 All right, everybody, let's get started. Okay, we're all excited. We want to hear about the Stateless Society. Okay, are you guys done? Okay, thank you. Okay, so what we're talking about, let me clarify because there's two types of talks that have been given lately at MisesU. So one of them where I'm talking about like private law and military defense and how would that be handled in the private sector, we're doing that later in the week. There's a market for security on the schedule. So if you were here for that and now you're like, you know, I wouldn't have come here. You're feel free to leave. That's fine. But I just want to clarify because that's such a big topic. I really do have someone leaving. That's awesome. All right. So, okay. So this is a person interested in private tanks. So because that's such a big topic. So here, this is more about just things besides that, but how would it be handled in a free society? Two housekeeping announcements though. So on your schedule for Saturday, you can see if you've looked ahead, there's a thing for what's called a Liberty Pitch. So what that is, it's you guys get the chance to come up and make your fast pitch for either, I think it's like libertarianism or Austrian economics, I believe if we're doing the same as last year. So there's prizes. It was hilarious last year. So even if you don't want to do it and just want to be in the crowd, it'll be more fun if we have a bigger crowd. But also, if you're thinking about doing it, don't like roll out of bed Saturday morning and start brainstorming at that point. Be thinking of it now and even practice. Feel free. So because again, it'll be better, get a pithy thing going. So I just want to mention that the other thing is you may have seen this thing floating around. You know, I'm sitting here. I'm trying to be a respectable economist. I don't know how Paul Krugman's ever going to take me seriously when we're doing stuff like this. I have nothing to do with it. But I just want to clarify, because for people coming from previous years, so the karaoke is today's Tuesday, right? It's tonight. And it's at the Sky Bar, all right? Friday, we are having music again, but it's different. So even previous years, we've gone to Bourbon Street and we've brought the equipment and we do the... That's not happening this year. If you want to sing, it's tonight, all right? On Friday, it's going to be live music. So to be clear, I get to sing both nights because I have a need for attention, all right? I just want to clarify. So, but for real, make sure if you were planning on singing, you got to do it tonight. It's not next... It's not on Friday. Okay. So first, I'm picking these terms carefully. Albert J. Nock actually, in his classic Our Enemy, The State, has a discussion where he explains why he's using that term state as opposed to government. And I used to not really care. I would have people occasionally like when I used to write for lurockwell.com and I would talk about, oh, the government are... And I used to have some people email me and say, Bob, I think you're using language improperly. You're not really against the government. You're against the state. And I thought, what's the big difference? Anyway, I do now try to use that term because for some people, government is a pretty broad category. Just any time there's like authority. So like some people think of the family, there's a government there. Or if you're in a church and you feel like, no, I agree to abide by the rules of the trade. If the elders say that, you know, I did something wrong and then I submit to their authority. So anyway, that's why I'm using the term state. And also in Rothbard's writing in particular, you can see how he defines it. And it's a much, in my view, crisper thing about what is the thing that I'm against in this talk. And so when I say the economics of a stateless society, I'm saying, could there be a social organization? Could we have society without this institution that claims to have a monopoly on the proper use of force? So it's not that the state is the only thing that gets to use force, but they're saying we're the ones in charge of the authoritative use of it or the legal use of it. And we might delegate it or we might say is the state, hey, if a burglar breaks into your house, you're allowed to shoot the person, but we're ultimately the final arbiters of that. We're the ones who decide what's the lawful use of violence in this region and that they have a monopoly on that. And also that they have the right to collect taxation. That those are some of the elements involved in what a state is. And so that's the institution that we're going to be talking about. So if that's what we have in mind here, consider this quote, for if the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the state, if we're convinced that the state is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the state would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another mafia gang. Hence the necessity of the state's employment of ideologists and hence the necessity of the state's age-old alliance with the court intellectuals who weaved the apology for state rule. Believe it or not, you're thinking, what, that was somebody, it was in grad school, it was a young Janet Yellen wrote that. Of course that wasn't Janet Yellen. It was Murray Rothbard. So the first lesson for today is trust no one, all right? Some guy in a suit in CNBC telling you something about how the government works or how the economy works and what the feds got. Trust no one, use your common sense. You know that wasn't Janet Yellen. Don't listen to me. Trust no one. Okay. Starting now though, you should trust me for this lecture. Okay. So I'm going to be going through a bunch of specific applications or areas, but in general, it's odd that the person defending the voluntary interaction of people in society is the one who's on the defensive. That there seems to be this general presumption that, oh yeah, the state should be doing all these various things and if you're going to be some crazy libertarian making a case for complete privatization or complete free market in these various areas that you're the one who's got the crazy idea and you have to justify it. And the reason I'm saying that's sort of odd and that you would think there would be this prima facie standard or case for volunteerism is that in these other areas, it's where the person who wants the state to be involved is the one who has to explain why, oh yes, there is this issue of this problem of how people interact with each other and the way we're going to get things done and the way to smooth out these disagreements or the way we're going to solve this problem is to have one group have all the guns, they get to make all the decisions, they get a monopoly and everything will work out fine. In general, you know that if it comes to giving TVs to people, how do we organize ourselves collectively to distribute TVs and you know if you had the state in charge of that and have a monopoly, there'd be all sorts of problems with that. The TVs would be a lot more expensive with competitive markets that the quality wouldn't be as good and also there'd be corruption involved that the people in charge would give TVs based on political favoritism or what have you. So that logic is still there in all these other areas. It's not that all of a sudden monopoly works out just fine or that prices all of a sudden are lower when it comes to police and other sorts of things we're going to talk about. So I just want to say officially upfront that it's weird that we're the ones on the defensive but yet that's the problem we face. So in general, also it's sort of easy that it's like the people who are for state intervention in these various areas, to them they need to think about the problem for two seconds and then they say, oh the reason free markets wouldn't work on this issue is because of these problems and it's like they can just think about it for two seconds but the entrepreneurs involved would have no clue about it. So what I'm saying is no, if there is a legitimate problem with a lot of these things they're more complex. So you can see why the market for TVs makes sense but some of these other things it's a little bit harder than that so you can see why maybe I'm not so sure markets will work fine and we'll talk about that but again the idea that all the entrepreneurs are just clueless idiots and they can only conform to the textbook model of perfect competition but a long time ago I would always this is vanilla ice and the reason I say it is because he's got a famous line in his big son he got a problem and you'll all solve it and I realize you guys have no clue who vanilla ice probably is, right, okay. I probably need to switch to say I got 99 problems and the government caused every one of them something like that. So some of this I'm sure is going to overlap with the other lectures you got but repetitions fine and I'll probably say things a little bit differently in a condensed form here. Manger for a while it's not like oh the Austrians because we like our little group and we credit Manger with this insight and the origin of money no for in terms of historians of economic thought I believe he even had the entry in an encyclopedia of economics you know in terms of who talked about the origin of money alright so this is not some Austrian thing where we're just talking about our guy this is you know he was known in the field for this contribution and so he pointed out that even though even back when he was writing that people just take it for granted that oh yeah the money is associated with the state that seems like clearly a thing that the government has to be in charge of he was saying you know it's odd to think that that has to be the case because think about before there was money right so money is clearly something that is created by humans right it's not like apples or something which is clearly natural money is clearly a social thing but yet it's also one of those things that we're going to say spontaneously but this wasn't yet fully developed at this point right so Manger was one of the ones who sort of advanced this theory so the presumption was if something had been created by humans or discovered by humans or events or whatever verb you want to use it used to be the case that everybody just assumed alright so there was one small group or one smart individual who just thought of the idea and then everyone followed suit right so maybe some wise king one day was sitting around and you know my kingdom would work a lot better if we had money and then started doing it and said hey everybody instead of just trading things directly like you have horses and you want to get eggs and that guy has eggs and wants horses and you have to fight each other why don't you sell everything against you know these stones that are intrinsically kind of useless to you but if you can sell everything against the stone then use the stone to buy things trust me it'll all be a lot more efficient so Manger was just walking through and saying why that couldn't be how money emerged that's impossible he was listening various problems with us just for example if you've not grown up in a society using money money sounds stupid right if somebody explained it to people who had never used it before the idea of using this thing that you don't actually want you're gonna give up your valuable goods and services for this thing you don't want but the reason that makes sense is because don't worry other people you're gonna likewise give up what they have for things they don't want it sounds kind of dumb doesn't it so it sounds like if you know you had a mandatory classes and you had to get the textbooks and you're trying to resell them you know to kids who don't want it but they need to take it and so alright so he so he pointed out that that's crazy you know we see now that we're growing up in this world that uses money that it makes sense but at the time you know how would you have known that and then there's other problems too even if there were a king that realized ah if all my subjects used a medium of exchange that would allow for transactions to occur that you know bar wouldn't allow ah still you'd have the problem of well what should be its purchasing power right so it wouldn't be enough just to say hey you were originally going to sell that horse for some eggs but I'm asking you no sell it for stones first and then use the stones to go by eggs the person selling the horse would say okay but then how many stones should I want to get in the transaction I don't know what stones should I get in the market because if he's trying to buy eggs you know what I'm saying so he would need to know how many stones do I need to get as many eggs as I otherwise would have gotten but the egg sellers in the same position so it's like how do you even get the thing going alright so you can see that the problems there I'm just mentioning a few as to why Manger was saying yes we're all using money it wasn't it's not a natural thing it's clearly a human institution and yet it's not that one person just designed the whole thing from scratch to explain it well it was a step-by-step process I'll just go through it really quickly because again I think you probably already heard this so the idea was Manger said even in a state of what's called direct exchange so that's a more technically appropriate term than saying barter direct exchange where people are trading things for goods that they're directly going to use either in consumption or for production even if we're in that kind of a framework some goods will be more saleable or you might say marketable than others right they will have a bigger market so the guy going into town to trade who has this and this very sophisticated exquisite telescope there's not that many people who are in the market that they're looking for an exquisite telescope okay it's a very valuable thing we can say and so if he does find the right buyer then maybe he can ask a lot for it but the point is there aren't that many people looking for that whereas the guy going to town with a bunch of eggs lots of people want to get eggs that day so if you walk through the logic of that manger was pointing out that somebody who has a relatively unmarketable or unsealable good if he finds somebody who wants it in as long as what that person's offering if those goods are more marketable than his thing he might make that trade just as a stepping stone alright so he might if he sees somebody with chickens and he's not really going to town looking for chickens he wants to get I don't know what horse is but he might say okay I'm much more likely to find someone with horses who wants chickens than someone with horses who wants this telescope so if he finds a guy with chickens who wants telescope he might swap okay and so that's why things that were initially more marketable their advantage would snowball because now the things that started out being a little bit more marketable because of that now more people are willing to accept them in trades even if they didn't originally want them so if you think about it also now more people are willing to accept it that means it's more marketable and so the thing could snowball in that way and so ultimately if one or a few goods or commodities have that snowballing process happen such that everybody in the community basically would be willing to accept that thing in trade to then go get what they want well that's what money is it's a universally accepted medium of exchange okay so I boil that down really fast but notice there Manger explained the emergence of money through voluntary you know rational process it's not that people just had this instinct to go create money each but the point was you know each thing made sense on an individual level but the people didn't realize the full scope of what they were doing nobody set up saying you know what I'm gonna do my part today to create money that's not what happened they just said no I want to exchange and get something and I'm more likely to get what I want if I take this thing using it as a medium of exchange okay so that's the emergence of money and then why historically were things like gold and silver adopted just because once you think through the logic of that process you know I mentioned he might take chickens well in general chickens aren't really a good medium of exchange right because they can if you got to move from place to place with them they're hard to move they go to the bathroom you got to feed them they could die right if you want to buy something that's only half a chicken you know it's all right so you see the problems there so if you think about the gold and silver are great on many criteria in terms of the durability the visibility the homogeneity but that's another one because you might say well how come diamonds didn't serve as money because those seem to be but it's not like a pound of diamonds it's a pound of diamonds if you have one huge diamond that's worth much more than a bunch of smaller diamonds of the same weight whereas with gold you know an ounce of gold is an ounce of gold unless it's like a coin or something you see what I'm saying so that's part of the issue there so gold and silver had properties that made them particularly good for that purpose okay so another thing then so I've explained to you where money could come from naturally there's no government involved and then even in terms of making coins so again I think a lot of people just assume oh yeah having official looking coins that are stamped I mean that's clearly something that's around the world do that I can't even imagine and no historically that that wasn't the case so here George Selgen he gave a great talk here at the Mises Institute years ago on this I think he has books on it as well I think maybe like Good Money would be the title or that's in the title one of his books so Selgen is S-E-L-G-I-N but he just goes through the history of some of this stuff where what's the point of having coins if we're back on a legitimate gold standard where gold is the money so things are quoted the prices are in weight of gold and so the point of the coins it's not that the stamping process is some legal thing that grants the money legal tender status no you can in a market economy that's without any sort of state intervention regarding money the point of stamping it making coins is just to ease the the transactions in terms of identifying and trusting that this thing really is an ounce of gold let's say so if a merchant is selling something for three ounces of gold then really what the transaction is requiring is the physical weight ounces of gold and technically you could give it to them in whatever form you wanted but by having coins that are stamped and they're hard to counterfeit they could have the ridges on the circumference so that you can't clip them and shave off gold and so on it just makes it easier so the merchant doesn't have to sit there and do chemical tests and weight it if you just give them a hunk of yellow rocks alright so that's yellow metal so that's the that's the benefit of having private coinage and so yes you can have the private sector involved in coining money and what Seljan also showed in the talk he gave here when he was going through the power points the money was gorgeous so in other words it wasn't just that oh yeah the private sector can handle it don't worry it did a much better job of the coins because if you were in business you wanted the public using your gold coins not your competitors and so how would you get them to do that well obviously you had to have coins that were hard to counterfeit because you wouldn't want anybody in the community to be afraid to accept coins that were stamped the way your name brand you wouldn't want the public to know oh this really is one ounce of gold or whatever one ounce of silver whatever the coin says it is so there was technological techniques to make that happen but beyond that why not make the thing really pretty to look at right so that's what they would do and so this is an area where the government or the state came in and eventually took it over but this is clearly not something that you need the state to be in charge of okay likewise for banking and here I'm also partly walking through this just so you can keep these functions distinct so we've talked about how money would emerge spontaneously if you will and again I'm using that phrase just to mean it's not the one group set there and planed but each individual human act or action in that process was rational or purposeful so you can see how that would emerge but now what about banking well even now we've talked about maybe the community uses gold let's say and we've even got private mints that stamp out coins and so everyone's walking around with gold coins still there's inconveniences from that that if you got to make a big purchase you want to buy a huge plot of land or you want to buy a factory something that's going to be 300 pounds worth of gold you don't want to have to actually load that up and travel and take 300 pounds of gold to the place where the deal is going to go down you could get robbed something could happen it's just physically hard to do so it's expensive to physically transport it so this is partly why you have a role for banks and so here let me also well here let me talk about this first so what what the bank does here in terms of demand deposits we're going to distinguish those from time deposits so this is like checking accounts so here I'm just talking about the function of having banks that give you checking accounts or what might call demand deposits it's for convenience and safe keeping as you accumulate money you don't want to just keep it in your house because you could lose it there could be a fire or something so this is why it makes sense to have you know a central institution that have trusted third party that maintains your stuff with your name on it literally okay and so how would you pay for that well they could charge you a monthly fee or every time you write a check they might charge a little bit or something and so you could have you know checking accounts or whatever with 100% reserve banking so in this talk I'm not going to get into the pros and cons 100% reserve banking all I want you to get it from this is it's possible right because some people because these two things have been fused in practice nowadays a lot of people think oh if banks don't lend out my checking account balance is how could banks work how could they make money and you got to keep the functions distinct that they could they would have to charge you a fee somehow but plenty of other businesses charge fees for their service that's how business works right so having the ability of a modern economy with you know ATMs around the country you could still have all that kind of stuff it's just somehow the bank would need to charge its customers enough to cover the cost as far as savings account and time deposits what would that look like well that's where your deposit you're giving money to the bank and you're genuinely lending it as it were okay so you might buy like a certificate of deposit so the distinction is conceptually that if I the bank says all right if you give us 100 ounces of gold right now we'll give you 105 ounces of gold in 12 months and you don't think that your money is sitting there available so that you can't demand it so that's what a demand deposit is so it's not in your checking account there you bought a CD for example so then the bank could go take that 100 ounces of gold and lend it out it's 7% interest to somebody else and then the bank earns the spread right and that's all consistent with 100% reserve banking so again I just I'm saying that because I know there are people who will tell you yeah Rothbard's crazy you know if you took his reviews seriously you couldn't have modern banking and that's that's just not correct you could that's how it would work what's interesting on this is this what this said I don't know if you can read in the back says central banks do the opposite of what the public is told so here it's funny Mises writing in human action this doesn't it's there but you kind of have to already know the context because he's he's real fast with it and he kind of assumes the reader knows the basic history about it Mises does that a lot in human action he'll have a footnote and be like now of course when we talk about diminishing margin to that has nothing to do with the Weber Fetchner Law of Psychology as if you know most readers are like oh yeah okay I thought it was the Weber so um and he's like he's like talking about quantum mechanics and I mean the guy I knew a lot you know there's something to this Mises guy there should be an institute so but anyway here what he's getting at is you could talk about we would call it for free banking or whatever term you want to use for this system it gets confusing because there are some people now in the free what's called a free banking school who might write things that Roth would have disagreed with so I'm just saying like generic term of free banking without talking about modern controversies but a system where the the government doesn't or the state doesn't do anything particular in terms of special treatment of the banking sector just saying you know enforcement of contracts right that you're just like pizza parlors can go in a business what if people could go in and run banks and let's say it's you know gold a gold standard or just the the community uses gold as money we have banks that emerge like this to serve functions of convenience and then also people you know buy CDs or whatever they make time deposits and so that's how the bank also fulfills the role of credit intermediary all the stuff we talk about and then what about this issue of keeping you know if they have demand deposits so the public puts a hundred ounces of gold into what they think is a checking account and what if the bank now actually lends some of that out and they don't keep all the reserves they're sitting in the vault what would happen and so Mises you know was relying on the literature at the time and saying the market economy there would be strict checks to that so let's assume that they were allowed to do that and that wasn't ruled like a violation of contracts still there would be strict limits on how low the reserve ratio could go if you know modern banking terminology because if anyone bank starts issuing more loans for a given amount of gold sitting in the vault so that for all the people who have checking account balances with that bank in a sense if the amount of gold backing up their checking account balance gets smaller and smaller relative to the community then what happens there's a there's a pretty quick check on that because the customers of the bank that has been expanding inflating when they deal with members of the community and they're writing checks and so on on net when the banks all settle up with each other like at the end of the week they're going to realize okay more of let's say it's the city bank that did it city banks customers on net will have written more checks on their checking account balances vis-a-vis the rest of the community than vice versa right if city bank inflated so now city bank customers tend to have more money compared to everybody else so in general just with their dealings with other people they will probably buy more stuff and so when the banks all settle up with each other they're not going to just sit there with claims on city bank the other banks will say to city bank okay you know our customers wrote checks on your people for a million ounces yours wrote checks given to our people for 1.2 million ounces so you owe us 200,000 ounces of gold settle up you ship it from your vault to our vaults and you have until you know the end of the month like our contracts says that we are a relationship with each other so the point is any one bank that inflates too much will quickly be brought to heal because it's not it's not that the individual customers would have to go do research and know what's the reserve ratio of this bank it's a much more fundamental quick process even if the people in the community all accept all the banks either either notes like if a bank has notes saying the bearer of this is entitled to so many ounces or if there's checks being written it's fine the merchants don't need to care about what about city banks ratio they don't have to do they can take everything it's just the merchant sells something to a city bank customer gets a check or a certificate saying this is like a gold certificate thing issued by city bank they're not just going to keep that paper in their cash register the merchant is going to go to his bank at the end of the week or whatever and deposit that stuff into his business checking account and so the point is that bank eventually that is going to get square settle up with city bank so the point is even if you allowed for fractional reserve banking legally the market economy would have strict checks to quickly bring up a bank to heal that tried to expand so that in that context now think about what the central bank is supposed to do one of the primary functions they will list you go to the Federal Reserve's website and look at the history of it one of the first things they list is they want it to be a lender of last resort so think about that mechanism I talked about what is now if there's a central bank a city bank gets in trouble they can just go to the central bank and they can get you know oh we're in trouble here we got these people wanting to redeem stuff and we can't we got caught with our pants down oh don't worry we'll come and we'll be a lender of last resort and we'll bail you out okay so the what the public is told is the reason we need central banking is to protect the public because we just had these fly-by-night banks you imagine just having free enterprise and banking how crazy would that be it's the opposite that under free bank enterprise and banking that they would be kept to a pretty tight standard whereas this the role of the central bank and also suppose this is the point Mises makes too there could be a cartel of banks and they could all expand together to get around the problem I said but as long as there's free entry even if all the banks collectively the big banks you know who are running the show they say okay let's all agree to inflate simultaneously so we won't have the gold drained from our vaults of ease of each other anyone can just start a new bank with a higher reserve ratio and collect all the gold from all the other people but not if there's a central bank that strictly regulates who can enter the industry okay so again when you think about the markets check on a bank inflating and ripping off the public the central bank even by its own definition of its role knocks down those checks okay who would build the roads everybody's favorite question so in terms of the history again with a lot of this stuff you can go and see that it's not that the state has always been doing it and then now we're coming with this nut job idea to let the market give it a shot usually what it is in these various areas is that originally it was the private sector that did it and then the state came in and co-opted it so here too I think Tom's out I know go ahead yeah okay so how does it go do you know what or should I just try to paraphrase it I'm standing here and we're all just stretching our heads yeah yeah so for the people thank you Tom alright a little cameo from Tom Woods so we have a podcast that you might be interested in alright so so for the people listening online what happened what Tom said there is my favorite line on this issue of jeez who would build the roads and Tom has a thing where he says it's weird that they think in the private sector without the state there that there would be you know you got a bunch of customers sitting here who want to go to Sears Sears is over there and then they're just all like jeez what do we do it doesn't occur to us why don't we build a road so it is interesting it does it like with the military it kind of makes sense why people could think that right because it is largely that there's the government literally the federal government owns the tanks and where that's an arm of the government but here they hire private construction companies and stuff to do that you know it's not like they're necessarily state employees who go out and build the interstates so it is interesting that you would think why do we need the government to do that so anyway early it was early turnpikes were financed by the road a good essay on this in the book is called the Voluntary City it's edited by Alex Tabarak and I think someone else and I apologize if that person hears this I can't think of what his name is but if they got a collection of essays about the Voluntary City meaning you know city using just voluntary means there's lots of good stuff in there but there is an essay on the early history of road production in the United States so here look sometimes people say oh the problem with this is we need to have standards right yeah it's fine to have different private companies making ice cream cones because there could be crazy flavors and who cares it doesn't matter if these guys say rocky road is one thing and these say it's something else I didn't pick rocky road to be funny with road but that was just so but clearly with roads like if one guy's intersection you know one company means green means go and someone else green means stop you know you're just asking for trouble so that's why the state running all this stuff to set the standards and that's in general that's kind of a weak argument right there's all kinds of things where there are standards in place that are not enforced by the state or any other agency like so it's not if you buy a printer you can buy a printer paper made from another company and it fits you ever notice that you can buy screws in a screwdriver from a different company and it works isn't that amazing so the point is that there can be standardization and so forth but the point is how much standardization should there be right there is a you know there's a Phillips head screwdriver the other kind so there are differences and the way to solve that is you say well I don't know where the cutoff should be let the market decide right so you want to have experimentation but there also is the need for standardization and that's not some question you can answer a priori and we just know what the right cutoff is and so you might think ok but with stuff like road is you know traffic light no I bet you would be surprised if you haven't already read on this to see there are some people who think the quote standard official approach to road design is actually very deadly so Google this guy Hans Monderman just as one example I saw this great video so he's a guy it was I think he's dutch I'm not sure but and so anyway he was designing roads for a certain area and he completely revamped it and he's talking to the reporter and he's walking it's an intersection like there's a round about and there's cars coming and going it's broad daylight and he's talking to the guy and he goes watch this I just want to show you how confident I am that my road design is good and that there's not going to be accidents he turns around and backwards just walks out in the street alright and he died well no no he didn't die and all the cars just are swarming around him it was amazing right so he's just going through it and all the car it looked like it was like a circus act or something but it was I believe it was real you know and so the point is he took away he's like how that happened he takes away all of the like there's no traffic lights there's no signs and it's confusing so the drivers approaching this intersection are like what the but his point is yes that's what you want drivers to you want them alert and you don't want them those and often thinking that oh no the way they design this road I don't even have to pay attention I'm just going to you know text my friend I'm going to do that no he said that's where accidents happen is when people get lulled into not paying attention and then disaster strikes alright so anyway that's just one example now that might not work for you know what we now call interstates that you know you were there you want to have baby you do want to have real fast things his point was that if using that approach in certain intersections where they're with the traditional model there had been a lot of accidents doing this like the amount of accidents went way down okay so that's just one example where you know we shouldn't just assume oh yeah everybody knows the right way to design roads no we don't and how would we know and if there is just one right way to do it then okay there shouldn't be any problem with allowing freedom into that sector because if someone tries something that doesn't work out no one else will do that anymore but the question is how would we know until we let people try I like Walter Block's point so he by way if you want to read more on roads he's got a whole collection on this and you know in terms of market provision of roads where he deals with all the you know all the kind of stuff that Walter Block would deal with right like what if some company buys you know I live in a cul-de-sac and some company buys the thing and then how do I get out and Walter's like I could get a helicopter ha you know that kind of stuff so it's okay but his one of his points that I really like is he goes through the statistics of how many people die on government roads year after year and his point is if this had been some private company's product that we're doing this there would be congressional hearings you know looking into this but since it happens on roads that the you know the state at various levels of jurisdiction controls they just blame it on the user right that's oh because yeah the drunk driving or the person was going too fast or they should have had the way we design this intersection is not conducive to safety maybe we should look at it and there's you can look at various so the you can rank like the intersections and see which ones are the deadliest in America right there are watchdog groups that publish you know real macabre lists like that to say here's the deadliest intersections in America or per capita what have you and so they know about it so you I would just would think the incentives under a private system with private ownership are likely to do something about that whereas now I found one the one that the I had a recent article on econ lib on the private production of roads and so there at Google to try to find a recent case of this and I think it was somewhere in Pennsylvania like the one that won the intersection the most deadly intersection of that year and the story doing the new story about it then said oh the you know the city planners decided to appoint a commission to look into this or something you know a reaction to something is oh there's a problem people are down okay we'll appoint a commission and we'll get around to you know so it's not that they're sitting at night saying haha we're killing more people excellent necessarily but the point is it's not like they're going to lose all their customers when it's you know they have the monopoly on that area okay so there's there's more there's a lot that economists could say is the big thing when it comes to roads is traffic jams so especially if you've just know there's certain times of day you you know twice a day typically you just can't go anywhere near the city through the road it's just crazy and that's not just up that's the fact of life that's what you know if you're living near a big city no that's the fact of having the roads that are underpriced right because what is a traffic jam except a shortage and you know in terms of economic terminology that there's not enough you have to be careful and precise about what's the definition of the good here like the quality supply is not something like that but in terms of quantity supplied and demanded the price for using that during rush hour you know is too low that there's the quantity demanded exceeds the quantity supplied that's a shortage and that's what certainly looks like so that's one element of just having these things not be owned privately that they were privately owned they would charge really high prices initially that would you know smooth the traffic flow and then with all those things in the field beyond that though it's just funny how people come up with all these crazy scenarios about all those horrible things that would happen if we had private ownership of roads you know there'd be corruption when there's literally do you guys know what bridge gate is with Chris Christie I mean there was literally a thing where his you know tenants or whatever because they were mad at somebody politically punished him by deliberately causing a traffic jam right but it was a scandal and there's some couldn't get somebody like somebody died arguably because of that and they got in trouble so I mean it's we literally know that putting government officials in charge of something doesn't all of a sudden mean I'm glad we got rid of the corruption problem that that doesn't that doesn't happen also there's really I mean this is becoming more alarming and people more people are paying attention to it civil libertarians with asset forge feature so there was an interstate I think it's I-40 it was they went through Nashville and this was happening was near us where some of the local news stations when I lived in Nashville were reporting on it where they there was the claim that there were a lot of drug dealers you know coming in getting drugs for I forget where they were supposed to be getting them from and then they were coming one way on the interstate and then going the other way and the police you know they accept roadblocks and they're a sensible justification was oh we're trying to catch these drug dealers but they were set up on the side where the cars with the money would be going through if you get what I'm saying right even on their own story they weren't set up on the side where the drugs would be coming in they were set on the side where after the deal was done and so they'd pull people over and some guy would like not trust banks and so he'd have $10,000 in cash in his trunk or some guy was going to go buy a car from somebody was bringing cash and so the police would seize their money and then you would have to prove you were in a drug dealer to get your money back right that sort of thing so that type of stuff again you know you could say that's government overreach but in a lot of you know like left leaning civil libertarian types of course are decrying the police abuse or whatever but if you privatize the roads that kind of stuff wouldn't happen as easily because then it wouldn't be normal for the police just to be sitting there doing that right it's not that when you go into a Best Buy the police tackle you and say prove you're not a drug dealer you know that doesn't because Best Buy would say can you do that here that's kind of bad for business alright so if roads were privately I'm just saying an offshoot of the state controlling the roads is it's not just a matter of oh man we got traffic jams and more car accidents than we need to it's that's one way of controlling all of society just like if they control the mail and they control the schools controlling the roads it's not just a matter of oh inefficiency we're not Pareto optimal anymore offshoots it's things like you know real invasive behavior also another example there's things where the supreme court ruled on this a couple years ago so now it's not as flagrant but there are cases where the police would pull you over they would think you were drunk driving you'd say no I wasn't they'd want to you know give you a breathalyzer you might refuse and they were doing stuff like they would forcibly hold you and draw your blood you know to be able to cause otherwise if you went and they took you in by the time they could test you or whatever maybe you know you would have processed some of the alcohol in your system so they wanted to go ahead and grab it right away so that again that kind of stuff happens because they're sitting on the roads okay what about public transportation can you imagine if airplanes or movie theaters ran their businesses the way public buses and subways work now if you've never been around a major city you don't know what I'm talking about but it looks like that all right now you might say okay that's a groucho Marx thing you got a Google image search has nothing right but it does look like that that's what I'm saying so again if you haven't lived in a big city but it's it's crazy they're literally people get squished in and you're like this until the next stop so for some people who are claustrophobic they literally can't use the public transportation government transportation state transportation in these things so just the thing through why is that right because movies on opening night lots of people want to see it but it's not like if you go to see Spider-Man opening night everyone gets crunched and it's like did you like the movie I couldn't tell some guy was sitting on my face so again why is that because the companies know our customers wouldn't like the product if we let so many people rush in right and so again just incentives that the people who run the agencies to control like the New York City subway system it's just different incentives it's not like the mayor is going to lose next election because the subways are too crowded at 6 p.m. that's that's not going to be an issue okay let me skip ahead I'm running out of time here to let me just end with immigration here I'm going to solve the immigration problem for us in two minutes ready so here something like prayer in school right people if you if you're not from the United States I really some of these political battles might not mean as much to you but the United States a while ago it was this real big controversy oh should in government school should people be allowed to pray like should the kids be allowed to pray before their meals should the teacher open up with a prayer wherever and there are arguments on both sides and so some people were saying of course not because if my if I'm an atheist and I'm sending my kid to the government school you know I don't want them forcing religion down their throat and other people are like yeah but my kids are forced to learn all kinds of stuff that I have complete moral objections to and you just said that's part of the curriculum so you're saying my kid can't like say grace before lunch that's insane okay so you are taking a political view there you're saying my my religion's wrong alright so those are the battles and I would say there's no solution to that right I think just the ultimate answer is privatize everything have this the schools why was that funny that's not a joke and and so there's no there's no answer it's not like you say oh what's the libertarian take on prayer and government school I don't think there is just to privatize the schools that's how you would solve that if you know religious parents want to send their kids to schools where they can pray they can if other people want to send schools where it's just purely secular they do that and that's that's how you solve it so likewise that you know that's my answer with immigration just privatizing there really is a great answer when you say oh what's the libertarian position on immigration to say you know what's what's the right way for the federal government to decide who gets to cross borders that to me that's like saying what's the libertarian position on how the USSR should have done broad bread production you know and it says they privatize it there's no you know so there's but also within this thing I will say a lot of self-described libertarians who are for what they call open borders they use some rhetoric that I think is clearly you know incorrect here things like oh there's a right to travel there's not a right to just travel wherever you want like that doesn't you know malls restaurants country clubs someone can't just come into your house and just say you know I have a freedom to travel where I want right so I'm saying some of the rhetoric in this debate now let me last thing I'll show you so in a free society private landers set whatever policies they want look at this I even got a diagram we'll end on this so I want to show you so instead of having bureaucrats in DC decide who can come if it were all privately owned each of these people could decide and notice conveniently everyone has really short names otherwise all right and now here watch I can even handle an objection because somebody's wait a minute what if people like what if Pam's crazy and she just lets all these ISIS you know terrorists or whatever come in here well look at this the benefit is ready bam you've got these guys there okay so the my point is even if you do think that oh Pam can't be trusted to set the right border policy there's other people run so it's not like the case for immigration control was really crucial that this the map looked like that and not like that right what if Mexico's border had just happened to look like that it's not like oh shoot privatization doesn't work right so anyway obviously there's a lot here and I'm sweeping under the rug but you get the you get the basic ingest of it okay thanks everyone