I understand that there's a lot of disagreement
on the intellectual property thing.
All I can say to you is read the Kinsella piece, K-I-N-S-E-L-L-A.
When I read it, I was unconvinced by it.
Maybe I'm not doing a good job of giving you his views,
but it's available.
Look under K for Kinsella in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.
It won the award for the best article
in the Journal of Libertarian Studies
in the last two years when it was published.
So I stand by it, but I think I want to move on now to Austrianism.
I have been asked to go over the abortion case, even though strictly speaking it's not economics,
and I will do that during the question period, and also I hadn't planned on, but I've been convinced by Mike
that I should do public goods, and I'll add that onto the list.
What I was going to do, well, the applications I was going to do was trade, poverty, what about the poor, how would libertarianism answer the problem of the poor, monopoly and antitrust, gold, the Austrian business cycle theory, taxes, profits and fractional reserve banking.
But I'll put in public goods higher on the list, so at least I get to it since I was asked about it, and maybe other people don't have interest in these other things.
So without any further ado, let me get into the second session, which is devoted not to libertarianism, but rather to Austrianism, and as we said, libertarianism is a theory about what should be the law,
and Austrian economics is about something very different, namely, what is the cause of economic phenomenon.
Okay, first of all, Austrian economics, I won't say has nothing to do with Austria,
but it has nothing to do with the economics of Austria, it just has to do with the fact that the first progenitors,
the original people who created Austrian economics, happened to come from the country Austria.
So it has nothing to do with the economics of Austria, rather that Carl Menger and Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were all from Austria.
The leaders after them, I guess, would be Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner, who both came from New York City as it happened.
But we are all Austrian economists in the sense that we adhere to the principles of this school of thought.
Similarly, with the Chicago School, the reason you call it the Chicago School is that it emanated from Chicago, but there are Chicago economists everywhere.
Okay, what is the principles or the axioms of Austrian economics?
Similar with libertarianism, there are certain axioms and then there are applications.
And I'll do the same one-two punch on the Austrian economics as I did on the libertarian theory.
The main axiom of Austrian economics is that there are certain principles of economics that are undeniable and yet have to do with the real world.
This is in sharp contrast to the mainstream economists who believe that economics is not a rigorous, hierarchical, deductive system where you start with a basic premise and you deduce and deduce and deduce.
Rather they believe that it is more on the model of physics or chemistry or biology, namely it's a science, a physical science, and you come up with a hypothesis, who knows from where, but then you test the hypothesis, the hypothesis has to be falsifiable, at least in principle, otherwise it has nothing to do with the real world, they say, they're sort of like the Vienna School of Logical Positivism, for those of you who are into that. For them, the key is a controlled experiment.
The salt vaccine, we had a controlled experiment, we had a double-blind test, half the people in the room got the salt vaccine, half the people got a placebo, lest not giving you anything would mess up the results, because we wanted to see if the salt vaccine did it, not if just giving attention to you would stop polio. We did it double-blind, namely, not only didn't you people know who got the salt vaccine and who got the water placebo, but neither did the doctor, lest the doctor
would give off emanations and sort of implicitly say,
well, you people aren't getting it,
so you people will get more polio than you people.
So this is sort of the ideal for physical sciences.
How close do we come to this in economics?
Not very close.
The closest we come to it, perhaps,
is East Germany versus West Germany
and North Korea versus South Korea.
In both cases, due to an accident of war,
countries were separated.
It was the same people, the same culture, the same intelligence,
the same educational skills, the same resources, the same everything, pretty much, except one had a roughly free enterprise society and prospered, and the other had a communist society and went down to the pits and from that we deduce or we say that since there was only one thing varying, that shows that that's the cause of it, namely it was communism versus capitalism. The obvious excuse on the part of the communists, well maybe everything wasn't perfectly the same.
Or maybe you had bad communist leaders or something. In other words there's no
knockout punch in mainstream economics. Whereas in Austrian economics we start
from basic premises which we claim are undeniable or deniable only upon the
pain of contradiction and yet have to do with the real world and indeed explain
the real world and help us understand the real world. For example, man acts
It's impossible to deny, since the very denial of it is a purposeful act.
So you're sort of caught in it.
Teleological thinking is illicit in the physical sciences.
Like you don't say that the reason the sun comes up in the east is because it wants to illuminate the world,
and then the reason it goes down in the west is because it's tired or something like that.
You don't attribute motives to inanimate objects, and that's fine in the physical sciences,
But, since economics is so beholden, we have physics envy, or at least the mainstream economists have physics envy, or science envy, or physical science envy, empirical envy.
They don't like anthropomorphism. Okay, anthropomorphism is fine to get rid of when you talk about the sun or the moon or a molecule, but when it comes to a person, well, anthropomorphism is a great thing. People have purposes.
Okay. Here, let me give you another one. There is a tendency for the rates of return on invested capital profits to equalize in all industries, assuming away differentials and risk. I claim that that is an insight into how the economy works that is undeniable and unfalsifiable. So again, if there are five industries, let's say there are three industries. There's industry A, there's industry B, and there's industry C.
You see, and here is the profits in all the industries, and here it's 50% profit, and
here it's 10% profit, and here it's minus 5% profit. I say there's a tendency for profits
to equalize assuming equal risk, forget about risk for the moment, which means that it's
got to come down from 50 to, oh, say 15, and go up from 10 to 15, and it's got to go from
minus 5 to plus 15. That would be equalizing. Now, I don't think we ever get there, because
Because long before we get there, something else changes, a compliment or a substitute
good or the demand or the change in taste or a war or a frost or a hurricane, something
will happen and push things around. But there's always a tendency. Because look, if industry
A was making 50% profit, where would you put your money? A, B or C? Well, obviously you're
going to put it in A, but if you put it in A, you're going to reduce the profits because
The supply of A's will now be increased.
And you're gonna take your money out of C,
which will raise the profits there.
But at any given time, it'll never be equal
because all I say is this is a tendency.
So it's unfalsifiable because you can't prove it wrong.
And yet, I think it says something about the economy.
It helps us understand the allocation of resources,
that there's a tendency for profits
to equalize in all industries.
Another one, all voluntary trade creates mutual benefit in the ex ante sense.
Okay, so here we go. Your name is Anatoly. Anatoly has a pencil, and I'm going to hold up his pencil.
Here's his pencil, and I have a tie, and I claim that if Anatoly and I trade his pencil for my tie,
He values the time more than the pencil,
values the time he's gonna get
more than the pencil he's gonna give up.
I, on the other hand,
since I'm also a voluntary participant in this trade,
I value the pencil more than the time.
So the reason we trade is because we expect,
in prospect, ex ante to be made better off.
Now ex post, one or the other or both
might regret our trade,
and it's an empirical claim.
Most trades we make, we don't regret.
Every once in a while, you buy a lemon car
or you buy a meal that you didn't really like.
But by and large, you know, you buy a tie or a pen
or eyeglasses or something or a haircut.
You know what you're gonna get.
You benefit not only ex ante, which you must,
but you also gain ex post.
But you see, this idea that you must gain
seems to be unscientific to the mainstream economists.
Whereas to the Austrians, how else can you explain
Another synthetic, a-priorized statement or basic premise, people act so as to render the future more desirable to them than had they not acted.
Again, it's inconceivable that they would act in any other way.
Now, it might be that the reason Anatoly wants to trade the pencil for the tie
is because I told him that there's going to be a quiz and he wants to get an A,
and he thinks that he can butter me up by making that trade.
We don't know the reason why he wants to do that.
It could be for any number of reasons.
But we know that there's something about the tie that he likes better than the pencil.
Otherwise, he wouldn't be giving up the pencil for the tie.
Okay, these are the praxeological, logical, distinct elements of Austrian economics and there are many others that I'll get to as we go along.
Let me talk a little bit about transitivity. We Austrians are down on transitivity. What is transitivity?
Transitivity is something beloved of the mainstream.
Transitivity means that if you prefer A to B,
you prefer A to B, and also you prefer B to C,
therefore you will prefer A to C.
Now this transitivity makes some sense.
For example, if I tell you that the number eight
is bigger than the number seven,
and the number seven is bigger than the number six,
it follows that the number eight
is bigger than the number six.
So I'm not against transitivity always.
In other words, there's some coherence to transitivity.
I'm not an anti-transitivityist.
But when the mainstream economists say
that there's something illogical,
if you don't prefer A to C,
what they're reckoning in the absence of
is that this took place at time t1,
this took place at time t2,
a second or five minutes later,
and this took place at time T3
and you could have changed your mind.
Namely that there are no preferences out there
that you have to accord to,
rather each trade has preferences implicit in it.
So this is a different methodological distinction
between the Austrian School of Thought
and the mainstream School of Thought.
Okay, I gave out, okay, the first thing I want to talk about is monopoly, and in order
to give you the Austrian flavor of the monopoly and antitrust laws, let me tell you the following
set of jokes.
There were three Russian prisoners in Gulag, and as prisoners do, they trade stories as
as to why they're in prison.
So the first guy said, well, I came to work late
and they accused me of cheating the state
out of my labor services.
Second guy says, well, I came to work early.
Every day I came early and they accused me of brown-nosing.
The third guy said, I came to work every day
exactly on time and they put me in jail
because they accused me of owning a western wristwatch.
Sort of, you know, when a bear plays a violin,
You don't ask how well he plays, you know, just the fact that he can play is pretty good.
Well, when an economist tells a joke, you know, it's the same kind of a thing.
Okay, now there are three people in U.S. jail, and they're all guilty of violations of the anti-trust law.
And the first guy says, I charge higher prices than anyone else,
and they accuse me of being a gouger and a profiteer.
The second guy says, well, I charge lower prices than everyone else,
and they accuse me of being a cutthroat competitor and a predatory pricer.
The third guy said, I charge the same prices as everyone else.
It's hard to see how he did, given these other two guys, but let's forget about that.
And they accuse me of being a colluder, a price fixer, and a cartelist.
Now, all these things are illegal under that law.
You can go to jail for any of them, but I submit to you, you've got to do one of them.
So you can go to jail for anything.
Anytime they want you in jail,
they can put you in jail for that.
Well, what kind of a law is that?
It's a crazy law.
Now, if I were to harken back to,
I don't want to lose my audience,
but I'll take a risk here, and it'll only be for a minute.
So if this is despicable and disgusting, you know,
avert your eyes, here is the monopoly diagram.
Here is quantity, here is price, and here is demand curve, and here is a marginal revenue curve, and we're going to assume that this is a marginal cost curve.
And according to the neoclassical economists, this is the optimal point. You should be producing that much, call it OJ,
Whereas, you will produce where marginal cost hits marginal revenue and your price up here.
And this is not the optimal, but this is the monopoly amount of production.
Now, if you don't know what marginal cost is and you don't know what marginal revenue is
and you don't know why they have to equal,
that would take me an awful long time to explain, so I'm not going to do that.
All I can say is that according to the economist's way of looking at this thing,
What the monopolist is guilty of is producing too little and charging too high a price.
Now, you'll remember when Anatoly and I were trading a pencil and a tie,
I said that it's a matter of undeniable logic that we both gain in the ex-ante sense.
Fine. So we each gained from trading one pencil.
And maybe we traded two pencils, and maybe we traded three pencils.
And now, Anatoly, the dirty rat monopolist, refuses to trade any more pencils.
We put him in jail for that because he's ruining consumer welfare.
Notice the subtle difference between saying that you gain from trading and that you lose from not trading.
See, suppose he refuses to trade the fourth pencil for the fourth tie or buy the fourth wristwatch or whatever it is.
From the Austrian point of view, nothing follows. All that follows is that he doesn't prefer the fourth tie to the fourth pencil, so we don't have a trade.
Nothing follows other than that. From the neoclassical perspective, you know, he or I or both of us could be a monopolist.
Let's try again. Who is the heavyweight champion of the world in boxing nowadays?
Who knows? Mike Tyson. He's the one I remember. Okay, so here's Mike Tyson. And according to the neoclassicist, Mike Tyson should be fighting 12 times a year, once a month.
But Mike, the monopolist, is withholding in order to jack up his price. He only fights nine fights.
and we lose this deadweight loss triangle because of that in terms of welfare.
This is the way the antitrust economist from the neoclassical perspective would talk.
What I would say is from Mike Tyson's first nine fights,
he gains more than it costs him in the form of being punched and the alternative leisure
and the fans gain more from watching him than the price of the ticket.
So there's mutual gain in the ex-ante sense.
What about the other three fights? The Austrians say you can't say anything about those fights.
Nothing follows from them. You shouldn't make them fight three more times.
And that's what antitrust law is predicated on when you look at the economics of it.
Okay, the next thing I want to talk about is poverty. What about poor people?
How will libertarianism or how will the free enterprise system handle the problem of poverty?
And I gave out a handout that I hope everyone's got, and if you don't have it, raise your hand, come up here and I'll give you an extra copy.
Well, I first put it in the form of a cartoon, helping the poor. There are two ways to help the poor.
On the left side, in both cases, there are people at the bottom of the pit who are poor, and there are people at the top of the pit who can help them.
And in the top, the big government answer is the poor are yelling more food and they're tossing down welfare buckets or stuff in buckets.
In the second one, the free market answer is more rungs, freedom rungs to let them climb out of that hole.
And I think that, you know, they say a picture says a thousand words and I think that's a thousand words worth.
Our contention as Austrians, and I suppose as libertarians too, is that the best way to help the poor is with economic freedom.
The best way to help the poor is not to give them welfare.
The best way to help the poor is to make them economically free because the people who are poor in relatively rich countries are infinitely richer than even the middle class in countries that are not free.
In this country, the poor people don't just have a television, they've got a calling television.
They've got air conditioning, not just fans. They've got maybe not a new Maserati, but they've got a car.
I remember in the early, in the 80s when the Soviets, during the Olympics, when a Soviet would win a gold medal,
they'd have a little interview with them, and they didn't variably show them in a little car and in an apartment.
And I was wondering, why do they always show every bloody Soviet in a little car in an apartment?
And the answer was, these are 23-year-old kids who are winning gold medals, 25, 18, whatever it is.
Who in the Soviet Union can afford a car when you're 23?
Only a gold medal winner.
Whereas here, you work in McDonald's, you can get an old beat-up Volkswagen.
You can get your own apartment, maybe not on Park Avenue or at least this part of Park Avenue, but somewhere.
So the poor and the rich countries, the free countries, do much better than even the middle class in the unfree countries.
Now, the other three things I have, the other page, what I did with the two co-authors is we took about 100 countries and we had 17 different criteria for what economic freedom was.
And on the basis of these 17 different criteria, we rated all the countries and we gave them an A through an F minus.
What were the criteria? Things like, oh, lack of regulation, low taxes, low union rates, free trade, things like that.
The less government you had, the more economically free you were.
And I'm not gonna go over the 17 different criteria. It's a book I did with Gortney and Lawson.
If you want more on that, just get a hold of me.
My email address is wblock, W-B-L-O-C-K, at loino.edu.
And I'll send you more information on this than you want to read.
So anyway, what we do is we rate all 110 or 120 countries in our sample
on the basis of these 17 criteria.
And we give them a 10 if they are economically free
and a 0 if they're not economically free.
and then we, I think we said that A was a country that gave eight or nine and B was a country with a seven out of ten and so on down the line and we define these criteria solely in terms of economic freedom, not in terms of wealth, otherwise we would prejudice the case and we found that countries who had the most economic freedom and that was, if I remember it correctly at the time, it was Hong Kong number one,
Singapore number two, Switzerland and New Zealand were three and four, I forget which was which, and the US was five, so we're only the fifth freest economically speaking country, but we're very economically free.
Most of the reaction I get from people from around the world, whenever they see this, they say, my country you put too high, because they know their country very well and they don't know other countries as well.
How could you put the country so high, because we have this, we have that, we have that, that is free enterprise types.
All I can say is other countries are even worse.
Okay, so exhibit A, part one, is that the richer you are, the freer you are, or rather to put it in the causal relation, the freer you are, the richer you are.
And it's got nothing to do with resources.
Hong Kong doesn't have one resource to rub against another.
Singapore, they're the same.
Whereas Brazil and India and China, they've got resources up to their armpits.
And yet they're very poor with resources, so resources don't do it. IQ doesn't do it.
Israel is probably the country with the average IQ the highest, the most PhDs and the most MDs and the most everything.
And they're an economic basket case. So it's not IQ. It's not resources. It's economic freedom.
It's bloody economic freedom. That's the biggest explanation of this.
Not only are countries that are economically free richer, countries that are economically freer are growing faster.
That's the second one. This is as of 1995.
You can see that countries in the A category are growing at the rate of 3.3, even though they're starting at a higher level,
and it's harder to increase proportionately when you start out at a higher level.
It's easier when you start out in the basement.
and countries at the bottom are not developing countries, they are retrogressing countries, they are losing income.
Charles Murray has done wonderful work on domestic welfare systems and Peter Bauer has done wonderful work on international welfare systems showing that you don't do well when you give people welfare.
Peter Bauer has this thing I call the three M's, the three M's of foreign aid.
What are the three M's? The three M's of foreign aid are monuments, doesn't have to be a monument to the dictator, it could be a steel mill that would be unviable since you could buy steel at one-tenth the price, then it costs you to make it, Mercedes, that's how the dictator gets around, and machine guns to keep power. That's where the foreign aid goes. And he says that when you have foreign aid, even though it's a very small proportion of our budget, one percent, half a percent,
Left Liberals are trying to raise it to 1%.
It's a tremendous amount of money for the recipient country.
So tremendous that the young, smart kids,
instead of going to become engineers or doctors or farmers,
they go and become bureaucrats to get some of that money.
Well, what kind of a way to develop the country
if the best and brightest of the youth
have an incentive not to produce things
but to grab some of that money?
And also this enhances and exacerbates tribal warfare,
Inter-Tribal Warfare, because look, under laissez-faire,
it really doesn't matter who the president is,
because the government does very little.
Under lots of foreign aid and under centralism,
it's crucial who the dictator is.
It better be in your tribe,
because otherwise you're in trouble.
So this exacerbates international warfare.
Charles Murray, famous for The Bell Curve,
did a lot of good work on domestic welfare.
and he says that domestic welfare ruined the black family.
What he says is that, to put it in my own words,
there are two ways to kill a frog
or there are two ways to try to kill a frog
with regards to boiling water.
One, you throw him in boiling water and he jumps right out
because he knows darn well
that boiling water is no good for him.
The other way is you put him in cold water
and you heat it up slowly and the frog stays there
and gets boiled.
Well, what Charles Murray says is that
The slave system was like boiling water.
The slaves knew that slave,
the blacks knew that slavery was no good.
After the slave episode was over in 1865,
the black family was almost as intact as the white family.
Not quite, but almost as intact.
There were messages in the newspapers
all throughout the South,
Lula Mae looking for Joe,
we were both married on Jones' plantation, where are you?
And they would try to get back together.
The black family was very strong.
In 1910 census, the divorce rate of blacks and whites
was about the same.
The family formation rate,
blacks was always a little bit worse, but very close.
That was the boiling water.
It didn't negatively impact the black family much at all.
A little bit, I mean, slavery isn't good.
But the welfare system was insidious.
That was boiling the water very slowly
and they stayed in there.
The black family fell apart.
Not only was there the rate of divorce,
it was that the family didn't form in the first place.
And we know from our sociological friends
who are no good on most things,
but on this they're pretty good,
that when you have an intact family,
this is sort of a proxy variable
for all sorts of economic health.
And when you have a broken up family
or a family that doesn't form
or a girl of 19 with three kids or something like that,
everything is bad.
So what welfare did is undermine the black family
and the undermining of the family
is a way of ruining the economy of them
and you're not helping them.
So the free enterprise answer to the question
of what do you do about the poor,
what you do about the poor
is you don't have minimum wage laws that don't employ them,
you don't have unions that exclude them from jobs,
you don't have high taxes, you have a free economy,
which is a very prosperous economy,
and you don't have welfare that undermines their family,
that's how you help the poor.
Okay, the next thing on my list is trade. And now look at the thing with the boxes on the other side of the handout where the cartoon was.
And what I'm going to do is to try to illustrate two things.
One is a thing called absolute advantage and the other thing is a thing called comparative advantage.
See, right now there's all this talk about what is it we're exporting jobs to India or Mexico or Japan or somewhere.
All the jobs will go. It's just a craziness.
What I assume is two countries, Canada and Costa Rica, everyone's got this in front of you if you don't speak up now or forever hold your silence, and two products, bananas and maple syrup, two days or two seasons, and I'm assuming that you can add a unit of bananas and a unit of maple syrup.
And in the first case, there's no trade. Canada can produce 110,000 units of maple syrup. Why? Because trees grow like crazy up there. It's so cold. Maple trees thrive. How do they produce bananas in Canada? Greenhouses. Greenhouses, it's very expensive. A banana can cost 50 bucks if you do it that way. In Costa Rica, bananas, they're up to their armpits in bananas. Bananas grow like weeds.
How do you get maple syrup in Costa Rica?
Gigantic refrigerators.
I mean, it's a little silly, but I'm purposely picking dramatic cases
to make a sharp point.
So they can't produce too much maple syrup.
What's the GDP of Canada without trade? 10,005.
What's the GDP of Costa Rica without trade? 15,020.
What is the total world banana production? 15,005.
25. That is, these are the only two countries in the world, I'm assuming. And what are the number of maple syrup units? 10,020. Everyone following where I'm getting the numbers from? Okay. And what's world GDP? 25,025. Fine. Okay, now we engage in trade. What does each country specialize? Well, obviously, Canada makes no bananas, and Costa Rica spends two seasons on bananas, not one on bananas and one on maple syrup, so they go twice 15,000
30,000, whereas from the Canadian point of view, they produce 10,000 per season, but
we now have two seasons, they're not going to waste one season on what they call it bananas.
So they'll produce 20,000, and together 30 plus 20 is 50,000, and notice that world GDP
practically doubles. This is the case for free trade. We're going to have a debate between
Bush and Kerry, and they're each going to argue about which one will have more tariffs
and more protection of U.S. steel and more protection of U.S. jobs, you know.
It's lunatic. It's lunatic for Canada to produce bananas and it's lunatic for Costa Rica to produce maple syrup.
But what about the poor workers in Canada who are making bananas?
Do you know what's going to happen to them? According to Keynesians, they're going to stop producing
because they'll all be broke and they'll stop buying bicycles and TV sets
and you'll have a depression in the bicycle and the TV set area,
which will spread like you throw a rock in the still water and the waves go out from where the rock hit.
Well, that's lunatic. That's a way to have a starvation.
Look, if we each had to have individual self-sufficiency, we had to produce everything for ourselves, we'd all die.
Ninety-seven percent of us would die. Ninety-eight percent of us would die.
Ninety-seven or ninety-eight percent of the human race owes its very life to trade, whatever trade we do have.
In countries where you don't have free trade, one country has a boom crop and the other has a starvation, and the other one will starve.
In this country, happily, you have bad times in Louisiana or Florida, stuff comes in because the prices go up in Florida and you attract stuff,
although they're now having anti-gouging laws in Florida, which is not going to help get candles and batteries and water and milk in those states.
But we don't do it as badly as some countries.
Okay, so this is the case for absolute advantage.
And most anti-free traders, most people who are afraid of outsourcing jobs,
even they will admit, okay, okay, in the case of absolute advantage, we'll go for free trade.
We don't have to, you know, import the tropical fruit.
We can, you know, or rather, we can import tropical fruit.
We don't have to worry about the banana manufacturers in Canada.
And indeed, if you're worried about the problem of poverty,
Who is going to take the biggest hit in the Canadian banana industry?
The low-skilled worker who is just pushing a broom in the banana industry?
Or the high-skilled worker who is a biologist of bananas?
Or the stock owner, the guy who owns the banana factory?
Obviously, the latter two.
Because if you push a broom in the banana industry,
you can push a broom in the maple syrup industry.
You lose very little.
But if you're a theoretician of bananas,
Because it might not translate as easily to being a theoretician of something else, because
you had to put many years of practice in that, and if it's the capital equipment, the greenhouses
are no longer going to be, they'll lose all their capital value, or virtually all their
capital value in Canada, except for what you could do with melted down glass or something.
Okay, now let's get to the tougher challenge, the challenge of comparative advantage. And
And here again we have two countries and two dates and two products.
Only now we're looking at it from the Canadian eye perspective and we assume that the evil
Japanese are better at both than us Canadians.
We could have used the Mexicans who are better at both, not because they're good at things
because they work cheap, but I've illustrated with the Japanese, the menace from Japan.
They can produce twice as many wheats as us, 70 to 35.
But in TV sets, they're really good, they're 33 times better than us.
So before trade, Canada has GDP of 38, same way I got the numbers above, and Japan 170,
in the world GDP is 208, and there are 105 weeks and 103 TV sets.
Okay now we open up trade, and what I want to prove to you or demonstrate to you or illustrate
to you, is that even if the other country is better than us in both, it still pays for
them to trade with us, we can still cooperate, we can still benefit from trading with each
other. So, if we have trade, who's going to do what? Well, obviously, you specialize not
in your absolute advantage, because Japan has an absolute advantage in both, rather you
specialize in your comparative advantage, and Japan only has a comparative advantage
Comparative Advantage in TVs, namely they're 33 times as good as us, whereas they don't
have us Canadians, whereas they don't have a comparative advantage in wheat, they're
only twice as good as us in wheat. Or looking at it from the other point of view, we Canadians
are fully half as good as these supermen Japanese people, but we're only 3% as good as them
in TVs. So the Japanese specialize in TVs and we get 200 TVs instead of 100. We Canadians
Specialized in Wheat, and we produce 35 for a grand total of 70 for two days, and now GDP goes up to 270 from 208.
So again, we show that the benefits of trade, even when one party is better at both things than the other.
One more example, the lawyer and the typist.
Here you have a lawyer who can produce 1,000 a day lawyering and 150 a day typing.
So what should he do?
And you need an equal amount of secretarying and lawyering,
I'm assuming, to get the case done.
So should he just do both and not specialize?
Well, if he does that, he'll make 1,000 a day from lawyering
and 150 a day from typing for a grand total of 1,150.
On the other hand, if he's smart, he'll say,
look, I can type, but it's silly,
I might as well specialize.
I'll spend two days in lawyering for a grand total of $2,000. I'll have to pay the type is $300, but I'll have $1,700.
So no matter how you slice it, whether it's a nation or an individual, free trade is a good thing.
Why then do we have so much steel tariffs and all this?
The reason we have it is because of the differential concentration of producers and consumers.
As consumers, how many items do we consume in a year if you include wedding rings and shirts and ties and toothpaste and everything else under the sun?
Thousands. How many do we produce?
Unless we work for Heinz, which means we produce 57 varieties of stuff, we produce one thing.
We produce lawyer services, doctor services, concert violin services, plumbing services, what have you.
So what happens when the toothbrush manufacturers go to Washington D.C. and either ask for a subsidy or tariff protection against evil, I don't know, Paraguayan toothbrushes?
Well, if there are 10 of them and it costs us a dollar each, they can make 300 million and divide that and make 30 million each.
It only costs us a dollar each, but it'll mean 300 million for them.
Will we so much as lift a finger to stop it? No.
Putting a stamp on an envelope is 37 cents.
Writing a letter costs us a half hour and if our time is worth $10 an hour that's $5.37.
We're only losing a dollar. Why pay $5.37?
They'll take some of this $30 million each or $300 million that they're going to get from us in the form of a dollar each
and they'll bribe their way through Washington.
That's why we have this sort of a thing.
And if we somehow got off our hind legs and stopped them dead tracks in the toothbrush monstrosity outrage, next week the rubber band people move into town or the paperclip people move into town. We're tired. We got our own business to do.
That's why we have so much regulation and subsidy and tariff protection. That's why, you know, the toothbrush manufacturers can come up with all sorts of great slogans, you know, America depends on its teeth or something.
or something, and you know, if you don't give us money, you'll have lousy teeth.
And we're not gonna stop that.
That's why we have that sort of a thing.
Okay, I've done monopoly, poverty, trade.
I now move on to gold.
What's going on with gold?
Well, let me read a quote, a very good quote
from Milton Friedman, who is no friend of the gold standard.
And what Milton said is that the classical liberal is suspicious of assigning the government any functions that can be performed through the market, both because this substitutes coercion for voluntary cooperation, notice the libertarian element, in the area in question, and because by giving government an increased role it threatens freedom in other areas. Control over monetary and banking arrangements is a particularly dangerous power to entrust the government because of its far-reaching effects
on Economic Activity at Large, as numerous episodes from ancient times to the present
and over the whole of the globe tragically demonstrate.
Okay, this sounds pretty good. I mean, I'm tempted to say, okay, Melty, you know, you're
an Austrian. Come on down to the Mises Institute. You're one of us. But not so fast, because
I have another quote from our friend Melton. And what he says here is, quote, the fundamental
defect of a commodity standard, that is a gold standard, is a commodity standard, from
And the point of view of society as a whole, something of which methodological individualists like Austrians are very suspicious, what's this society as a whole, is that it requires the use of real resources to add to the stock of money.
People must work hard to dig gold out of the ground in South Africa in order to rebury it in Fort Knox.
The necessity of using real resources for the operation of a commodity standard establishes a strong incentive for people to find ways to achieve the same result without employing those resources.
Resources. If people will accept this money, piece of paper on which it is printed, I promise to pay X units of the commodity standard, these pieces of paper can form the same function as the physical pieces of gold or silver, and they require very much less in the form of resources.
Well, this is a very different kind of a statement. The first one is, you know, markets, voluntary cooperation, better than coercion, tragic history of government money control. But in the second one, I'm very disappointed.
The argument amounts to the statement, freedom costs real resources, therefore, don't do it.
Well, this is hardly a ringing endorsement of liberty.
What about justice though the heavens fall?
What about our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honors?
What about millions for defense, not a penny for tribute?
We don't get that. We get, well, a ringing declaration for freedom,
but it costs money, therefore, let's forget about it.
First of all, it's not true that it costs real resources, or if it's true, it's true in a very greatly attenuated way,
because that gold would be dug up anyway for teeth and for industrial purposes.
It's only the differential because the gold would be slightly more valuable when it's also used for money that would maybe get a little bit more gold,
but it's not certainly the whole amount of gold that's mined.
But suppose it did cost resources. That doesn't follow that we shouldn't have it.
The question that the economists would ask, well, is it worth it?
Look, fences, gates, locks cost money. Does that mean we shouldn't do it?
No. It means we only do it if the value of it to us is worth more than the cost of it.
Well, the costs of not having gold standard are very serious.
Some people say that we had World War II because of this.
World War II because of the German hyperinflation of 1923 which brought Hitler into power.
Had we not had the German hyperinflation in 1923, the German society might not have been so messed up and Hitler might not have been able to get through.
So this is conjectural, who knows, but this is certainly an instance.
Another point is that the Austrian analysis of the business cycle is that it comes about from inflation.
So our Great Depression came about from this.
Well, these things seem very serious,
certainly worth an insurance policy.
Let's go back a little bit in history
and theoretical history and ask,
why do we need money in the first place?
And then I'm gonna try to prove to you
that money has to start as a commodity.
Again, this is not original with me.
It started with Rothbard and came with Austrians before that,
but I'm just sort of passing on the baton now,
as I am for most of my lectures.
Most of this stuff is not original with me.
Some of it is, but most of it is not.
So why do we have money in the first place?
We have money in the first place
because of a thing called the double coincidence of wants.
I have a chicken and I want pickles.
I have to find a pickle-owning chicken-wonter,
which is tough.
I mean, where are you gonna find a guy
who's got pickles and wants chickens?
Do you know what the odds of that are?
And I have to, I can't produce everything that I want.
I can't produce both the chickens and the pickles
and the rye bread and the wristwatches and the shirts
because that way lies death.
We've established if we're gonna live,
we have to specialize in something
and have a division of labor and specialization
and more productivity and learn and have R&D
and stuff like that.
Okay, so we have to trade.
So instead of making a direct trade,
A direct trade, I make an indirect trade.
I know I'll never find a guy
who's got pickles and wants chickens.
What do I do with my chickens?
I'll trade them in for something
that I know everyone will accept.
And then I take that thing
and I trade it in for the pickles.
Because he'll accept that because everyone will accept that.
The whole reason that we have these pieces of paper
of money is because we fully expect
that everyone else will take it from us
when we want to spend it, right?
That's why we accept it.
If we didn't think that other people would take it,
we wouldn't take it in the first place.
Murray Rothbard used to say, well,
suppose I come up with a thing called 100 Rothbards
and I start trying to buy stuff with it.
No one would buy it.
And I always used to say, well, Murray, I would buy one,
just sort of put it up on my door or something like that.
But that was just sort of a giddy kind of a counterexample.
The reality is that he couldn't put Rothbards
and then start buying cars or houses.
Okay, so what sort of things were there that everyone would accept?
Well, everyone accepts sugar, salt.
Sugar and salt and fish hooks in fishing communities last a long time.
Bananas would make a very lousy money.
Cement would make a very lousy money for opposite reasons.
Bananas because they'll go bad.
They'll go bad. Cement won't go bad, but it's so heavy compared to the value of it.
Diamonds would make a lousy money because you can't make change in it, because if you cut a diamond in half, you get one-eighth the value.
So whenever there was competition between these various commodities, gold and sometimes silver won out.
That's why Austrians and libertarians favored the gold standard. Not because we're fetishists.
Even though I accused somebody of being a fetishist here before, I don't know if it was a gold fetishist.
One of my favorite cartoon characters was Scrooge McDuck.
And what old Scrooge would do is he'd get in his money bin,
he'd throw the money and it would sort of land on him, go, ooh, you know.
Well, we're accused of that, but we're really, you know, we're not into that.
We have our other perversions, but not that one.
We're really not into this gold fetishism.
So the gold standard is really shorthand for market money.
I mean, we favor whatever...
We look back at history and say whenever people were free to choose,
which is the title of one of Friedman's books.
They always pick gold, so we favor gold.
Look, if tomorrow we had free enterprise money
and people picked platinum or molybdenum
or something else that I can't pronounce,
we would have no problem with that.
So it's only called the gold standard
because of this historical accident.
Really what it is is free enterprise money
or free market money or capitalist money.
But it always has to start out as a commodity
because it's only a commodity that we know
that other people will accept
because of its commodity value.
Whoops.
Okay, enough of gold.
Now, I had other things on my list to do,
and the other things I had on my list to do are,
can't find my list, oh, here it is.
I was going to do the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, Taxes, Profits and Fractional Reserve Banking,
but since I'm sort of running out of time and since I was specifically asked to do public goods,
I'm going to move into public goods.
Now, public goods are an instance of so-called market failure.
The big three market failures are monopoly, externalities, and public goods.
There are many other market failures.
It seems sometimes you read the American Economic Review,
which is the flagship journal in the profession,
and every article is coming up with a new market failure.
They just love market failures.
Well, our Austrian economics is sort of predicated on the idea
that there's no such thing as market failure.
And what I'm going to do first is to make the public goods argument of market failure,
and then I'll try to show why that's wrong.
So, for the market failure types, there are two things.
Two things, one is excludability, and the other is a thing called rivalrousness, this is the idea that you really can't have a free enterprise lighthouse, or a free enterprise army, because you'll protect free riders, and if the free riders don't pay, well then how can you finance it in the first place?
okay so let's develop it the question is can you exclude people that is thank you
for a little musical break can you exclude non-payers the key is can you
exclude non-payers and we say yes you can or no you can't and we divide all
And then here you say, is it rivalrous? This is the question, should you exclude? Should exclude? And the question comes about, if there are marginal costs or zero, then you should not exclude.
If marginal costs are zero, you should not exclude. And if marginal costs are positive, then yes, you should exclude.
Marginal costs means there's a cost extra to service one more person.
And if it doesn't cost extra to service one more person, the argument says,
well, then you shouldn't exclude even if you can exclude.
I don't think this is fully coherent yet, but when I give examples,
that I think will put flesh on the bones of this argument.
It's a coherent argument. It's a rational argument. It's not just gibberish.
So we have to do full justice to it if we're going to then criticize it.
Okay, so what kinds of goods are there that the marginal costs are greater than zero of servicing one more person and that you can exclude them?
For example, a hot dog. Is a hot dog, can you exclude non-hot dog eaters from eating hot dogs when they don't pay?
Yes. You threaten to call the cops on them. Okay, there are a few hot dog thieves, but by and large, most people, let's forget about thieves. You can exclude non-paying hot dog eaters by just threatening to throw them in jail if they grab your hot dogs without paying.
Should you exclude them? Yes, you should, because one guy eats up a hot dog, it costs real money.
Okay, everyone with me on that first case?
Okay, let's take a case here where you can exclude, but you shouldn't.
And the example usually offered there is a broadcast.
Can you exclude people from TV or radio?
Yes, you can, by jamming the thing and then selling them a box that unjams it
and charging them a monthly fee for unjamming it.
You can exclude it pretty cheaply.
Should you? No. Because if I'm broadcasting a show, the Jay Leno show, and everyone is watching here, except David, and everyone is paying, but David isn't, does it cost anything else to let him watch it? No, it costs nothing.
So I shouldn't exclude him, because it costs nothing for him to enjoy it.
So if I exclude him, GDP is lower than it would otherwise be.
And for the mainstream economist, this is a big no-no.
So a broadcast is a case where you can exclude, but you shouldn't,
because the cost of adding one more listener is zero,
because you have to undergo all the costs to put on the show.
So we say that this is a private good,
and now we have the first case of a public good.
What's the second case of a public good?
Second case of a public good is where you can't exclude,
but there are extra costs.
And the example there is a crowded city street.
Here, it's impossible to exclude, say those guys,
to anticipate my criticism.
Maybe the government can't exclude, but I'll bet your private street owners sure could.
You know, they exclude from Disney World, they don't exclude from Central Park,
because the people that run Central Park are government.
By the way, just off the point a little bit, where do you feel safer?
In Central Park at three in the morning on a Saturday or in Disney World?
Obviously in Disney World, because if a murder or a rape occurs there,
They lose tons of money.
Whereas in Central Park, when I used to live here,
I don't know what it's like now, but you know,
no one meets anyone at three in the morning
in Central Park, that's muggers' terrain.
Okay, so in a crowded city street,
they say you can't exclude, but it does use real resources
because when it's a crowded city street,
any new person who enters slows everyone else down.
Got it?
Okay, and what are the cases here?
So that's also a public good,
And then the fourth case is a public good, both on excludability and rivalrousness grounds.
And here you have the lighthouse and you have national defense.
Okay, so I hope now by giving examples, I've articulated exactly what it is that these people are saying,
whereas before when it was just the principles, it was maybe too airy-fairy and theoretical.
So the argument is that this is private goods,
but these all three have public good in this
and therefore the government has to subsidize
or tax or do something to fix the market failure
because the market can't provide it.
Or if the market can do it, the market shouldn't
because it's inefficient to exclude people
for whom including costs nothing.
Okay, that's the argument.
And now what I'm gonna try to do is criticize this.
Well, first of all, let's take this case here. Let's call this A, B, C and D.
First of all, don't get the impression that there are 25% of the goods in all these categories.
Rather, here it's 90% of the goods, and the other three, it's 10% of the goods, to just give you rough numbers.
These are not socialists. These are actually what passes for free market economists of the non-Austrian stamp.
Okay, I mean, the Marxists would say everything should be a public good and, you know, market can't do anything.
Okay, so what are some of the problems with this?
First of all, I object to saying that the marginal costs here are zero.
Whether there are marginal costs or not is a subjective thing.
Austrians are subjectivists in these costs.
Costs are subjective things. They are undergone by individuals.
If I start up the Jay Leno show and I sell it to all you guys, I might resent giving it to David for free.
Maybe it'll cost me in terms of personal terms. Who the hell is he to get the show for free? Everyone else is paying for it.
So I dispute the argument that marginal cost is zero. Secondly, I have a reductio.
Every enterprise that is less than at full capacity has marginal cost of zero for the extra amount.
Take a baseball game and everyone paid 10, 20, 30 bucks to go to the baseball game, but only 90% of the seats are filled, right?
Well, would it cost anything to let one more guy in there?
No, wouldn't cost anything. He'll sit there quietly. He won't disrupt or anything.
be a nice guy, just like everyone else. So therefore, according to the logic of this, baseball or any institution that has less than full capacity always is a public good and the government should become involved.
Look, they put me up at a hotel. Does that hotel have 100% capacity? No. If they have 70% capacity or 80% capacity, they're doing pretty well.
So to take one extra guy off the street and say,
hey, my good man, how would you like to stay in this hotel tonight?
Would only cost them zero if you forget about the laundry and stuff like that.
Right here, we have this room. It's only, I don't know, 70, 80 percent full.
Here's a seat right in the front row.
We could put one more person in there.
Now, not that we're charging here, but it's the same principle.
I'm just giving more examples to solidify the understanding of the case.
So the reductio ad absurdum of this stuff is that everything with less than full capacity,
which means virtually everything, even tomatoes, not every tomato gets sold.
Some go to rot.
So does that mean we should force them to give all tomatoes away for free, which means
that the market can't produce them, which means that only government can produce potatoes
or tomatoes or hotel rooms or anything else like that?
Well that's a recipe for disaster or it's a recipe for socialism.
Okay, now let's take B, crowded city street.
Well, the government road owner can't exclude,
but a market guy could exclude.
How could the market guy exclude?
I didn't do a full job on the private roads
because I said I was just hitting the high points.
You don't put a penny in in front
of every little old lady's house.
Rather you, you know those universal product codes on the bottle of soda?
And when you go to the grocery store you go blip.
Well you could put them on the underbodies of cars.
And then as you go over the road you register and at the end of the month you get a bill.
And anyone who doesn't have a universal product code or doesn't pay the bill or whatever,
you come get them.
You can exclude them.
You don't have to stop them each time and say give us a penny now, give us another penny.
Ronald Coase wrote an article that everyone interprets as saying that there were private linehouses in Great Britain in the 17th or 18th century.
My buddy and I, Bill Barnett, have an article out, or at least floating the rounds of the journals, saying that this isn't quite so.
Let's forget about that curlicue. What Ronald Coase showed and what other people actually
showed, what Ronald Coase failed to show in my view, but what other people did show, is
that you had private lighthouses. Now how can you have a private lighthouse? Surely
the cost of allowing one more boat to benefit from the lighthouse is zero, and surely you
can't exclude a boat, but they did exclude the boat. What they had was a credible threat.
I say, okay, look, this time you'll get away with it. But next time, if we see that you're the only boat out, we're shutting out the lighthouse, and then you might crash on the rocks, and your sailors are going to know this, and you're going to have to pay those sailors twice as much. And also, you're going to have to go slower, and slower means more costly. So we have a credible threat to exclude you, and if you don't pay, we're going to do all these things.
National Defense, same thing, whether it's national defense against the Iraqis or the Ayatollahs or the Soviets or the Martians or whoever it is, same principle, whether it's domestic or international terrorists.
Can you exclude non-protected people? Sure, if you think about it. Look, on your house, you've got a seal of approval that Walter Block will protect you. On your house, you don't. You dirty rat, you didn't pay.
So that tells somebody else, your house, if you attack your house, I won't stop them.
It might not be something, it might be something, who knows?
Everyone wears a little thing on their lapel.
I'm protected by Walter Block Protection Services, or not, or Acme Protection Services.
We can exclude non-payers.
Most property, you see, you might ask, well, how could the poor pay for protection?
The way the poor pay for protection is the poor rent apartments, and when the poor rent apartments, they rented from rich landlords, capitalist pig landlords, and the capitalist pig landlords would have an incentive to make sure that the people who were renting weren't accosted, as the case I gave you in Disneyland.
When people go to Disneyland, they feel safe.
If anyone acts obstreperously, they're surrounded
by a bunch of ducks and geese and mice all packing heat,
saying, you know, sir, come with me, go quietly,
or we're gonna kick your butt or something.
I don't know what they say.
I've never been on the receiving end of that stuff.
But you can exclude people.
You can protect people with private property.
You don't need the government to do this.
You can say, look, people in Massachusetts
So taxachusets don't pay for defense and tell the ayatollah, you know, if you guys go there, we're not going to mess with you.
Now, it's not a perfect exclusion, but it's, nothing is perfect.
Okay, I'm supposed to go from six to seven, and I've already gone over and I forgot to do the abortion,
which I won't do because no one's asked me yet, but now we're having a question for it, right?
Till 730, okay. What about abortion? Speaking of Austrian economics, what about abortion?
Okay. Whoops, I keep stepping on that thing. I don't know what's wrong with me. Well, I'll give you the quick and dirty answer on that one.
This is a very tough, tough question, and libertarians disagree. Needless to say, those who disagree with me are on the wrong side of this issue.
There are two schools of thought on the abortion issue. There are the pro-choice people who believe that you can have an abortion pretty much at any time, at the extreme, and then there are the pro-life people who say you can't.
I think that the libertarians offer a third alternative, a real third alternative, not just a compromise, but a real philosophical third alternative.
and even if it's wrong I recommend it to you on that ground because here we have
this horrible philosophical dispute where well-meaning people on both sides
of the issue find themselves at loggerheads probably since slavery in the
1860s there was there is no dispute that more pulls ourselves apart from each
So a third alternative, evictionism, the libertarian view, which stems from private property rights, which I gave in my first lecture.
And let me tell you how that works. Now, I am going to, in some sense, take the pro-choice position.
So when should I say that life begins? Well, it's hard to say when life begins.
You know, is it at birth or is it at conception when the sperm and the egg get together and you have a fertilized egg?
In order to make it toughest for myself, because I am going to come out in some sense for the abortion pro-choice situation,
I'm going to assume the very worst case for myself, namely, I'm going to assume that life starts at inception.
A fertilized egg is a human being. Why? Because it has the potential to grow.
and also, because I don't want to get away with easy arguing, assuming something that makes my case easy.
So what is the evictionist philosophy? The evictionist philosophy is you have no right to abort,
because abort equals evict plus kill, and the fetus, the little person in you, is an innocent person,
hasn't first initiated violence, so you're not entitled to initiate violence against him,
But you are justified in removing them from your property.
Now take the case of a pregnancy that results as a result of rape.
So here you have a 15-year-old girl walking down the street, gets grabbed, gets raped,
and all of a sudden she's got this thing growing in her.
It's a human being, but it's a trespasser.
It's an unwanted tenant.
It's, what's that word I'm looking for when one animal lives inside there? It's a parasite. Not intentionally, but in effect, it's a parasite.
She has a right to rid herself of that. To kill it? No. Now in 500 years from now, there's no one who doubts, I think, that all such fetuses will be able to be removed from the woman's body without being harmed in the slightest.
I mean, if we live that long, surely in 500 years we'll have the technology that we can remove it.
Will she then have the right to kill it too? Absolutely not. 500 years ago or 50 years ago, the only way to remove a fetus is to kill it.
Right now, if we adopt the libertarian evictionist theory, we will at one fell swoop at least get rid of partial birth abortions, which is a monstrosity.
Anestrosity, where you have a baby that's just about coming out of the womb and they kill it.
A greater injustice than that is hard to imagine.
Because there are many people that are willing to take over the baby and raise it, and this woman kills it.
That's just downright murder.
And as the years progress, every 10 years we'll be able to go back a few weeks, maybe now.
In the ninth month, all babies will be viable if they're merely evicted but not aborted.
And maybe in 10 or 20 years, we can go back to the eighth or seventh or sixth month.
And when we get to the year 500 from now, the year 2504, we'll get right back to the beginning.
So I'm offering this as a pragmatic way of solving the problem from the pro-life point
of view.
Right now, the pro-life people are losing.
I happen to be a pro-life person philosophically or out of purpose.
I don't like the idea of baby human beings being killed.
If we adopt evictionism, medical technology is on our side.
As the medical technology improves, the problem will end.
If we don't, if we stick with our present guns and say, no, it's got to be none of this,
no evictionism, and we stick with what we got, even in 500 years from now, we'll still
have babies being slaughtered.
Okay, now what are the objections to my modest proposal?
One objection to my modest proposal is the following.
I invite you for a trip on my airplane.
We get up to 30,000 feet, I say, okay, time for you to leave.
You say, well, what about a parachute?
I say, well, we don't have parachutes,
and no parachutes for you, leave.
The point is, the analogy is that the mother
invited the baby on board, and it was a nine-month trip,
or when I invite you on board, you know,
I'm supposed to take you up and then take you back,
and none of this in the middle get rid of you.
The one problem with that analogy is the case of the rape.
The rape mother or the rape victim did not invite anyone anywhere.
And if all babies have equal rights because they're all equally innocent,
that baby has no right at all to be in there.
And if that baby has no right at all to be in there, then no baby has the right to be in there.
Second argument against this criticism is the following.
I believe in implicit contracts.
And the argument here is that the mother has an implicit contract with the baby.
For example, if you go to a restaurant and you order a cup of coffee and drink it down
and they present you with a bill for a million dollars,
forget it.
There's no way in libertarian society that you're going to have to pay a million dollars
because the implicit contract is that a cup of coffee costs a buck or two
if you go to some fancy schmancy place, you know, five or ten bucks.
I don't know about a hundred or a thousand bucks, now we're getting in that gray area, but certainly if it's a million bucks, that's crazy.
So I'm open to the idea of implicit contracts. Does the mother have an implicit contract with the baby? I say no.
Forget about the father for the moment. If there is an agreement with the father, as in the Mary Beth Whitehead, I think it was, who was hired to have a baby, contractually obligated, well then she had an obligation to keep that baby because she would be violating the contract.
Fine. So if there's an agreement with the husband, okay, but just suppose a woman goes to a bar, gets impregnated, and that's it. There's no husband in the picture. Does she have an implicit contract with the baby?
Well, I say a necessary condition for an implicit contract is that there be two parties. Now, I'm willing to consider the baby as a party, or the fetus, or the fertilized egg, but at the time of intercourse, there's no one with whom to have a contract.
Because at the time of intercourse, the sperm and the egg are not yet together.
Another argument against my view is, quote, if you make your bed, you have to lie in it.
If you get pregnant, you have to go through with it.
Why? Why do you have to lie in your bed?
If I'm stupid enough to go rock climbing and I fall and I get a broken leg,
do I have to lie in my bed and that is not get my broken leg mended?
No, I can get my broken leg mended. I don't have to lie in the bed of broken legs.
So I reject the argument that you have to lie in the bed that you've made, and I conclude that on pragmatic and on philosophical principled reasons, the only correct view on this is the eviction theory.
Unfortunately, very few people have heard about it. I had one article on this in Reason Magazine in 1972.
I have another article coming out in a law review, which has been accepted by three different law reviews, the kids love it, and then when the adults hear about it, they renege on their agreement. It's the most amazing thing.
Three law reviews in succession have accepted it and then have reneged, and now a fourth law review has said, well, accept it, and I said, well, get me a letter from your dean.
Otherwise, I'm taking it to another law review. In law reviews, you're allowed to send multiple submissions.
One of these days, it's going to hit the fan, this stuff is going to get publicized.
Not that it's original with me, Murray Rothbard had some of it in him, but in his writings.
But I think this is something that libertarianism can contribute to the overall debate on this,
and this is a crucial debate, and yet what I'm doing is harking back to what I started with two hours ago
when I started talking about property rights. Anne?
It seems to me that this argument is clever, but it seems to me that every argument you've made so far comes to a collision and the issue of abortion, because, okay, I can see you mentioned argument, but you're not talking about a mature tenant, you're talking about a creature that requires care for at least six years, a minimum, to even become functional.
So, I mean, now you've got a public goods argument. If the mother gives up a property right, somehow that child is viable. Who's going to provide that protection, instead of becoming an obligation to the public?
I mean, even though, I don't know, it just seems to me that this argument resists property rights, it's coming at these arguments in another way, that I don't know that eviction is a quiet solve.
Everyone able to hear that? If I were to summarize it, I'm too clever by half.
I think that you're raising a very interesting question, but one that's a bit tangential.
You see, I'm talking about just abortion. You're talking about who has the obligation to take care of the baby afterward.
It's a different question, so we're not really conflicting.
Well, under libertarianism, there are no good Samaritan laws. There are no positive obligations. There are only negative obligations. Remember, we said the non-aggression axiom means you've got to keep your mitts off of other people.
If there's someone drowning in that pool over there and I could just throw him this life raft and then just walk away and I don't, do I go to jail? No, because I didn't. Now if I pushed him in, that's a different thing. But if he's just lying there, I don't owe him any positive obligation.
If we have positive obligations, right now all of you people and me should be in jail because we know darn well that there are now people starving in Africa or Asia or somewhere, South America,
and yet you've got a wristwatch, you've got a car, you've got a house.
What are you doing with that stuff if there are positive obligations?
There are no positive obligations and this applies to parents and children.
Parents have no positive obligations to bring up children.
Now happily, for the preservation of the human race, we are constructed in such a way,
there are good sociobiological reasons for thinking this,
that when a baby smiles, we light up and when a baby cries, we feel very upset
and we're ready to help that baby.
So I think that for all practical purposes,
most babies have someone that wants to take care of them
and even if they don't, there are other people
who are willing to adopt them.
Indeed, because some couples are infertile
and they're not able to have babies,
if there were no baby black market or black market in babies,
right now it costs 20, 30, $40,000
to get one on the black market.
With a non-black market would cost less,
would be a positive price, namely there's always someone ready to take care of babies.
Even, there was this case in Canada where you had a baby with spinal bifida and this and that
and everything else under the sun wrong with the baby.
It wasn't a baby, it was 13 years old and the father killed it, or killed the child, I shouldn't say it.
The father killed the child.
I would say, and then there was this other case just in newspapers where there was a husband and a wife
The libertarian answer, as far as I'm concerned, are based on my understanding of libertarianism, and you know, I'm not the authority, everyone's got their own views, but my own view is there are no positive obligations, but you homestead. We human beings are situated that we like to take care of babies. Look, if there were two tribes a million years ago, one like us and one that didn't like to take care of babies, there's a name for that tribe.
It's called extinct.
We come from a long line of people that love babies.
And it's in our guts.
We're hardwired for loving babies.
So I don't think we have to worry about that.
And the question you're raising, I insist,
is a different one than the one I raised.
The one I was talking about was abortion.
The one you're talking about is taking care of children
after abortion, two separate issues.
Other questions?
Yes.
What about the defense? The example you gave really was more police action, local defense. What about missile defense?
And you're in trouble.
But in Massachusetts and in, I don't know, Minnesota,
PINCO places, they don't believe in defense,
you can go nuke them as far as I'm concerned.
I'm not going to stop you.
I am now exclu...
No, no, it's not facetious, it's the same thing
as the Lighthouse case.
I have a credible threat to make to non-payers
to make them pay.
Remember, the debate is can you have this stuff
on the free enterprise system?
The only way you can have it on the free enterprise system
if you can exclude non-payers,
because if you can't exclude non-payers,
everyone's gonna say, well, let George do it.
Let George pay, I'll free ride on him.
So you have to have a credible threat to exclude.
And I think we have credible threats to exclude in anything.
We can credibly say that unless you pay me,
the ACME Defense Agency, I will not protect you.
And I will announce that I'm not protecting you.
Brittany refuses to subscribe to my service.
Now, if she puts on a sign on her lapel
that she's protected by my service,
if she, what do you call it, counterfeits one,
she goes to jail for theft, fraud.
But she doesn't have to, she can be a pacifist,
she can say, look, I don't want to be protected.
And I think this applies to police actions,
international, Martians, I mean,
if we ever get to Martians, we can say to the Martians,
look, you mess with the payers, we're gonna come get you.
Those guys over there who haven't paid,
you need not worry about the Acme Company.
That's all we have to say.
Now, is this a perfect exclusion?
No, it's never a perfect exclusion.
You can't perfectly exclude hot dog people.
There are always a hot dog thief out there.
That's the answer.
I can't do any better, I'm sorry.
I did my best.
Any other questions?
Well, I guess we can finish now and have our snacks.
Thanks for your attention.
Thank you very much.