 This week's Bunker Story is brought to you by FaceBeef. A couple of days ago, I was on FaceBeef and I noticed this quote. The United States is third in murders throughout the world. But, if you take out Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, the United States is fourth from the bottom for murders. Believe it or not, these four cities also have the toughest gun control laws in the United States. So, under this quote, a few people had liked it. And then I made a, what I thought was a humorous comment. I said, I'm a liberal. Therefore, this is either one, a lie. Two, it's far more complicated than that and you are misrepresenting it. Or three, I don't care, guns kill. And a someone called Mark, I'm not going to give his surname, someone called Mark came back and said, Killers kill, not the weapon. And somebody liked that. And I responded to Mark, you're a wrong mark. Guns are designed to kill, therefore they kill. You have a right to defend yourself. Your best weapon is 911. In England, after calling the emergency services, we offer an attacker a nice cup of tea and perhaps some biscuits if we have any. To which Mark replied, I don't want to get in a big debate here, Bernie. I respect both of our opinions. Today, I am broadcasting from a post on Facebeef. Hello and welcome to Life, Liberty and Property. This is Bernie. Today we have another interview. This time it's with somebody you probably already know. He's quite famous. He's a brilliant scholar, a very interesting man all around, actually. Stefan Kinsella. And I'm just going to go straight to the interview and let it speak for itself. So hello, Stefan. Hello, Bernie. So we've been chatting back and forth on Facebook. One of the things you said was that you were in London in the early 90s. Is that right? I was. And from the school year, 1991 to 92, so for about a year, 9 months or a year, I was there at King's College, London, student housing in Camberwell. And thoroughly enjoyed my year there. Camberwell, I know it well. Well, it's funny. I look at the maps now. I don't really know London because I just took buses. And I just was going by point-to-point on the bus map, bus schedule. And I really didn't learn the geography. I just knew where I was going. And I got there and did things in those areas. But yeah, it was a fun year. I loved it. Loved it. And I took my son to London about a year ago when I had to go to Turkey for Hans Hoppe's thing. So we stopped in London. And he just was in love with it. We saw the Tower of London and the Tube. And he was 10 years old. He was just enthralled. Well, cool. So what was this thing about Matt Cowell? Oh, yeah, I don't know what called it to my attention. I think I saw a blood drive being advertised in my son's school. And every time I see that, it gets me upset because ever since I've lived in London, or maybe for the last 15 years, if I try to give blood, they always reject me. Really? And yeah, so I'll go to give blood. And I give it up now because, and so I'll go to apply. And they ask me the questionnaire. And everything is normal, except did you live in the UK for more than, I don't know, three months or something like that in this time frame? And I did. And they're worried about Matt Cowell disease. Wow, that's extraordinary. I've never heard of that before. Yeah. So if you happen to have lived in the UK for more than a certain number of months, if you're an American back in the 90s, they will not let you give blood here because they're afraid of Matt Cowell. It's crazy. Wow. That is extraordinary. I'm going to have to check that out here and see if that applies here. I get the feeling it probably doesn't. I don't know. The Americans are a crazy species sometimes. So they don't test for it. They just ask you. Yeah, they just ask you. You saw a report and they say, well, you've lived in London. So are you've lived in England? So thanks, but no thanks. Okay. Well, that's, that's, that's wild, really wild. So you're a lawyer. And one of the things I've heard you, you heard you talk a lot about law and I've heard you talk a lot about IP. I've heard lots of your stuff for the last several years. And I really like what you say. I really like your, your stuff. And I'm very much with handsome and hopper myself. You work as a lawyer. I also get the idea that you actually, you have some love for the subject, right? I do love the subject and I like the practice. I've enjoyed many parts of the practice. I did, I did burn out a little bit on the drudgery of aspects of the patent practice after a good decade of doing it. And so I made some changes. But yeah, I like advising clients. I like working with engineers. I liked it when I did some family law and oil and gas law and other things earlier in my career. I won't say I always wanted to be a lawyer because I didn't. It didn't even occur to me until I was in basically in graduate school and engineering. Really? Oh, yeah, I just did it to make money. And because I'd like to argue and people said you should be a lawyer and that's not really a good reason. But for me, going to law school was like, I loved engineering. I love science and technology, but I was more than that, right? Because I was reading economics and political philosophy and history and Iran and all that. And that is not the engineering way of thinking. It's just outside that box. We don't get exposed to any of that kind of stuff, really, as engineers. And so when I went to law school, I just felt like a whole new world had opened up to me because you could think and talk in normal terms, maybe a little bit specialized. But you could talk like a human, right? You're talking in humanistic terms about purposes and right and wrong. So for me, it was liberating. And I thought law and law school was analytical like engineering is. It's not empiricist, but it's analytical in terms of in the sense that it's problem solving. So I liked it. I enjoyed engineering and law and I liked being a lawyer. I liked everything about it. I've had a good education and a good career. I really can't complain and I've never been a whiner about that stuff. And you get to argue, right? Say again? You get to argue as well, right? Well, I never really did. I was not much of a litigator. Oh, OK. So I argue in my libertarian vocation, you know, in my political writings. So I guess I've used some of that skill set there. But in my career, no, you don't argue that much. It's more transactional and applying for patents and doing contracts and giving people advice and helping them negotiate things. So there's really not much arguing for lawyers if you're not a litigator. Yeah. OK. From other talks I've heard you talk about, you've mentioned something like, I'm paraphrasing here, the purpose of a court in the absence of a state would be to discover the law. Have I got that right? Yeah, that is one way I've tried to word it, trying to be careful there. And I got that coincidentally. I posted something on Facebook, I think, today or yesterday about Rothbard's book review of Bruno Leone's freedom in law. I saw the post, yeah. I think I'd read that a long time ago, but I'd forgotten Rothbard's exact words. And there was an audio version of it, so I listened to it when I was walking this morning and not smoking a pipe. I find that funny. We'll get to the point. I sometimes exercise and I used to smoke a pipe and I mean a cigar and you have all these health nuts that look at you like you're insane because what are you doing walking and smoking at the same time? So from the Leone, Bruno Leone has this wonderful book, Freedom in the Law, which Rothbard critiqued and praised. And he emphasized, I don't know if he emphasized it. I got it from someone that I read, but I tried to emphasize that law should be, we have two types of law now that the government, the state enforces on society. And one is basically made law, law announced by the creeds of the legislature, which is what most people think of as law now. But the older way of law, the way law arose, it was viewed as being discovered by judges or by courts or by decentralized processes. And I say discover instead of made by judges because they viewed themselves as assuming there was a justice, a natural justice or a natural law out there that they were trying to figure out. So they were discovering the law, not creating the law. I think that's fascinating and very interesting. Do you know exactly where it comes from or? No, I think it's mainly from Leone, but it is fascinating to me too. And one reason is because I am from Louisiana, which is the only one of the 50 U.S. states which is a civil law system or continental law, right, a Napoleonic Spanish law, French law, Napoleonic Code Spanish law hybrid system based upon the continental and the Roman law. So I was sort of reared in the Roman, Spanish, French, civil law tradition, mixed in with the common law because Louisiana surrounded by, you know, the other 49 states which have the English style common law. So it really comes from a study of both of those two systems, the common law from England and the Roman law and its modern versions in which, you know, the serious scholars of it when you study the way it works, the law is viewed not as being created or made, but it's viewed as being discovered and found in a process. And also codified, is that right? Well, it was codified not until later, and that was more of a, that was, say, Napoleon was one of the ones that started the modern codification process in the Napoleonic Code. And it introduced an element of legis, a legal positivism in that the first few articles of the civil codes say that legislation is a supreme source of law, and the following codified articles are law because the legislature is blessing them. But what it was was it was a carefully distilled summary of the principles that had been figured out by a decentralized non-legislative process in previous centuries. So the legislature in the continental systems took decentralized law and they codified it with the help of legal scholars, and then the legislator blessed it to sort of take supremacy. So it did introduce an element of legal positivism which I would not agree with, but the substance of the codes themselves or by and large fantastic private law codifications. There have been other private codifications which have nothing to do with the legislature, like the Uniform Commercial Code in the U.S. and the American, the ALI, the American law is a two restatements of the law. Of course, Blackstone's codes earlier on, Blackstone's codification earlier on, even just the Emperor Justinian's codifications earlier on, which did have a government aspect to it. But yeah, there's lots of role for legal scholars to codify, summarize, restate, reshuffle, slightly correct. The law that develops in a sort of more organic, you could say Hayekian fashion. Leoni was heavily influenced by Hayek and I think vice versa. I think he also influenced Hayek. All right, that's really interesting. Maybe Codifying wasn't quite the word I meant to use. I think what I was meaning to say was something more like setting precedents. Would that be right? Okay, so yeah, so in the common law, the idea of stereo decisis, right? The idea of precedent, the idea that a previous decision of the court is binding. Although even that is exaggerated, because on occasion courts will break from precedent and change the decision. But by and large in the common law, there's a great respect for the judicial role and therefore the courts try to organically develop the law by working within the existing precedents and if they come up with a new case, they have to reason by analogy between the previous precedents and so the law grows organically and if it's very similar to a previous case which you think was decided wrongly, you have to do one of two things. You have to either explicitly say, I'm not going to follow precedent or which is like basically overruling the previous court or you have to come up with some kind of reason that you distinguish the current case. And sometimes that's an artificial reason and sometimes it's a legitimate reason. In the civil law system, there's something analogous. It's called jurisprudence constant. That's a French term I believe or Latin. I think it's French. It means constant. So the idea there is that you're not really bound by a particular holding of a previous court because they're all entitled to interpret the civil code as it's written because the legislature lays down the rule and the court just applies it like an administrative function. However, if a long series of court decisions have always interpreted a given civil code article in a certain way, then that has strong persuasive effect on succeeding courts. So it's similar to stare decisis or precedent. I wrote a long article on this in 1995 for the JLS Journal of Libertarian Studies and I've written a summary version of it in the meantime and they're both on my website if anyone's interested. I think it's a fascinating topic. Most people just want to talk about intellectual property with me nowadays, so I rarely get to talk about this topic. I've heard you talk about it many, many, many times. I find it fascinating. You totally converted me on the subject. I was pretty much sticking with... I mean, in the last 15 years at least, I've made most of the money I've made has been through either software development or photography, both of which I heavily relied on copyright. So it was a big deal for me to look at and change. You know, having had some skin in the game kind of thing. I understand. I have skin in the game too. I'm a patent attorney, so that's why I struggle with it. But for some people, it is hard to figure this out and I understand that totally. It took me a long time to come around to my current view. I do think that now the more clear these issues are and the more obvious injustices from the system, right? Trademark, patent, copyright. We hear them about them every day. I think it's easier now for, say, newer libertarians who are starting to think about it. I think it's just easier to figure it out right away, for at least some people. Well, I didn't find it that way for me, but now in retrospect, it seems easy. Yeah. When I've heard you speak about IP, and I'm not going to talk about IP particularly, but you usually begin with, okay, what is property? Where does it come from? And you talk about lucky and homesteading and Hoppe's variation on that. And so we begin with a discussion of property and why we need property. And I find that fascinating and very, very persuasive. The idea of we live in a world of scarcity. We need to have some rules of some kind or other in order to decide who has control over what property, at what time, for what purpose, et cetera. Yeah. And are you still there? Yeah, I'm here. Oh, sorry. It's just so quiet. Such a good line this. I know. I know. I heard your last interview and you had some Skype with Neema Vadati. Yeah, that was awful. So far we've been lucky. Knock on a socialist head, you know? Okay, so when we talk about property rights, do you actually, I mean, when talking about it with people, depending on how deep you want to go with it, do you sometimes use your go with certain words just because other people understand them even though you don't necessarily totally agree like the word rights, for instance? Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. I do that sometimes, mostly in casual conversation. Yeah. In more intellectual settings with people that are really interested like rising students or people in an interview or in a lecture, I try to be precise. Or if I use a word in a different way, I try to qualify it sometimes. And I've done that more and more in recent years. So on this issue of property, I actually try not to say what is property because that's, and last night I did a liberty.me, this Jeff Tucker's do venture, I did a liberty.me seminar on libertarian confusions and clarifying terms. And one thing I've noticed is you have to be careful not only because of confusion of, you know, even ourselves on these issues, which are not easy and outsiders of, you know, say opponents, but people that are dishonest and disingenuous or they will equivocate. So you have to be careful to not go with them when they set you up. You can tell. And sometimes they're doing it on purpose and sometimes they're not. On the IP issue itself, even libertarians will do this. They'll say, well, don't you have the right to the fruits of your labor? Or they'll say, well, the question is an idea property. And I don't think that's the question. I think that libertarians have a good intuitive sense of the way the system should work, given what we've had so far to deal with, you know, the existing, the pre-existing industrial age, which really wasn't too much of an intangible property issue, not a digital age issue. But now we're having to confront these other issues and we have to be a little bit more careful with our application of these concepts. And so I never say, is that property or not? I step back and I wonder, where did the word property come from? Why did we start using it? And if you go back to Locke, which is really the genesis of a lot of our ideas, he was talking about who is the proper owner of something, who should properly be conceived of as the person with the right to control a given thing that there can be conflict over, which Hume pointed out as well and which Hoppe emphasizes in his writings, right? So it's always a question about who has the legally recognized right to control a given scarce resource, something that people can conflict over. So the question is not, is that property? The question is, what is the resource that is an issue? What's the dispute over? And then who is the owner of that resource? So I always try to use the word resource now because if you just use the word property and you refer to the thing, the resource, that you have a property right in as property, then you lose sight of the fact that we're always talking about ownership of a given resource. When you talk about it that way, it becomes pretty clear, at least for the libertarian, that there's only about two or three fairly simple rules which answer that question when you apply them to the contextual facts at hand. And those are for the body's self-ownership, which is the person himself is the presumptive owner. And for everything else, for external resources, it's either the person who first started using it, you know, the Lockie and Homesteader or the original appropriator, or someone that he transferred it to by contract, or that he owes it to in payment of a debt like restitution or rectification for a crime or a tort or something like that. And other than that, basically, no one else has a better claim to that resource. So if you always focus on who owns the resource, you don't even get to these IP confusions because, let me give an example I've been giving lately. People say that we fight over religion, you know, Muslims and Christians or whatever. Yeah, yeah. But they don't really fight over religion, they fight over physical things like their bodies or their land. The religion is maybe what motivates them to fight, but the fight is always over a scarce resource. Yeah. Okay, so the libertarian would say, well, the Christian can't kill the Muslim who doesn't convert to Christianity because the Muslim owns his body. So the property right is in the body, right? Or you can't steal their animals or take their land or burn their crops or whatever because they own those physical resources. So if you put it in terms of the dispute it's always about who owns a given resource and you don't say, is that property or not? The question is, who has the property right in that resource? Then you also couldn't so easily make the IP mistake that people do when they say, well, you can own a piece of land or a house or a car that you created with your labor, but you also can create ideas which are useful and valuable on the free market. And so you own things that you create and so those things are property. So you see they have this kind of mishmash, this sloppy terminology that lets them get down a rabbit trail of equivocation and confusion. So if you just keep asking, what's the scarce resource at issue and what are the libertarian principles that we're applying to determine who owns it? It's very simple. And then you'll see that the ultimate issue with IP is that the state or the legal system that you're favoring as an IP advocate is awarding the right to control or a property right in a resource that was already owned by someone else. You're awarding a right to control to someone else even though there was no contract, there was no tort, and that other person didn't find that resource. So there's none of the three libertarian principles that would justify giving them the right to control and to tell you how to use your own resources. And when you put it that way, it becomes pretty clear in my view that IP is nothing but an evasion of property rights. Yeah. I've heard people actually saying that creation is another way of acquiring property rights. Yeah, I think that's a confusion because there is a link between the creation of wealth and property rights, but they're not the same thing. So I think you have to just be, again, clear with your concepts, your language, your terminology, and your analytical framework. I would say that... The hard thing is to make other people understand exactly what you're saying. Well, I think the struggle is a pedagogical when really it's to get the idea straight in your own mind so that number one, you understand them and you have a clear, consistent way of thinking and then you have to try to find a way to communicate them to people. And that strategy, that's pedagogy, it's a lot of special skills and not everyone has it. But in this case, what I just typically explain to people is that if you own a resource and you transform it into something more valuable, you have increased your wealth because the thing you own is now more valuable to you or to potential customers or whatever. But you haven't created a new property right because you had to own the resource that you transformed before you started working on it, right? So labor and transformation and so-called production is a source of wealth. There's no doubt about that. In fact, if you and I exchange two things, I exchange my apple for your pear, we haven't really created any new matter or any new things in the world, but we have increased the sum total of wealth in the world because we're now both better off after, right? So that's almost a perfect illustration of how a voluntary transaction or labor or action can increase wealth, but it doesn't create new property titles. Property titles only come from original appropriation or contract. Have you had a discussion with anybody who has said there are other ways of acquiring property other than, I mean, forgetting the creation type idea, but other than first appropriation and the other ones that you listed? Have you ever like had a socialist, for instance, come along and say, well, no, actually the state owns everything or something like that? Have you ever had that kind of discussion? I don't think that explicitly, usually because they're a little bit leery of the idea of property. They don't want to really admit that they're in favor of property rights anyway, not so clearly. Although everyone is theft, right? Yeah, every system is a property system because they ultimately decide who gets to use a given resource. The question is only are the allocation rules of that system just legitimate or can you come up with a reasonable explanation of it or can you argue in favor of it coherently? They just don't try to do that. You'll hear the democracy settled. The people want this. They show this to the representatives in the legislature and they've decided these kind of arguments, but I don't really regard them as serious. They're sort of avoiding the issue and assuming their position. Yeah, it's hard to find anyone that will actually confront what you're actually saying and discuss the actual points that you're saying rather than just deciding something different. What I find is the most common thing they resort to, conservatives especially, but sometimes socialists if you push them, they will begrudgingly admit that they value liberty too like we do. They characterize us as favoring liberty and only liberty. It's your only value. They say we value liberty too. It's just not our only value. But to me that's just a dishonest way of explaining that sometimes you're in favor of non-liberty or aggression. But a criminal could say the same thing. A guy trying to attack someone could say, look, I generally favor liberty, but in this particular case, I really want to do the following thing and that requires me to put a hole in your body. So in this case, I'm not a simple minded person like you with only one value. I have many values. That's really what the conservatives and the socialists end up saying. And I think actually it's a straw man because we libertarians, and this goes to the thick, thin debate which you've probably followed. It straw mans us by assuming they were all radically thin in the way the thickers straw man the thinners. If that makes sense. Yeah, your only value is liberty. The thick advocates want to incorporate these other values as part of libertarianism or something like that. But the presumption of that attempt is that if you don't incorporate libertarianism, you don't have these other values. But to my mind, libertarianism is just one discipline or one part of your life among many. No one is just a libertarian. We all have other values. But we do happen to believe that aggression is wrong. I mean, that is one thing we believe. Just like most people believe murder is wrong. So it's one thing we believe and we elaborate that. And you just can't undercut that by saying that's all you believe in because it's not true. You can't undercut it by saying that it's your only value. I think Robert Nozick's phraseology was good. Felicitous here, he said that, you know, rights are, we view them as side constraints. Things that they really are like an absolute veto over certain possible considerations of what's a good policy or law. You could have it A, B, and C, but if it involves murdering someone, that's simply not permissible because we think that's unjustifiable. And look, you can argue with us. You can say, look, I favor the state because I believe murder is good, but they don't want to say that. They want to say, well, we believe in liberty, but we believe in other things too, unlike you superminded libertarians. So that's the tactic I find them using most often. Right, yeah, totally agree. So another question I've got for you. What are your current interests in terms of personal study? Well, history is one. I have a deficit in my knowledge of history. I sort of had to learn it on my own because, again, I was an engineer and I'm from Louisiana and the U.S., which doesn't have the best undergrad, I mean, high school and secondary education system. So I've learned history on my own, so I'm always trying to read more history and learn more about it. So I love history. I'm reading two or three books on that now. I'm also reading Cravel's book on the state, which is fascinating. You've not heard of that. What is that? Oh, it's Martin van Cravel, and he's, by the way, speaking this year. He's an older gentleman now. He's an Israeli scholar, I think. I think it's called the rise and decline of the state or something like that. He has a thesis, which I rejected when my friends described it. He says basically the state is a modern institution. It's only been around for about 300 years. I first rejected that because, as a libertarian, we define the state differently than I think a political scientist like he would. For us, the state is just any institutionalized use of force. And by that definition, even in Rome, there was a state. But by the modern definition of the state, I think he's correct. There's something changed in the nature of the state. It became sort of an independent administrative bureaucratic agency with an independent personality, like a corporate personality, like in the 1600s, something like that. So this would be like the nation state? The nation state, and it's separate from the identities of the current administrators. And I think the powerful aspect of that line of thinking is that once you understand that aspect of the state, it puts a damper on this political activism that a lot of libertarians get into because they think that if you vote for Ron Paul or if you vote for A over B, you put a different president or a different congressman in the office or whatever, it's going to make a difference. But it really won't because they're just temporary... Caretakers of the office. Yeah, it's the office that's the problem. It's not the holder. It's not just the office. It's the administrative bureaucracy that exists outside of the administration itself. Or as you say, and I think in England, I think you guys, you use the word government, like we use the word administration here. Yeah, that's right. You're forming a new government. Whereas libertarians tend to use the word government to be synonymous with the word state, which is another confusion. So the Obama administration comes in, they change the administrative agencies, but of course the heads of the bureaucracies and the legislative people, they all stay intact. They're just functionaries. They're the real state. And just like in England, you know, if parliament can't decide on a new government or a new administration, as we would say, the state still exists in the background, right? Or even in the U.S. when they say the government, the federal government has shut down. It doesn't really shut down. So it's a bizarre thing. So I think that that sort of can open our eyes as to the futility of electoral politics. The solution is not to elect the right people, I think. Absolutely. Okay, so I'm sorry, I interrupted you. You were saying something about this book. You were studying this book. Sorry, go ahead. The first thing you said about the book was that when you first heard about it, you rejected the theory? I did because I said it's ridiculous to say that there was no state until 1600 because there's always been states. But that's just a semantic. I think that's just a definitional thing. It depends on how you define the word state. So in our sense, the state has been around ever since the dawn of mankind in a sense. But the modern state does have a particular feature which is fairly recent. I do believe that's correct. And I think that complements, in a way, Huntsman Hoppe's sort of a contrarian democracy thesis. His idea where he challenges even people like Rothbard and Mises, right, who sort of went along with the western liberal idea that the modern western liberal democratic republican state idea of America and western Europe is not perfect and it's not perfectly libertarian, but it was an improvement over the monarchies before, which was an improvement over previous systems. And what he said was he thinks that they had, like he said, even Rothbard, who was about the most radical and the first radical libertarian systematic thinker, I think, they had a soft spot for democracy in the American sort of western European approach. And he sort of has a contrarian position which he says we shouldn't assume that the move from monarchy around World War I time to the modern democratic state was unalloyed, you know, a wiggest progress. It may have been a retrogression, at least in some ways. Oh, I think it was. I think it totally was. And I'm totally with the idea if you have a king or a dictator, someone like that, you can see where the evil comes from. You know your enemy. And you might get a good king every now and then. It's possible. If you have a bad one, they're only there for a short time and they could be killed. And plus, they could probably only be the king of so much of a territory, so you could leave if you had to. Yeah. You couldn't really imagine the king of a North American territory that large. It would be hard to imagine. Usually there are smaller territories. Oh, I think Obama can imagine it. I think the president can imagine it. Maybe Hamilton too could have imagined it. But I think now another aspect of democracy is it's the people who live there under this system. Under a monarchy or a dictator, they know that the enemy is over there. In a democracy, it's their friends. It's their family. It's themselves. And no one can quite put a finger on exactly where it's all coming from. 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It maintains your child's ability to go to a state-run school where you won't have to worry about parenting and the school won't have to deal with your kid asking questions. Compliason, you'll go from this Quick, now what do you want to do? to this Good morning, mother. I love going to school. And this week we're learning all about how the government is our federal family and they're here to help us. Compliason, talk to your school psychiatrist and ask for it by name. The BBC News The BBC Radio 4 programme You and What's Left after we've taken our fair share of what you earned is running a competition that anyone who hates their fellow men and women can enter. A spokesman for the programme said As you know, the subtitle of our programme is There ought to be a law. Well, in recent times having the top most curtain twitches at the BBC are having a hard time conceiving of new regulations that haven't already been implemented. So we thought we'd ask the Great British Public for help. Are you aware of any area of life that isn't covered by an existing regulation? If so, you could win a seat at the next recording of the BBC News and get to put your case for it. So come on now, get out those grievances and petty annoyances and let's see if we can't make this country even more intolerant. In other news, one of the World Cup matches has ended and we have a score 4-2. That's the end of this news bulletin. Let me ask you a question. What are your thoughts on the immigration sort of a controversy among... It says at the moment. No, no, no, not that. I just mean among the theoretical controversy among anarchist libertarians where Hoppe had these sort of contrary in opinions on immigration saying that immigration in today's system announced a forced integration and so a lot of these anarchists... So there's a debate there too, just like there's debates about abortion. There's a couple of different aspects to that. In the UK, the two aspects I see is are you talking about just people coming into a country from some other place and the arguments are around do they go on state benefits or do they work should they be welcome, should they be welcome or not welcome, that kind of thing. That's one aspect, but another aspect that we've been having a lot of in the UK and I know because you go to the property is it property and freedom? Yeah, PFS, property and freedom society. If you go there then you know Sean Gabb, right? I do know Sean very well. So one of Sean's and he's probably spoken about this talking about how there was once we had a tradition in the UK or at least in England or I think in England I'm not exactly sure. My history of English my history of these islands where I live is nowhere near as good as my history of America. Interesting. Yeah. But we have a we've had Cobdon we've had a lot of libertarian, classical libertarian thinkers were British in our history. There was a tradition of liberty in this country and it has pretty much entirely gone. It's not being taught and I don't know if this is the other aspect of immigration that you were talking about or that I thought you might have meant is that we've had lots of immigration from other cultures. People coming in but the culture is different. Their traditions are different their ideas of rights are completely different and that's just basically serves to dilute any dilutes our own traditions. You know it's nothing to do with where you were born or it's nothing to do with color it's nothing to do with race it's nothing to do with religion although they might come into it with what are your basic beliefs? How do you get along with people and if you believe something different Right and I think there's aspects of that in the sort of paleo anarchist anti-immigrant view which is that in a democratic system in certain cultures in certain contexts if you allowed open immigration then you would very soon as a practical matter just lose the culture you had which supports a certain degree of libertarian rights already it's not perfect but we have a certain degree of it so that's one argument it's a consequentialist I think Ralph Raco has argued that about Switzerland I think that argument is less persuasive in the US context itself I think by and large immigrants that come here are net beneficiaries to the economy and to the culture because we have such a diverse culture already I think it could be said that in the US especially 100 years ago or up to about 100 years ago they were going there because of what because of the American culture they wanted to be a part of that culture it wasn't just a location yeah yeah I get that impression too and I suspect there's an aspect of that maybe not they don't want to become English if they move to England but I think I would imagine people moving to England from poorer countries to a better life oh absolutely they may not want to become English or British they're probably not doing it to get on welfare but I don't know maybe they are but I think that tends to be a caricature yeah these are the arguments that you get in the newspapers and whatnot I don't think they're very real anyone who's got enough gumption to leave their country and go through all the amazing bureaucracy that it probably takes to arrive here has probably got enough about them that they can make a living right but if you believe in open borders then you want to get rid of the red tape and the difficulty so that would sort of lower that barrier and it would make it a little bit easier for say lower quality immigrants to come in so that's sort of the counter argument I guess against it I'm totally for open borders because I cannot support the state in doing anything but I understand some of the arguments that try to point out the cost that will come with open borders in a state run system like we all have now I agree with you on that I can see cost but I cannot go along with the idea that the state can it just directing a border in the first place it just seems so outrageous let me ask you a question have you been to the states? where have you visited? New York in the world I've never been to New York I would have loved to have gone to New York prior to Bloomberg when it was still possible to smoke there I would have loved to have gone to New York I'd love to have seen it but I've never been there I've been to the west coast and I've been to Florida Oregon, Washington California basically six months each time and pretty much like the place very much like the people, like lots of things that were going on there had a funny incident in Los Angeles with a crossing a road and getting stopped for jaywalking getting a ticket is that not really a type of crime enforced in Europe very much it doesn't exist in England it doesn't exist until you can't cross a road what? yeah and at the time I think I knew about it but I thought I was going to challenge the guy anyway and I was in a hurry to get across the road but he came up to me and I was just saying I can't believe this, this is ridiculous you can't cross a road without permission what is this? the worst thing about it you never know when you travel across the US like I do I'm never quite clear what city town, county, state I'm in what the laws are going to be on jaywalking or turning right on red or left in your case and I'm always sitting there looking for a sign saying is jaywalking prohibited or not here it's bizarre that we're now running or looking for permission all the time but I wouldn't want to have a centralized central state to make a uniform just to solve that problem no so here's another question for you and I probably know the answer to this but people listening might not what are your current interests in terms of getting the word out so a few things number one I've been involved in Jeff Tucker's new venture Liberty.me so like I said I did a seminar last night there and one of my guides just came out how to do business without IP and also property so Liberty.me is one thing I'm working on a book I'm working on two books actually I'm working on one book which is an edited selection of some of my previous articles I'm going to call it law in a libertarian world I think that's interesting I think Hoppa is going to write the introduction that's very interesting that's not much new material but just edited in one place because some people seem to like books still and I'm going to do a new book on IP my against intellectual property I think was systematic and correct but in the last 12 years since then or so I've come up with a lot of different arguments and ways of presenting things and examples and so I'm going to just do a new one from scratch and if I finish it and it's going to be called copy this book so that's what I'm working on in terms of getting the ideas out there in 2014 I decided because my wife has a very hectic job and I don't get a paid a lot for a lot of these speaking gigs that I do on the side of my job I decided for 2014 as an experiment to take off the year not do any traveling for libertarian events and I resisted every invitation so far except I finally gave in I knew what would happen I got invited to speak at the New York Liberty Fest in October when my wife is out of town and so I'm going to do that one take my son and then I just got invited to speak at Yale and by a leftist to speak before a sort of moderate leftist group of undergrads with a political journal a moderate leftist group at Yale well I don't know if they're moderate leftists I'm just saying they're not libertarians I get invited because I'm a libertarian but I didn't get invited by a libertarian who is just trying to promote us they really want to hear from libertarians and I figure I can't turn down an invitation from a university that I could not have been admitted to as a student so it's my chance to go there so I'm going to go to Yale in October I'm doing two speaking gigs this year I got invited to Russia which was an interesting thing I got invited twice I got invited by the Adams Smith Institute Moscow which I was invited two or three years ago and I couldn't go then and I delivered by speech remotely which I'll do this year but then I got invited to speak in St. Petersburg and Moscow by Esquire Magazine Russia and they were going to pay me it was bizarre they wanted me to go speak on alternative legal systems from a libertarian perspective and they were going to cover it with the media and do it in their magazine and pay me and everything but I turned it down because I was still sticking to my plan of well plus I'm a little bit afraid of Russia I have this sneaking iron ran suspicion that if I step foot on their shorts they're going to arrest me but I know I'm not that important but you know I kind of think you know I don't know I hate to tell you this but I kind of feel the same way about going to the States again I can't I can't argue I can't blame you I can't blame you I can misarrate and I don't feel that way about Russia and you may be right to be honest I was also pretty sure they weren't going to pay for business class and I don't know if I want to fly to Russia I'm a little bit spoiled too I'm a little bit spoiled too so that was interesting I thought because I'm not famous I'm well known in libertarian circles but I'm not a famous speaker or anything so it's interesting to start getting these invitations which to me shows that libertarianism is becoming a more known third alternative it's not a threat to them yet but they know that it's out there and sometimes they want to hear from someone with a fresh perspective and they dip into our little pond and sometimes they see my name and I think that's what's happening so I found that interesting so I don't know I edit libertarian papers I mean the executive editor of libertarian papers a journal so I do all I can do as an avocation I have a job on the side of my libertarian pursuits so I don't know how to change the world I just try to be on the right side of things for my own conscience yeah that's a good statement I like that I like that very much yeah changing the world is not a realistic you might be able to change the mind of someone in front of you but what worries me sorry what worries me about people that want to change the world is I'm afraid that they're going to give up when they realize they can't do it right I don't mind people wanting to change the world but if that's your driver if that's your motivation then you're just going to be a temporary I came up with a term recently I call them way station libertarians people that are sort of passing through in their temporary exploring struggle to figure out what they believe in first they're socialist then they graduate school and then they flirt with the environmentalist and then they become a libertarian and then they become a neocon I mean and I won't name names right now but I can think of a few classic examples of people I used to be friends with and I know they've done this and it's dismaying it's usually because they they convert too quickly and when someone converts too quickly it's something that they didn't get an incremental searching pacing plotting gradually awakening discovery of these ideas that they were desperately searching for something to grab on to and if that happened it's going to happen again I've seen people like that too you see that in religious converts driving along the road in London after taking my daughter to school and going back home and I ran out of either I ran out of petrol or someone else one of us had run out of petrol and the other one stopped to help I can't remember if I was to run out of petrol or not it could well have been me, I've done it several times but we got talking and one of the things that she said to me was that she had recently converted to being Jewish yeah, it was Jewish, which was unusual because it's far more frequent, you'd meet someone in London who's just converted to Islam or something like that right but she's recent convert and they always seem to have a what's the word there's a certain zealousness about zealotry, what's the word? zealotry and someone who's been doing all their lives kind of thing there's more apparent passion and it's a lot of fire but it's not really inspired by they haven't personally evaluated every single part of the whole thing and figured it out and arrived at that conclusion it's kind of like they've had some sort of conversion experience or something they're looking for a cause instead of the cause happening to them after the gradual accumulation of evidence or thinking that makes it just obvious that this is really what I am like I did with IP for example I was trying for three or four or five years to find an argument for IP I looked under every rock I could I read article and I actually think it made me a stronger IP opponent because I read everything I could I read so many articles on every side desperately searching for someone who had figured it out and could give me a solid argument for IP and finally I quit searching because I realized this is just I'm looking in the wrong direction all these other guys I'm reading make more sense and I think that's a more solid way to approach something and when it finally just dawns on you that you just can't deny the evidence of your eyes or your reason anymore how did we get to that we were talking about how people convert how did we get there I can't remember how we got here I used to think someone should invent an iPhone app where you can track your conversation branching points or whatever and retrace it when you get closer wouldn't that be something and it could be automatic you need to get a pattern on that as well sorry couldn't resist well here's something I don't know if you want to talk about this but I get this question all the time well there's two things that are related it's the hypocrisy issue so I just had this guide published on liberty.me on IP and I had to go back and forth with the functionaries there to make sure that it didn't have a copyright notice or the copyright notice in the wrong way because some of my previous publishers have sometimes put copyright notices on the things I publish with them and as a copyright as an IP lawyer I know that they actually did it incorrectly they were actually legally incorrect in what they said if ABC organization publishes my article and they say copyright ABC organization and I wrote the article and I never signed an assignment they actually don't own the copyright so when they say that they're factually wrong it doesn't make a big difference legally that they do that it's just a mistake it's a careless mistake but you would not believe the grief I get from this over the years because some of my IP articles have a copyright notice on there by some other organization which is just factually incorrect you're a hypocrite you're saying there should be an IP but you copyrighted your article and this group copyrighted it then I have to go through all these tortured defenses of something that is detailed in the weeds of IP law they don't know what they're talking about it's irrelevant to the issue anyway and ultimately it's an ad hominem because they're basically trying to say we don't need to listen to what you're saying because you're a hypocrite and I'm actually not a hypocrite in that case and even if I was it wouldn't be relevant to the issue so I had to fight with these guys I just wanted to get it straight just so I wouldn't have to go through this for another 10 years because I know when people read these articles I'm just going to get grief from these no nothings I think you'll get it anyway I'll get it anyway but yeah it'll go up to another level they always will find another thing so that's one thing hypocrisy and the other one I get all the time is how can you be a patent lawyer and blah blah blah it would be opposed to it you are acting defensively for the companies that might be attacked by other people well it's a boring topic and if people are interested in this kind of career if they understand it and they want to really understand it I can explain it but as long and short is personally I help companies defend from patents and then I do other functional things that manipulate the system because it exists just like a tax lawyer or a CPA would or whatever but to me that's not the interesting issue the other interesting issue is let's assume that the patent system is a bad idea let's just assume that we live in a universe or there could be a universe where it's possible that having a patent system is not a good idea just a simple proposition yet there's one anyway we can imagine that now you have these highly trained deeply knowledgeable experts in that system with your patent attorneys now do you think that it's impossible that someone who really knows the system really well would not discover and point out that there's something wrong with the system or if they do do you not want them to do that I mean if an IRS agent one day wakes up and says the tax system is theft of course of course do you want them to remain silent do you want only people that are ignorant of the details of the system to have an opinion on it so the entire criticism it's basically I think it's a dishonest argument they're trying to use everything they can to make people just shut up so if I know a lot about the system and I criticize it I'm more dangerous than the average so they want me to shut up it's just like a black person opposing affirmative action Walter Williams or someone like that yeah Walter Williams or the Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court they'll say these so-called liberals in the US they will use basically racist arguments that they used to decry they'll say well how dare Clarence Thomas oppose affirmative action after all he benefited from it and yet one of the criticisms conservatives level at affirmative action laws is that there's a stigma attached to minorities and that you would assume that they didn't really earn their success because of affirmative action and when you make that argument they will attack you for being racist which I think is also wrong but they make the same argument because they're entitled to make it this is one reason I have leftist and rightist friends on the libertarian side I hate the left more than the right I just can't help it I know the right is more warmongering in some ways but I just really really really I hate the left they have this smugness this pretension that they're better than the right and they're as bad or worse I think at least the right doesn't really pretend that they're superior in that sort of smug sense I don't like the right either but that's my take on it I just cannot stand the left it's their unwillingness to argue logically just unwillingness to confront an argument and take you apart they know they can't I guess they know they can't actually know whether they know they can't or not it's just never occurred to them as a strategy to point out any faults in your real argument it's like they'd rather just try and get people to not listen to you right and I think that's partly because they know their arguments aren't working and they just want to use their current domination of the system they don't really need to argue because they're basically in control they're pretty much one also I think they are stupider in the sense that they're not as economically literate or emotivist a lot of conservatives at least do have some appreciation for economics I think the conservatives big problems they don't have a system and they're not consistent which is the human failing so I can see why libertarians tend to think that our natural allies are the right sometimes but I don't know what your thoughts are on it it's a sometimes thing it's definitely not an always thing anything else you want to talk about I'm out of questions well we didn't talk about tobacco oh my god we must talk about tobacco property well tell me about hey this is fascinating I've learnt that I said it was Neema and he mentioned Sheldon Richmond and now you come out of the woodwork as well I wonder who else well and I didn't even know that Sheldon smoked I met Sheldon in San Diego I've known him for years over the internet but we went to Libertopia about 2 years ago and we had lunch together and met his wife and I just didn't know he smoked pipe and I was then I've been smoking cigars for 15 years and then a pipe for maybe 5 years and I haven't been a connoisseur like you and Neema have been but I also found that the habit started getting to be it wasn't a habit for me but it was more like just the ritual and just the keeping up with everything maybe it's just my age or my time in life I'm 48 and for some reason in the last 6 months I've noticed I don't really drink coffee that much anymore and I know you like tea but I just I don't like coffee morning caffeine habit has sort of waned with me lately and also the desire to smoke just to keep up with the tobacco so now I'm lately of the mind that I don't want to have a humidor I don't want to have all that stuff but I might go get a nice cigar every now and then because you can do that with cigars you don't have to have a pipe you don't have to have anything you just go buy a cigar and you can smoke it you know what I mean I just wish there were cigars that were more like pipes because the only cigars I've ever found that are aromatic are all these L-Chipos we call them here they're really why don't they make good cigars that are like pipes with a nice good tobacco aromatic flavor I can't understand that that is that's the most appalling heresy I've ever heard tell me why well in my experience the people who are the most those that consider themselves connoisseurs tend to like tobacco and they like the flavor of tobacco so they smoke for tobacco it's not um I understand they don't care about what it smells like to other people even for pipes you have a blend that you prefer right and maybe not aromatic but there's a blend right there are many blends that I like and there are some that I prefer above others but I avoid aromatics so if you smoke a pipe you don't smoke like cherry flavored or apple flavored absolutely no well you see I told you I'm not a deep connoisseur to be honest I mean that could be I don't know that could just be a fashion I'm not sure let me give you one thing you might not have thought of which may be a slight argument in my favor my wife and other women I've noticed much prefer the aromatics they put up with they will complain about a cigar even a good cigar not too much but they will complain but if they smell a man smoking a cherry pipe or something they say oh that smells pretty good so it's a way of keeping the wifely bitching down yeah that's totally true that's a very good argument I mean hey what can you say amazing could be an argument for having no let's see who else smokes a pipe in our movement I've always thought Jeffrey Tucker ought to Jeff is a cigarette smoker and I've never been a cigarette smoker or in a marijuana I don't inhale so I don't even smoke marijuana but I have tried e-seg recently they're surprisingly technologically amazingly good I've heard this from a few people now I think they're better for they're primarily good for cigarette smokers who want to quit because you can get your nicotine fixed without the tar but if you're a pipe smoker or a cigar smoker like I was and you are you do it primarily for the ritual and for the taste and if you use an e-seg for that it just doesn't work well because you're going to burn out the battery it just doesn't work because it's not off the taste you know there's a guy named T. Franklin Harris who was an old libertarian friend of mine I think he's a pipe smoker I don't know if you probably don't know him but I don't know I'm not part of most of my pipe and cigar smoking friends are not libertarians so I don't know who to mention there well it's interesting I mean one of the probably the main reason I became a libertarian well it's not that main reason but the main thing that kind of led me towards finding out about it was through smoking interesting yeah basically and it was around about 2000 2000 we had had laws in the UK for many years I mean since the 70s there had been warnings on cigarette packs and tobacco packs and things like that they said things like smoking might be damaging to your health okay maybe damaging that sounded reasonable to me and it was kind of acceptable okay fine and 2000 my wife was pregnant with my first daughter and I thought well I ought to investigate this smoking let's see if it's okay or not should I be doing it or shouldn't I be doing it and I decided to you know just study up on it and find out and I went to the most nanny the most hysterical organization that I know of on the planet which is called Ash A-S-H there is an American version but the UK version is unbelievable I mean they are so hysterical it's quite incredible and I went direct to them to find out all about it because I figured you know they are shouting the loudest they probably got some evidence so yes they have some evidence but it's buried under mountains and mountains of claims that are not backed up by the evidence yeah so I studied to study these things and studied to study things like epidemiology oh gosh it's all quite complex stuff but as a result I basically figured they were shouting way above what the evidence was really saying yes there may well be some dangers but there's no the thing that changed in 2000 was that the labels changed it no longer said smoking may damage your health it now said smoking kills yeah I've seen those come on that's a bit outrageous yeah it's almost like the German laws that say you can't deny the Holocaust I mean the government's officially establishing a fact that no one can challenge you know that kind of stuff not that I'm a Holocaust denier but I'm just saying it's uncomfortable assuming the role of policing thoughts yeah listen I don't want to cut you short but my next one is starting right now I enjoyed it I'd love to see you again give me some websites and things that people can find you on probably the best side is just my name StefanKinsella.com Kinsella is Irish by the way so it's K-I-N-S-E-L-L-A pronounced Kinsella over there and Stefan with an A S-T-E-P-H-A-N so StefanKinsella.com we'll have all my stuff there okay thanks a lot Stefan it's been really great having you on Kinsella I've enjoyed it thanks a lot have a good good evening you too bye bye bye if you've been affected by any of the issues discussed in this program a couple of hours on BBC Radio 4 will soon have you forgetting all about rights and all that other nonsense