 I actually have two questions, one from Professor Stone. When you started speaking about the beginning of World War II, it looks like it was only Hitler who started the war. What do you think about actually the role of Stalin and Soviet Union in this? Because it looked like they both agreed that the peace agreement and then simply Hitler broke it afterwards, but the beginning was like a common endeavor of two states. And then I would like to ask Professor Hoppe when you have this argumentative ethics, it's very, very big improvement into ethical ethics in what we know now, but you always look to restrict it very strictly to human beings, while in fact, some people when exploring life of animals, even they so that they send some signals and do reflexive to those signals and have something similar to a very primitive ownership and then the primitive property. So how do you comment on this? Thank you. I think you were asking about Russia in the Second World War. Well, I mean, I said Hitler really profited from the strange gap between illusion and reality which was universal in the between the wars. And that was never more so than in the case of Stalin's Russia. He was supposed to be a revolutionary regime and it's offering just tyranny and starvation on an enormous level. The curious thing is that Stalin himself seems to have known that he was very close, the country was very close to collapse and so he came to terms with that they're expecting France to stay alive, afloat, that the war would last in the West as the First World War had done. Therefore he could easily make terms with Hitler in order to stop him attacking Russia. I think Stalin's policy only makes sense in terms of realizing that the Soviet Union was a colossal failure and in a way it was Adolf Hitler who created the Soviet Union. If it hadn't been for galvanizing the thing in the Second World War, wouldn't have fallen apart. So the Soviet Union is yet another of these, well, rubbish heaps, like the League of Nations. Sorry, I'm overstating it, but usually what I mean. No, with regards to animals, I think it was perfectly clear. Obviously they cannot argue with each other. So whatever I said does not apply to them. That we sometimes think that the talk coordinate the actions by signals and so forth is all a human interpretation of their behavior. And helpful interpretation sometimes allows us to predict what they will do and so forth. But recall my initial point was my initial point was what makes humans, humans, and what makes them different from every other entity in the world is precisely that we can do one thing with each other that we cannot do with any other entity that lives in the world. I would like to ask Professor von Storn about the role of two prominent figures at that time. One is the impact of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the personal history of Adolf Hitler. There's a theory about him affecting Hitler's becoming of anti-Semites and I'm not sure. I want to ask about what you think about it. And the other question is about Keynes appraiser or he praised the economic success of the Nazi program around the 1930s, what do you think about it? Thank you. I'm not sure Keynes exactly praised what Hitler was doing. We're obviously the public spending side of it. But Keynes was a man who was very careful. And I don't remember anywhere where he actually talked about it. See at that time, most people thought that the Nazi economic recovery or employment recovery was something going to our minds. There was a book by a Keynesian, a follower of Keynes, it's called Claude Gillebaugh, who was a very straightforward Cambridge economist. Very, very respected man and he wrote a book called The Economic Recovery of Germany in 1938 I think. Now there's a curious side to this because in 1940, in the invasion scare, the British picked up a lot of people who they suspected of being pro-fascists. Claude Gillebaugh had said that the Nazi economy would not collapse because of blockade. It was far stronger than that. And because of this and his argument that Hitler had solved the employment problem simply by Keynesian, or we would call them now, Keynesian public works. Because of that, he was quite seriously considered as a pro-fascist and he was nearly picked up by an interned. H.A.P. Taylor was a wonderful footnote on it that he was nearly put on trial for this recognition of the truth. Now, look, Wittgenstein and Hitler, apparently they did spend a year together at the high school in Lentz. And I can't imagine they would have anything to say to each other. Wittgenstein, the son of a vastly rich family. He didn't know you know, he was Jewish. He, I think his sister told him, much later on, you realize we're Jewish pure son because what had happened was that in the 1840s, an awful lot of Jews in Austria-Hungary converted because they couldn't convert Catholicism because that was even more bizarre than traditional Judaism they didn't want to go along with. So they converted to Lutheranism, which was vaguely, I mean, it was vaguely second grade and you, and they were technically Lutherans, apparently Wittgenstein didn't know that they were Jewish until much later on. Now, the final point on this is, you know, I don't think we read anything into Wittgenstein and Hitler. One, the odd thing is that Wittgenstein seems to have been one of the recruiters of the Cambridge spies in the 1930s. Now, there we're onto something because he did vanish off to Norway at odd points and he did of course know all these burgesses and the clans as well as having the essential ingredient in the whole thing, namely homosexuality. And that was, I mean, I was a fellow of Trinity in Cambridge for a bit and Stephen Ronserman was the most terrible gossip and up to here in MI6, he always said it was Wittgenstein was the fifth, was the recruiter, maybe a legend. Just a little thing on, Keynes did write a preface to the German edition of the general theory which came out the same year as the English edition and he did emphasize in the preface that he thought a regime like Nazi Germany would be a far more appropriate place to implement his policies than the liberal Western democracies. So in this sense, I'd say he did at that time have some sympathy for the German regime. Only in this sense, I do not know enough about Keynes or to say more. As far as the Nazi economic recovery is concerned, years ago I give a speech I think that is also on the internet somehow available on comparing whose wealth's policy to how to get out of the Great Depression with Hitler's policy, how to come out of the Great Depression and I pointed out that those made huge mistakes from the point of view of Austrian economics but Hitler did less than Roosevelt and the economic recovery of Germany was far quicker and far more drastic than the recovery in the United States which actually did not happen at all until the end of World War II. Stefan, from a libertarian perspective, I think one of the major criticisms of corporations has been their symbiotic relationship with what has come to be known as the corporate state and this derives I think from the role that concentrated economic interests have in directing governmental policy over those with diffused economic interests and it seems to me that the statists, whether they are of a left or right persuasion, really don't want to criticize the role of the state in directing the society or particularly in its economic aspects. So in the corporate state system it seems to be easier for them to condemn just the corporation or just the motivations of the corporation and leaving the state safe, so to speak. Do you comment on that? Well, I would say I agree with that completely and they don't criticize the worst and biggest corporation of all, which is the state, which has corporate status. Of course, that's what the modern state is, it's a corporation. It exists even though it's members and it's administrators come and go. So I agree with that and I agree that the left and the critics of corporatism, as they call it, do focus on corporations instead of on the fundamental issue. Of course, I would be in favor of state stopping its corporation laws and just let the free market operate. I would be even more in favor of the state abolishing itself altogether. So my only point is that in a free society, I don't think that being a shareholder per se should make you causally responsible for the actions of employees of a company that you have some kind of interest in. But that doesn't mean in some cases they couldn't be. But in any case, I don't believe that someone becoming a shareholder or the lack of shareholders being fully responsible is a contributory cause of the state's power. It is the corporate state alliance. But it's not because of limited liability, in my view. My question goes to Professor Lin. Since you explained how intelligence differences are to be observed between different races, I was wondering if there is any testable hypothesis or hints with respect to what the physiological cause for this could be. The question concerns how these differences in race, differences in intelligence have appeared. The generally accepted theory to explain this is that the human species evolved in Africa, of course, about 150,000 years ago. In equatorial Africa, in the region of contemporary Kenya and Uganda. And some of these, some of this population migrated northwards first of all into the Middle East and then into Europe and Asia. And those groups that migrated northwards encountered a more demanding environment. In particular, the problem of survival over the cold winters. In equatorial Africa, there are plant and insect foods available throughout the year. Whereas as our ancestors moved northwards, there are no plants or insect foods throughout much of the winter and spring. So our ancestors therefore became reliant on hunting large animals for food. And that is more intellectually demanding. They would be hunt animals like horses and deer. These animals run fast. So in order to capture them and kill them, it was necessary for men to go out in groups to devise group hunting strategies. One of which, for example, was to drive a number of these animals into the loop of a river. So the animals were forced across the river to escape. The men would have some comrades on the other side of the river and would club them down as they came out on the other side. So this was a quite intellectually demanding exercise to catch these animals, kill them and then bring them back to the group. And then there were other intellectually demanding problems for survival in the cold climates like making clothes and shelters and making flowers and keeping them going. All these things were intellectually demanding and required a higher intelligence than was necessary in equatorial Africa. So you get a gradient. The most severe climatic conditions were northeast Asia, which is why the northeast Asian developed the highest IQ after that Europe and then after that, North Africa and Southern Asia. That's the generally accepted explanation today of those of us who work in this area. If I might add a point, I believe you all. I had a question as to what were the physiological correlates with the group differences in intelligence. Well, it turns out the brain is probably, well, it's by far the most complex organ in the human body and there's some estimates that perhaps even half of the genome is involved in the formulation of the brain. So we really don't know the details about how the brain works, but at the gross level, there's an unquestionable connection between brain size and intelligence. And there are definite differences, well established now through all kinds of scientific means of brain sizes by race, even when you control the body size. And so the North Asians do have a brain that is proportionately large in that of Caucasians and blacks and then I believe it's Australian aborigines at the smallest brain, is that correct? That's right. So this is a, again, this is a very gross surface level physiological correlate for intelligence, but it is something that differentiates intelligence within races, within families, and also between races. Stefan, I'd like to thank you for such a clear overview of the dispute over corporations and for such a fair exposition of the views of those who do not agree with you. However, I am not convinced by your analogy with the sale of the gun. If I am a gun manufacturer, or better than that, if I'm a gun seller and I sell a gun to him over there and he takes it off and shoots somebody, then his will, his decision to commit that crime is a new intervening cause. It breaks the nexus between my initial possession of the gun or my manufacturer of the gun and the criminal act. It is an entirely different matter, however, if I as a sole proprietor, so let's leave aside corporations for a moment, it is an entirely different matter if I as the sole proprietor of a company employ a van driver to make deliveries for me and the van driver has an accident and injures somebody or destroys some valuable property. The van driver himself may well be without assets, but the van driver is acting on my instructions in my time. He is in small matters over the decision whether to turn left or right to stop and put the handbrake on, et cetera. He is in small matters, closed with my authority and if he has an accident and even leave aside whether I have been negligent in my employment of the man, in my training of the man and in my choice and maintenance of the van, forget, leave aside those matters for a moment. If he does cause an accident, I must surely be held partly responsible for his actions. Now, I do agree that the doctrine of vicarious liability has been carried too far, certainly in England and probably in America, we can both think of the cases, but I do think it, nor, I think it just plain common sense that if someone is acting in my time about my business, closed with my authority and he commits a tort for which he cannot through his own assets compensate a victim, then I should be held responsible. And if that is the case for me as a sole procreator, then it is surely the case for me and for my fellows as a shareholder. I find it very difficult to believe otherwise than that. Your claim that ownership does not imply responsibility strikes me as perverse, but I put back to you, I could say more, but this is a question, not a reply. Okay, well, first of all, Joe Becker did call to my attention. I did make a mistake with the Smith and Wesson example. I gave examples of a rental car where the ownership is retained and a stolen knife where the ownership is retained. The gun example should have been the theft or the lending of a gun. I was trying to show cases where I think we would agree that mere ownership by itself doesn't imply responsibility, which is a type of strict liability theory which you're sort of adopting here. I might be persuaded in the sole proprietorship case, but the reason you initially gave that the sole proprietor is responsible wasn't because of ownership. It had nothing to do with ownership. It was because he was directing and controlling the actions of the employee, right? So you say these phrases, he's going about my business or he's cloaked with authority, which is, I don't know if that's question begging or circular or metaphorical, but we have to ask the question, do we have a clear theory of causality that means that just because you're a shareholder. So the part I would disagree with you on is going from the argument that if the supervisor of the employee is liable and surely the shareholder is. I don't, because the only surely there, the only reason to make that statement surely is because the shareholder is the owner. And again, if we, in the classic case of ownership, we're talking about what we're used to every day. I own a car, I have the right to control it. A shareholder really is called an owner by the state, but that's just a legal classification. As I said, the shareholder can't use these objects directly. They don't have the right to supervise the employees. So my reason is that a shareholder, by virtue of merely being a shareholder, I mean, we could make up another word for it. Instead of calling a shareholder or owner, we could say this guy is someone who has the right to elect directors and the right to receive dividends. That's really all he has, the right to elect shareholders and the right to receive dividends. He doesn't have the right or the authority or the power to control the actions of the corporation, to even choose its policy or direction or especially to select and hire employees. I mean, by your theory, a manager who supervises an employee wouldn't be liable because he's not an owner. So if you're gonna link it with ownership, then that's really all that matters. And then we get to the point where instead of a classic form of ownership where you own your home or a car or a gun, now we're letting the state or some lawyer or some legal theorist arbitrarily analogize and say, well, the guy that invested money in this company and has the right to elect directors, we're gonna call him an owner. So now he's going to be responsible like an owner would. I think the theory of causation has to go back to actions performed by the person and how he is acting in concert with somehow the person who committed the tort. So I would say a manager of the corporation who directs the actions would be liable under your theory and I would agree with that. If whether he's the owner of the corporation or not, the direct supervisor of the negligent employee, he could be liable. Maybe the board of directors could because they set policies and they hire the officers. But the reason they're all liable is because of their actions and their supervision of the employees. I don't see that shareholders have that right to supervise. They're passive. So that's my reason that I don't agree with your last step. Who owns British Petroleum? I think ownership for the libertarian simply means the legally recognized right to control the scarce resource. So to the extent that has normative implications, then we're talking about really sort of a legal factual situation, not what the state classifies things as, not how the common law rules have evolved to distinguish between a leaseholder and a fee holder and whatever. So for example, I would say under libertarian principles, if I own a house and let's say I rent it to you for a week, now you have a contractual type of property right for that week, I don't have the right to come in and kick you out. So at that moment in time for that week, you are under libertarian theory, the owner of the home, not me. Now I'm going to retain my ownership at the end of the week. Now lawyers have complicated classification schemes for other purposes, but then that's kind of hijacked and the state's classification scheme is hijacked for other purposes. It's like a type of equivocation in a way, really. So I think ownership just means the legally recognized right to control. There are gradations of it in the law that's useful, but it's not useful for, I think, this causal responsibility analysis. I have a question for Professor Haber. How has 9-11 and the government's reaction to 9-11 and especially the people of the West, the masses, their reaction to the government taking away their liberties, how has that affected your opinion on the prospect for libertarian social revolution? I didn't understand the end of your question. So how did that affect what? I will rephrase the question. On my way over here I listened to one of your old lectures called How America Can Be Saved? And it's, I think it was before 9-11, that lecture, and you sounded very optimistic about the prospect for a social revolution, a libertarian social revolution. So the question is, did 9-11 and the things that has happened after 9-11 affect that? I think when I gave that speech, I think there was a speech before donors. If you have speeches before donors, you tend to be always a little bit more optimistic than you are. No. For obvious reasons. So I think I was then not all that optimistic and I have become less optimistic since. Yeah, I want to ask Jared Taylor what he thinks of libertarian anarchism in the Rothbardian-Hopian tradition. What I think of libertarian anarchy in what tradition? Rothbardian. In the Rothbardian tradition. Well, I think that the founding of the United States was based on a deep suspicion of centralized government. And I share that deep suspicion. I live close to Washington DC, as I often say, so that I can keep the enemy in my crosshairs at all time. I think that I am fundamentally a libertarian, but the one aspect of doctrinaire libertarianism that I do not and cannot support is the notion that borders should be abolished. I think that privatization of most things, perhaps all things is a desirable thing. I think that charity should be voluntary and not obligatory. I think all of the aspects of the welfare state have contributed to all sorts of degeneracy. But again, where I part company with those who are libertarian across the board, is that I do believe that borders are necessary to preserve a kind of functioning homogeneity without which a society can descend into a kind of chaos. To me, the immigration question is, of course, under dispute among libertarians themselves. So I do not take this open border position that some libertarians do take. Let me explain why. The reason why there exists, so to speak, borders of the United States, borders of Germany, and so forth, is the fact that the state in Germany, the state in the United States, has of course forced people to contribute taxes to building roads, building facilities here and there. So we can say, yes, Americans own America in the sense that American taxpayer money has been used to build all facilities in the United States. And it is their genuine property and those people, of course, do have a right to determine who comes in and who doesn't come in. The current regime is very imperfect because the state assumes this type of control. But of course, private individuals owning private roads, owning private facilities and so forth, they would do exactly the same. They would also control who has access to what type of resources. And the question that we always have to ask, this is, I think, the mistake of those people who are in favor of open borders among libertarians, that they think public property, so to speak, is unknown property. But it is not unknown property. It is property that has been financed by certain people in the United States. Not all people in the United States have financed them. Obviously, state employees themselves have not financed them. Obviously welfare recipients have not financed them. But there exist, of course, massive amounts of people who have actually financed them and they do have the right to stop people if they don't like them to come. So public property is not unknown property that stands open to be occupied, homesteaded, and so forth by foreigners. And that there is a difference between the United States citizens and foreign citizens can be simply seen in. Have Indians, for instance, contributed to American streets being built? And the answer is no, they haven't. So certainly they do not have the right to travel on American roads unless they are invited by Americans. Have Germans contributed whatever roads in China? There might be some Germans who have contributed taxes. Again, via taxes and so forth. And them I would grant a right to access those places that they have actually financed. But by and large, it is the Chinese that have done that. By and large, it is the Germans that have created things in Germany and it's Americans who have created America. So yes, they have the right to discriminate against foreigners and let certain people in and exclude others. How about the German financed roads in Greece and Spain? They shouldn't walk? Yes, then of course the Germans have the right to access those roads. I have a very fundamental question to Hans but also for the other members here. It goes on human nature and I remember a lot of discussions we had on natural law and human nature years before and I agree more than ever what you said today. But it leads, we have to argue and to argument to find arguments for arguments. And but it leads back to the fundamental question which one position is taken by Rousseau on one side that the man is born free and good by nature. And on the other side we have the story of the Old Testament that the man is corrupted by original sin. I don't like the term but I like the act that Eve took the apple and that after eating the apple and sharing it with her husband. Thank you. Mankind is able to find out the difference between good and evil. And this is the starting point to this side. And what is more important than the decision to bear the consequences. So I think Eve by taking and eating and sharing the apple is the mother of liberty. And we should be grateful for that but it's the opposite position than Rousseau. So what's your preference, more Rousseau or more Eve? If you put it this way, of course that we were expelled from the Garden of Eden then implied that we have to live in a world of scarcity. And only in a world of scarcity do we develop ideas to try to become intelligent because only intelligence will guarantee a success in a world of scarcity. In a world of super abundance in the Garden of Eden we wouldn't even have to do much thinking if anything at all. All we would have to do is just grab apples and shove them into our mouths. So in this sense I'm on the side of Eve as having initiated the cognitive development of men and part of the cognitive development of men is of course also the idea of freedom and of justice and good and bad and so forth. Let me just emphasize, I did not, my lecture did not imply that men is good or bad. What it implied was that we can distinguish between good and bad, between right and wrong. Whether we always do it is something, the matter that is completely different. When I criticized corpse by saying, look people who say that one man is another man's wolf, I did not imply by that that men are not sometimes wolf-like, that they beat other people, kill other people and so forth, but you cannot say that men is only a wolf because that is contradicted by the very fact that you formulate that in a sentence that you present that as an argument and that indicates that you are also something else, different, entirely different from a wolf. By the way, the translation of Eve is life. I have a question for Jared Taylor. For me the pivotal point of your presentation was your observation which is obviously correct that starting somewhere in the 1950s there's been a sea change in racial perceptions. What before this change, before this watershed was perceived as acceptable discourse, would now be dismissed as outrageous racial slurs. It seems to me however that there is a non-sequit or some kind of implicit assumption in the implications that you draw from this sea change that the present situation is a degenerative one in that the natural state as shown by our history of racial relations is either strife and oppression or segregation and this is how things must be and any attempt to negate this reality is going to result in tragedy. Perhaps I can use a thought experiment to get my point across. We can imagine Jared Taylor living in the late 18th century, the early 20th century, late 18th or early 19th century. He would presumably point to the Americans and say, well, you know, what they are doing is a denial of human history. What they're saying, the Americans, is that there can be cooperation amongst competing religious groups. The whole history of religious difference is a history of murder and oppression. And what the Americans are saying is that in fact different religious groupings can live together and horror of horrors perhaps even respect each other. Surely the message, why can't you see this sea change as a positive development? As one more instance where America has been a beacon of light to show that what has undoubtedly been bad in the past can be overcome and we can come to a new era in which we can overcome these religions. If your point is that as a matter of historical fact, we are a bigoted and murderous species, I would have some sympathy with that view. If however your point is that this is how we ought to be or this is how we naturally are, I would question you. Ah, very interesting question. It reminds me of the great vogue of course that Marxism had for a very, very long time. The idea of the classless society, the idea of a society that would abolish selfishness and one in which we would live from each according to his ability, each according to his need. I think that was an extremely seductive one, one that attracted people for many years but the result of course we all know, result was all kinds of catastrophe. I believe that Marxism essentially failed because it was a misreading of human nature. It might be better if we lived in a world where there was no selfishness, where we really could create Marx's new man but I just don't think in our fallen state that is something that's possible. The United States today, and I think most European nations, has embarked on this notion of building a nation in which race can be made not to matter. And I think that the civil rights bargain of the United States of the 1960s was very much the idea that we whites who have been dominant, we will dismantle our racial consciousness. We will dismantle any attempt to think in terms of our group interests with the expectation that every other group would do likewise. The trouble is no other group has done so. And so in the United States it is only whites who are not allowed to defend their racial interests whereas every other racial group does so. And it is one thing to be an optimist in an entire society of optimists or to share idealism with others who are equally idealistic but this experiment of unilateral disarmament, if you will, is one that I think sufficient data have come in to show that so far, and I see no reason to see this change, it is only whites who have approached the racial question with this kind of goodwill and expectation of reciprocity. And given the situation we have today, one in which, as you say, whites are trying to build this world that will transcend race, but no one else is doing so. And unless whites realize that this fallen nature of man, just like the selfishness that Marxism tried to abolish, this is part of our nature. I think it is always better to build a society on a correct understanding of human nature rather than an illusion. The American politician Adelaide Stevenson once said that, given a choice between disagreeable fact and agreeable fantasy, Americans will go for the fantasy every time. Well, I think the idea of building a race in which race can be made not to matter is a very agreeable fantasy that has captured the imagination of large numbers of people. But I think the data are in that this must require the same thinking in all groups and we are not at that point and I don't believe we ever will be. I beg your pardon? Yes, it is one important story. Ah, we had the historical example of religious hatred which can be overcome. Yes, yes. And it was not overcome because all religions said, oh no, we will not tolerate everybody. It was overcome because of libertarian principles which are at the founding of the American state. I would agree with you that the abandonment of these libertarian principles and I'm not a Marxist incidentally by and I would agree with everything you said about Marx except the idea that Marxism would lead in a, it has a fantasy of a better world. Marxism is a vicious ideology in its own right. The respect of other races just like the respect of other religions is not beyond human achievement. Perhaps it might prove to be because we are fallible species but to suggest that it ought to be is to me pretty outrageous. I'm not necessarily saying that it ought to be. I think there are differences between men and women. Should these differences be ignored? Should they be, should we try to minimize these differences? I think again, we have to accept things as they are. As for this thought experiment, oh, I would certainly agree that our species has made all kinds of progress in terms of setting aside sources of conflict, organizing society in ways that are more fair, ways that are more productive. It's just that I brought up the question of Marxism because I think simple idealism is not the solution. Idealism can bring us into new vistas, it's true, but idealism that is misdirected can lead us to catastrophe. And in the case of the whole racial situation today, I fear that ultimately in the long term, whites not just in the United States but in Europe as well are being displaced by others. And for the first time in history, a majority population is not merely permitting itself to be displaced by others but has convinced itself that to resist this displacement is somehow evil. That to me is contrary to human nature. And unless this revolt against human nature, this revolt against a sense of community is somehow brought to an end, in the long term, our race will disappear. And I think of that as, as I said in my concluding remarks, a real tragedy. Okay, I need a signal from Hans now. We've got six more people on the list. Okay. Stefan, I agree with your assessment a lot. And you made two points that, one was the latter point with respect to liability, tort. The first one was in the attack, the assault on the corporation, as you called it, which I find it more frightening. This quote that the corporations are basically instruments of the state because they've been licensed by the state. But I like to challenge you in one thing though, in that there needs to be some ethical and moral components into this because primarily this issue is an American one. To some extent it's British. He asked you, who owns British Battalion? The answer is every pension fund in Britain. They're very same people that they expect some equity, but the problem is strictly American because American law has become really an instrument of extortion. This does not, this is not true in other parts of the world. Even in France or a lot of other places, the liability of the corporation can be easily met through insurance policies. There's no tort in the sense that the large of the corporation, the large of the damage, some jury of peers, goes after it with envy, et cetera. These things don't exist. So the corporation is not under attack, say in Europe that I'm very familiar with in any sense. It is in the sense of taxation and regulation as it is in the US. But I would like to suggest to you that the issue of corporate ownership, the reason corporations are rather less is because there's no essence of ownership any longer. In fact, in America, they call them stakeholders now. It's the lieu of stockholders or owners. And when you abrogate the element of ownership, you abrogate a sense of responsibility. And without responsibility, you have an amorphous entity that is rather less. And then the system, a legalistic system tends to attack it and destroy it. There are no strong owners anymore. There are renters. So I think a lot of it is possibly Guido Hildesman referred to it as a symptom of the age of credit, the age of credit, the access to credit, the ease to which with credit and with borrowings you can actually try to acquire wealth, so to speak, or capital or grow. Has contributed to this effect, this whole idea of the relationship between the state and the corporations as with the idea of corporatism. Others have suggested. So I think it's a symptom of a money issue. This legalism and this legal extortion is taking place. And I was wondering if you ever thought about that ethical and moral antecedents to this problem rather than just looking at it from a corporation which is truly only American, thank you. Well, I think I agree with, I'm glad you asked this because I wanted to follow up on Sean's because I did fail to complete my answer about BP. I agree with most of what you say. Corporations in America, especially the large ones, especially the big pharmaceutical industry, Hollywood, the movie industry, the music industry, some parts of the software industry heavily lobbied the state, for example, to foist our fascist patent and copyright laws on the rest of the world. So they're implicated in the state but that's only because of the state's existence, of course, and a big pig trough is gonna draw pigs. On the other hand, corporations are craven and gutless, partly because the state has so much power over them. If you just look at the regulations on public corporations with Sarbanes, Oxley, and these rules, the extortion, the taxes, and just the very fact that the state claims the right to give them life and grant their charter and then claims the right to regulate them in response and has created this notion of stakeholders, which for people who don't know, is this amorphous, new leftist doctrine that it's not only the legally classified owners, the stockholders that have the right to control the corporation, but it's everyone who has a stake in the corporation, which would be the local community, et cetera. So you have all these environmental activists and people like this that the corporations are kissing their rear ends by trying to appease them and not doing anything too bold because they don't wanna lose their charter or be sanctioned by the state or be penalized or fined. So it does lead to corporatism. And I agree that to the extent that state intervention and even corporate intervention with the state and getting in bed with the state, to the extent it has led to a distorted business field or distorted economy, I think we should abolish the corporation to get rid of these distortions. And maybe we would have a different corporate structure, a different corporate scene. My focus here, of course, was on whether or not the grant of limited liability is really a cause of all this. And I don't, yeah, I agree with you on that. I don't disagree that that is probably a much bigger effect in the first place to the way corporations act is the financial interventions that the state basically causes. I don't disagree with that. On the question of ownership, maybe a little libertarian in the weeds, but the reason I focused on ownership is because if you, so Shawn asked who owns BP and I gave the example of a house. The question for the libertarian is simply, as I said, the legally, who owns the right to control a resource? So in the case of BP, at any moment in time, there are certain managers in place and the board members who have the right to direct the actions of the employees, who have the right to allow access to the tangible equipment and capital that the corporation owns. So in a sense, those are the shareholders at a given moment in time. I'm sorry, those are the owners, okay? So if we want to determine ownership, the question is who has the right to control this resource? And by agreement of the shareholders, they do. But if you're going to say, because the state calls the shareholders' owners, then they're the true owners and we've already determined that ownership, because it means the right to control something, the right to direct the control of something implies liability, now we're sort of equivocating because we're shifting to the state just saying these guys are owners. But really, let's just look at what they are. They have the right to receive dividends, they have the right to elect directors. All that means is a very vague, small effect on who the directors are. It just means the right to receive a financial benefit from the corporation. Lots of people do this. Quite often bondholders, quite often creditors have agreements with the corporation on who's going to be on the board of directors. So are we going to establish a rule that anyone who has any influence whatsoever on who the board members are, what corporate policy is, anyone who gets a financial benefit from a corporation like a customer, we could call them owners too, but because they have some of the same characteristics that shareholders have. So that is why I brought this point up. I mean, imagine a restrictive covenant, which is an example I gave. You have a neighborhood of 100 people, they all agree when they move in, usually by a master plan of the original builder, they agree that they will abide by a veto effectively of their neighbors on certain uses of their property, like you can't paint your house orange or you can't put a pig form in your yard. Who's the owner of my house in such a neighborhood? Well, I'm the 99% owner and my neighbors own 1% in a sense. They have a partial right of control. They have the right to tell me not to use it for a certain purpose, not to build a pig form on my property. I have the rest of the right. It's divided by contract. Now, there are perils of dividing by contract as people point out. You have more amorphous responsibility, but usually in a contract, you're going to have at any moment in time, just like the rules for private property and a free society, this is the entire purpose of political theorizing is to come up with a set of rules that answer the question at any moment in time, not in the future, who has the right to control this scarce resource right now? And the first political question, the libertarian principles that Professor Hoppe talked about determines what person or group of people have the right over this resource. And then internally to that group of people, they have a web of contracts that specify who among them has the right. And that's what you have in a corporation and that's what you have in a restrictive covenant. That's what you have in a partnership. That's what you have when two people buy a car together or buy a condo and aspen together and they agree that you can use it on these weeks and I can use it on these weeks. So ownership is relevant when we want to determine that question. How we get people to act morally and ethically in such a situation is beyond my pay grade but I don't think the state should encourage it by interfering with corporations or even with chartering them. So I agree that they should abolish that but let the free market operate. I would like to ask Mr. Stone what he thinks about two historical works on Second World War in case that you've studied them. The first is which was published about a year ago by Herbert Hoover Freedom Betrayed which puts forth this thesis that the intervention of the United States in the Second World into Europe prolonged the Second World War and if they wouldn't have intervened Soviet Union and the national socialists would have destroyed each other and it would have been favorable to the United States of course and also to the outcome of the Second World War and the second work is by Anthony Sutton. It's called Wall Street and Hitler and in case you know it, what you're hearing is these two works. Thank you. Let me take the second question first. I read about the book rather than read it. You know there were, it goes back a long way to say that capitalism caused Hitler. It had obvious origins in Germany where people would say that the capitalist went along with Hitler. Well you know, I mean it's in a sense true but it was investigated quite a long time ago by my called Henry Allen Turner. Who looked into all this and the capitalist had to hedge their bets in Germany. You know they preferred the national liberal party with people's party as they called it. Hedged their bets with the Catholics and only really came along to start supporting Hitler when he was already winning. And Titian wrote his memoirs about that before and no fleeing. I mean after all, you know, capitalism's, capitalists have to protect their positions and everybody else did. You know, I'm never terribly impressed by these American conspiracy theories that Gore-Vidal came up with one which was quite well documented that somehow Roosevelt was prodding Hitler into war. Now, of course he was and Hitler solved all sorts of problems for him in the end because he was attacking, well his men were attacking American ships. And you know, somehow there's a strain of American thought which I never understand quite that somehow this was Roosevelt's fault, not Hitler's for actually attacking. Now, Harold Herbert Hoover is an exceedingly interesting man. One of these very characteristic American figures of the 1920s, he did a huge amount of good in Belgium who's saving it from starvation, repeated that feat in the Soviet Union. And when he spent a huge amount of money saving the Soviet, saving Russian peasants from starving in 1922, 1923. But it's, you know, to that we owe the Hoover Library and Stanford, which was a fabulous institution because he said, you know, the way to pay me back is give me czarist government documents. So it was for a long time the leading institution for the Soviet archives started opening. It was to the Hoover Institution that he went for books and papers. I owe it a lot, right? As I wrote about Russia in the First World War. Now, he's that kind of can do mentality, but he emerged from all of that with a hatred of the Soviet Union. You know, I think the statutes of the Hoover Library are that this money is given to demonstrate the falsity of the doctrines of Karl Marx. I'm literally quoting, I think that's the foundation of it. He went in with Hansen, and Hansen's the great Norwegian and Hansen's assistant in that case was a certain major quizzling who was the, you know, who was the Nazi collaborator in Norway during the war and was executed for it. Again, out of hatred of the Soviet Union. Now, you see, when Hitler and when Roosevelt ended up in the alliance with Stalin, somebody like Hoover, so talkily unnatural, but why can't we just stay out of it and let them bash each other to bits? Well, the answer is that somebody would have won. And, you know, that would not have, you're an isolated America. Already, I mean, Hoover, I'm sorry, I'm talking much too much, but I'll shut up. But Hoover himself must have known that the tax rises he made in 1932, and his policy of closing down after all, closing down 6,000 banks in the middle of a slump is crazy, and putting up taxes is also crazy. But he must have realized that his policies had something to do with the depth of the depression, which Roosevelt, when he ate it, was very successful in overcoming. So his way of getting back was to, was for this man, great man, man of prodigious achievements and all that, is to come up with these sad theories that Roosevelt somehow bought by the Jews to, you know, to play up Stalin and play down Hitler and so on and so forth. It's a great pity, because, you know, the world owes him a lot, but it just went wrong. You have the last question. Okay, so my question is for Stefan Kinsella and maybe Professor Hoppe, if he would like to add something on this. I was a little bit confused after your presentation and after your answers to the questions, I'm confused more about the subject. When you said that ownership is only for scarce resources, I'd like to ask how a corporation is a scarce resource and is it really possible to own a corporation? And in fact, if you challenge your definition of shareholder ownership, in fact, it fits to the copyright owner exactly and how is it possible that shareholders own a corporation which does not physically exist and is it possible to own a shareholder or they're just in contractual obligation with the pound or whatever it is? Sure, well, I was actually kind of disputing the common notion, the state classification that shareholders are owners of the corporation and it's considered in the law to be an owned thing because it has a legal personality and the state treats that as a type of ownable thing. From my point of view and from the point of view of libertarians, when you talk about who's the owner of the corporation, the question really is who's the owner of the scarce resources that the corporation owns? So 10 people come together, put their money together and by a contract between them, they agree what's going to be done with it. That money is going to have an administrator, a manager, it's going to be used to purchase certain real assets which are scarce resources, building capital goods and then it makes money. It's just a convenient legal fiction. It really would have no owner. I would agree in a free market that the corporation doesn't even exist as a legal entity. That's why I disagree with the entity theory. So it's just a way of conveniently saying who owns these resources? Like let's say you have the McDonald's building. So then the question is who owns that building? Well, it's really 17 co-owners if 17 people came together to form a corporation. They just own it through the mechanism of what they call a corporation and they adopt the common name just like a trade name just to deal with the public and to make it easy for people to know who they're dealing with. But really, you're right. Corporations do not have a scarce, they're not a scarce resource. It's just the means by which real people own scarce resources, which are the physical assets owned by the corporation including the money that it makes, the profits that it makes, the products that it generates. So we're really talking about ownership of the scarce resources including the trucks and the things that are used. These are scarce means used by actual employees to commit torts. So we're always talking about scarce means. So that's what the whole dispute is about. And then the question Sean asked about ownership. What I'm pointing out is there's a distributed form of ownership. Some shareholders have a claim, some bondholders have a certain claim and a certain influence. Board of directors have a certain claim all by virtue of the structure set forth in a contract between a number of people. So we're talking about ownership of the scarce resources owned by the corporation. If it has no resources, it's worth nothing. So really that's the ultimate question.