 My question is for Frank. What is, when you give that talk in the Netherlands, what is the reaction in general? Well, thank you for your question. Well, like I said in my speech, I mean, I say the most un-PC things and people haven't got angry at me. And only one person has called me a racist once after a very modest article in the newspaper and that was it. So apparently my arguments are pretty good and I haven't been a non-person yet. So, but if I would gather more publicity, they would know how to find me, I think. You know, they would denounce me and stuff, but up till now it's been okay and the responses are also of relief. Like, you know, first, many people feel that there's something wrong with the egalitarian anti-discrimination movement and ideology. But they cannot pin it down and so the book, that's why I like the book and why I decided to write it, because in 100 pages you're forever inoculated against egalitarianism and you have your ammunition and your discussions with people who call you a racist or a sexist or etc. So there is a response of relief, but the audiences have mostly been liberty-minded or right of center. They don't want to invite me. No, it's amazing. I mean, I say the most outrageous things and that would be, you know, wherever I talk, people are very talkative about it. They really like to discuss these things, which you would expect from university to welcome, but no, they talk about very unimportant things, I think, often. I have a question concerning the relation between Switzerland, Switzerland-Lichtenstein, but let's say Switzerland and Austria, which is, as we heard, very, very thoroughly friendly. Nevertheless, there are, we talked about that, Schweizer-Witze, jokes about Swiss. Of course, there are many Austrian jokes, jokes about Austrians in Switzerland. I would say also that there is a very good and friendly relationship, but maybe one point, quite important within these historical contexts, you mentioned that after World War I, when there was this vote in Vorarlberg, whether they would like to come to Switzerland, the vote was tremendously for this change, but nevertheless it did not take place among others because of Switzerland. That fear that too many Catholics come into Switzerland and change that order that was in Switzerland. Could you comment on that aspect too? Yeah, my comment is that my speech was just related to the position the Austrians have against their, to their neighboring states. And this may be mistakenly heard, I know that there are some discriminating ideas from the Swiss side to Austrians. So I just meant the Austrian view of the Swiss and the Lichtenstein people. I wanted to add a point of view from the Katzelmacher, the Italians. It's just a reflection about what you said. In Italy we have a distinct difference between the regions where the Austrians ruled, Lombardia, Veneto, Ferioli and even Toscana, which have a tradition of good administration, even with the mass of the Italian states, whereas the rest of Italy is more like disorderly Mediterranean as you would expect. So just to reflect about this, the Austrian Empire left a very good impression, even on the countries which fought the Austrian Empire bitterly like Italy, which was built in the fight against Austria. And so I would like to hear your comment on this. Yeah, I have nothing to say to contradict what you said. I just want to add this term Katzelmacher is a thing from centuries, not centuries, from decades ago. So modern Austrians do not even know the word. So it's my generation and the older ones who have some ideas of the times when the Italians changed the side and they began the war on our side and they ended it on the other side two times. And therefore this pejorative word stems from, but nowadays this is absolutely tied out. May I add about the word Katzelmacher because it's sometimes misunderstood. It is nothing to do with cat, making cats, but it means making kettles because there were people, particularly from the region of Riulli, who went to Vienna and they sold the kettles of people who were specialized on that. And from this kettle maker it came out Katzelmacher. I think it's not just in Italy, it's almost everywhere. The difference is still visible, interestingly, and of course the architectural patterns of the city but then seemingly the tradition of better administration. But I think mostly it was the border between Western Europe and Eastern Europe that followed it. So there are many other reasons for differences. And the administration seems to have been quite efficient because at the time it was kind of Mandarin system where they really tried to attract an elite to the public service. So it was, for example, Böhm Bawerk who instituted direct income taxation and he did so with an amazingly small number of public employees. So they were really orderly and efficient. Unfortunately that wasn't such a good precedent to do so. But also it explains a bit, as long as the Austrian economists were part of the establishment they thought that the minimal state is possible because they saw the potential of having a small elite with a very high, let me say, the patos and the ethos of the administrators. So they really or many of them thought it was a privilege to be a servant for the public and I think that may explain some of the better administration. But I think the main reasons are more cultural and more Western European. I live in South Africa so naturally the whole topic of discrimination was always very present and when I left more than 20 years ago we often had discussions about this. So anyway, about 15 years ago I then, in thinking about this topic, realized that, similar to what you said, discrimination is a fundamental requirement of life. If I choose food instead of poison, I'm discriminating. And every living action, every single living action is an act of discrimination. So if you forbid discrimination you're actually forbidding life. But the interesting thing is then I realized, wow, okay, so that means if I forbid the government from discriminating, you effectively forbidding government from taking actions. So I then designed a constitution that forbids the government only but not private individuals from discriminating. Therefore you would be limiting government but still leaving room for that. So it's another, to go into details isn't the right place here but it's kind of funny that one can turn it around on its head. Well, thank you for your compliments for the talk. Yes, I didn't go into government discrimination and it's easy to say for libertarians while governments shouldn't discriminate but the Dutch government does discriminate regarding national holidays for either a Christian. So in a way they do enact religious discrimination which was fine anyway because 99% of the population was... Another thing is what they do of course with combat and crime is to discriminate and when they try to prevent people from having car accidents they target young men. So it is very difficult not to discriminate even for a government but to discriminate in a way that Jim Crow laws where they would say to bus companies, the blacks and whites should be separate. That is very immoral I think and the funny thing is also the remarkable thing is that anti-discrimination laws are actually similar to discrimination laws because in both situations the government tells us whom to associate with. So it's the other side of the same coin namely coercion. Did I answer your question well or respond to it? Thank you. We can talk about it later on and that applies to everyone. So what's your view on baffarian? Baffarian. Baffarian. Yes. So do you think Austrians would be more friendly to baffarian versus the German-German? Well, because I'm asking this because whether religion comes into play because I believe baffaria is mostly Catholic and the rest of Germany might be Protestant so yes. Yes, as I have said most Austrians are Bavarianized Slavs so they are quite close apart from for Alberg which are Alemanic so it's a different Germanic tribe so that may be the reason why for Alberg for more attachment to the Alemanic Switzerland and Liechtenstein. So of course there's a cultural closeness which is obvious between Bavaria and large parts of Austria but I mean there's no talk nowadays of joining Bavaria or creating a big Bavaria I've never read or heard about anything and I think goes back to Napoleon, the big I mean change difference between Bavaria and Austria so it's not a topic of today it's just a cultural closeness but then you see the closeness differently in Slovenians in the south of the same music and way of dressing so it's very close to the Elpine cultures which are German speaking so it's more this Elpine and Redacopholic identity. The difference between the northern Germans and the southern Germans the Bavarians in special dates also back to the German war I mentioned in my speech when the Bavarians fought on the Austrian side and lost against the Prussians and well that may be an explanation for the recentiments of the Bavarians against the northern Germans. Also to Karl it seems to me that if the PCB Brigade and the anti-discrimination movement were consistent in their thinking they would be very much in favour of the free market because there is no more relentless enemy of irrational prejudice than the free market. A sexist employer who chooses to pay a man 40% more than a woman simply because he doesn't want to employ women or promote women would get a 40% smack on his bottom line which would soon sort out his prejudices yet all of them, all of the PCB Brigade are fanatically anti-market. Have we as libertarians failed to convey the message that in fact the most egalitarian, most anti-discriminate, anti-prejudice institution that you could have is a free market if it were allowed to operate? You mentioned you're from South Africa. Strangely enough one of the most effective apartheid laws was not the colour bar laws which discriminated on colour it was the law which demanded the rate for the job. So you had to pay the same amount to a white man as the black man. Who would you choose? A white man who speaks English or Afrikaans or who comes from a city and is acculturated or a black man who's just come from the village and has no industrial experience if you had to pay the same amount. There's no awareness of the fact that the free market allows the disadvantaged to discount their disabilities and to osmosis into the mainstream and undermine the very foundations of prejudice. I think if that is the message that we could get across we'd get a better understanding hopefully of what it means to be a libertarian. Yeah, quite true. Thank you for your question or your comment. I didn't go into this very much but many people have commented on the book that they say that many of these laws that don't seem to have anything to do like you mentioned about equal pay are most detrimental to or conducive to discrimination like the minimum wage law and equal pay because feminism has this great reputation for me that they shoot themselves in the foot because if you want equal pay of course and for any reason good or bad or right or wrong a company owner would say well I don't want to employ women and you have to and then the state demands that you pay them equally or sorry I don't want the company wants to pay them less for any reason doesn't matter in this case but economics says that in that case he will favor the man instead of the woman. You make it more easy for sexist to be sexist and I don't think we really failed in explaining this well we could do a lot more and the book tries to help with that but as with the PC brigade these people want to be they look at good intentions they don't care about bad results they want to feel good about themselves I think is often the case I mean this is not always the case but I think it's often the case and in my discussions with them I noticed that and a friend of mine he mentioned they want to be world improvers they want to have the status of world improvers but they don't care about improving the world they care about preventing individual choice they do care about results they have a hidden agenda their agenda is to interfere with individual choice individual freedom and the disguise behind this good intentions they very much have very much results oriented yeah but different results than the good results they it's a charade it's the whole thing about good intentions well that we have to call them out for the inconsistency of their arguments and their shameless hypocrisy and their virtue signalling I'm glad these words have become more common now because now we can use them more often against them what's your opinion in Austria the feeling about the EU do they want to have an exit as well or do they voluntarily be brave and stay in the EU or what is your opinion on this I would exclude it from the background of Austrian history and the background of Austrian history is a continuous changing from small to great to small to great and whatever so it happened several times in our history and I think that the Austrians fundamentally are very afraid they felt themselves treated badly by history in the 20th century it was very difficult for them to get out of the insinuation that they were all Nazis they were only about I would say a third of them were Nazis which is I would say enough but then they got the status of the first victim of Nazi aggression the conference in Moscow in 43 and afterwards they built up their new identity this is one side of the thing the second side of the thing is that there is a strong anti-Austrian mood in the Austrian left remember what Andreas talked about the idea of the unification with Germany in the first republic and the high degree of let's say of unity between social democrats and national liberals or Nazis so they all wanted to go to Germany the only group were the Christian Social Party of Dolfus who tried to continue this legalistic, loyalistic tradition of the monarchy, the independence of Austria the Austrian idea for Central Europe which was revived also after 45 and so you have fundamentally two groups on the left there is still a kind of hate against the Republic of Austria the idea of Austria itself which you can see in this incredible Europeanism so we have to overcome this old traditional and catholic and reactionary Austria in order to be modernized and we cannot do it out of our own forces because we need the help of the European Union so there are very few people in Austria which would openly say that it would be much better for us to leave the European Union I am among them I think Austria's schizophrenic is a split country we say Vienna is a kind of a waterhead or overblown was the center of the huge monarchy now reduced to a little bit more than 10% of it but retained the size and the bureaucrats and so on and then there's rural Austria and that's really split and you can see the electoral results it's boils down to binary results and that will continue so we have a polarized country and at the moment it's more than 50% in favor of staying with the status quo of course everything else is quite risky but that may change in the future and that's quite open so I agree that nobody actually not nobody but just a small portion of the Austrians really would like or prefer a dramatic change so the Austrians are conservative from the onset and they do not like changes at all and now we are part of the European Union it was a clear vote how long ago? 20 years or something like that so it was a clear vote to enter the Union and I think it would be difficult to find a majority today to leave again and you have also to take into consideration that the media to 100% is propagandizing so you cannot really fight against these forces successfully Do you think the follow up to that now that the government realizes that it's not very effective is quotas particularly in the workplace is that what is causing those changes? I'm sorry I didn't get that what changes? Quotas in the workplace in some countries Johan mentioned South Africa that's an example where quotas are being implemented we see it in Germany in the police force now they're trying to not so direct but indirect quotas in government employment and I'm sure it's happening elsewhere too Yes thank you for your question Aaron I do think indeed that they see that the previous policies to get parity in the workplace didn't work but of course they will not admit that it had a counterproductive effect so they'll now come with quotas and they implement... interesting I write about this in the book too they tried it in, it was in Norway to have a 40% of board of directors needed to be female and according to the economists 200 companies went off the stock market because it was only applied to publicly traded companies and of course you have many other companies they started having token positions so you can't fool nature and so it will have a detrimental effect too I mean it will also stigmatize women because of that and because you know, due to weak you need affirmative action etc and another side effect is that it stigmatizes women in the fact that if you have a certain position on your own merits people will... and Thomas Sowell has written on this and Walter Williams but if you have rightly gained that position on your own merits people will look at you not being certain whether you are there because of affirmative action and suppose we would... we gave that wonderful example I think of suppose the Qantas Airlines or something or British Airways has a policy of affirmative action for pilots for women or minorities you know, people would be very scared or more scared to fly with them because they would know that the pilots would be selected because of their characteristics and not their merits although I'm sure there are very many eligible minority members or women that could do the job but of course this is an unintended consequence and did I answer your question? I want to make a funny addition in this country that the system of discrimination fully exists That's one of the advantages here certain things you can say here which would get you into deep trouble in other places but there are other things that are problematic to say here I can comment on that because the first book Beyond Democracy was translated in 20 languages and this book The Discrimination Myth but I thought well this is typically a western item an issue in Thailand they don't have this so I don't think there will be a Thai edition or a Turkish edition The question for the whole panel there were some comments just now again talking about the difference between urban voters and rural voters in Austria but we see it everywhere we see it in the United States the big population centers versus so-called flyover country we see it in the Brexit vote between London and non-London you mentioned Vienna versus the rest of Austria so we see it everywhere and I'm curious if you think that there's a possibility of a split at some point political split between big cities and rural areas and how this could play out how that could look a split like this is impossible along territorial lines and that's why it's not thought about today but actually I think it's the more natural solution and that would have been the only solution to keep alive the cultural realm of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire because you couldn't have split it along geographic lines but obviously the settlement was very different in cities and in the countryside for example in what is today Ukraine and was then Galicia, Lemberg was a Polish city with German Jews and the countryside was Eurothenians which I'm now called Ukrainians so it's impossible to just carve out a national state but it would have made sense to have cities as autonomous and diverse concentration points like a harbor or so on or not in the trade routes whereas you have the countryside which is organized along different lines and more homogeneous lines so I think that's the solution that out of history would make most sense but it's so far from our current political thought that I don't see it as any feasible solution to the problems because I mean carving out Vienna out of Austria today along territorial lines wouldn't make any sense you wouldn't want to have a wall and no exchange I mean Vienna would die immediately without having access to the trade routes and the countryside so this idea of having autonomy but being open that's very hard to grasp at the moment and that's why a lot of reaction towards the European Union and decentralization tends to shut down and that I don't really like about these reactions and a lot of of course the countryside reaction against the more urban cosmopolite elites is a bit reactionary in a negative sense in that they think they just shut down and have their autonomous or even autarky regions and that of course doesn't make sense so it's a different way of thinking about politics which I hope will I mean remain as the only peaceful solution to cope with the polarization we're seeing at the moment I think there are several dimensions of this question from the historical point of view it was a very highly discussed topic of the conferences in Saint-Germain in Versailles after the first World War so the question fundamentally was when the town has is dominated by a certain nationality should we take the town and then attach the surrounding regions and villages or should the town be incorporated in the majority of the people out there that was a very important question for instance in a town like Fiume nowadays Rieke which was mostly Italian with Hungarians living there and Germans also and incop and circundated by a Croat population or the same thing in Slovenia in Trieste and they decided in the case of Fiume to give it to the Slavs because it was a rebellion you've probably heard of Gabriele D'Annunzio who was employed in Italian and he organized a military expedition and he occupied the town for a certain period and then it was given to after the war after 45 the Yugoslavia the Slavs now this is one side I think this is decided because you cannot change these assets anymore as it has been done after two wars the second thing what you meant before is the growing difference from the cultural point of view and the political point of view of urban and popular urban and the popular part of the strata of the population and this you see in nearly all elections particular this thing was the outcome of the regional elections in Germany now in Saxony and in Brandenburg where you had a tremendous victory of the so called populist alternative for Germany and enormous losses for the political parties and the outcome is or was the voters voted much more to the right than ever and they will get governments much more the left than ever because they are all getting together and form an anti-IFT coalition which continues to make the things even worse the question is how long this can continue because the people want to have answers on questions like mass migration centralisation loss of incentives I mean how long can it last and how long can it last in your the democratic will of the people I have two questions for the Austrians you can pick which one I don't want to answer one of them was the map of the Hungarian empire what was interesting all these pockets of different languages especially Hungarians in Romania especially Germans all over what has happened to them I travelled to Romania a couple of years ago and there is definitely still a lot of that there is there a movement or what's happening to those minorities and the other one is the political mess you've had and the entertainment with your political developments in Austria lately is there any hopeful signs in that I respond to your second part of the question here is the expert for the first part so actually I do not see any good solution which can occur in the next future elections in two weeks as you know and there is a good chance that the former Chancellor will be the next Chancellor so this young man called Sebastian Kurz but he threw the so-called right wing Freihetliche Partei out of the of the government and I do not see a realistic chance to get that again despite the fact that the majority of the Austrians or a relative majority of the Austrians prefer this kind of a coalition between the Freihetliche and the ÖVP I think that the feelings of the really strong forces in the ÖVP are great coalitioners so they really want to have again a coalition with the social democrats which they had in the last 50 years and this was not good for the country in my opinion but I do not really see a realistic chance to have a second stage of a coalition between the Freihetliche and the ÖVP so in the short run I do not see any light on the end of the tunnel regarding the national minorities in the east and in tactics after the first world war the main problem was that with the dissolution of the with the it is okay no? okay thank you after the dissolution of the dual monarchy did not change the pattern the demographic pattern of the territories there so there were still Germans there were still Romanians in Hungary and whatever Hungarians in Romania and there were some changes after the first war that means people working for the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy from the centralized government had to leave Slovenia for instance but also the Czech Republic but most of all the structures the demographic, the minorities the map remained as it was under the dual monarchy that changed after the second world war because after the second world war and after the atrocities committed by the Germans and by the Nazis there there was this the ethnic cleansing with brought about 12 to certain million people from Germans from the eastern part of Europe to Germany and to Austria but there were still in Romania as a good example there were still minorities who could remain in Romania because Romania was never as anti-German as for instance the Czech Republic of Poland so they were rather accepted there and they remained and then they became an object of business under Czarszewsku so Czarszewsku the communist general of Romania literally sold the German minority to Germany the Germans had to pay I think something about not much money but not I think about 50,000 marks for a person and they went to Germany and then he sold the Jews to Israel so the last kind of ethnic cleansing was done in a capitalist way in the sense that you treat people like the property of a dictator