 98% or more of the population thinks that we need a state. What do you find usually after you give the reasons for your ideas? What do you usually find is holding people back? Because you would describe philosophical and political anarchism as a more moral position than a state-based system. Most people think that that's probably crazy, so after you've not done all these arguments, what do you find still holds people back from becoming anarchists? Well, I mean, if you want the psychological answer to that, I think psychologically, the answer is status quo bias. And most people are just not really up for considering a radical departure from the way their own society works, and also do not want to hold a fringe view. That is a view that's very far from the views held by the rest of their friends and so on, and that would be considered crazy. I think that's the real reason why it's hard for anarchism to make progress. I mean, as far as arguments go, there are a bunch of kind of Hobbesian people who think that if you have anarchy, then everybody is going to be attacking each other and killing each other and stealing their stuff. Right, and that seems to be the argument even among libertarians who are not anarchists because quite a lot of libertarians are not anarchists. They're monarchists in the vein of Robert Nozick or they're classical liberals or something of that sort. They believe that there should be a state in that it's legitimate and has authority and should enforce certain laws. She looked through those aimed at protecting our rights, and so for those of us libertarians who are not anarchists or skeptical of it, can you give us maybe the thumbnail sketch of how that works? Like without a state there to protect our rights, protect our property, protect us from violence, so on and so forth, wouldn't we just have chaos and anarchy in the way that that term is often used? No. For people who are already libertarian monarchists, they probably already know what the anarcho-capitalist theory is, but basically the theory is we need to privatize the functions of the state. If you already believe in privatization for most industries, really what you should be asking yourself is why do you think that the protection industry is different from all or almost all other industries? That's policing me. So the government provides a service of protection from rights violators. My claim is the same reasons why the government shouldn't control agriculture and they shouldn't control clothing and shouldn't control housing also apply to why they shouldn't control protection. If there's a particular provider that has a monopoly and they get to force you to subscribe to their service, it's going to be lower quality, there's going to be lower supply, they're going to jack up the prices and so on. But it seems like we're talking about potentially two different things because there's protection, but then there's control of the laws, right? So you could imagine a society where we had a state that wrote the laws and ultimately enforced them in the sense of courts, but where our police forces were all just security guards hired and private. So it seems like there might be a difference between – we can have multiple competing garment manufacturers because Trevor and I can wear garments from different places without any conflict coming out of that or we can buy our food from different farmers and different grocery stores, but that seems to be different if we could operate on different sets of laws entirely. So then what was considered a violation under my law is not for Trevor's and so then Trevor violates what's illegal for me but not illegal for him and how do we handle that? And so it seems like competing legal systems seems potentially more problematic than just having different police forces. Yeah. So the basic story is when two people have a dispute with each other, they need a dispute resolution service, right? So they hire a third party arbitrator and then the third party decides what's the resolution of the dispute. The reason they do this is that this is a much better way of solving disputes than fighting it out, right? Now in the anarcho-capitalist world where people are hiring protection agencies, the protection agencies themselves will probably require that you go to third party arbitration to resolve your disputes because, you know, again it's more efficient and they don't want to get messed up in this situation where there's this war between different customers, right? But if going to a third party to settle disputes is better enough that people would do it in the absence of a state, why do we settle so many disputes by fighting right now? I mean constantly people beat each other up all the time in disputes. They don't say, well, you know, I'm mad at you and you're mad at me and we're going to go to a arbiter. Yeah, well two things. One, no, people don't do that all the time. Like I've never, you know, in my adult life I've never been in a fight and I don't know anyone who has like in a physical fight. Well you are a philosophy professor so that might be a reason for that. Yeah, maybe, you know, to buy a sample, right? Most of my friends are intellectuals but still. But the other thing is actually so the government provides this dispute resolution service, the government court system, you can sue people but it's so bad, right? I mean it's so incredibly expensive and it takes so long to resolve disputes that it's almost worse to resolve a dispute using the government's method than it is to fight it out, right? And you know, that's pretty bad. Like, you know, you're really failing, really falling down on the job, right? Like which would you rather have? Somebody has a fist fight with you or they sue you? As soon as people are saying fist fight over suing then there probably means there's something wrong with the court system. Yeah. But why wouldn't that mean then that we would expect to see like two countries have a dispute which looks a lot like two protection agencies with different legal systems, their clients are in a dispute but countries don't tend to go to, they don't always turn, always are often turned to say the United Nations to settle it. They instead go to war which is extraordinarily costly and they know it's extraordinarily costly going in. Yeah, isn't that weird? Yeah, I mean, it seems totally irrational. Of course if you analyze political action by assuming that countries are people then they're completely irrational people. On the other hand, if you analyze political action by looking at the specific actual people who are involved in making decisions on behalf of the country, it's a little different, right? Because the enormous expense that you're talking about is not borne by the actual people who are making the decision to go to war, right? So George W. Bush did not have to pay three trillion dollars because he started that war in Iraq and he also didn't have a risk of getting shot in the war and he didn't have to shoot anyone else, right? So I mean, part of the problem is that the decision makers are insulated for the costs. And that seems to be this question of will we talk about the government in terms of the government should pay or the state should pay? If we listen to your arguments and then take them seriously, we're just talking about a group of people who happen to be named a thing, the government or the state. Yeah. There's a group of ordinary human beings who have gotten control of a lot of weapons and they've convinced a lot of other people to obey them, right? And then they decide to do a bunch of things that you would consider to be horribly wrong if any other organization was doing them, right? And if you look at the world in that way, then things like immigration restrictions and licensing laws and all that is just ordinary people deciding that they don't like certain things that are happening, which may be because they happen to have something called authority that people agree with, but there is no moral justification of them doing that, which of course libertarians in general make that claim a lot about a lot of different things. Yeah. I mean, this is really... I think the core rationale for libertarian policies is just look at what you would think of government policies if they were done by anyone else, if they were done by an ordinary person, because actually the government is just a group of people who are not superior to the rest of us, right? They're just people like you and me who just managed to get some power. So if I decided as an individual that I don't want foreigners just moving next to me and taking up jobs with companies in my neighborhood, and so I use physical force to stop foreigners from coming in, people would call me a racist and they would consider this very wrong. And basically the same applies for all of these other controversial libertarian issues, right? Consider the drug legalization debate. If anyone other than the government was issuing these edicts that there are certain substances that you can't consume and then using threats of physical violence to capture people who consume them, that would be considered very wrong. You've told me before that you advocate, I think what you call rational extremism or reasonable extremism in the... and how to advocate for liberty. Could you talk a little bit about what that means and what you think it brings to the table for the arguments that we make here every day at the Cato Institute and had all over the country? Yeah, so I am an extremist. I mean, my ultimate position is anarchism. But that doesn't mean that I'm unreasonable. I think that people have a misperception that if you take an extreme position, just that by itself is rhetorically ineffective and will make people not listen to you. But I think if you have the extreme position but you have reasonable arguments for it, then you can get people to listen. On the other hand, if you have a more moderate position but it's incoherent, I think that's less effective, right? And basically I think more moderate positions are incoherent. I basically think, I mean, the rationales for libertarianism, if you follow it through, are going to lead to anarchism. Now the reasonable aspect is, well, you know, when you're advocating your extreme position, you should listen to what the other side's arguments are and confront them. I think there's a lot of kind of libertarian literature that appears to be unaware of the other side's arguments. So libertarians frequently reject the idea of political authority and maybe not under that label, but basically assume that there's no such thing as authority, but don't actually respond to the reasons that people have given for why there would be authority. So my suggestion is read the most intelligent and informed opponents and then try to respond to what they say. And I guess that's, you know, my concept of the reasonable extremist. Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod. That's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.