 Okay, I'm starting this recording now. This is another episode, I think, of the podcast and recurring or return guest and Matthew Sands. We've been talking online about some issues and we decided to just hash them out here. I think we're talking about homesteading and blocking homesteading and those kinds of issues. Is that right? Yeah, primarily, yeah. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and what you think this talk should be about? Yeah, okay. My name is Matthew Sands. I have a project called the Nations of Sanity Project, which is built on the assertion that crime and therefore also law can and should be defined by the concept of individual self-ownership and established as the terms of a peace agreement, that's kind of what my little project is about in a nutshell. And the kind of reason for this conversation, I mean, it actually started about the kind of talking about the border issue and as it related with regards to kind of blocking, denying people access to things that aren't your property. And then we kind of moved on to the subject of, which is obviously in a similar vein with regarding similar principles with the idea of like blocking someone homesteading around them and blocking them in and stuff like that, which I think works on the same principle. So it's kind of, that's kind of, I think I initially came to you sort of speaking about the borders and then we kind of evolved into a kind of more general conversation about sort of denying people access to anything other than your own property. And that's when we kind of came across this disagreement with regards to the doughnut homesteading and obviously we had a few back and forth on the email and got to this point. So why don't we set the stage a little bit with the background of, this came about because of the sort of the immigration disputes among libertarians, right? Yeah. And so I guess the default position for a long time among some libertarians was what you might call open borders, right? Because it means the state has no right to stop anyone from coming into a region because the state is illegitimate and criminal and doesn't own anything and, you know, the typical reasoning. And then some libertarians, even the more radical ones, I mean, I would say that in the old days or in the menarchists or the moderate libertarians here, I would say most libertarians are not open borders because they're not anarchists, right? And so they might be pro-immigration because they don't have this false economic idea that immigrants are bad for jobs or whatever like, you know what I mean? Like if they have an opposition to immigration, it's a different thing. It's not economic. It's more cultural or aren't just practical or something like that. And so I think that what happened was in the 90s and the 2000s Hans-Hermann Hoppe and others who were radical anarchist Austrian libertarians who were anti-state nonetheless started saying, hold on, we should not be so much in favor as libertarians of open borders because of X, Y, and Z reasons. And even Rothbard seemed to change his stripes a little bit on this and join with Hoppe and the others. And then, of course, they got accused of being nativists and racist by the other side. But I think that we can come up with reasons for why this debate happened and why it's emerged and why it's still happening today. Would you kind of agree that's a fair assessment of where we are? Yeah, definitely. And I mean, like my own kind of sort of evolution into this subject. Oh, hold on. I didn't hear your report. Yeah, it says it's recording here. Oh, does it? Oh, mine, it says it's recording. Good. Good. Okay. Yeah, no, I agree with that. I mean, anything I would sort of, if I was kind of describing exactly what you did, the only thing I might have said slightly different is I might have said, because the thing is about the libertarian thing. Although I do agree with you that a lot of libertarians hold that position. I think it's a kind of incorrect in accordance with their own principles because from a principal's point of view, I don't really think there should be any difference between libertarian and an anarchist because they're both working from the same basic principle of individual self-ownership. But a lot of people who call themselves libertarians are, and I'm trying to be derogatory towards them, but I often would just refer to them as kind of inconsistent libertarians or less consistent libertarians. But a fully consistent libertarian for me is just an anarchist, really. Of course. I agree with that. Yeah, I'm trying to be, can sell out being magnanimous for once, like I will include in the libertarian ambit, people that are not fully consistent libertarians. So yes, Henry Haslett or David Friedman, actually he's a bad example, he's an anarchist, Milton Friedman or an Ein Rand or Robert Nozick. It's hard to deny that they're actually libertarians or big libertarian influences. So I think that I would classify them as minarchists and I would say that they're not fully consistent libertarians because I would say that a fully consistent libertarian is an anarchist libertarian. On the other hand, I would also say that many anarchists are not consistent anarchists because, and what I mean by that is the socialist libertarians like, sorry, the socialist anarchists, they say they're anarchists, but if you're a socialist, you have to support the state. I mean, we know this from economic reasoning and from political theory. So there are people that call themselves anarchists who are not true libertarian anarchists. And there are people that call themselves libertarians who are not true consistent libertarians because they're not anarchists, right, the objectivists and the minarchists. But the way I look at it is there's a core of libertarian thinking which is the most consistent which is libertarian anarchists. And then we can expand that group to include the minarchists and maybe the objectivists. And then beyond that, there's the classical liberals and, you know, you go beyond that. That's how I look at this issue. I'm trying to be reasonable and welcome people into the fold. But of course, I agree with you that there in the end, there's no difference between a libertarian and an anarchist because, but anarchist has different meanings in the world today, like it can mean lefty or whatever. Yeah. I mean, I must admit, I personally, when I kind of describe my own self, I usually go for volunteerists just because I don't like the connotations of anarchists or libertarian because often if I say libertarian, they might think I'm just a conservative who smokes weed. And if I say I'm an anarchist, they might think I'm a kind of left style anarchist who doesn't respect property rights. So I always go for volunteerists because I feel like that's less likely to be confused. But no one knows what that means. But that gives me an opportunity to tell them. Okay. All right. I'm not a verse. Hold on. I'm not a verse to that. I'm not a verse to that. I think I hit the mute button. All right. Go ahead. Right. So with regards to our sort of disagreement. Yeah. I mean, so basically, because as I say, I started with the border thing and I heard kind of Dave Smith having a few debates, I just kind of wanted to be on the other side of and then I kind of heard him referring to Hop a lot. So I read Hop and kind of got a good idea of where he was getting, you know, his ideas from with the border enforcement. And then it came across to these other things, which is what I discussed with you about like the homesteading and and it's the basic the basic crux of it. If I want to try to condense it down into the most concise form, the basic crux is that I kind of disagree with Hop and I disagree with Dave Smith and potentially with you as well. Is I don't see how like our property rights, we have the right to defend and deny people access to our property. But I don't see how we have the right to deny people access to anything other than our property. Now, that doesn't mean I'm obliged to make it easier for somebody to get somewhere. But it does mean I'm obliged to not make it impossible for them to get somewhere. And that's kind of where I'm kind of landing on it. Like like the way I view the way I view property rights, much like cell phone ship, you know, it's the same kind of idea, you can do what you want with yourself as long as you don't infringe on other people's rights to do the same. And it's kind of the same with the property rights. I can do what I want with my property, build it where I want etc, except as long as I'm not, you know, violating somebody else. Yeah, I got you. Let me let me interject for a second to try to set the stage for people that are not familiar with the background here and then you can continue on. In a sense, what you're saying from my perspective is more like I think your argument is okay, is loaded in a sense up. So let's say it's a little bit like when the classic when the conventional person says, Oh, you libertarians want to deny food to the poor, right? Or they'll say you want to let the poor starve. Like that's how they frame the issue, right? And it's like, well, we don't we don't want to let the poor starve, but we're focusing upon what property rights should be. And then the consequences are something we can address later. But our goal is not to let the poor starve. In fact, I would say most libertarians that I know, including me, contrary to popular wisdom, are overly concerned with the fate of the poor. I mean, I do think that socialism hurts the rich and the billionaires or the potential billionaires, but it hurts the poor the most, right? And that's my main reason for opposing socialism is because it hurts the poor. And so I forgot my train of thought. Where was I going with this? Well, you were saying about how obviously, like socialism hurts the poor, and it's a little bit like, I think you're trying to say that my argument was a little bit like when people say, Oh, you're trying to stop people getting food, because you don't want them to eat or whatever, because you're right. Yeah, so it goes back to the property argument like, Oh, you want to have a system that blocks people from doing A, B, and C. It's like, no, well, we're focusing on incremental ideas that show what people are justified in doing, right? So if I say that, Oh, okay, I have the right to have this piece of property, that simply means I have the right to exclude people from using it, etc. And that has certain implications and certain consequences. If it happens to have the effect that you can't cross my property to come to this virgin territory that's somehow encircled by a donut of, I mean, this is such an unrealistic thing in the first place. So like, let's go back to this whole, to the whole thing that caused the dispute. Frank Van Dunne and Walter Block, they've argued that like, if you could like somehow use Lockean principles, which infuses most of the libertarian arguments, which says that the basic libertarian property principle is the way we identify who owns what is from Lockean homesteading principles plus contract, like something like that, right? So the guy that gets it first, and then who he transfers it to by contract, like, that's how we figure out things. But then they say, well, even though we're libertarians or we're kind of Lockeans or free market guys, we're worried that, oh, we can imagine a scenario where one guy could homestead a donut or a bagel or a circular kind of slice of property, or somehow isolate someone from crossing our property, basically, to access a wilderness, an unknown segment of land. And by the way, this comes up again, this came up in the immigration debate, because among immigrationists, people that talk about immigration policy, you will have different arguments on different sides. So you'll like, for example, one of my arguments, trying to give a different spin on the anti open borders argument is, I would say something like, well, I'm not saying that the US state is justified in the existing having an INS that stops immigrants, all this kind of stuff, right? I'm anti state, so it's hard to defend that. On the other hand, the fact is that the US government controls, as a matter of legal fact, you know, 43% of the land territory in America, which is huge and vast, including roads and public facilities and borders, but also including just vast wildernesses like, you know, the Rocky Mountains and unowned, what I would call unowned territory. And so one argument I posited in the article I mentioned that you talked about was that it's not clearly a rights violation if an outsider, meaning a non American, is denied access to say public roads in America, which they need to use to immigrate into the country and to to immigrate into the country. And the reason is that they're not an owner of that. And then, you know, so then you have to go into the distinction between legal ownership and rightful ownership. So legally, the federal government owns these roads or the state governments, and then as libertarians, and especially as anarchist libertarians, we would say, and then rightfully they're owned by someone else, some private citizens or private people, usually American citizens or something. You could make a crazy argument that everyone is entitled to it because every one of the world is a victim of the US government. And so they're all claimants on retribution from the US government because, you know, someone in Colombia or whatever, or Vietnam or whatever, or even Russia or China, I don't know, you could make a crazy argument like that. But once you open that door, it's like, I don't know where you go from there. But that's where this came from. This came from this idea that the argument among some libertarians is basically a dispute about what is the status of what we call public property. And so let's just distinguish it. Transform property like government buildings and government roads or natural resources like millions of acres of untransformed land like in the Rocky Mountains, okay, in America. Now, the thing is, most libertarians, especially the left-leaning ones, what they want to do is they want to classify all government property as unowned and therefore, subject to appropriation by anyone except for the government, right? So like, if you have a public library and a bum comes in and he's just messing the whole thing up, or a public elementary school and you have a pervert in the girl's bathroom, they say, well, you can't object to that because the government doesn't own it. And that's why people get really upset. And I think that the analysis, the mistake in the analysis is that they think that if the state owns something, it's unowned. Now, I think that they fail to make a distinction. I think that if the state claims possession and protects and restricts access to certain natural resources, there's a distinction. If you have a public road or a public library, those things are owned. But as a libertarian, what I would say is the government is the legal owner, but they're not the rightful owner. The rightful owner is whoever has a claim against the government. And I would say the taxpayers, the local taxpayers and the local landowners are the best claimants to get that, like if we ever have a revolution, reduce it. As for other things like the Grand Canyon or the Rocky Mountains, they're not owned at all. It's just the government is preventing you from using it. So I would classify it that way. So that's how I look at these things. And then this leads to the second distinction, which is, okay, well, then what if someone homesteads this doughnut of property and they prevent you from homesteading the interior? This is a totally private scenario, even potentially, right? And so your argument, I believe, is that if you use your rights in a way that blocks people from accessing unowned resources, you're somehow violating their property rights or something like that. So that's my kind of prelude. I'll let you take it from here. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's pretty much, I mean, I'll clean it up a little bit. But yeah, that's pretty much where I'm coming from. I mean, the one thing, what you said there, most of that, I agree with and actually hold the same position with regards. I don't have a problem because, again, this is something that Dave Smith brought up when he was having an immigration debate, like the heroin addict that walks into the public school kind of thing. And, you know, I'm like, yeah, that's fine. I don't have a problem. And Dave's argument, I mean, I love Dave, but his argument is, that's crazy. You might agree or not, but that is not really, it's not really a coherent argument. I mean, I think he could flesh it out if he had to, but just saying it's crazy is not referring to libertarian principles to make a claim, right? Exactly. And, you know, and if I was to stillman the people who would, you know, defend the heroin addict, their position is obviously that it's not rightfully owned property by the government. Therefore, you know, like you say, they basically take the unknown principle. Now, I have no problem with the idea of treating government property as if it was private, because it's still property. So like that school would otherwise be private. And then you can argue that even in our current situation, even if the government aren't the rightful owners of it, you could argue that the taxpayers are because they paid for it and what have you. So I don't have a problem with roads and schools and things that are actual property. But like you, so this is where we're on the same page, that doesn't apply to things like the wilderness and the forest. And the one reasons why I objected to Dave using that example with regards to the border discussion is I'm like, well, yeah, but keeping somebody out of a school, which is property, so you're treating it like, you know, as if it was privately owned property, which is fine, because it is property and it would otherwise be private property, is not the same as an entire country that wouldn't be private property, even in our Ancap society, it would be a region of of a lot of unknown property or sorry, a lot of unknown areas that aren't even property at all, as well as different properties of different people, you know, that are all existing within this kind of region. So that's kind of like where I'm coming from. Even though I do agree, because that's the thing that's like, that's, I suppose that's one of the reasons why I really wanted to jump into this debate is because I see like these, this kind of divide with the kind of like, say the libertarians arguing that government properties should be unknown. And then people more on sort of Dave Smith side of it saying, well, no, we should treat it like private property because, you know, it technically is, you know, proper, you know, and all the rest of it. And I'm thinking, well, okay, I actually disagree with both of you in a way, because I don't agree with the people that saying, oh, yeah, let's treat the schools like it's, you know, the same as the Grand Canyon. I'm saying, no, no, I'm saying they're very different. I'm saying the school in an Ancap society would be private property. And, and, you know, we can, we can make that case that right now it should be treated as private property, even though it's technically, you know, public property. But, you know, it's still property, it still would, it still has, you know, there's still a rightful owner that you can assign. And in a, in an Ancap society, it would be private, but in an Ancap society, the Grand Canyon wouldn't be private property. These untouched areas that you mentioned, you know, forest and land that hasn't been homesteaded and, and, and, you know, mountains and forests and all of these things, they wouldn't be property. They wouldn't be anybody's property in an Ancap society until someone come along and homes it. And even when someone does come along, they're only going to own the little spot that they've homesteaded. And the, you know, so my point is, is that I, you know, I'm, I'm fully accepting the argument that we treat government property, like private property, and we can exclude people from it. That's perfectly fine. But how does that help us? How does that justify us denying them from denying them access to everything else? You know, because we wouldn't do that in an Ancap societies. Okay, so let's, let's talk about a couple of things. So I pointed out in my writings, and it's pedantic that it's better to use the word property to refer to the relation between an owner and a resource. But the common parlance is to call something property or not property. And like you just done. And but what, let me just clarify. I think what you're meaning is the common. So when you say, oh, like, this is property, this is not a property. What you're saying is, this is a resource that has already been transformed and it's already subject to ownership by someone. Yeah, right. So I think, so I think we could distinguish between the national forest, which are just wildernesses, which by the way, which might have been appropriated by now, if the government hadn't stopped it, maybe not. But we don't know because the, you know, the federal government prevents people from using in any substantial way about one third of the entire territory of this massive United States country. So they're blocking people. And so by the way, I'm not opposed to a private owner homesteading a donut that prevents someone else from homesteading the inside of it. Because I don't agree with Walter Block's idea that, you know, you're preventing just as nature abhors the vacuum, libertarianism abhors an owner property. And therefore you're committing a libertarian crime. If you have a piece of property and you don't allow people to cross over it to homestead owned property. So I don't agree with that. But that doesn't mean that I don't agree that the federal government in America, which is a status criminal organization, can be criticized for preventing people from homesteading the Rocky Mountains or whatever. Actually, I think they can Alaska, whatever and more. So, but the reason is because they're an illegitimate criminal state, which is doing something unnatural and something unjust. But being a private owner who's done nothing unjust and merely not allowing your property to be crossed for someone else to cross it to homestead or access some wilderness somewhere. I don't see how that's any kind of trespass or rights violation, which to me is the interesting issue. Right. So that's why I make all these distinctions. What do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, I think, understand what you're saying. I mean, I think the rights violation becomes clearer when you put somebody else in the middle of that donor. So say you've got an existing property and someone creates their little donor property surrounding your property and basically because I mean, it depends on how big the donor is, I suppose. But I suppose the one thing when the thing that kind of prevents me from agreeing with Walter completely or finding it harder to just, you know, so certainly say, oh, yeah, Walter's right on this one is because I'm imagining the doughnut homestead and I'm imagining this unowned area in between. And I'm just thinking if people were complaining that they didn't have access to that and you didn't own it, it seems very easy that you could just homestead it in a way that you basically did own it, depending on how, you know, like, it's like, why wouldn't that just be your kind of inner garden? No, I know what you're saying. I don't think that's a solution actually. I'm denying myself an obvious solution. First of all, property as a concept is not linked to, well, it is linked to Euclidean concepts, but it's not linked to limiting on a spherical animats, number one, right? We happen to live on a spherical orb like the Earth and the surface, right, for right now. But that's just what happens to be the case right now. But of course, you could imagine the circle going all the way to the equator and then going smaller the other way. So it's like, if you have a doughnut of property here or in the equator or here, or you have a peninsula and you have a, you know, a line of prop, I mean, there's all kinds of geographic or orientations you could imagine where people are basically inconvenienced by the fact that someone happened to have a lot of contiguous property ownership, I guess. But this concern to me is no different than the concern which you hear from the lefties all the time like, well, what if one guy buys up the entire Earth or something like that? It's basically the concern about monopolies, right? Like, so this is what this all boils down to is the concern about monopolies. And honestly, if you're really concerned about monopolies, you should just be a libertarian who opposes the state because that's the only source of real monopolies, right? So I guess that's the way I look at it. Like, I just am not concerned about these trivial grad schools, dorm room, bullshit hypotheticals you can think of, which are basically unrealistic because this is not going to happen because I mean, Walter Blog, who writes about the doughnut, himself thinks that there's no case for government expropriation of property to make roads because he thinks it's always possible to make a road if you just make a deal with people. Well, if you really believe that, it's like, well, who's going to do a doughnut of property that's going to encircle a huge valuable tract of unowned land and just never make a deal with anyone to homestead the inside or not homestead it himself? Like, the whole thing is so unrealistic. And again, if you look at human history and everything we know about human life today, and for the last 10,000 years, when has this ever been the problem of human life that there's a doughnut and people just can't get to this magical forest of cerulean crystals in the middle? It's like, it's all like Star Trek space cadet hypothetical bullshit that makes no sense and it's a dream it's a dream to solve what problem really? That's I guess that's kind of my question. Like, I think that for real world humans, walking and homesteading and contractual title transfer actually works to solve the basic problems of humans living in a world of scarce resources where we can conflict with each other. It's pretty good. It's better than socialism. It's better than statism. It's better than theocracy. It's better than autocracy. So now you're complaining that you could imagine a hypothetical doughnut. Like the whole thing makes I don't really see what the point is. You follow me? That's where I kind of am on this. Okay, I understand what you're saying. I mean, two things. One is, although I understand that the doughnut property is perhaps unlikely, I think it's more that the principle that it's attaching to which does connect to real life situations like national borders, like, for example, like blocking off a peninsula, like, and it's not them. And also the other thing is for me, I mean, I can't speak for the lefty libertarians because I'm not one of them. But for me, the problem, my concern is a monopoly because I agree with you fully that that's just not going to happen in a libertarian society. And if anything's geared up to not have monopolies, it's a libertarian society. So if you're anyone who's scared of monopolies, I fully agree with you, they need to be libertarian because that's the best way to avoid those. But my problem isn't a monopoly. And my, to go back to the doughnut scenario, and let's put myself, I'm a property owner, and I've got this doughnut of property around me. It doesn't have to be one person who owns the entire doughnut. It could be a collection of properties. And now it becomes a little bit more realistic. It could be a collection of properties, all of which are like up against each other. So there's no gap between them. And say the last property owner closes that circle on me. Yes. Now I'm in prison. So up until that last property owner came in and closed that last little bit of land, I didn't have a problem with all these property owners around me because they weren't affecting me. But as soon as they closed that circle, they imprisoned me. And that's when I feel like they stepped over the, the nap. Okay, I don't disagree. But let me, let me give you three considerations here. Number one, if that's a problem of human life, what's the best way to solve it? Is it to adopt socialism? Probably not, right? So my point is, if you can find problems in libertarian approaches to practical living, they don't result in utopia. Okay, we don't, we don't pretend to be utopian or some of us don't. And so what's the, what's the alternative? Like, I mean, that's, that's one and number two, I pointed to you in my writings and I'll put it in the show notes for our episode here. The law, the common law, the civil law has come up with solutions for this. Like, you know, they, like the civil law says, like very rationally, this is not some libertarian enterprise. It's just the practical way that people resolve their disputes using scarce resources. And they say that if you get enclosed through no fault of your own, like this, you're going to have a right of way to access the public road or something like that. However, if, if it's your fault, like, if, like I, if I, if I'm, if I'm like enclosed by a doughnut with one little opening, and I sell that to someone and that closes me off, that's my own fault. But of course, this never happens because no one wants to be closed off. So these problems are like so ephemeral. And so I'm not opposed to the reasonable idea of a right of, right of way to access other things. The other, the other thing is though, where's the stopping point for this reasoning? Because again, you could imagine a belt around the equator. So which, which is the bigger, which is the bigger, like, what is it bounding? It's just separating two hemispheres. Or again, a peninsula with just a horizontal line across it. Or if you have a doughnut, I mean, mathematicians would I'm sure weigh in here, like the total dorks that they are, the level of dorks that they are. If you have a circle, what's the inside and what's the outside? I mean, there are, there are whole PhD theses about what's the inside and outside of a bounded shape like that, right? You could say that people on the inside are being prevented from home sending the outside. There is no objective difference between the inside and outside of a circle on a spherical surface, because there's just difference in area, but I don't know, maybe the inside is the more valuable part and the outside is just wasteland. You know what I mean? So it's like none of this is objective human, but none of it's realistic. I don't know if this has ever happened in human life. Like why? So I think people focus on this as a hypothetical situation to illustrate the fact that in some cases, yeah, I can't block people from using this barrier territory to cross into from A to B, right? You can't use ownership of middle ground B to prevent people from going from A to C if there's a barrier between. But I think if you're going to argue that, and again, this is why this comes up in the integration debate, because people like me say, well, I'm not really arguing against open borders. I'm simply saying that in the current state of affairs, like in America, the federal government, as a legal matter of fact, owns 30, 40% of the country, like the territory. I don't think they own it as a matter of natural right, but they own it legally. And I think that the natural owners or the citizens who have the right to reclaim it if we ever have a revolution, we can just auction it off and sell it off. But in the meantime, it seems reasonable to me that the government's going to commandeer the functions of just say roads. I think we can all agree that in human society there would be a need for transportation routes and roads. And so the government has commandeered that, like the commandeer communications and education and money and banking and everything and law and order. But one of them is transportation and roads. Okay. So given that they've done that and they've used, they actually used taxpayer dollars and expropriated property of people to build these roads, at least give the people that they're, that they're subjugating with their system the right to transport, to move using the roads. Does this mean that automatically an outsider from Columbia or China has the right to use this road? I don't think it's so obvious that they do, because they don't have a property claim. You could argue they have a restitution claim if they're, you know, a Vietnamese citizen, the America bombed or something. I guess you could make these extended arguments. But then you get to this point where some government in some local region, America, France, Europe, China, whatever, Russia doesn't have to be American. They have legal control, but it should be controlled by the citizens or by someone else, by some private actors. How do we distribute that? How do we do justice? In the meantime, the way justice is done is to let the citizens at least have a reasonable simulacrum of usefulness of the natural life service that the government has commandeered. If you're going to have government schools, it would be better if they're better than if they're worse, because you're forcing the citizens into that. If you're going to have national health care, it'd be better if it was better than if it was worse, if the government's going to force you to pay taxes that support it. That's your only solution for health care, right? And the same thing for transportation and for other things. I won't say it's even second best. It's simply recognizing the fact that the government or the state harms people, and it's better if the state harms people less than it harms people worse. This is why some libertarians argue and have preferences about different forms of government. Even the anarchists might say, oh, I'm an anarchist, or the monarchists might say I'm a monarchist, but they'll say, okay, in the real world, I would rather A versus B or C. I don't know, monarchy versus democracy versus this bureaucracy or whatever. And so when you say that I would prefer a monarchy to a democracy, it doesn't mean that you're a monarchist, right? It just means that you're sort of saying like, given this state of events, this state of affairs, I prefer the least harmful one or the most beneficial one. That's sort of how I look at all this. And so I think that's how we translate that to say immigration policy or to ownership issues and things like that. I think it's reasonable for a libertarian who's an anarchist and who abhors the state to say, whatever the state does, they're going to harm people. And given our welfare status democratic system, if you have immigration, you're going to have problems one way or the other. Or if you don't have immigration, you're going to have problems. Like whatever the government does, whatever the state does, they're going to be hurting people. They'll hurt outsiders. They'll hurt insiders. They'll hurt citizens. They'll hurt non-citizens. They restrict the right to travel. And then when the people can travel, they give them the right to vote and the right to travel on the public property to get welfare. So like there's no good solution. We know this. The only solution is to privatize everything down to the nth degree. So that's how I look at all this. Tell me what you think is crazy about this, given a libertarian perspective. And yeah, there's a few things there that I wanted to kind of touch on. The first thing I wanted to say, because when I said about the donor or denying people access through property and all the rest of it, and like you, obviously the solution isn't socialism or isn't to reject property rights. But one of the things that, because I've had this argument with lefties and socialists before, where they try to argue against property rights and they'll give extreme examples of how property rights might be used to violate somebody in some way, as if that's an argument against property rights. And I'm saying, well, no, no, no, that's no more an argument against property rights than saying this person might use their self-ownership to rape somebody is an argument against self-ownership. It's not a, you know, like we can have property as long as we don't violate people. We can have our self-ownership. But the condition of it is that we don't violate people because everyone's going to have the same self-ownership and the same freedom. So I don't present this problem with the donut thing saying, well, this means we can't have property. I'm just saying, no, no, it just means that when we apply our property rights, we've got to, I mean, the way I kind of picture it in my head is I kind of picture this trifecta of self-ownership, property rights, and the non-aggression principle that are all kind of linked to each other, you know, self-ownership being the fundamental presupposition, property rights coming from that, and the non-aggression principle being the kind of implicit moral principle for it. So for me, so, and that's what governs your self-ownership. And for me, that's also what governs your property rights. So it's not about saying you don't have the right to build your house, or even it's also not even saying you have to let people have a, you know, pass through your property, or have some kind of or sort of easement, or something like that. I'm not even saying that. I'm saying that you can build your property where you like as long as you're not violating anybody. And for me, denying people an access to anything other than your property is the violation. So that's kind of the crux of it for me. Yeah. So I see where you're coming from, and to concede some things now that I've been too hardcore to admit. So as I said earlier, I am somewhat of a loose fan of like the way the civil law deals with this enclosed estate issue. I think it's a practical, reasonable way. And again, even the law, this is a positive, normal, modern law. They say that if you allow yourself to be enclosed, you can't complain. But if other people enclose you, then you have to have the right of way to get outside. To me, that's reasonable. And I think it's reasonable as a libertarian as well, for many reasons, one of which is, first of all, this wouldn't be a real problem. You could always just buy access from someone. But in the end, the whole purpose of property rights is to come up with the system where we can live together without conflict. But if you do trap someone in their own property, you're going to have a fight at some point. And so we need to have a resolution to this. And so what's the most reasonable resolution? Okay, some kind of right away. But knowing this, I think people would find ways around it, or they wouldn't get trapped. This would be a very, very rare thing. And again, this is not a problem of capitalism. It's a problem of the fact that we live together in a world of scarce resources, where this is possible. This problem could happen in socialism. And so then the solution would be the dictator tells you what to do. Okay, so this is again, also my fallback when people point out like, Oh, what if you're two guys on a on a desert island, and you're going to starve? How does capitalism help you then? Or if you're two guys on a on a boat, and there's only enough, there's three guys, there's only enough food for two. Well, okay, yeah, capitalism won't solve that problem. But socialism won't either, because sometimes tragedy is possible, or it failures possible in human life. So I don't see these as big reasons to oppose generally the idea of locking and homesteading and contract as the most reasonable ways to decide what property rights are. And to me, that's the fundamental question. And if you can say, Oh, I can dream up a scenario where there's a a figure eight loop, which looks like infinity on one side and was like a figure eight the other way. And then people couldn't cross from here to here, and there's Moldova here, and there's like an interior country here. Okay, you can dream up scenarios. But what's the purpose of political rights and theory and law is to solve real world conflicts and problems between people that can practically actually help them do it. And it actually has like that's what the private law has done. And the private law has come up with, okay, in the civil law, I'm not sure what the common law, I'm sure the common law is something similar. But if you enclose in the state, people have a right of way to get to the local road. Now, that whole solution assumes a state because they're assuming a state road. So all these solutions come about with judges in a quasi state system, and they're taking for granted certain state institutions like roads and things like that. Okay, so that's the solution they came up with. Okay, what would they have come up with in a totally private situation? I don't know, maybe something similar, maybe something different. I don't know. But the fact that we haven't run the experiment yet, because we haven't had a free world yet. And all we know is what people have done before in a quasi private world. And we can only draw our lessons from that. I don't see how that's a criticism of a free society and the goals that we all favor as libertarians. Does that make sense? And do you agree with that? Yeah, it does make sense. And I do agree with that. I mean, and to clarify my own position, I don't think what anything what I'm saying is an argument against a free society or an argument against property rights or anything like that. And I'm not looking to throw the baby out with the bathwater like nothing I'm saying in my view, at least from my perspective, nothing I'm saying compromises or or as an argument against lock in homesteading and property rights, like like for me, it's not and and also sorry, I'm a bit all over the place. I've got so many things I want to make. But one of the one of the things I really want to pick up on is is the right of way issue. Because although I do agree with you that these kind of idea of saying, okay, well, if you were kind of, you know, enclosed, the state saying, okay, well, then you've got a someone's got to provide an easement so you can, you know, access this thing and all the rest of it. Now, although that seems to sound relatively reasonable, the thing that bothers me about it is it's not libertarian. And I actually think there's a libertarian answer that's better than that. And the and the better than that answer I have is, so like, say, take take you back to the scenario is, you know, say I'm the property owner that's trapped in the middle of this, this doughnut, but it's different lots of different property owners that make up this doughnut. Can we just clarify something? Yeah. So there's two issues apparently. One is the issue what Walter Walter block talks about, which is so let's say Frank Vandenberg said Walter block. Walter block talks about a doughnut that encloses unowned property. So no one's trapped there. It's just that they're prevented from crossing your property to homestead it. Okay, so that's one issue. The other issue is if you are actually in the middle of that and you're now trapped. Okay, so I assume you're talking about the second issue right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm talking about the second issue, mainly because I think illustrates my side a bit better. So let's say I'm the property owner and I'm the one that's about to be trapped in the middle of this giant circle of this doughnut of properties, but it's not one property owner. Okay, there's different properties. Say you're one of them. So you're one of the many property owners that lives in what eventually becomes the circle around me, but right. It's not you're the last one that 99 of the guys get to get to homestead it, but then the final guy, he can't now really homestead his property completely because now he has to have a right of way. Yes, he's the guy that is blocking the guy. Yes. And just to just to put a bell on it before you tell me what's wrong with this, just to put a bell on that. So yeah. So basically what I'm saying is that last guy, the one who's closing the circle, he's the one who's violating because he's the one who's imprisoning you. Now, my problem with the state solution about property owners being given is I would say that like say, for example, even though he's the violate, let's say he goes ahead and does that and he closed that circle. So now I'm trapped and I'm not just trapped by his property. I'm trapped by lots of people's property, including you. I can't come to you and say, right, you've got to give me an easement and I don't think it would be right for a government to say, Stefan, you've got to give Matt an easement because he needs to get to the so-and-so and now he's trapped because you didn't trap me. This final property owner did who closed the circle and rather than saying even that he's got provided an easement, I'm actually saying he was never allowed to build that property there in the first place because he was never allowed to trap me in the first place. Or you're saying he could build it subject to an easement is what you're saying. Would the easement be his property? Well, he could build it subject to the right of the enclosed person to cross. Yeah, but basically the fundamental point I'm trying to make is that it's not about well, hold on. So we can imagine two scenarios. So let's just, I wish we had, we were both AI, so we can imagine a circle which is like 99% closed, right? A C, a big C. And the guy in the middle sees this C flowing around him over centuries and he just like, well, I guess I still have a way out. So the final piece of property, it's either homesteaded because it's unowned or it's owned by someone else and they just sell it. So there's only two ways we can imagine some new owner coming to own this little final, this final link in the chain, right? This final gap in the fence. And so you could imagine, so if it's by contract, then the person who owns it, you could say he has to sell it but subject to the condition that the new buyer knows that he can use it but he can't block egress from the interior people. Or if you homestead it, you homestead it if it's unowned, which is hard to imagine, but it's homesteaded subject to, again, this requirement. So basically people come to own this thing subject to a right of way or an easement. And to my mind as a lawyer, this is not confounding because, and this is where I sympathize in a way with the left because they, when they oppose what they call the enclosure movement in Britain, or they oppose, or they say ownership is theft or property is theft, part of what they're getting at is that, and by the way, Hans German Hoppe in his paper in my journal, Libertarian Paper, he talks about this like you can have distributed property rights or collective property rights or partial property rights. So you could have like a town that is a little community of people and they have access to a river and they have a little path between the buildings, but they haven't totally homesteaded it yet where they own the path or the ground, but they've established a right of way, which is the type of partial property right, you know, the way to get to the river or the way to get between the streets. So if someone paves a street and they want to make a business on it, they can do that, but they have to do it subject to the existing, the pre-existing property rights, which might have been partial, that might have been rights of way, that might have been what we call easements or userfrucks in the law. They're just, again, all property rights are usage rights of scarce resources and you could describe them legally different ways. They can be absolute, fee simple, allodial, you can call it, or it could be a right of way or an easement or a userfrucks, something like that, which is temporary or partial. And this is what results when people have contracts with each other, like if two neighboring landowners have a big tract of property and they have a road nearby and they want to have a driveway, instead of having two driveways, they might say, let's just have a driveway right down the middle of our property lines to save money and to save property, to save acreage, real area, and let's just have an agreement. And so they agree to have a co-ownership agreement. So who owns this, let's say there's a driveway between tracks A and B, right between the middle or on one side or the other, it doesn't matter. And they have an agreement between the two owners that each one can use the driveway. And that's fine because you're not parking cars on the driveway, you're just doing it occasionally, so you can both use this one strip of land easily. Who owns it? Well, the contract between them is, to the rest of the world, A and B as a conjoined unit are the owner. That's all they know, is that A and B are the owner, which means that for C or D or E or F to get the right to use this driveway, they've got to get the permission of A and B, which one? They don't know. And the agreement between A and B is a private contractual agreement that specifies which one gets the consent to others using it and when they can use it themselves on Tuesdays or Wednesdays or whatever. To me, this is just the nuances of the clever ways people can use their contractual and property rights for resources to come up with ways to use them. So a right of way to me is not surprising. I think the problem is you have libertarians who are not familiar with the nuances of the law. And so they think in these things, they use this term a lotial, which is a little crinkish, and they think it's either A or B. It's either all or nothing. If I sell you a car, then I cannot control how you use the car. That's it. And if I control how you use this car, or if I lease you an apartment and I can prevent you from smoking weed in this apartment, then you don't really own this apartment. It's like, okay, that's fine. But still, people can have complex contractual arrangements about how they divide up the usage rights of these scarce resources. I see no problem with this as a libertarian, none, and as a lawyer, right? Yeah, I don't see a problem with that either. And I can see that being probably the more likely way people will negotiate, particularly with local property owners and stuff like that. But just to go back to the big C that's about to become a big circle around my property, let's say, for example, the C hasn't closed yet, it's still a C, let's say, for example. So I can go out the gap of the C. But let's say that I like to go somewhere that's like the other side of the opening, if you like, in this big circle. And it would be more easy, it would be more convenient for me if there was some kind of easement or passage on that side. That's when these kind of negotiations with property owners would really kick in, you know, for me. Well, I agree with that. But think about this for a second. We have to be careful about not being circular in our reasoning. So for example, if you live in a community where the law is this as opposed to that, and then you know that, you know, basically, you're screwed. If people encircle you, except for the last segment, like if you know that's the law, then you're going to negotiate that way, right, taking that into account. On the other hand, if the law was different, you would negotiate in a different way. Like if you knew that, okay, well, when the last guy encloses me, he's not the guy at fault. Now the law says that I can choose the most convenient route to the nearest public road. Even if that's not the last guy, if it's like the guy to the south of me instead of the east of me or whatever, you know what I mean? Like if you know that's what the law is, then you will coordinate your affairs accordingly during the development of all this stuff. But you can't use, when we talk normatively about what the law ought to be, we have to be careful about not building it upon what happened to happen already, because what happened to happen, yeah, it will factor into people's predictions. So, and then the second question is a libertarian is like, well, then what's the role of a libertarian thinker? Is it to predict and to map out everything ahead of time, or to just map out general principles that we think ought to be followed, and then we have to wait and see what develops from that. And that's the way I look at it. So I think that we have to be a little bit humble and cautious in, from our armchair is saying, well, I think it should be like this. So all I can tell you is that in the civil law in, in, in France and in say, Louisiana, and probably in the common law, the common law over time has incrementally developed solutions for this actual problem, which is a fairly rare problem. But when it has happened, they developed a solution. And if I look at it as a libertarian outsider, yeah, I know that the judges weren't thinking like libertarians, but they were basically trying to apply the established private law principles, which are roughly compatible with libertarian thinking. And they were trying to do justice, trying to do the fair thing, trying to do the workable thing. And they came up with a solution. And so all they can say is this is all we know for now. This is how the courts and the legal systems have, have approached these issues. And it seems to have worked. And all we can do is imagine that probably something like that would happen in our utopian libertarian society, either by contract or by custom or something like that. That's how I look at it. And beyond that, when people say, I want you to tell me right now exactly how your society, your utopian anarchist side, like, you know, they'll say, well, what's your anarchist plan? It's like, well, you don't get anarchy if you want to know what my plan is. We don't, we don't have a plan. Our plan is to abolish the state and to let private interactions, you know, reign. And whatever happens, as long as it's just at every step of the way, that's what we're okay with. Unless we want to advocate to like, as private citizens to say, oh, you're doing this wrong, you should change it. So I guess I'm always comparing, when people criticize anarchy for having the wrong plan or system, I'm like, well, number one, we don't have a plan. And number two, what's your plan? What's what's socialism's plan? Why is that better? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the only thing I would say, I understand what you're saying, I do agree with a lot of that. I mean, but the thing is, is, for me, what, what libertarianism and what this whole kind of these intellectual discussions that we do and all of that, what it's all for me, what it's all about is, and certainly what my nation's society projects is about, is about drawing those lines. Because the thing is, is as anarchists, we're not trying to dictate to people exactly how they negotiate peacefully amongst themselves. All we're dictating, or all we're demanding in our principles is that they do it peacefully, is that they do it within the realms of self ownership, property rights and the non aggression principle. Now there's a lot of areas where that's very obvious where the lines are drawn there, but there's certain areas where, obviously, like this where we have these discussions and debates, because I think that it is important, even though a lot of these scenarios are very edge cases, and I do understand they're very obscure and extreme, but they often tie to a principle that does connect to something more real. So like the doughnut homesteading might be more fringe and unusual and unlikely, but the, the borders blocking off peninsulas blocking off that sort of stuff isn't so unusual. Obviously it's even a real world, you know, obviously situation discussion. And it's something that you can also picture happening in a, in a private property society. So like from my example, even though like the whole, you know, where, where the, because I do agree that's come across as quite a reasonable solution, the whole thing of saying, well, you know, you've got to provide easement sometimes to people to get to different places. But I remember when we were having our email back and forth, and I was kind of saying, you know, you don't have the right to deny people access. And one of the things, this isn't verbatim, but one of the things you kind of said to me was, well, why do I have to let someone across my property? Right, right, right, right, right. And my, and my point is, is that's exactly right. You don't, that's my point is, under libertarian principles, you shouldn't have to let somebody across your property. And if we go back to this C, and you're a part of this C, you shouldn't have be forced to make me go through your property. Right, right, right. And so let's distinguish our, our previous discussion from this, because so what I was trying to get at was, um, there's no, I was trying to say, you need to identify exactly why what I did was a violation of someone's rights. That's all I was trying to say. And so let's give an example. So, um, uh, if, if, if you say that if I enclose my estate completely with no exceptions, now I'm violating someone's rights, which is effectively what you have to say to argue that by enclosing off the guy in the middle from either homesteading the middle or from escaping the middle, whichever one it is, because there's two separate arguments, I'm violating his rights, then you have to basically make some argument like there's a duty or something like that. I think the better case would be the reasonable case, which would be you always homestead property or acquire property or use property or have property rights in a given area in a contextual way, which means there's always a history and there's always a background context. So I think that if this was a realistic possibility in a given community, then traditions and customs would develop, would develop, which means that when I take this property, I know that I'm taking it subject to certain rights of way. So in a, in a way I'm being sympathetic to the, to the lefties who are opposed to the enclosure movement or to a property right that prevents people from crossing this unknown field they used to cross or from hunting in it or whatever, which is why, by the way, why in some European countries like in Italy and stuff, they still have these sort of traditional rights of like, even if you own, you know, a thousand acre estate, you can't stop hunters from hunting on it because they had that right before. And I think there's something to that. But to me, that's not a limitation on property rights, it's respect for property rights and it's a recognition of the nuances and the complicated ways you can have property rights. And so sometimes this is why I was a little bit mocking of this allodial idea, this, this allodialism idea is this idea that I own it 100% to the end of the era, to the, to the up to the heavens, to the middle of the earth and whatever. It's like, well, most property rights, you take it with certain conditions. I mean, if I buy some property from you, but you as the seller retain the right to, I don't know, come visit it once a year to see your old home, then you take it with our condition. And I think that sometimes we have to homestead or contractually acquire resources subject to certain usage rights that have been acquired somehow by other people. I'm completely sympathetic to that notion. Once you take that into account, you can see a little sympathy for this idea that, yeah, if I, if I encircle your estate, and I'm the last guy, okay, maybe I have a special duty or maybe someone else on the ring does, I don't know. And by the way, I don't know though it has to be bagels or donuts, it could be, it didn't have to be a circle, it could be any weird shape, you know, as we mentioned. But the point is, these are practical issues that get worked out. And I think there's also something to, I don't want to be, I mean, you mentioned the word volunteerism. There's something to mutualism, even though I think there's a leftist aspect to it, which I think is misguided. But there's something to the mutuality of property rights. I mean, property rights are normative. They're not causally causal things that you have like this godly ability to enforce. You have to rely upon your neighbors to recognize your, to mutually recognize each other's property rights. And if you push it too far in a certain condition and a certain reality, no one's going to cooperate with you, right? You know, at one end, they might just simply not be willing to help you. They're going to say, if you're going to like sue everyone every day in this jury system, we're just not going to show up and be jurors and screw you. You're wasting our time. And at the other end, they might actually say, that's it. We're not even going to respect your rights at all, because you pushed it too far. There's a certain aspect of mutualism that goes along with normativity, I think. And so I do believe that when a conflict reaches epic proportions, if people want to avoid outright war and physical fighting, they need to find a compromise. And so I do believe there should be a norm of the obligation to try to compromise, which again, which is a heavy, sophisticated, deep, legal notion. And it complicates things. And if you're just some libertarian absolutist who says, I own this, you're not going to like this because you want an answer to the question. But you can't always deduce answers. And you can't always ask a libertarian scholar from their armchair, tell me what the fucking answer will be in your system. Because we're not dictators. We're not even judges. We're just people with opinions who try to think about the way that people living together in a peaceful way, trying to do the fair thing and the just thing, what they would do and what they should do. That's about all we can do. And of course, we have a lots of economic knowledge now and knowledge about politics and the state and history that we can draw to bear. But in the end, we have to let people play their parts and work things out as best they can, which is why I think that these donut problems are not, they're not the real problem of human life. I mean, if that was the last problem that we had, I'd be happy. So when we come back, so let's just, we need to wind this up in a second. But the reason this all came up is because I was using some of these arguments to talk about how, well, I'm not anti-open borders, but given that the, let's take American example, given the federal government literally legally owns so much property, including, let's say, the roads, then the question is, does it violate the rights of outsiders for the federal government to prevent them from using the roads? And if you say no, then you can have immigration policy because if you, if the federal government has the right in effect to prevent outsiders from using the federal roads, then you could, you could make immigration policy out of that. You see what I mean, right? What about all the unknown land that they could travel across? Well, they have to get to it. I'm just making a very narrow claim, like simply the federal roads and public facilities. But no, I think I would, I would argue as a libertarian, the federal government has no right to restrict outsiders from accessing the interior, but they don't have to let them use the public roads to get there. So that means that as a matter of practicality, there, it's going to be a minor problem. I could see an argument, as I mentioned in my email to you, I guess I could see an argument that, say, American citizens have a primacy of, I mean, let's, let's imagine tomorrow the federal government is winding down and they're going to have an auction. So they sell, let's just, let's say they sell the Rocky Mountains and all the public lands and Alaska and everywhere else. And they make, you know, $75 trillion, who gets the money? I mean, I would say the American citizens who pay taxes have the primary claim, but you could make an argument that, you know, people that we bombed in Iraq have a claim. At this point, it gets to be ridiculous. But my single point is that I think that you could make an argument that American citizens and taxpayers, and I hate to make this American, we could make it British or something like that. But in the U.S., I think that the natural owners of the American roads or the taxpayers, the legal owner is the federal government, but outsiders are not owners at all. So if they're denied access to the roads, then it doesn't violate their rights. Now, if 95% of American citizens slash taxpayers want the roads used to allow immigrants to come in, I would say it violates the rights of the citizens because the property that they own is not being used the way they want it to be used. But I don't think that's the case. I don't think that the primary harm being done to the American taxpayer who has a natural claim on the roads is that they're not being used to allow illegal immigrants to come in and use them. I think it's that the roads are being poorly managed and not being upkept and there's money wasted on them, whatever. So I just think that's a weak argument. So that's sort of my libertarian argument about the open borders debate. I'm simply saying that if the federal government blocks outsiders from using federal roads, which would reduce immigration, that it doesn't violate those outsiders' rights. Now, you could argue that it violates the rights of citizens and employers here in America who want to invite them to their property, which is why I think that they should be allowed to invite them, which is why Hoppe's solution is, okay, just let anyone invite someone as long as they are willing to pay their, I don't know, pay their upkeep instead of them being able to go in welfare. To me, that's a reasonable, it would be an improvement. It's not libertarian anarchists, but it would be a step towards reducing one of the harms of immigration policy, which is that it prevents people from inviting people that they want to invite. And it would also reduce the other problem, which is, which he calls the first one forced inclusion. The second one is forced integration, like so the fact that in the U.S., because of anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action and public facilities and welfare and voting rights and all this stuff, once you allow someone in, they're an active human with different legal rights in the system. And if you again make them have a sponsor, that reduces that problem too. So to me, that would be a reasonable solution. And the fact that someone who comes up with a reasonable solution that reduces both of the fundamental problems of immigration into a social democratic welfare state, and they're called a racist and a bigot and all this, it's, to me, it's insane. It's like it's a reasonable solution. And by the way, it's not his, you know, he's an anarchist like he's like abolish a state and then this goes away. The entire concept of immigration disappears in a political context if you get rid of the state. But as long as you have a state, whatever you do, you're gonna screw someone. I guess that's kind of how I look at it. And what makes me look at it without as much angst is the fact that, well, if you don't let them use public property of the government, I'm not saying that's what I prefer. But what I'm saying is that's not the travesty of our time. Like if you, if I'm not invited to go to Japan and use their public property, I have zero claim on Japanese property on that island. It doesn't really violate my rights. Do you follow me? So that's how I look at it. Yeah, I suppose from my point of view, though, it's like, it's the difference between being obliged to help somebody get somewhere and being obliged to not prevent them from getting somewhere. So like, like, like with the whole, like, we don't have to let them use our roads. We don't have to. And all that would very much discourage a lot of immigration, because it's going to be harder for them to get across all the rest of it. But that's not where the, the violation of libertarian principles comes in, in my mind, when it comes to, you know, immigration enforcement, it's more about like when people talk about building a big wall to prevent people, you know, and that's when you actually stop. And this is like, this is to go back to that sea example and the donut thing. That's where it ties to that, because it's like the difference between me saying to you, who lives on one part of the sea, who never had, who didn't imprison me. I'm not saying the reason why I'm saying that no one should have a right to say to you, you've got to give them an easement and you've got to give them a pass because they're blocked in, because you didn't block them in. So you've got no, there's no positive obligation on you. It's that more negative obligation if just don't imprison me. And it's that last person who closed the sea that's, that's so, so for me, it's like, I don't object to everything you said about, you know, denying people access to the property that was rightfully owned by the taxpayers and the rest of it. That's all fine and well, but when we start building walls and violently preventing people from entering the entire region, including areas that would be unowned, you know, right, you know, if we're going to buy rightful only right thing, that's when I feel like we're violating a libertarian right. And although I do understand all of the externalities when people say, well, yeah, but what about all these other violations that come with immigration? And I fully accept that point. But my argument to that is, well, yeah, but all of those externalities, the libertarian solution is to fix those much in the way that you alluded to with your whole, don't let them use public property. And a lot of these problems go away because they're not coming over here, certainly, I mean, different in America, but because we have an immigration problem here in England as well. And I say to people, I say, well, they're not coming over here for the weather, they're coming over here for the free stuff. And if we had any control over our government to the point that we could make them do an immigration policy that we would want to stop coming over, then we would have that same level of control to get rid of these externalities and stop them giving them all the free stuff in the first place. So from my point of view, there's there's two issues I have. One is my problem with a lot of the kind of, I'm not using it derogatively, but border terrians for want of a better word is these, there's this potentially libertarian violating kind of action that they're advocating at the expense of actual libertarian solutions that are just as easily attainable, both arguably unrealistic, but no more than the other, you know, but one's a libertarian solution that because that's the other things where if you fix those externalities, the immigration problems go away and a lot of other problems that those externalities cause even without immigration go away. Whereas if you fix immigration, which if you did it violently, you know, would likely be an anti-libertarian thing, but also all those other externalities are still a problem, even within your domestic populace, you know, like, you know, the welfare, all these other, you know, immigration makes them worse, I'll grant you that. But, but that's, so those are my kind of two points. One is, I feel like we've got a libertarian solution to a problem that's being ignored for the sake of a kind of, you know, status one or an anti-libertarian one. And then the other issue is, is I think there's something that's getting lost in the argument because, like I said, I agree with you. And I actually think that's the, that's a libertarian solution. Don't let them use the, don't let them use the property. Don't let them have all the welfare. Don't let the, you know, those are the libertarian solutions to the immigration problem. And there's also that issue of like, let's not get things confused. It's not about saying we have to let, we have to invite these people in, we have to give them our roads to drive and, or, or fly them over on our planes on our dollar and all the rest of it. No, no, no. We're saying we don't get to stop them. We don't get to physically stop them because we don't have the right to do that. We can prevent them from using our stuff, but we don't get to prevent them from, say, let's just, for example, say they want to trek across and visit the Grand Canyon from outside. You know, what right do we have to stop them from doing that? And that's where my kind of. I agree. I agree. I think if we had like a hypothetical where Ecuadorians were somehow hiring charter planes and parachuting down into the Rocky Mountains and the American military was shooting them down in the air, I would completely oppose that, right? I mean, and I think that the real solution is the obvious solution, right? The obvious solution is to be, well, it's anarchy or at least menarchy and have a more reasonable situation if, at least in America, because we're not a homogenous country like Japan or Switzerland or something, which has different considerations. But if we had a total free market and no welfare and no app, no automatic birthright citizenship, voting rights and no affirmative action and no anti-discrimination laws, then the only argument against immigration would be an economic one, which would be flawed, right? Which is we, oh, you're stealing our jobs, which is one of the arguments people use against it, which is libertarians think is not the argument to use against immigration, right? Or it would be racist or nativist or something like that, which again, that's not what I think we ought to do. I mean, I think diversity is good and humans are all humans and blah, blah, blah. So I think immigration would actually be a good thing. And I actually think in America's case, immigration is still a good thing on balance, although I'm not sure that's the case in every country given the welfare states and all that. We're a unique case. I think it's still a good thing, but what I would think would be a more sensible policy would be to radically expand legal immigration by quality and by sponsorships or whatever and to have less illegal immigration. I think that would make more sense, but this is again, the statist situation, right? But the point is, given that you have the state, it's just, I mean, it's a difficult problem because I actually, I'm actually concerned about, well, you have so many competing issues. Many countries in the world, we have declining world population, right, for the first time ever. And so we have Ponzi schemes in almost every major country with our social security and our welfare systems. I mean, they count on expanding young people to pay the debts of the old people because it's just not sustainable. And so these countries are all facing a big problem soon. And unless we increase fertility somehow, which I don't think is happening in most countries, you have to have an immigration to make this welfare state Ponzi scheme sustainable. That's not the most ringing endorsement for immigration, but you know what I mean. It's like, it's the reality. I guess my argument is simply, I simply tried to point out that the people that are the libertarians that pretend to be open borders and that are so hostile to anyone who points out real world problems, right? I mean, if you look at my article that, the only article I wrote on this, I called it something like a simple libertarian argument against open borders, but I didn't say that it was my argument or that I agreed with it. I just was, I was just pointing out that if you agree that there's public property, which is not unowned, so again, this gets back to the theoretical thing. A lot of libertarians, they will make this argument that, oh, if it's government property, it's unowned, which is why a bum can come into a library or to a public school. And which is why early on at our talk, I said, well, I think there's a distinction between owned property and unknown property. The Rocky Mountains are unowned, let's say, or parts of Alaska or whatever, but there's lots of land that's owned, but then the question is, then you have to get nuanced. The government is the legal owner, but we libertarians don't think all law is just, so it doesn't mean just because the government's a legal owner that they're the natural owner or the rightful owner, right? So you have to make these distinctions. And so I was simply making the point that I'm not taking a side either way, and I can't side with the INS, the federal government, using force to stop these innocent people. I mean, if I had to take a side of a person, I would take the side of the innocent immigrant because they have committed no aggression, but the other guy is an agent of the state. I'm simply saying if they're prevented from using a public road in America that they have no ownership claim to, that in and of itself doesn't violate their rights. That was my only narrow claim, and that if that was put into place, that would, as a matter of fact, be one way to reduce what we see now as the flow of illegal immigration. That was my only point, and but to me the interesting issue is what's public property, what's unknown property, who the natural owners are, who are the claimants to this property. To me that's the interesting issue. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I suppose the only the only thing I sort of would sort of tally on to that is that, like, what you're saying about, oh, God, I've lost my train of thought. My mind's done a little, sorry, could you just repeat the last bit you said, because it'll hope to get back in my head again. Well, I guess what I was talking about, like, my argument is very narrow. I'm not arguing against immigration. I'm simply saying that if you clarify the ownership of what we call public property, and if you don't make the mistake of saying that certain public property is unowned because it's owned by the government, right? Then you could get to the conclusion that it doesn't violate the rights of the outsiders to be denied entry to the US if they're denied use of these roads. I think that where we got off on not a tangent, but the reason we started our discussion or our debate online in email was because you're trying to make this analogy to the C shaped horseshoe thing and the enclose of the state's thing. You're trying to argue that you're trying to characterize a legal policy in a use of property as you're trying to characterize it as blocking someone from accessing unowned resources. I think that's the essential difference that we have here. Or maybe not a difference, but that's the kind of implicit claim you're making. So I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what your argument could be is this. Just like if you enclose someone's estate and you can't block them from exiting their property or whatever, or homesteading unused property in the middle, whatever, whichever one it is, just like that, whoever owns these roads and these border territories surrounding say the US, if they use that to prevent you from accessing the Rocky Mountains, which are unowned, then they're somehow violating your rights. So you're trying to characterize it. So the way I'm characterizing it is it doesn't matter how I'm using my property. I'm using it the way I have the right to use it. And if I own this road, I can control who can use it or not. That's it. That's the end of the story. Whereas you want to say, well, in this context, you're effectively denying me from using this unowned resource in the middle of the country. The question I would have is, well, but why does an outsider have a right to access an unowned resource in the middle of the country? I would consent that they have the right to homestead it if they can get there. But I don't think they have the right to get there. You follow me? It's almost like a welfare right to say that you have the right, if there's a homesteadable resource somewhere, then you have the right to get there too. You don't. I mean, this is Walter Bach's argument that, again, just as nature abhors a vacuum, libertarianism abhors unowned property. Libertarianism doesn't abhore unowned property. That's not true. But that's effectively what you're arguing, I think, if you want to argue for a positive right to access an unowned thing. That's the thing. I'm not arguing for a positive right in regards to, like, for me, there's a difference between letting them use your roads and building a wall across the breadth of the country to prevent them from getting there any other way. Why? Why is there a difference? Well, because one, again, it's a little bit like that sea shape where I don't have to make you give me an easement because I want to get over that sea shape, but you don't get to close the sea and make it a circle because now you're actually imprisoning me. There's a difference between facilitating you. I mean, a good example is here in England because we're obviously in Ireland, Britain's an island, and all our immigrants come over here on boats. I mean, that's the big thing. They're just arriving on their own little boats on beaches and stuff like that. Now, a lot of people say, well, we need to stop them. We need to turn their boats away and it's like, well, no, we don't actually. We just need to stop offering them free stuff and then they'll stop coming. You know what I mean? But the point is, is there's a difference between, yeah, we can close our ports. We don't have to let them on our ships. We've got like a channel tunnel, for example. They don't have to be allowed on that, all of those sort of things. But if they get on their own little dingy and come over here on their own steam, then I don't see how we have them. They're not stopping them. Then we are committing an act of aggression. And it's the same with the wall versus the roads. Like letting them use our roads, that's us helping them get here. But building a wall to prevent them, that's not us not helping them. That's us actively stopping them. Do you see the distinction I'm making? I see the distinction. I'm not sure how you could make a, I'm not sure he could make a coherent relevant libertarian case that it's really relevant. The reason why I think it's important, if I can just add on to that, the reason why I think it's important is because you alluded to libertarian solutions to the immigration problem, which is precisely why we should be rejecting all of the anti-libertarian. We don't need to build a wall. We can just not let them use our stuff. I totally agree that that's a better solution. But what I'm saying is one is a libertarian solution and one is an anti-libertarian. Not letting us use our stuff, that's a libertarian solution because that's fully within the rights. We don't have to let them use our stuff. But building a wall to prevent them from traveling and accessing things that we have no rightful claim over, that's when I feel like we're violating. I think that's a fair point. But let me ask you a question just simply. Let's imagine Israel or Japan or Switzerland. They're both fairly homogeneous countries like Japanese, Swiss, and Jewish. They're not melting pots like the US or even parts of Europe. If Israel or Japan, and Japan might have to start doing this to save themselves because of the declining population, but if they totally had a policy of open borders tomorrow, I think it's reasonable to think that all three places would have millions, if not some of them, billions of immigrants over a decade or two. But what do we mean by open borders? Do we mean bringing them in or do we mean just not stopping them? Because that's just not stopping them. Just letting, just having no restrictions whatsoever. But without an incentive to come. And by the way, Israel has walls. They have to knock down their walls. And so all their walls are knocked down. I mean, do you really think that in 15, 20 years that there would be a Japan or an Israel or a Switzerland left? Well, if they did exactly what you suggested, which is to properly protect the use of their public services and their property. I just simply not stop immigrants. That's all I said, just with everything else being the same. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, the thing is, is like I say, stopping the immigrants is the anti-libertarian thing. But that's my point. There's libertarian solutions. So I'm saying if you stop doing the anti-libertarian thing, what would happen to these countries in 15 years? With all the other anti-libertarian things still going on. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's bad things. They wouldn't exist anymore. Switzerland would disappear. Japan would disappear. Israel would disappear. And they're not perfect libertarian paradises, but they're relatively more liberal than a lot of countries in the world, right? Yeah, I understand that. But what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is, say that's the course they're on. And you're saying, well, we've got a little temporary and limited power over the government to make them do something we want. Yeah. And we can stop that immigration. I would say, well, no, if we've got that power, use it to fix the external. I totally agree. But when libertarians like you criticize people who oppose unlimited immigration as long as the current policies don't change, then implicitly you're saying that if we had the chance, we would change that one little thing. And if it resulted in the destruction of a nation in 10 years, so be it. Yeah, but the problem I have with the other side of the argument is, when I say, well, if we fix these externalities and they say, well, yeah, but that's not going to happen. I'm like, well, yeah, but nor is your border dream either. You know what I mean? It's like, like the both. I know, I know, but I'm talking normatively when you criticize someone for having a position and you have a reason for it. And one of the reasons is the practicalities of what it would occasion is like, well, I'm simply saying, I think that there are some, if you're a liberal and a libertarian like we are, there's a reason to be cautious of advocating some policy that's totally isolated from everything else. If it actually would result in the reduction of liberty over time, and I do think that mass immigration into certain countries without any other changes in their policies would result in the reduction of liberty severely or even the loss of it. And I don't think that's insane for a libertarian to be concerned about that. No, I don't either. And I'm not in the crowd of people that shouts xenophobe at people like Dave Smith or anything like that. I totally understand, and I do understand the welfare and open borders together don't exactly, it's a recipe for disaster. I fully accept that. But my point is, is there's a libertarian solution to that problem that's just as attainable as this anti libertarian solution that a lot of libertarians like Dave seem to be acting like is our only solution. It's like, well, we've got this scenario, immigration with these externalities is a nightmare. So we've got to stop immigration. And I'm like, well, this is a perfect opportunity for libertarians to, rather than say, rather than compromise our principles, but to stand firm and say, well, this is just the immigration thing in a way, as bad as it is, is a perfect advertisement for us when we're trying to point out all of the problems with these other externalities. And they go under the radar without immigration, you know, a lot of right wingers and left wingers as well, they don't care about a lot of these externalities, because they don't see, they don't see, they don't see the problem. But then when you've thrown a bunch of immigrants into mix, they're like, Oh, well, now this is a problem. And it's like, yes, it is a problem. And the problem is, you know, as I say, these externalities. So from my point of view, and I know we need to wrap it up because we've gone over our time a bit, but just from my point of view, the reason why I've been so keen to kind of jump into this is I feel like the debate's being had in the wrong areas. Like, because I'm like you, I don't have, I'm not one of these people that's saying we can't exclude people from schools and roads and stuff like that. Because that is our right, you know, to do that with property, we have a right to exclude people from property. But I mean, I think you called it unknown property when referring to things like lakes and forests and stuff like that. I mean, we're talking the same thing, but I generally say it's not property at all, but unknown, not property at all, you know, we're saying the same thing. But that's, that's kind of like my crux to I feel like the wrong debates being had here, because, you know, someone like, you know, Dave, and people like Hop, they're arguing this one thing. And then there's other people that are saying, well, that's unknown property. And they're having this other argument. And I'm saying there's a, there's, that's the wrong debate, because you can still accept the right to exclude people from roads and an actual public property. And not only can you accept that, but that alludes to a better solution than border enforcement and building walls. And well, let me ask you this, would you agree or concede that possibly in a modern, you know, rich Western liberal democracy, which is declining, which they all are, but you know, they're still relatively rich. And if a policy was adopted, which was just a shift in the immigration policy, and it simply said, we're going to keep the restrictions now on illegal immigration. But anyone can come here as long as you find a sponsor, an employer or a family member, someone who says, I'm going to sponsor this guy, which is basically Hop's solution. Like, so he says that, okay, you should just have to have a sponsor. Now, as a, as a pure libertarian, I don't think that's the ideal solution. I don't think anyone needs a sponsor to exist on the earth. But if we did shift to that policy, then to, to come to the European Union or the US, or England under such a policy, you would have just simply have to find someone willing to take you. That's all. Which means you have to be employable and have no bad criminal record and, you know, be a good risk. And the person inviting you would have to like say, okay, I'm going to pay for your bills instead of the national healthcare service and the welfare system or whatever. If you just did that, it would reduce the burden, the negative effects of immigration that people complain about. And it would, it would, it would reduce the negative effects of excluding people that we have now. You know, like, if someone really wants me, I'm an valuable engineer, right now I can't go. But now under the new system, I could because someone says, okay, I need this engineer and I'll, yeah, I'll pay a bond because I know this chemical engineer from, from India is not going to, he's not going to go rob some store or something, you know, so it, that would be a big improvement, I think in the overall world's immigration system. And by the way, I believe these, these sort of studies I've seen that say that if you want to improve overall world welfare of the average person, the biggest way to do it would be to have open borders. I mean, not completely open borders, but basically let the poor people go to the better places, because they could, you know, quadruple their GDP per person per year or something like that. So I think that allowing immigration and people to vote with their feeds would be a big boon for humanity. But if you did it in this way of saying, okay, you can go to these countries if you have a sponsor, that would satisfy the complaints of both sides to a large degree. Wouldn't, wouldn't you agree with that? Well, it would for this debate, it wouldn't satisfy me because it's, it's not libertarian enough. No, but it would be an improvement is what I'm saying. For sure. I mean, look, Australia has a much better system than we have here in England, because Australia has a point system and they don't have an easy to get welfare system like we do, and they don't have as much socialism and all of that. So, you know, yeah, you can certainly look at that's much, that's, you know, but these are all kind of, I suppose the problem is, is these are all status solutions. And I really feel like, I feel like that, I suppose from my point of view, and I do understand, I don't want perfection to be the enemy of progress. So I don't want to kind of, you know, and I certainly don't want to throw the baby out of the bar portal with regards to, you know, these kind of quibbles I have, because I still, you know, very much believe in property rights. I just feel like they need to be, you know, defined by the nap with regards to, you know, restricting what you can stop other people from doing. But I just feel like there's this, you know, like libertarian principles is our north star that we need to always be moving towards. And I just feel like, particularly with this immigration issue, there's a lot of solutions that are better than, you know, the status quo and would lessen the overall harm, but they're not libertarian solutions. And I feel like all of the focus that we're putting on them is focus that's being drawn away from the actual libertarian solutions. That's why I kind of wish that the libertarians, rather than being divided about open borders and closed borders, and, you know, should we do the invite system like Hop says, and should we do it like that. And it's like, you know, and some people, you know, want to free for all the rest of it. And I'm just like, there's, there's a libertarian solution here that doesn't involve using violence to stop people from coming here, but does do enough discouragement, you know, within the realms of what we are allowed to do as, you know, libertarians, that's, you know, that's peaceful. Because as I say, not letting them use our property is within our rights. And it's perfectly peaceful, physically stopping them, at least from my point of view, with a wall or whatever, is violating. And, you know, so that's kind of my, I know we've got to wrap it up, but that's kind of my crux to it is like this, there's a libertarian solution, which is very much like what you're talking about. And that's all very fine. And that's why that's my problem with the debate, because, like, particularly when I've mainly been watching Dave Smith doing debates, but he's, I feel like, I mean, he's not purposely arguing, it's a straw man, because there are people that genuinely make the arguments that he's arguing against. But it's not my argument. And it's not for me, the, it's not the good argument, the good libertarian argument isn't let heroin addicts go into public schools, or let them drive on our roads or let them come, you know, it's none of that. It's not, it's not, just like it's not, you've got to give me an easement because I want to travel to your part of the sea, you know, it's none of that. It's, it's, no, it's, we can do all of those things to discourage because that's within our rights. What we don't get to do is actually use violence to prevent people from accessing places that we don't have any say over. And I hear you, I don't know if I can make in my mind a short line distinction. I would agree with you. Well, I would agree with you that we should highlight the ultimate solution, which I think we do, which is the problem is that's really anarchy is like it's really a state-of-the-art society and no one wants to hear that. I do think that if you came up with a solution that reduced rights violations on both sides of the spectrum in a significant way, that would be something libertarians should support. But yeah, I agree. I wouldn't call it stated. I think, sorry to interrupt, but I think you did that though with when you talked about, but this is what I feel like it's getting lost because for me, there's a very big and important distinction between a road and a school and a library and the Grand Canyon and the forest and all these unhomesteaded areas. And my problem is, is when I listened to Dave Smith, he talks like they're the same thing. And he talks like the other side of his argument. And that's why I feel like he, again, I'm not saying there are people that, you know, but it could be, I haven't, I mean, I haven't followed all this, but I would also say there's a distinction between when you talk about these private, like so we talked earlier about private solutions about in the law, right? In the private law about how we deal with these enclosed state issues. There's a distinction between that and between a national government's ownership of the borders of a country. And when you try to analogize one to the other, so when you say, for example, oh, I can imagine in a little, you know, a little peaceful Germanic realm in Germany in 1600 where you could have this practice, this custom evolve where if you enclose an estate, you have to grant it right away. Okay. I could see that. That's reasonable. In fact, that's happened in the past. But then when you say, oh, well, so now I'm going to extend that principle and say, well, you, what that means is you could never block someone from accessing something. It's like, well, no, that's, it was, it was highly, it was highly contextual and it was a private law context and it had nothing to do with citizenship and the federal governments, you know, the national government's access to borders of a political entity. It's a little bit of a stretch to simply say just because you could see in a private law context where there would be a private law rule against enclosed estates means that there's a distinction that's relevant between the federal government owning roads, owning roads and controlling use of them and building a wall. It's like, I don't, I don't think it translates. It's just too much of a stretch. Well, I think it does. Well, the reason why I think it does is because, and this is, this is an argument I've heard they've made is he says, look, we could do it privately. So that's why we should allow the government to do it, you know, what's the name me? And like, you know, that works for a school. It doesn't work for a country. It works. And I think, I think well, I think from what I've heard him say on this and other people say, and I haven't heard all this, but I think what they're getting at is that when they say like, what a private thing would do. So I think what they're imagining is something like this. So the state co-ops and so Murray Rothbard talked about like, there's, there's, there's different ways of looking at different things the state does, like you can be binary about it, but you can divide state activities into things that should be done and things that shouldn't be done. Right. So if the state is putting people in prison for smoking marijuana, there's no way to say what the market and analog for that would be because they're doing something they shouldn't be doing at all. It's criminal. Yeah. It's just criminal. On the other hand, if the government is running a school or a road, these are things that we know would emerge in private life. There would be roads, there would be, there would be schools. And so, yeah, we would say the government shouldn't do them, but if they're going to do it, they're already making the local citizens pay taxes to fund it, and they're probably monopolizing it. So your only choice is to use our roads and use our schools. So at least give them a school and give them a road that works reasonably well. What does that mean reasonably well? Like the way that private people would do it. And the reason is because if they do that, then they're minimizing the harm. So when the government takes your taxes and forces you into a situation, they're committing a violation of your property rights, and they'll never be able to repay it. Like even if we have anarchy take over some day, it's all wasted. It's all thrown away. But it's better to have a harm this level than this level, like small level to big level, which means if the government is going to force you to use their roads and their schools, then if the roads and the schools were almost as good as what you would get on the free market, then yeah, you're going to complain, but at least in a free market you would still be paying for it and you'd get something back. On the state system, you would pay more for it and you'd get less back, but at least it's roughly a minor, not obviously minor, but like it's a certain level of invasion of your life and your rights. But if they outlaw all the roads and they only let commissars and the Communist Party people drive on the roads and you're stuck in your house, they've done way more harm to you than if they made a road that you could use. You know what I mean? So I think the idea is that if the government commandeer a certain natural private functions, then if they run them closer to the way that the private market would run them, then they do less harm. And so that's a better thing. People are victimized less. I think that's why people bring up these examples and they're saying that it's better if the government victimizes people to a lesser degree. And I see nothing wrong with that, with wishing people to be victimized to a lesser degree. Yeah, but the problem I have, and this is one thing I read from Hock, where I kind of disagree with him on it, is because the point is, yeah, if we had an Ancap society, these public schools would be private and they'd have their right for owners and they'd set the rules and that's all fine. And we could do that with the roads and everything else. But my point is, is in an Ancap society, we couldn't, a bunch of private property owners couldn't conspire to build a big national border wall. Correct. I totally agree. I totally agree. However, in Ancap, there would be no such thing as immigration. There would be no citizenship. There would be just private property owners. Sure. But my point is, is we, because what Dave's saying is, is look, if these things were private, we, you know, if we would, you know, like we're saying, oh, we don't want government to do these things. But, you know, if we have government, we're stuck with them. So let's at least treat them how we would want it treated if they were privately owned. My point is, is, okay, that works for schools, that works for roads. It doesn't work for the national border wall. Because we wouldn't just like it doesn't, it doesn't work for cocaine prohibition either. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, the border thing is like, and this is why I said that your analogy about private C shaped prohibitions doesn't automatically extend to what the government's doing for the borders. Because just because you could see a reasonable probe, a reasonable limitation on property rights, where if you enclose someone's estate privately, then they might have to have a right of way. It doesn't automatically translate to the national political context of citizenship and immigration. I'm not saying you can't make an analogy. I'm just saying it doesn't translate easily just because the context is so different. Because, you know, if I have to grant a right of way to my neighbor to cross my land, first of all, I knew that was a condition of buying the land or I knew that was the custom in the area. And he's not going to, that probably doesn't mean he can cross my land and set up shop there and build bombs on my land. And he's not a, he's not an inherent threat to me. But with immigrants, it's a whole different situation. They become citizens, they get welfare rights. It's simply a different thing. And I think you need different arguments. And I think, again, you and I are on the same page. I think the right argument is the nations of sanity argument or the anarchist argument, the voluntary argument, the libertarian, whatever you want to call it. It's, what's the ultimate solution is to move towards a certain ideal state where everything is private and there's no state and everyone's rights are respected and then people can trade with each other and move back and forth as they see fit. It's a free world. The goal is a free world. And the problems were stuck in this halfway state. Anyway, look, I enjoyed it. I'm glad we talked. I enjoyed talking to you. But I think we should end here. You can feel free to plug anything you want to plug or close with however you want to close. I've just, I really enjoyed talking to you. It's always a privilege. I always consider these conversations, whether they're debates, discussions or whatever, I always consider it like borrowing somebody else's brain because I think about all these things myself all the time. It's nice to be able to bounce them off another brain and have another perspective and hear arguments and push back that I wouldn't obviously come up with on my own. So I really appreciate that. And yeah, I find I never view these things as debates. I hate debates. I like open discussions where people can share ideas and talk and see what they have in common and where they differ and where they want to explore things. But I've enjoyed it. But I appreciate it. So maybe we'll do it again sometime. Yeah, I'd like to because I think there's still some meat on the bones. I'd like to go through hop in more detail perhaps in a separate kind. I didn't want to divert this conversation too much. But there's this thing to discuss there. So perhaps, yeah, we could do it again sometime. But I appreciate it. All right. Take care. We'll talk later. Thank you, Stefan.