Today, what I'm going to be doing is speaking to you about libertarianism and Austrianism,
libertarianism in the first hour and Austrianism in the second hour.
I'm going to be giving sort of a smorgasbord picture of libertarianism, looking at the
tips of the icebergs of which libertarianism is composed, as opposed to one sort of meal
or one kind of, one aspect of libertarianism.
But before I get into libertarianism, I should say a few words about the difference between
in Libertarianism and Austrianism.
Libertarianism is a normative enterprise.
It tries to, it's a part of ethics.
It's not all of ethics.
All of ethics is what's right.
Libertarianism is that part of ethics
which talks about what is just law.
That's the only thing it asks about, what is just law,
but that's enough to keep us busy.
It's not a philosophy of life.
It has nothing to do with morality, only with just law.
Austrian economics in sharp contradistinction
To libertarianism, a political philosophy is an economic, a branch of economics.
It's a positive science, not a normative enterprise.
And as a positive science, the goal of it is to explain economic reality,
to understand it, what causes what, why do we have inflation,
why do we have depressions, things like that.
It takes no moral view about them.
For example, you could be an Austrian and a non-libertarian.
You could say, look, I know what causes depressions.
It's just that I hate people and I want to have a lot of depressions.
So I'm not a libertarian, but I'm an Austrian, so don't conflate the two.
There is one similarity in my treatment, though, of both of them, and that is, for each, I will be going over the axioms of it first, and then a whole bunch of examples to fill it out and make it come alive.
Okay, now to libertarianism. Libertarianism asks only one question, asks and gives only one answer. What is the question that it asks?
Well, the question that it asks is under what conditions is it okay to use force against people? Under what conditions is it okay for me to poke someone in the snout or shoot him or take something from him?
And it gives only one answer. We're not pacifists, so it says only in self-defense or in return of stolen property are you justified in using force or violence against someone.
Otherwise, you gotta keep your midst to yourself.
Which I don't think is, how shall I say it,
it's not groundbreaking.
I mean, if you ask anyone, what's the appropriate way
for us to deal with each other,
they'll say something like that.
Keep your midst to yourself.
The only way we should engage with each other
is in a voluntary basis.
Someone wrote a book about rules for kindergartners
and it was hold hands and listen to the teacher
and be nice and don't take each other's toys
and don't be bopping each other over the head with toys.
Well, that's what libertarianism is.
Because it's really uncivilized
to interact with each other in any other way.
What's your name right in the front?
David, if I want David's bag over there,
the appropriate way for me to engage with David
is to say, hey David, I'll give you 100 bucks for it
or I'll give you this great tie or what do you say
or I'm a nice guy, please give it to me.
That would be an appropriate civilized way
if I wanted his bag.
The uncivilized way would be just take it, and if he resisted, beat him up if I'm bigger than him, or if I have a gun or something.
Similarly, if I want to go to bed with one of the lovely ladies in the room, the appropriate way is to try to convince them of the merits of such a course of action.
Seduce them, give them a present, tell them a joke, I don't know, whatever works around here.
I'm sort of a little out of the market for this, but that's sort of a thing.
Whereas if I just forced them to do that, that would be totally inappropriate.
Now, so far, what I've said, I don't think is mind-boggling. I think if you ask the next hundred people that walk down the street, well, do you agree with this? They would say, yeah. I mean, that's civilization. Being nice to people, don't invade them. Any interaction with them should be a mutually voluntary one. So in a sense, libertarianism is for everyone. But here's the cruncher. Libertarianism maniacally
are all crazy about being logically consistent with this.
We apply it to everything with no exceptions.
And here's where we deviate from everyone
such that the Libertarian Party candidate for president
is expected to get two, 3% of the vote
if he's doing very well and one or 2% of the usual.
Whereas, and you don't hear about Libertarianism,
it's because we are rigidly dedicated
to upholding these principles, hell or high water.
Let me give you some examples of this.
I once met some Nazi kids, neo-Nazis, real neo-Nazi kids.
Don't ask, I go to a lot of conferences
and I was trying to convert them to libertarianism
because that's my usual way of dealing with people.
You know, I meet someone, I try to convert them
to libertarianism, so I said, look, you know,
we'll give you a better deal than those guys.
You can't kill people, but you can sing Nazi songs, you can goose-step, you can have ovens if you want, you can do all of it, you can have the swastika flag all over the place, you just can't invade anyone, you can't coerce anyone.
Didn't work, but I gave it the old college try.
Where do we stand on the political spectrum?
Well, the usual political spectrum is a left-right sort of a thing, and you have people further to the left in accordance with their views, as a rough estimate, because some people are left on some things and other people are right on other things, so it's a little complex, but for example, if I were to put Bush over here, Bush here and Kerry here, they're both sort of centrist, Bush is a little to the right, Kerry's a little to the left, I don't think anyone would object. If I were to put
Ronald Reagan, maybe a little to the right of Bush, and if I were to put Karl Marx a little to the left of Kerry, again, no one would object.
Well, where do libertarians fit in on such a political spectrum? My claim is that the political spectrum doesn't really fit in libertarianism so much the worse for the political spectrum.
Let me prove why the political spectrum is a snare and a delusion. The reason it's a snare and a delusion is where do you put Hitler?
Well, most people would put Hitler way over to the right, can't put him over to the left.
Where do you put our buddy Stalin? You put him over here, way over to the left, because he's an extreme leftist.
Well, the political spectrum is supposed to put people close who are ideologically close and far away who are ideologically far apart.
And yet, my contention is that these two guys are peas in a pod. Yes, they had a different rhetoric when they slaughtered people.
by and large, these two guys are going to the same place in heaven or hell, namely the latter, there's not much difference and yet the political spectrum puts them on opposite sides of the place.
Where do you put Mother Teresa? Well, Mother Teresa was no right winger. You have to put her on the left. Right next to her buddy Stalin? The whole thing is silly.
and it's not just because libertarianism doesn't fit in nicely here.
So what we do is we have a different kind of a political spectrum
and our political spectrum is a cross
and over here we have the usual left and right, but over here we have good and bad.
And what is good and bad? Good, you'll never guess,
good are people who adhere to the libertarian axiom of non-aggression.
You keep your midst to yourself, you don't steal, you do voluntary interaction, you're good.
You don't? You're bad. So Hitler might be down to the right and Stalin down to the left because of superficial differences that we still keep with this kind of a political spectrum.
And Mother Teresa might be on the left, but she's high because she never used violence.
And then we can put other people in here depending upon how good or bad they are and how left or right they are.
What about socialism versus capitalism?
How does libertarianism fit?
Are we against socialism?
And again, the answer I'm going to give you,
I think will be a little surprising,
because you might think, well,
libertarians are against socialism.
And in a sense, we are, if you define socialism
as nationalization of the means of production.
But if you define socialism as
from each according to his ability,
to each according to his need,
which is an alternative definition of socialism.
Then you get a very different way of looking at it.
So here what I'll do is I'll put socialism
and here I'll put capitalism, can't spell.
And my contention is that that's not the debate.
The debate is not between socialism and capitalism,
rather the debate is between volunteerism and coercion.
So for example, you could have voluntary socialism
From Each According to His Ability to Each According to His Need
is done in a monastery, in a kibbutz.
Forget about, what do you call it,
government subsidies to the kibbutz.
Forget about that, but just an ordinary kibbutz
or a commune, or even a family.
The family and the commune and the kibbutz
and the monastery all belong there.
In the typical family, the little girl eats in accordance
with her, not ability to earn income, but with her need.
So, we have voluntary socialism. Here is coercive socialism. What coercive socialism is obviously North Korea, the USSR, things like that.
What about capitalism? Well, here is laissez-faire capitalism, where the entire society lives according to libertarian code.
And here would be, call it coercive capitalism, if you will, or fascism,
where you have a veneer of property rights and a veneer of ownership, sort of like Nazi Germany or the present society where the politicians rule vast rules all over the place.
So my contention is that it's not really a debate between socialism and capitalism, rather it's a debate between voluntary socialism and voluntary capitalism on the one hand against coercion.
So the more important political philosophical distinction is not between socialism and capitalism, but between coercion and volunteerism.
Okay, the second premise or the second axiom of libertarianism, second to the non-aggression axiom, is private property rights.
Because, again, to use David, since you're sitting so close, I'll use you as my foil. I hope you'll excuse me for this.
I'm sorry for this. Suppose I grab his bag and I run off with it, or rather, let me put it non-pejoratively. Suppose I grab the bag that's sitting in front of him and I run off with that, and then he chases me and tries to tackle me and grab it back.
Who is guilty of the initiation of violence? You might say it's me, but you don't know, because you don't know who is the proper owner of that bag. It's sitting in front of him. That doesn't mean it's his injustice.
It might be that he stole it from me yesterday and I'm just grabbing it back.
Maybe it's got my picture in the picture of my wife and kids in it.
Who knows? Maybe he's the thief.
The way you can tell whether aggression is being utilized or not, you have to have private property rights.
So how do you have private property rights under libertarian code?
Well, there are two things for which private property rights can apply.
One of them is the person and the other is physical reality, virgin territory.
Well, with regard to the individual person, there are only three ways you can do it. One, we each own ourselves. And this is very much in accordance with homesteading, which is the principle that underlies it for the libertarian, the John Lockean, Murray Rothbardian, Hans Hoppean homesteading, because I know that Ken has a baby, Duke, who's now about a year old. I don't know how it is with you, Ken, with your son, but with my kids, when they were up to about a year old,
You can kiss them all the time you want it.
And they never said squat.
They weren't really homesteading themselves yet.
When they got to about a year and a half or two years old,
all of a sudden they go like this and they learn the word no.
I don't know where they learned that from.
But they learned the word no and it was an incipient
taking over their own bodies through homesteading.
They were sort of awakening in a sense
and seizing ownership of themselves by saying no
and demonstrating that they now are control of themselves.
And my kids now are 26 and 24,
So that's one way, and that's the libertarian way. The other way, or second way, is the
ubermension owned the untermension, or the Joneses, as Murray Rothbard would say, own
everyone else. But what's so special about the Joneses? Why are they any different? And
this is not generalizable. Libertarianism is not a heavy lifting, but it's hot work, so
Okay, so the second way is some people own other people and this we can reject because there's no reason to believe it.
The third one is we all own one over and of everyone. So there are six billion people on the earth. We each own one sixth billionth of everyone.
This too, apart, this is problematic too, because apart from being a recipe for having committee meetings forever,
how could you even have a committee meeting? Because a committee meeting means you have to vote for something, like can I scratch my head?
Well before we, before I can scratch my head, because we need rules to know what you can do and what you can't do,
what's permitted and what's forbidden, if we're going to get along with each other.
Along with Each Other.
Well, before I can eat so much and scratch my head,
I have to get permission of three billion plus one people?
But how can we even vote?
The usual way you vote is you raise your hand.
But how can I raise the hand?
It's not my hand.
I only own one sixth billionth of it.
So the whole thing falls apart as a rational way
of girding or undergirding property rights.
So we're left with the libertarian way.
We each own ourselves.
Slavery would therefore be forbidden
because it's an incursion on someone else.
Not talking about voluntary slavery, it's another issue.
Similarly with private property,
the way you get to own nature is you mix your labor,
the labor that you now own because you own your body with it
and therefore you convert it into own property.
So you can own farmland, you can own theoretically,
and according to the libertarian,
you can own the oceans and the rivers,
but that's a whole other story
which we'll maybe not or maybe get into, but ideally the libertarian goal is that all of the earth should be owned privately so that everyone will now know what they can do with their property and we will in that way reduce conflict, which is one of the reasons for having property rights.
Now there's this guy Proudhon who said property is theft, but that's wrong because you can't have theft without property, right?
The reason that that's David's is because he homesteaded that
or he got it through what Robert Nozick calls
a legitimate title transfer,
which means either you homestead it
or you do any voluntary way of getting it.
For example, he could have traded it or bought it
or rented it or something like that
or have it as a gift or won it in a gambling poker game
or something like that.
All of these are legitimate title transfers.
Okay, well I think that's about it
for the axioms.
The only difference is, as I say,
libertarians apply this very consistently.
And now what I wanna do is to apply it
to a whole host of things.
Now, I thought you were gonna be given out my book,
Defending the Undefendable,
and I see there's a whole bunch of them on that table,
and you haven't been given them, so I'll, I don't know,
I'll deal with that somehow.
I think some of you have it,
but I think the idea was that each person
should pick one up and maybe during the break
you can get one.
So what I'm going to do now is to go over a whole bunch of instances and to apply the libertarian's eyeglasses to all of them and to see how they stack up against the non-aggression axiom and private property rights and the ones I've got on my list and I don't know if I'll get through all of them but I'll make a try, blackmail, libel, government, courts and police, roads, inside trading, abortion, giving back,
Reparations to Blacks for Slavery and Intellectual Property, Patents and Copyrights
As I say, I don't know that I'll get through all of them, but I'll have fun trying to apply libertarianism to them all.
One point about the book that I'm making, all the chapters in that book, what I'm doing is, I call it Defending the Undefendable,
And the people that I defend, could someone lend me a copy of that book? Could you pass it forward?
Thanks. All of the chapters here are instances of being compatible with libertarianism,
in the sense that none of them necessarily violates rights.
Now, a baker could commit a rape, but that doesn't mean that there's something wrong with baking per se,
Okay, so here is a list of people that I defend only in the sense that I say they shouldn't go to jail or that we should not be using violence against them because remember the whole point of the libertarian axiom is under what conditions is it legitimate to use violence against people and the libertarian view is if you murder, if you rape, if you steal then we can use violence against you but if you do any of these things in these chapters and I have a chapter on each then we got to leave you alone even though some of them are not nice because they do not
If you first initiate violence, therefore, it's unjustified to use violence against them.
So here's the list. The prostitute, the pimp, the male chauvinist pig, the drug pusher, the drug addict, the blackmailer, the slanderer and libeler, the denier of academic freedom, the advertiser, the person who yells fire in a crowded theater, the gypsy cab driver, the ticket scalper, the dishonest cop, the one who doesn't give you a ticket for things that you have a right to do in the first place, like do drugs or sex or whatever.
The non-governmental counterfeiter, the miser, the inheritor, the moneylender, the non-contributor, the charity, the slumlord, the ghetto merchant, speculator, importer, middleman, profiteer, one of my favorites, the strip miner, litterer, waste maker, fat capitalist pig employer, the one who pays low wages, the scab, the rate buster and the employer of child labor. None of them are guilty of any initiatory coercion, therefore it is a violation of their rights if we put them in jail or in any other way use violence against them.
Okay, so I now want to go through a list and I think I'll be starting with the blackmail.
Now in blackmail, what you have is a threat coupled with a demand for money or sexual favors or any old thing that seems of value to you.
and we have laws against blackmail.
So if I saw you last night with a woman
that isn't your wife and I threaten you,
then I'm gonna tell your wife,
unless you give me a hundred bucks or a thousand
or a million or whatever it is, that's what blackmail is.
Now, did I initiate violence against anyone?
No, my claim is I didn't.
You have to distinguish that from extortion.
In the case of extortion, what I say is,
if you don't give me big bucks or whatever it is
I'm asking for or favors or something, I'll shoot you or I'll kidnap your kids or I'll blow up your house or I'll do something like that. That's extortion. There the threat is to invade and the libertarian is against not only actual invasions but even the threat of invasion, a serious threat of invasion. You are entitled to use violence against the perpetrator thereof. So I'm distinguishing between extortion on the one hand which I say is illegitimate and blackmail on the other hand which I say is
is not illegitimate.
Paradoxically, if we got rid of the laws against blackmail,
our reputations would be safer than they are now.
By the way, do we own reputations?
Can you homestead a reputation?
No, no.
A reputation consists of the thoughts in the minds of other people about us.
My reputation consists of what you guys think about me.
David's reputation consists of what you people think about him,
including me, all of us think about him.
Can David own all of our thoughts? Can I own all of your thoughts? No.
I can't homestead your thoughts. They're your thoughts.
Unless I buy them from you, which is a different kind of a case.
So you can't own your reputation, paradoxically, even though you can sell it.
You can work hard for it. You can sell.
Goodwill in a business is the business reputation.
So it's a big paradox. You don't own it.
Another paradox is that reputations, even though you don't own them, would be safer in a regime where there was no law against blackmail, so this is another big paradox, because right now in the newspapers you read houses for sale, jobs, personals, cars for sale, you'd then read all sorts of claims that, you know, this guy is, you know, he's a blackmailer.
This or that guys or that and now I'm going to read off a list of various libelous statements and I make two apologies one if I mention your name and you don't like it or two if I've inadvertently left you out so here are cases of libel and I claim that libel too should be legitimized that people should not go to jail for libel so I'm going to start libeling everyone
Mr. Hank Brackmann, you're a pervert. Mrs. Hank Brackmann, you're a commie. Richard
Blyberg, a weirdo. Michael Elkin, pinko. David Gilmorton, takes candy from babies. David Jarrett,
rubber fetishist. Dick Cosman, sicko. Mei-Lin Lin, sadist. Ron Mantle, Nazi. Steve Milanovic,
masochist, David Schatz, heroin addict, Brittany Schaeffer, pornographer, Ann Williamson, lesbian, Pat Barnett, pimp, James Fogle, slumlord, Lew Rockwell, adulterer, Steve Berger, rapist, Rebecca Dassow, murderer, Patrick Burke, thief, Ken Garshina, blackmailer, Josh Gold, extortionist, Peter Jepson, drug dealer, Bill Strong, highway robber, Stu Tabin, pirate, Eleanor Lorge, prostitute, Barbara Fitzsimmons,
Women's Porn Star, Mike Martino, watermelon, a watermelon is someone who's green on the
outside and red on the inside. It's a big curse word in where I come from. David McKnight,
randroid, another in-joke sort of a thing. Mike Hamill takes a bath with a rubber ducky.
Caitlin Murphy is a leather fetishist. Ron LeBeau plays with blow-up rubber sex toys.
Dick Weitzman is a pimp, Daniel Gilbert is a sissy, Adam DeMarc is a wuss, John Grizzetti
is a mama's boy, Ted Goldthorpe is a sicko, and Sarp is a crybaby.
What I've now done is I've libeled everyone. I've besmirched your reputation. If people
out there believe me or if you believe me about each other, the demand curve for your
You will take a hit. You will have been harmed. Is harm a violation of libertarian code? No. Harm is not a violation of libertarian code. If I open up a grocery store across the street from you and I take away half your customers, I've harmed you, but I didn't violate your rights. So libertarianism allows for harm of various kinds. I write a negative book review about your book. I write a negative movie review about your movie. I've harmed you.
I've violated your income, or I've reduced your income, but did I do something for which I should go to jail, or for which you would be justified now in using violence against me?
Yes, in the view of some, but not in the view of libertarians.
Okay, the next thing on my list is government. You're in my favorite institution.
Now, there are a lot of people out there who think that government is necessary, maybe a necessary evil, although I don't believe that and I'll try to show why I don't believe that, but they think that government is, you know, maybe fumbling and bumbling, maybe sometimes inefficient, but the strict libertarian view is that government necessarily violates rights. Therefore, in a free and just society, we wouldn't have it. Now, this sounds a little radical, but remember, we sort of agreed
I think that the libertarian axiom of non-aggression and what do you call it, property rights is something that most people would adhere to and if I can prove to you that government is incompatible with that then I'm counting on you if you agree with the axiom and you're rigorously logical and are willing to make deductions from premises to come out with the conclusion that government is a problem. Okay, why do I say this?
If government wanted Dick's, I'm sorry, David's bag, it wouldn't say, hey David, we'll give you this if you give us the bag.
They'd say, you know, it's April 15th, you have to pay your taxes. You don't pay your taxes, you go to jail.
Well, he's an innocent guy. He didn't do anything. He didn't steal that bag in the first place. Who were they to come and grab it from him?
Well, one argument is, well, they're the majority. Majority vote. We had a vote. We elected the president.
and the President said we have to have taxes.
David, you got to kick in.
Well, look, suppose three of my buddies
and I broke into your house and we were about to,
I won't say steal your TV, maybe I'll be less pejorative.
I'll say liberate it or transfer it from your ownership
to our ownership.
We're going to take your TV and your bicycle.
But we're philosophical robbers
and we're willing to dialogue with you.
So you object and you say, well, you know, it's my TV
and it's my bike, get your mitts off.
And we say, okay, tut, tut, tut, not so fast, don't worry,
we'll be democratic about this, we'll have an election.
And I'm the gang leader, I say, okay,
how many people think it's okay to take, what's your name?
Ted, how many people think it's okay
to take Ted's bicycle and TV?
And me and my three gang robbers, we raise our hands
and we say, well, who's against it?
And Ted raises his hand and we say, say, Ted,
you know, majority vote, well, this is just theft.
The whole thing is superficial, it's silly that we're having an election about his property.
It's sort of two wolves and a lamb are having a vote as to what to have for lunch.
It's just silly. It's no justification. Majority vote is no justification.
I put up our friend Hitler's name before. Hitler came to power as a result of a democratic election.
He didn't win a majority. It was a complex sort of a thing, a plurality.
He lost this vote, he won that one, finally he was appointed.
He came to power not through a coup d'etat, but through an election.
Well, if Hitler could come to power through an election,
so much the worse for elections as justification or as a principle
on the basis of which to decide what's just and what's unjust.
So we libertarians are not electionists or democratists.
We're rather non-aggressorists and private property rightsists.
Okay, let's take another example.
Maybe it's a club. It's the USA club. You know, you join the golf club, or what club are we in now?
Metropolitan club. You join the metropolitan club, they say, okay, pay your dues. If you don't pay your dues, we kick you out.
But the metropolitan club is a voluntary club. If you're in, you pay your dues, and if you don't pay your dues, they'll kick you out.
The US club is not a voluntary club. Let's take the following scenario. Let's go back to, I don't know when the country started.
When the country started, I was very young then, 1776, 1789, somewhere in there, and there was some guy in the wilds of Western Massachusetts, and news travels slowly, so the tax collector gets there maybe six months after the country starts, and he goes to the guy in Western Massachusetts, he said, well, we started this USA club, and the guy in Western Massachusetts says, oh, wonderful, I wish you the best, I'm happy to deal with you on a voluntary basis, I'm a libertarian,
I won't aggress against you. You don't aggress against me. We'll live peacefully. I've been living here for many years. Happy to welcome you. Would you like a cup of coffee?
And the taxpayer says, you don't understand. This isn't a voluntary club. You're in it whether you like it or not. And if you don't like it, leave.
Well, what kind of club is that where they come to your property that you homesteaded and your grandpappy homesteaded and gave it to your father and gave it to you?
So I reject the idea that the U.S. is a voluntary club. And the idea, if you don't like it, leave, is sort of a circular argument, because we're trying to establish if the government has legitimacy. And if you say, if you don't like it, leave, then that assumes that they have legitimacy, the very thing that's in question, the very thing that we're trying to see if they do have legitimacy or not. So I reject that sort of an argument.
That sort of an argument. Look, suppose I buy a house in Harlem and every day I'm robbed.
Did I know that I'd be robbed every day? Yes, I knew it. So what? It doesn't mean they have
a right to rob me, right? So someone who comes to this country, they know they're going to
be taxed. That doesn't make it right. Just because you can predict robbery doesn't make
it non-robbery.
Let me try another one on you. Another argument for the voluntary society is the argument
from world government. If somehow there's some reason that the nation must control the
individual because somehow the individual is too stupid or whatever, for some reason
When the nation has to control the individual, then the truth of the matter is that the world government has to control the national government.
So what I'm saying is that there's an analogy between the individual and his nation, and all the nations and the world government.
And if you accept this, then you must accept world government.
I'm trying to pull a reductio on you good people who so far don't agree with me.
I'm trying to say that this relationship is the same, as shown by the equal sign.
And that if you don't believe in world government, then how can you believe in this sort of government?
And the libertarian would say, no government is justified because governments are inherently coercive.
Okay, how would this work in the case of streets, private streets and roads?
I don't know about you people, I used to live in New York City and get around a lot easier than now.
I mean, to go anywhere takes about a half hour and I'm talking three blocks.
I mean, the traffic is murderous and I don't think it's all due to the storms and all.
It's just horrendous.
But the real reason I think we should contemplate private roads as opposed to government roads
is because, does anyone know how many people die on the roads every year?
About 40,000, 40,000 people die on the roads.
In the United States, just 40,000, or 40,000 in the United States, in other countries, other numbers. Right now, a thousand people on our side have died in the Iraq War, and this is seen as a horrible thing as it is. But we're dying like flies on the roads. And these are government roads, they're not private roads. They used to be private roads, but now they're private roads.
Initially, all roads were private. They were turnpike roads, and they would have, what do you call it, where you pay money, a turnpike gate or something.
They had all sorts of rules as to how much you would pay for road usage based on how many axles and how many horses and how big and heavy the wagon was.
Also, they would have it based on the width of the wheel. If it was a wide wheel, they would charge very little.
Think steamroller because it would sort of flatten out the ruts in the road.
If it was a very thin wheel, think ice skate, you could go fast but you would rip ruts into the road so they would charge you more because you're ruining the road.
So it was a perfectly viable economic activity and the benefit of it is that we know from economics, to look ahead a little bit, that when you have competition you get a better product.
The reason that there's no crisis in wristwatches or ties or pens is because all these things are private.
There is no pen crisis. There's no bubblegum crisis. The crises are all having to do with government.
Why is this? Is it that entrepreneurs are somehow inherently better, rather, they are better, but are they more efficient?
And my answer is no. You can get some bureaucrats who are, you know, on any individual basis, stack up against any entrepreneur.
What the entrepreneur has in his advantage vis-a-vis the bureaucrat is the profit and loss weeding out system.
The reason pens and pizza are pretty good is because anyone who produces a bad pen or a bad pizza goes broke, loses money and then goes broke.
So you have a weeding out of the inefficient, but we don't have it with roads.
When people die like flies on those roads, does anyone lose money?
Who's in a position to do anything about it? No.
There's no one who loses money, so why should we expect efficiency here?
Yes, the mayor will come out, whatever, but he doesn't lose money.
He can't go bankrupt if too many people die on the roads,
or if there's, what do you call it, too much traffic congestion.
Now on that traffic congestion business, the way that you can look at a thing called peak load pricing,
peak load pricing, here is time of day and here is quantity of road use.
And in most cities, I think in New York City, 24 hours, the whole thing is clogged up.
But in most cities, from, say, 12 a.m. to 6 a.m., you have very low road usage.
Then from 6 to 9, you have the morning rush hour.
And then it's sort of intermediately busy until, say, 4 p.m.
And then it pops up again till maybe, I don't know, 8 p.m. or something like that.
and then it goes down to the level of low usage, right?
Is that a fair depiction of traffic?
Okay.
Peak load pricing means you charge more during the peaks
and we all know that demand curves slope downward.
So other things equal, the higher the price, the less usage,
the more you make someone pay,
the less other things equal, they'll use it.
So, if you charge a high price during these peaks, you'll get less usage there, but you say, well, people gotta get to work.
Well, not so fast. Yes, they have to get to work, but maybe the factory will locate closer to them if you charge them more for usage, or maybe they'll have staggered work times,
or maybe you'll move closer to the factory or the factory will move closer to you, or maybe you'll carpool.
Look, if to get across the Washington Bridge or the Lincoln Tunnel is, what is it now, six bucks?
Suppose it was a hundred bucks. That would slow some people down. That would get people to carpool and whatever.
Instead, the government, you know, asks you to add a benevolence to carpool.
But we all know what Adam Smith said about benevolence.
It's not from benevolence that the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker give us their product.
It's out of a keen appreciationivid their self-interest.
Well, if the prices are higher, then you even out these peaks.
You might increase it a little bit here and increase it a little bit here, but you will decrease the peaks.
What does the government do in its infinite wisdom?
What the government does is it engages in anti-peak load pricing.
Because what it'll do to get across the Washington Bridge or the Lincoln Tunnel or the Triborough Bridge,
They'll give you a monthly ticket and you can buy, I don't know, 20 or 30 round trips for a lower price.
Now who is likely to use these monthly trip tickets?
Commuters who use the facilities during the rush hour or people who come in and shop?
Obviously workers, people who are coming in to work.
so if you give them a lower price what you do is you increase the peak you
make it even worse do you see the point so the government is responsible for
traffic congestion the government is responsible for road deaths now there are
many people who say well how can you say the government is responsible for road
Road Debts, and they start saying, well, what is the real cause of road debts, Block? You're a moron. You don't know what the real cause of road debts are.
And they say, okay, well, here is road debts. And what's the cause of them? The cause is drunken driving, speeding, driver error, and a whole bunch of things.
The National Highway Safety Traffic Administration lists about 103 causes, like how far away the hospital is and how quick the ambulances are, and do your cars have, I don't know, seat belts or airbags or whatever, things like that.
They have 103 causes of it. This is nonsense on stilts. Let me show you why I think that's true.
Suppose I told you that a restaurant went broke and that the reason the restaurant went broke was it had lousy food,
cold food, that is, the heated food, it was dirty, and the location was bad, and I gave you a whole bunch of lists like that.
Would you accept that for a moment? No, you wouldn't accept that for a moment.
You wouldn't say that those are the ultimate causes of the bankruptcy of the restaurant.
What you would say is that those are the proximate causes.
The ultimate cause of the failure of the restaurant
is that the manager can't manage his way out of a paper bag.
The manager is supposed to make sure he hires good cooks.
The manager is supposed to make sure
that the service is good.
The manager is supposed to make sure
that the place is clean.
The manager is supposed to locate the restaurant,
not in a cul-de-sac, but where people can get to it.
The manager is supposed to have good advertising
or good pricing or whatever it is.
I'm not a drug addict, but I have to toke up because I get dry, so excuse me for a cough drop break.
We have to distinguish between ultimate cause and proximate cause.
If I take a gun and I shoot the guy who's in Central Park now, and you capture me,
and I say, it wouldn't me to have done it, it was the bullet, I'm innocent,
I'd be confusing ultimate and proximate cause. Yes, the bullet was the proximate cause, but I'm the ultimate cause.
The ultimate cause is the key, not the proximate cause. Yes, the proximate cause is a driver error and speed and drunken driving and things like that.
But the ultimate cause of the highway fatalities is that the government can't stop it.
How could private enterprise stop that?
Well, when I first started writing about this stuff, I came up with all sorts of weird things,
some of which have actually come to pass many years later.
For example, putting crosses, or I guess Jewish stars or something, where fatalities occur.
Taking a schmushed car, one that's accordionized, you know, flattened and putting it on a pedestal and scaring people.
I don't know, maybe another way that it's not so much the speed limit,
but it's the variation in speed. I used to drive a 90 cc Honda and downhill and with a tailwind I can get up to 40 miles an hour but uphill with a passenger you know forget it I would be chugging along and yet I'd go on the highways because the minimum speed was 40 and I could make 40 some of the time and if the maximum speed is 70 most people do 75 80 the variation is gigantic and there's no rule that you have to do the speed limit in the left lane I mean
I mean, you'd get some duffer in the left lane who's doing 55 or something and everyone's sort of going in and around.
Maybe that's what's causing the accidents. I don't know.
Maybe what we should have on a three-lane highway is an 80-mile-an-hour speed limit there and 65 here and 50 there.
And not only a speed maximum, but a speed minimum. Or rather, you have to do those speeds.
Now, I don't know. But I do know one thing.
I do know that if different people own different roads and different people try different things and some worked and some didn't and the ones that worked made money and expanded and bought out the ones that didn't work just like ties and pens and cough drops and, what do you call these things here, microphones, that we'd have a better product.
This is not rocket science, this is basic economics, that you get a better product when you have competition.
Why ever should we not apply it to roads as well?
Okay, the next thing on my list is courts and police. How would this work?
How would a society work, a libertarian society work without any government?
Suppose you had a robber, or suppose there was a contract violation,
and there was an honest dispute between Ted and myself.
I said, I delivered 100 pigs, I'm a farmer.
He said, only 90 pigs came through.
What do we do?
Well, one thing we do is we look back at history
and we look at the law merchant,
when different traders from different countries
in the 17th, 18th centuries would trade with each other
and have just this sort of a dispute.
And what they would do is they would appoint judges, not based on politicians who didn't make it,
but based on people who were well known for their probity and their brilliance.
You know, they came up with different ways of threatening to cut babies in half.
You know that one about the two women who wanted the baby and the judge said, cut the baby in half.
And the real mother said, no, no, no, you can have the baby.
And the other one said, oh, no, sure, cut them in half.
And then the judge knew.
So you get judges based on wisdom and probity and not the Supreme Court types that we now have that make all these weird rules.
There's this latest case in Connecticut, I think, where they're trying to nationalize a whole community because they can get high rises.
It's just a violation of property rights. And there are courts that uphold that.
I hope the Supreme Court doesn't, but we'll have to wait and see.
Well, this is a big sanction in those days that if you wouldn't,
if Ted and I had a dispute
and Ted wouldn't take it to the court,
no one would trade with Ted.
He'd be out of international trade.
So this is a very serious sanction.
And there's another former student of mine, Ed Stringham.
I don't know if you know him, but he was also at Holy Cross
and he did his dissertation on various diamond merchants,
Merchants Exchanges and Stock Market Exchanges and private groups that have judicial courts.
Another one is the Beth Dean for Orthodox Jews. The reason that there are many Jews in the diamond merchant business
is because they can go through these courts at a very cheap price and they can deal with each other based on religious background
and also these private courts. The American Arbitration Association can run rings around others
and again the same economic principles apply to why we have good crayons and good cough drops because you have competition and if you get the reputation for being a lousy judge, nobody comes to you.
Okay, so much for commerce. I think that's easy to see. Suppose we have a rapist or, you know, somebody who's not a white collar type, the type who if you mess with he doesn't threaten to sue you, he threatens to come at you with a baseball bat. What about that?
It's interesting, in my hotel, I saw a big pussy, the guy on the, what do you call it, show?
The Sopranos, yeah, he was just standing there, a guy like that.
Not him personally as the actor, but a mafioso type.
Not that the mafioso doesn't have private courts to settle internal mafioso business also.
But suppose we have a real problem. Well, or suppose that David and I are having a dispute about something, and I say, okay, we now have private courts, and each court is connected to a police or an insurance society, and David and I are having a dispute, whether it's a physical dispute or a commercial dispute, and I say, okay, David, let's go to my court, and they'll settle it. And David says, your court? The hell with your court. I'll go to my court. And I don't like his court, and he doesn't like my court.
My Court. Now it's possible that both courts will agree with me, in which case the whole
thing is over because if even his court doesn't agree with him and they've got police and
I've got police, David doesn't have much of a chance. Let's take the rougher case. The
rougher case is David goes to his court, I go to my court, and the courts find in opposite
directions. Now it's possible that my court could find in David's favor and his court
could find in my favor, but let's forget about that because it's sort of a weird case. Let's
Let's suppose that my court favors me and his court favors him. Now what? Einran once wrote an essay saying, blank out, you know, it's case closed, you can't have it, it's weird, queer, it's crazy.
Rothbard and Hoppe and David Friedman, who's also in on this, have to give credit where credit is due, says the following, well look, these courts weren't born yesterday.
Do you realize that they can sometimes come to a situation where they will disagree about something?
Like this case between David and myself?
And now the story goes, there are legitimate courts and there are illegitimate courts.
The legitimate courts are courts that will anticipate this and will deal with it in a rational way.
And what they'll say is, okay, court A is my court and court B is David's court.
If A and B will say to each other, if we ever come to a situation where we're on opposite sides of a dispute, we will go to Court C, and we'll pick Court C in advance, just in case that happens.
Or we'll pick Court C, D or E, and we'll flip coins to see which one is called, or something like that, and we'll agree in advance to be bound by that higher court, and that's where it'll end, because all justice has to end somewhere.
Okay, so I say those are legitimate courts, those are rational courts, and there will be no problem because both your court and my court are agreed that they'll go by whatever the higher court says, and then you and I will have to pretty much go along with that because you'll have two police court insurance companies on the case of the loser.
But suppose David goes to his mother, and his mother says, my David? Do something wrong, you gotta be kidding, you gotta be drunk, you gotta be crazy.
My David would never do anything wrong. Namely, his mother, pardon, I don't mean to get on your bad side, but his mother was a bandit court.
And here comes the punchline. Fighting is a lot harder than negotiating. It's a lot more expensive than negotiating.
Legitimate courts, with most courts, will settle disputes in a non-heavy financial way.
They won't have to hire cops to shoot other cops, which is a very expensive kind of a proposition when you do it voluntarily.
So they'll only fight banded courts. Banded courts will fight everyone.
And since fighting is much more expensive than non-fighting, we predict, as economists, that there will be a weeding out of banded courts.
Can there be banded courts? Well, maybe, but they have this competitive disadvantage.
And again, I harken to this phenomenon of economic efficiency.
The reason we have pretty good hotels
and pretty good basketballs
is because competition brings us them.
And the reason we have lousy post offices
and lousy motor vehicle bureaus and lousy highways
is because they're brought to us courtesy of a system
that does not automatically penalize inefficiency.
Okay, what's next on my list? Let's try inside trading. Now, there are, suppose I hire a guy to go look for oil. What are they? Not archaeologists. What are they? They go and look.
Mineralogists? Geologists. I'll hire a geologist. I've got the money. He's got the brains. He knows where the gold or the oil is buried or he can take a helicopter or somehow he's got a dowsing stick. I don't know what he's got. Somehow he's going to find oil for me.
I can make two kinds of arrangements with them.
One, I can say, look, I'll pay you $100,000 a year,
and you find anything, you keep your big yap shut,
and you don't use your knowledge to buy or sell stock
in my company or other companies or anything like that.
No inside trading, that's the deal I make with them.
Or, I can make a second deal, I can say, look,
I'll pay you $10,000 a year,
But if you find anything, you can buy up to X amount of the stock in the company or whatever it is.
Now suppose what he does is he says, okay, I'll take the 100,000 and I promise not to trade on my own account as an inside trader.
And then he does it anyway, the rotten person.
Well, he's guilty of a contract violation.
It's not a crime, it's a contract violation.
Violation. He should not go to jail, but he should be made to pay me back whatever it was, because it was not a crime of violence. It was a contract violation, very similar to the Paola case. Now, I hire Ken to play records, and the idea is you're going to play records. I'm hiring you as the expert to play the best records. Let's say it's rap music. Now, I don't know from rap. I'm into Mozart, but all rap sounds about the same to me, but you know which is the good rap music and which is not. So I pay him to do that.
The Dirty Rat, what does he do?
He gets bribes from bad rap music,
which is a sort of a redundancy,
but he gets bribes from bad rap music
and he won't play the good rap music
because those guys won't pay him off.
He's again guilty of contract violation at most.
Now in the case of Martha, poor Martha, she's going to jail.
That's really despicable.
I mean, I'm a big fan, well, not a big fan of hers,
but you know, it's an injustice.
It's a violation of the libertarian code.
Again, so payola and inside trading are similar kinds of things. They're contract violations, they're not crimes, would be the libertarian analysis of them.
Lou, I'm supposed to go from 4.30 to 5.30? Oh yeah, questions, okay. I have a few more that I didn't get to.
Abortion, Reparations to Blacks for Slavery, and Patent and Copyright, Intellectual Property.
Okay, well that'll be a question, do intellectual property. But I'm now officially no longer
lecturing, I'm now answering questions. The intellectual property, I have to write down the
This is in the name of my friend Stefan Kinsella, who wrote a magnificent paper in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.
By the way, the Rockwell, the Mises Institute puts out the Journal of Libertarian Studies and the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.
The stuff I've been talking about so far is mainly Journal of Libertarian Studies stuff, and this, in my view, is the best libertarian journal,
as is the quarterly journal of Austrian Economics, the best Austrian journal now in existence.
So if you're interested in further stuff, I publish heavily in both.
If you're interested in further material on that, I would suggest you read that.
It's all available for free on the lewrockwell.com or the Mises web.
I'm sort of a klutz when it comes to that.
So other people can tell you better how to access that than I.
In any case, there are two things in play here.
One is patents and the other is copyright.
The libertarian view on patents is that patents are illegitimate, illicit, improper.
We shouldn't have patent law.
Why?
Because, let's suppose, what's your name, Mike.
Let's suppose Mike and I are both trying to create
this kind of a pen.
And we're both working for years and years
and Mike and I are racing
and we're getting to the patent office.
And he beats me to the patent office by five minutes
and he gets 100% of the value of this pen and I get zip.
If I try to sell my own pen
that I made with my own blood, sweat and tears
that I homesteaded, it was my idea.
I'll go to jail because he has the patent on it.
That's theft of my work.
So patents are seen by libertarians
as an improper sort of a thing.
What about copyright?
Copyright is a little more complex
because if I have this book, Defending the Undefendable,
and if I sell it to you
With a contract that you agree not to copy it, and you do, and you start selling it, either under your own name or under my name, it doesn't really matter.
You're breaking my, you're breaking a contract with me.
So in that sense, copyright is, if it's a contract, in other words, what we're saying now is we're not saying that you can own intellectual property, we're just saying you can have a contract around it.
Why do we say you can't own intellectual property?
The reason we say you can't own intellectual property is because it's not scarce.
And the only thing to which private property rights can apply are scarce things.
To get back to the point that I started making at the beginning of the hour,
the reason we have to have property rights is to reduce conflict.
You know, do I have a right to stand right here?
Does he have a right to have this bag or should I have that bag?
There can be conflicts about things like that.
There can be conflicts about who has the right to get my body to do what it wants or what other people want it to want.
But with regard to intellectual property, it's not scarce.
If girl A puts her hair up in a ponytail, and girl B sees that girl A has a ponytail and puts her hair up in a ponytail,
did girl B steal anything of girl A's? No. Girl A can still have a ponytail.
She didn't say, take that rubber band out of your hair, I'm having the ponytail, you can have the ponytail.ivid
If only one person can have a ponytail at a time, then yes, we should have property rights over to see who has the rights to the ponytail.
But, anyone can have a ponytail while you have to have a certain length of hair, and some of us don't qualify, but that's another issue.
If we could have rights to intellectual information, then every time I use a word, say the word
word, now somebody invented that word. I'd have to pay them. I couldn't use language
because if you could trace it back far enough, forget about the lack of knowledge problem,
suppose we looked at it from God's eye view and we know who invented every word and we
know who their heirs are, we couldn't speak without their permission. So there's something
I'm feeling a little wonky about a situation where you can't even speak and the problem with it is if I use the word word, David can also use it and Ted and Mike can also use it without taking anything away from me.
So the point is that property rights only apply to things over which we can have a conflict.
They can't apply to things such that there's no conflict possible because you have an infinite amount of it or, you know, anyone could use the word word or the English language or the French language or what have you.
There are some people who come up with, see, so far what I've been doing is answering this on sort of a rights-based answer.
What is the logic of the axiom of non-aggression and property rights?
There are some low-life types who are very pragmatic and say,
but if you didn't have intellectual property, research and development would come to a dead halt.
And therefore, since we have less research and development, we can't possibly tolerate that.
Well, if it was a dispute between pragmatics or research and development
and the logic of the libertarian axiom, I would go with the latter every time.
What Kinsella says is that the optimal amount of research and development is that amount of research and development that occurs
when the law is righteous.
And that if we truly now have more research and development
then that amount would be?
Well then we have too much research and development.
There is such a thing as too much research and development.
Look, suppose we put 100% of the GDP
into research and development and we all starved.
That's no way to run a railroad, right?
So there's an optimal amount of research and development
and the optimal amount is not the maximum
that we're capable of.
I mean, we're capable of way more
if we subsidize research and development
and, you know, tax shoes or something like that
and the scientists wouldn't have shoes
but they'd have laboratories, be a little weird.
But Kinsella continues on this.
As a matter of fact, it's very hard to make the case
that you would have less research and development
because like take the case in the music business.
Ken, what's your name again?
I'm sorry, Ted, sorry.
Ted is our rock and roll rap music person
and he makes a rap music thing
And everybody copies it. So we say, well, he won't make rap music. Well, maybe that's not such a bad thing, but forget about that point. There are other ways that he can cash in on this, apart from selling records. He makes the record, and I pirate it, and I sell it to Olin Sundry. What I'm really doing is serving as his advertiser, as his marketing advancement. Because now everyone wants to hear him sing, because I'm selling so many of his records.
Each record is sort of like a business card or like self-advertisement.
I publish a book.
This lady, what's your name? Anne.
Sells it. She sells millions of copies and now everyone wants to hear me give a speech and I get paid for giving the speech.
I invent the cure for cancer.
Well, I ought to be able to cash in on that in some way or other.
I'll win the MacArthur Genius Award, maybe, or not. That's mainly for lefties, so I might not win that if I cured cancer.
They gave it to Paul Ehrlich, so, you know, I need say no more.
There ought to be some other way that I can cash in on that, and, you know, first you have to find out what it is, but suppose you can.
Well, you know, well, then there'll be fewer cures for cancer.
But who says that we have the optimal rate of finding cures for cancer now would be my point and Kinsella's point.
That my point is that there's an optimal amount of resources for everything and it's not the maximum.
And yes, we want to have resources involved in curing cancer, but it doesn't mean and maybe there's too much now.
Now, maybe the optimal, it's sort of like with space exploration.
When did we send the man to the moon?
What year was that, 60, 69?
Maybe we sent them there too soon.
Maybe private enterprise never would have sent them there in 69,
because in 69, we wouldn't have the rocket technology
and the fuel technology to make it viable.
Now, I hear some people are talking about
making commercial flights to the moon.
Maybe private enterprise will make it
when it's optimal to make it.
Maybe we'll get that cure for cancer
when it's optimal to get it.
But I take another case of the pragmatics.
It used to be when television first came out,
everyone thought that theaters would go bust.
They didn't.
What happened when paperback books first came out?
Everyone thought that there'd be no more hardcover back,
No More Hardcover Books
because you can get a paperback at five bucks
and a hardcover at 25,
but yet we found that the timing is very important.
If you want to get that hardcover book
or go to the movie now rather than wait for it to come out
later and see it on TV or rent it,
people are willing to pay a premium for that.
So even though you don't have
intellectual property rights in that, you still have some.
What's the optimal amount?
Again, it's hard to say what the optimal amount is.
My answer that I get from Kinsella's,
the optimal amount is the amount that ensues
when we don't have any intellectual property rights.
Let me give you one more of Kinsella's cases.
What Kinsella says is the railroad is coming through town,
but nobody knows it yet.
And land sells for $10 an acre.
When the railroad comes through town,
it'll be a thousand an acre.
And somebody breaks into the person's house
who knows that the railroad is coming to town,
and he goes down to Clem's Barbershop
and he spreads the word.
And now, if there's intellectual property,
there's intellectual property rights,
the guy who stole it should go to jail.
But how about all the people that he told it to?
Must they now sell their land for $10 an acre
or can they hold out for a thousand an acre?
If you believe that there's such a thing
as intellectual property rights,
you must believe that you should force them
Plagiarism
I would say you should not go to jail. But we do have sanctions against you. If you're a professor, you lose your tenure. If you're an intellectual, you lose all your credibility. So there are sanctions against that. Not total, but the point is that since you can't own ideas, look, the pipe is yours, the pipe is yours, the pipe is yours, the pipe is yours, the pipe is yours, the pipe is yours, the pipe is yours, the pipe is yours, the pipe is yours.
and Life Hackerian Theorem, we plagiarize that every day.
Okay, it's nice to give a footnote or something,
but the very English language,
if you really believe in intellectual property,
you can't speak, shut up.
So those of you who disagree with me
are precluded from speaking.
I'm just sort of teasing here, I hope.
Ken?
What do the libertarians think about the Iraq war?
Well, there are people who call themselves libertarians, who believe that we should have, that the United States was right in invading Iraq.
I belong, I think, to the majority of libertarians, and I would say that the people who disagree with me on this are not libertarian on this issue,
even though they might have splendid libertarian credentials in many other areas.
I would say that the libertarian position is best articulated by George Washington in his farewell address
when he warned about entangling alliances with Europe, which for now read the rest of the world.
and John Quincy Adams who said that we favor the freedom of every country but our government is limited to protecting only our own freedom.
So the question is, was Iraq really going to attack us with any credibility?
And my answer is they didn't. They weren't. If they were, they're no more likely than 20 other countries to attack us.
So I think it was unjustified to go there.
The people who did attack us, well, your friend and mine, Osama, what he said, he said three things.
You see, you have to ask, who started it? Who started up first?
What Osama said, the reason he ticked off at us, not because we have freedom and not because we have mini skirts
and not because we have rap music, he said it was three things.
One, we had soldiers in the Holy Land, which he means Saudi Arabia.
Two, we aid in Abed Israel.
and three, we had that circle around Iraq, the embargo around Iraq which killed millions of people.
Why is it that Osama is not attacking Denmark or Canada or Sweden or Switzerland?
The ideal sort of foreign policy I think that a country would have, any country,
would be sort of the foreign policy of Switzerland, armed neutrality.
Switzerland has stayed out of all the wars that I know of.
Switzerland is a great country, foreign policy-wise, so I would say that the correct view would be, yes, punish the people who killed innocent people in the World Trade Center, but realize that we started first, but still get them because they killed innocent people and the killing of innocent people is improper, and then pull out of Iraq, pull out of Saudi Arabia, pull out of, I mean, I don't know how many countries there are in the world, maybe 250, but I think the U.S. has troops in 150 of them.
If I were a Martian with a pretty good telescope and I could tell the color of the uniforms
and the flags, and I saw that one country had soldiers stationed in every other country
in the world practically, and no other country did that, I would conclude that the country
with soldiers in foreign countries is a imperialist warmonger, an aggressor, what have you. I
Look at it from the Martian eye view, or God's eye view, or any other eye view than the American view or the Bush view.
And again, we have soldiers in bases in every country known to man and some countries not known to man.
They're just all over the place. No other country has that.
Suppose the Chinese had troops in South Carolina.
How would we feel about that? Or if the French had troops in Wisconsin?
Or if the French had troops in Africa or Asia or South America?
Nobody has troops anywhere else except us.
We, I think, are the world aggressor.
Now, some of my best friends are American. I don't hate the American people.
I think I'm a patriot, like George Washington and John Quincy Adams was.
But I don't go along with this aggression.
You know, we used to have a Department of War, and then they changed it to the Department of Defense.
I think they want to change it back. It's the Department of War.
A Department of Defense would say, look, we're not going to mess with you guys, don't mess with us.
Any citizen want to go to Italy or Spain or somewhere, we can't protect you there,
because you can have overlapping sovereignties.
We'll defend Fortress America, isolationism, America First, that sort of a thing,
I think would be the libertarian foreign policy.