WEBVTT

NOTE Plumb Line Libertarianism

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000
It's a great honor to be asked to give the Murray Rothbard Memorial Lecture.

2
00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:13.000
One of the most poignant lines from the movie and the play Amadeus for me was,

3
00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:18.000
if God spoke to man, he would speak to man through the music of Mozart.

4
00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:21.000
And Mozart is one of my favorite composers.

5
00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:28.000
And I guess I would like to extrapolate from that and say that if God spoke to man in economics or political theory,

6
00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:34.720
Murray, he would speak to him, us, through the words of Murray Rothbard.

7
00:00:34.720 --> 00:00:41.600
I took a long time to think about what I might say about Murray, or in his honor, and my

8
00:00:41.600 --> 00:00:46.980
first thought was I'd try to be a stand-up comic and storyteller and regale you with stories

9
00:00:46.980 --> 00:00:52.980
Let me just tell you one of those. When I was a young lad, I used to keep track of how many pages I would write per day, and if I wrote five per day, that is double-spaced type of writing.

10
00:01:16.980 --> 00:01:21.980
I've written pages of about 300 words on a page. I figured I did okay.

11
00:01:21.980 --> 00:01:23.980
And many days I didn't make it to five.

12
00:01:23.980 --> 00:01:27.980
But sometimes I'd make it to 10 or 15 if I really had a good day.

13
00:01:27.980 --> 00:01:31.980
Well, one day I got up really early in the morning. I stayed up till 3 in the morning the next day.

14
00:01:31.980 --> 00:01:37.980
And I got 22 pages done and, you know, filled with youthful braggadocio.

15
00:01:37.980 --> 00:01:40.980
I called up Murray and I said, well, how many pages do you do in a day?

16
00:01:40.980 --> 00:01:53.980
I used to pester the hell out of him. I'm amazed that he was friendly to me.

17
00:01:53.980 --> 00:01:59.980
So finally I pestered him. I'm a world-class nood, so if you get in my face, you're in trouble. I'll come get you.

18
00:01:59.980 --> 00:02:03.980
Finally I got out of him. What he said was eight pages an hour.

19
00:02:03.980 --> 00:02:30.980
So in my most productive day, I did 22 pages, I did almost 3 hours of Murray, and you can see from the width of the books on the shelf that he's produced that, you know, he, I mean a good typist can do 8 pages and maybe a little more, but you know, he's really clacking away and it comes out first draft pretty much, it's just appalling and amazing.

20
00:02:30.980 --> 00:02:40.980
I decided not to keep going with these stories, rather to give something more substantive as a better way to honor him.

21
00:02:40.980 --> 00:02:47.980
And then the problem is how do you honor him? What can you say about him? Because he's so accomplished in so many different fields.

22
00:02:47.980 --> 00:02:52.980
For me though, the essence of Murray is libertarianism.

23
00:02:52.980 --> 00:03:06.980
The reason I was tempted to give all these stories is that my thought is that many people in this room, maybe half the people have not met Murray and only know him through his writings and maybe his tape-recorded speeches.

24
00:03:06.980 --> 00:03:15.980
And as the years go on, there are fewer and fewer people that have had personal experience with him, and it's more important, more and more important for people such as myself who have to share it with you.

25
00:03:15.980 --> 00:03:20.380
and if you see me over coffee later I'll regale you with the stories but now I

26
00:03:20.380 --> 00:03:26.300
wanted to get into some substance and for me the essence of Murray was Mr.

27
00:03:26.300 --> 00:03:30.820
Libertarian. It was not for nothing that he was widely called Mr. Libertarian.

28
00:03:30.820 --> 00:03:35.300
Further he approached this in I would say and I mean this is a compliment in a

29
00:03:35.300 --> 00:03:43.100
rabid maniacal way. He was no pinko type of Libertarian of which there are all

30
00:03:43.100 --> 00:03:50.100
all too many. I warn you, the pink-o-ism stops right here.

31
00:03:50.100 --> 00:03:59.100
If you define libertarianism, I think, non-controversially as the non-aggression axiom and private property rights coupled with a Lockean homesteading theory,

32
00:03:59.100 --> 00:04:09.100
the essence of Murray was not that he adhered to that. Many, many libertarians do. Heck, many non-libertarians do. If you ask them, do you favor violence against non-aggressives, they're not going to say yes.

33
00:04:09.100 --> 00:04:19.100
This is rather the rigid, unyielding, praxeological way that he followed this that I think is the quintessential Murray.

34
00:04:19.100 --> 00:04:24.100
He was seen, though, as inconsistent. He was anti-war, so he was seen as a leftist.

35
00:04:24.100 --> 00:04:28.100
He was in favor of laissez-faire capitalism, so he was seen as a right-winger.

36
00:04:28.100 --> 00:04:31.100
He was for anarchism, so he was seen as a leftist.

37
00:04:31.100 --> 00:04:38.100
He joined the Peace and Freedom Party, which was obviously a left activity, but this was alliances.

38
00:04:38.100 --> 00:04:43.900
Murray, for strategic reasons, would join with other groups at various times in his life

39
00:04:43.900 --> 00:04:46.900
when his views and theirs coincided.

40
00:04:46.900 --> 00:04:50.300
And I certainly see nothing wrong with that.

41
00:04:50.300 --> 00:04:55.300
One of the things that Murray did, and here what I'm going to do is to extend on Murray,

42
00:04:55.300 --> 00:04:57.700
Lew Rockwell asked, what am I going to be speaking on today?

43
00:04:57.700 --> 00:05:03.000
And I told him a defense elucidation and extension of Murray's thinking.

44
00:05:03.000 --> 00:05:06.300
Well, one of the things that he did was his attack on the modals.

45
00:05:06.300 --> 00:05:09.300
And I'm going to try to elaborate and extend on that.

46
00:05:09.300 --> 00:05:11.300
Who are the modals?

47
00:05:11.300 --> 00:05:16.300
The modal libertarians are people who are libertarian on many issues,

48
00:05:16.300 --> 00:05:21.300
but say on victimless crimes, left-wing libertarians, so-called.

49
00:05:21.300 --> 00:05:25.300
They would argue from the fact that you should legalize drugs,

50
00:05:25.300 --> 00:05:28.300
which I think is perfectly plumb line,

51
00:05:28.300 --> 00:05:33.300
to the fact that somehow you should use drugs, which is very different.

52
00:05:33.300 --> 00:05:42.300
These modals would argue from the fact that we shouldn't put people in jail who engage in weird sexual practices.

53
00:05:42.300 --> 00:05:48.300
Somehow we all ought to be engaging in these practices, which again is a little bit off.

54
00:05:48.300 --> 00:05:53.300
And I think Murray did yeoman work in this, as he did everywhere.

55
00:05:53.300 --> 00:06:04.300
Now, the only possible change I would suggest is, why give them the honorific of libertarian?

56
00:06:04.300 --> 00:06:07.300
Why call them left-wing libertarians on these issues?

57
00:06:07.300 --> 00:06:11.300
Yes, they're libertarian on other issues, but on these issues they're just crazy.

58
00:06:11.300 --> 00:06:14.300
They're just misunderstanding.

59
00:06:14.300 --> 00:06:18.300
Now, I want to read something, an email I got from Lew Rockwell.

60
00:06:18.300 --> 00:06:22.300
I'm not sure who wrote this, whether it was Mark Fullwiler.

61
00:06:22.300 --> 00:06:27.300
I think it's more full while or two, Lew Rockwell, about the Lincoln cult.

62
00:06:27.300 --> 00:06:31.300
And he says to Lew, you don't get Liberty Magazine, do you?

63
00:06:31.300 --> 00:06:36.300
There is a fawning review of it, a fawning review in it of a book on Lincoln

64
00:06:36.300 --> 00:06:40.300
that shows that the Lincoln cult is alive and well among so-called libertarians.

65
00:06:40.300 --> 00:06:45.300
The gist of the reviewer's argument is that Lincoln said he was against slavery, therefore he's a great guy.

66
00:06:45.300 --> 00:06:50.300
But the point that I want to focus on is he calls them so-called libertarians.

67
00:06:50.300 --> 00:06:56.300
I would be much more comfortable with calling them so-called libertarians, or quasi-libertarians, or semi-libertarians.

68
00:06:56.300 --> 00:07:01.300
I mean, Milton Friedman calls himself a libertarian, and if he calls himself a libertarian, you know, we've got a lot of troubles,

69
00:07:01.300 --> 00:07:04.300
because he's very different than plumb-lined libertarians.

70
00:07:04.300 --> 00:07:10.300
And so I would be happy to accord them these other words, or libertarian on some issues,

71
00:07:10.300 --> 00:07:16.300
but not on the issues where we're disagreeing.

72
00:07:16.300 --> 00:07:19.300
What I want to do today is not talk about modals, though.

73
00:07:19.300 --> 00:07:24.300
I want to talk about people who are so-called right-wing libertarians, and I'm coining a new phrase.

74
00:07:24.300 --> 00:07:28.300
And if anyone has a better word for it, let me know, and I'll use it in my next talk on this.

75
00:07:28.300 --> 00:07:32.300
Instead of the modals, I want to call them the schmodals.

76
00:07:32.300 --> 00:07:34.300
So who are the schmodals?

77
00:07:34.300 --> 00:07:37.300
Well, the schmodals are to libertarianism, as are the modals to libertarianism.

78
00:07:37.300 --> 00:07:42.300
Only when the modals deviate, they deviate on the left, the schmodals on the right.

79
00:07:42.300 --> 00:07:55.300
And the reason I think it's important is that while Murray himself had distinguished himself from the Schmodels mainly on the Worn Peace issue, somehow it hasn't resonated as much in our community as his wonderful work on the Models.

80
00:07:55.300 --> 00:08:03.300
So I want to get the Schmodels, and I want to get them under the topic of four headings.

81
00:08:03.300 --> 00:08:08.300
And I'll try to illustrate my point under these following four headings.

82
00:08:08.300 --> 00:08:13.300
One, war and peace. Two, abortion. Three, reparations.

83
00:08:13.300 --> 00:08:20.300
And four, misuse of language in the economics profession, for want of a better word.

84
00:08:20.300 --> 00:08:23.300
Okay, let me start with war and peace.

85
00:08:23.300 --> 00:08:29.300
Lewrockwell.com has done yeoman work on this issue.

86
00:08:29.300 --> 00:08:39.300
Certainly an honorable mention goes to Justin Raimondo's anti-war comm. Both of them have done heroic work. Both of them have been unpopular in many circles.

87
00:08:39.300 --> 00:08:44.300
I somehow think that Murray is up there somewhere smiling at these efforts.

88
00:08:44.300 --> 00:08:51.300
In my view, what we had been calling the Department of Defense never should have been called the Department of Defense,

89
00:08:51.300 --> 00:08:58.300
because if you go by what they did but not by what they were called, they should be called the Department of Offense.

90
00:08:58.300 --> 00:09:06.300
If you take a Martian eye view of this, if you're a Martian looking down on the earth and not knowing anything about anything, but you can just recognize who is who,

91
00:09:06.300 --> 00:09:14.300
and you want to figure out who is the aggressive nation, you have to ask yourself such things as, well, who's got military bases on foreign territories?

92
00:09:14.300 --> 00:09:22.300
Who's got sailors and soldiers all over ships all over the globe? Who used the nuclear bomb on civilians?

93
00:09:22.300 --> 00:09:27.300
War is the health of the state, says Randolph Bourne, and I think that's true.

94
00:09:27.300 --> 00:09:34.800
We have rent control, price controls, business subsidies, economic regulation and many other objectionable things because of war.

95
00:09:34.800 --> 00:09:38.800
War doesn't create these things, or rather war creates these things, these things don't create war.

96
00:09:38.800 --> 00:09:47.300
So if we're for free enterprise, we have to be at least biased in favor of anti-war or peace.

97
00:09:47.300 --> 00:09:56.300
There is such a thing as just war, there are defensive wars, but my claim is that the US is an invading power, it's not a defensive power.

98
00:09:56.300 --> 00:10:02.300
It's true that we've had civilians of ours killed, but there were many civilians that we've been killing all over the world.

99
00:10:02.300 --> 00:10:08.300
Yes, defense, just war, secession, but the world's policeman, I think, is what we've become.

100
00:10:08.300 --> 00:10:12.300
And this is unjustified. This is incompatible with libertarian theory.

101
00:10:12.300 --> 00:10:20.300
I take a reasonable expression of the libertarian view on foreign policy as George Washington's farewell address,

102
00:10:20.300 --> 00:10:32.300
is very well addressed, where he warned us against getting involved in entangling alliances and advised us to take on a peace policy.

103
00:10:32.300 --> 00:10:42.300
Yes, we can criticize modals like the Cato Institute for making modal mistakes, but they also make schmodal mistakes.

104
00:10:42.300 --> 00:10:46.300
And the schmodal mistakes, I think, are more important, if anything, than the modal mistakes.

105
00:10:46.300 --> 00:10:50.300
namely with the War Street Journal, that's not a mispronunciation.

106
00:10:50.300 --> 00:10:55.300
They make left-wing mistakes, yes, but they also make right-wing ones.

107
00:10:55.300 --> 00:10:59.300
My point is we're neither. We're neither left-wing nor right-wing.

108
00:10:59.300 --> 00:11:02.300
We're plumb-lined libertarians, or at least that's what Murray was,

109
00:11:02.300 --> 00:11:06.300
and that's what I intend to engage in.

110
00:11:06.300 --> 00:11:11.300
This, to me, is an exercise in product differentiation.

111
00:11:11.300 --> 00:11:14.300
We are distinct from them. We are a precious flower.

112
00:11:14.300 --> 00:11:20.300
We don't want to be conflated with left-wing semi-libertarians or quasi-libertarians, nor with right-wing ones.

113
00:11:20.300 --> 00:11:28.300
Okay, having briefly treated War and Peace, let me move to my second issue.

114
00:11:28.300 --> 00:11:30.300
My second issue is abortion.

115
00:11:30.300 --> 00:11:36.300
Now, the right-wingers take a pro-life position.

116
00:11:36.300 --> 00:11:39.300
The left-wingers take a pro-choice position.

117
00:11:39.300 --> 00:11:45.300
I think libertarians have a distinct position from all of them, from both of them.

118
00:11:45.300 --> 00:11:52.300
We have what I call the evictionist theory, namely that the woman has the right not to kill the fetus

119
00:11:52.300 --> 00:11:57.300
that she doesn't want but to evict it from her body since she is the private property rights owner of the body

120
00:11:57.300 --> 00:12:05.300
and the fetus that is in her when it's unwanted is in effect a parasite, an invader, a trespasser.

121
00:12:05.300 --> 00:12:10.660
Trespasser. Now some of you may or may not follow me along on these principled

122
00:12:10.660 --> 00:12:14.460
arguments that I'm now to give but I also have a pragmatic one which I hope

123
00:12:14.460 --> 00:12:18.300
will convince you if not the philosophical one. Okay, I start the

124
00:12:18.300 --> 00:12:22.660
analysis with when does life begin? Start at the beginning. This is an

125
00:12:22.660 --> 00:12:28.880
intractable position. It's sort of a continuum problem. Many people have great

126
00:12:28.880 --> 00:12:34.500
debates over this one. My read on this is that the life begins with the

127
00:12:34.500 --> 00:12:40.300
Fertilized Egg. As soon as the egg is fertilized, that's it. That's life. Why do I take this position?

128
00:12:40.300 --> 00:12:48.180
I take this position for two reasons. I'm going to have to take off my coat. This stuff is no

129
00:12:48.180 --> 00:13:00.480
heavy lifting here, but it's hot work. Why do I take this decision? One reason, a philosophical

130
00:13:00.480 --> 00:13:15.480
The second reason that I take this position is that I am going to come out in favor of a pro-choice position, at least in principle, therefore I want to make it hardest for myself to assume that the baby is an alive human being baby at the fertilized egg stage.

131
00:13:15.480 --> 00:13:26.480
The second reason is, to me, if you compare, suppose there are two twins, the mother is giving birth to twins and the first twin came out and the second twin is still inside.

132
00:13:26.480 --> 00:13:33.480
According to the present laws, I understand it, if you engage in any violence against the twin who's already been born,

133
00:13:33.480 --> 00:13:37.480
you're guilty of assault and battery or murder or whatever you do.

134
00:13:37.480 --> 00:13:42.480
Whereas if you do something to the baby that's inside, like the partial birth abortion business,

135
00:13:42.480 --> 00:13:46.480
it's okay because it's just like a protoplasm or something like that.

136
00:13:46.480 --> 00:13:50.480
And yet the babies are like six minutes apart from being born.

137
00:13:50.480 --> 00:13:53.480
And you know, they're pretty close, it seems to me.

138
00:13:53.480 --> 00:13:59.480
Whereas the difference between a fertilized egg and an unfertilized egg is widely different.

139
00:13:59.480 --> 00:14:02.480
Namely, one will not grow into a human being and the other will.

140
00:14:02.480 --> 00:14:05.480
And that seems to me to be a big distinction.

141
00:14:05.480 --> 00:14:11.480
But I'll rely on the first one, I'll rely on both actually, that I want to make it hardest for myself

142
00:14:11.480 --> 00:14:14.480
so that I can overcome the highest obstacles in my analysis.

143
00:14:14.480 --> 00:14:22.480
Abortion, one of the reasons I think we have problems with the abortion analysis is that it's a complex word.

144
00:14:22.480 --> 00:14:28.480
Abortion means two things. Abortion means eviction plus killing.

145
00:14:28.480 --> 00:14:31.480
Let me say that again because it's crucial, it's absolutely important.

146
00:14:31.480 --> 00:14:35.480
Abortion is not just eviction, it's not just killing, it's both.

147
00:14:35.480 --> 00:14:43.480
So you really shouldn't be talking about abortion, or if you do, you should be careful to distinguish between the two constituent elements of it, killing and eviction.

148
00:14:43.480 --> 00:14:51.480
And my claim is that eviction is justified always since it's the mother's property, but never killing, murder.

149
00:14:51.480 --> 00:14:55.480
Of course, the eviction always has to be done in the gentlest manner possible.

150
00:14:55.480 --> 00:15:00.480
If there's a trespasser who comes into the Mises Institute and the Mises people don't want him here,

151
00:15:00.480 --> 00:15:03.480
the first thing they can't, they can't first just plug him.

152
00:15:03.480 --> 00:15:13.480
I mean, I'm pretty rabid, but you know, but even I am not that rabid because that's not libertarian rabidity.

153
00:15:13.480 --> 00:15:16.480
I'm a libertarian rabid person.

154
00:15:16.480 --> 00:15:20.480
The first thing is the softest way to eject him.

155
00:15:20.480 --> 00:15:48.480
The only way to evict 100 years ago, even in the generalist manner possible, is to kill the baby, because we didn't have scientific technology which would allow us to evict in a non-harmful way.

156
00:15:48.480 --> 00:16:01.480
I posit, I stipulate, that 100 years from now it will be possible to evict, without harming the baby in any manner, shape or form, to evict the baby without hurting it at all.

157
00:16:01.480 --> 00:16:13.480
Right now we're in some sort of intermediate stage where we can evict, at certain stages in the late term pregnancy stages, without much harm or without any harm to the baby.

158
00:16:13.480 --> 00:16:17.480
But at earlier stages, the baby will be harmed if we evict.

159
00:16:21.480 --> 00:16:27.480
So, the libertarian position is that you can evict, but not kill.

160
00:16:27.480 --> 00:16:32.480
My claim is that right now, those of us who are pro-life in our desires,

161
00:16:32.480 --> 00:16:37.480
who don't like the prospect of millions of fetuses, millions of people being killed,

162
00:16:37.480 --> 00:16:42.480
would do well to adopt this policy of mine, evictionism,

163
00:16:42.480 --> 00:16:46.480
Even if you don't follow me so far, and I'll be considering objections to what I said,

164
00:16:46.480 --> 00:16:50.480
because the present system isn't working.

165
00:16:50.480 --> 00:16:52.480
The present system is a failure.

166
00:16:52.480 --> 00:16:59.480
All the pro-life people in the world have not been able to succeed in getting us to a position where we don't have the slaughter of innocent people.

167
00:16:59.480 --> 00:17:01.480
I use that word advisedly.

168
00:17:01.480 --> 00:17:05.480
Whereas if we adopt evictionism right now, we will be making a compromise.

169
00:17:05.480 --> 00:17:07.480
The eviction position is a compromise.

170
00:17:07.480 --> 00:17:11.480
See, the pro-life, what I have in my notes here is a chart.

171
00:17:11.480 --> 00:17:18.520
Evict, kill, and the pro-life people say no, don't evict, and no, don't kill.

172
00:17:18.520 --> 00:17:22.680
The pro-choice people say yes, evict, and yes, kill.

173
00:17:22.680 --> 00:17:26.520
Whereas the evictionists say yes, evict, and no, kill.

174
00:17:26.520 --> 00:17:30.920
So it is a compromise. So if we adopt this compromise, this means that right now

175
00:17:30.920 --> 00:17:36.600
we will be giving assent to the killing of some innocent people, namely, say, in

176
00:17:36.600 --> 00:17:40.360
the first to the sixth month. Just pick that number as an arbitrary number.

177
00:17:40.360 --> 00:17:42.860
I don't know what the medical technology is now.

178
00:17:42.860 --> 00:17:47.360
Whereas at least we'll be saving people in their 7th, 8th and 9th months.

179
00:17:47.360 --> 00:17:52.360
So we'll save some of the people, but the genius, if I may say so, of this argument,

180
00:17:52.360 --> 00:17:57.860
is that as time progresses, every decade that goes on, we might save another month.

181
00:17:57.860 --> 00:18:02.660
So in one decade from now, it'll go to the 5th month and to get decades for the 4th month, etc.

182
00:18:02.660 --> 00:18:04.660
And eventually, we will have what we want.

183
00:18:04.660 --> 00:18:09.860
We pro-life people who want to save human beings who are very young.

184
00:18:09.860 --> 00:18:17.860
Whereas if we stick with the present, we're going to lose and we'll always lose and we won't have a compromise and we won't be winning in the future either.

185
00:18:17.860 --> 00:18:29.860
So I say let's at least, even if you don't agree with me, let's take a part of a loaf because that loaf will be getting bigger as time goes on and eventually medical technology will solve this problem if we adopt the compromise.

186
00:18:29.860 --> 00:18:36.860
But if we don't adopt the compromise, my prognostication is that we'll just endlessly have this slaughter of people.

187
00:18:36.860 --> 00:18:44.860
Okay, now let me consider a few objections to my argument.

188
00:18:44.860 --> 00:18:52.860
First, there's this airplane trip business that I invite you on my airplane, and we're up at 37,000 feet,

189
00:18:52.860 --> 00:18:58.860
and I say, by the way, this airplane is my private property, and get the hell off.

190
00:18:58.860 --> 00:19:01.860
And you say, well, how about a parachute?

191
00:19:01.860 --> 00:19:03.860
I say, no, no, no, that's positive obligations.

192
00:19:03.860 --> 00:19:28.860
This is one argument against my thesis. My rejection of this is as follows. What we really have here is an argument over implicit contract. My claim is that there is an implicit contract when someone invites you on the plane that they're going to land you.

193
00:19:28.860 --> 00:19:39.860
Look, if you go into the restaurant and order a cup of coffee and they present a bill for that cup of coffee of $5 million, this is a violation of the implicit contract.

194
00:19:39.860 --> 00:19:44.860
So now, the question is, what is the implicit contract in the case of birth?

195
00:19:44.860 --> 00:19:50.860
Well, my claim is that for there to be an implicit contract, there have to be at least two contracting parties.

196
00:19:50.860 --> 00:19:54.860
And at the time of intercourse, if you forget about the father, and the father only comes into this,

197
00:19:54.860 --> 00:20:09.860
There's only the mother and the fetus in the eviction or the abortion scenario, and there cannot be a contract between the mother and the fetus, even an implicit one, because at the time of intercourse, there's only a separate sperm and a separate egg.

198
00:20:09.860 --> 00:20:17.860
There is no fertilized egg for there to be a contract with, so I claim that there is no fertilized egg.

199
00:20:17.860 --> 00:20:26.860
There is no fertilized eggs for there to be a contract with, so I claim that this argument fails.

200
00:20:26.860 --> 00:20:32.860
Another one has to do with positive obligations.

201
00:20:32.860 --> 00:20:36.860
One of the essences of libertarianism is saying that there are no positive obligations.

202
00:20:36.860 --> 00:20:40.860
So let's talk a little bit about this stem cell research business.

203
00:20:40.860 --> 00:20:49.860
Here you have a lot of fertilized eggs, and people are attempting to experiment with them, that is, kill them.

204
00:20:49.860 --> 00:21:01.860
And my claim is that if you are, or take a, before I get into that, take a case, there was this case in, well, let me get off the case in Canada,

205
00:21:01.860 --> 00:21:10.860
Just take a case where I have a baby and I don't want to feed it anymore and I just leave it in its bed and I don't feed it and I let it starve to death.

206
00:21:10.860 --> 00:21:18.860
Have I committed a libertarian crime in not notifying other people that here is a baby that I'm no longer willing to take care of?

207
00:21:18.860 --> 00:21:23.860
Now the libertarian view of babies and ownership is you never can own another human being.

208
00:21:23.860 --> 00:21:26.860
I'm not going to get into voluntary slavery, that's a different issue.

209
00:21:26.860 --> 00:21:36.860
You can't own another human being. You can only own the homesteading rights to it, namely the right to bring it up.

210
00:21:36.860 --> 00:21:39.860
And how do you get the homesteading rights to bring up the baby?

211
00:21:39.860 --> 00:21:44.860
Well, by one, by giving birth to it, and then by caring for it, taking care of it.

212
00:21:44.860 --> 00:21:50.860
So as soon as you're unwilling to take care of it anymore, like you want to now starve it, you've now lost your rights to homestead it.

213
00:21:50.860 --> 00:21:57.860
But is it a positive obligation that you have to go off and notify someone in the common law tradition?

214
00:21:57.860 --> 00:22:07.860
My understanding is that the unwanted baby would be put on the church steps or given to the hospital or given to some charitable organization.

215
00:22:07.860 --> 00:22:18.860
My claim is that this is compatible with the libertarian opposition to positive obligations, and here's my argument.

216
00:22:18.860 --> 00:22:20.860
It has to do with forestalling.

217
00:22:20.860 --> 00:22:23.860
Now, you have to get back into homesteading theory.

218
00:22:23.860 --> 00:22:28.860
The point of homesteading theory is to get all unowned property into the hands of people,

219
00:22:28.860 --> 00:22:31.860
and then we can have a free market with buying and selling.

220
00:22:31.860 --> 00:22:37.860
But suppose what I do is I homestead an area of land that sort of looks like a bagel.

221
00:22:37.860 --> 00:22:40.860
It's, say, 100 miles wide.

222
00:22:40.860 --> 00:22:42.860
The bagel part is 100 miles wide.

223
00:22:42.860 --> 00:22:47.860
And inside, the hole in the bagel is, say, 100 square miles.

224
00:22:47.860 --> 00:22:59.860
Am I allowed to do that? My claim is that I'm not, because if I do that, I'm forestalling the rest of you from getting into that 100-mile-square area, which is the whole naval,

225
00:22:59.860 --> 00:23:08.860
assuming that there's no technology to dig under my land or to build a bridge over it. I'm precluding you. I'm forestalling you from unowned property.

226
00:23:08.860 --> 00:23:16.860
And this is illegitimate. I have to allow you access or egress into there, otherwise I'm violating what I take to be libertarian homesteading theory.

227
00:23:16.860 --> 00:23:20.860
and Homesteading Theory. In other words, I think we libertarians have two problems with Locke.

228
00:23:20.860 --> 00:23:26.860
One, he had this nonsense about leaving as much and as good for anyone else, nonsense.

229
00:23:26.860 --> 00:23:31.860
You grab it all, anything you can homestead. And two, he didn't have this forescaling theory.

230
00:23:31.860 --> 00:23:37.860
Now, let's get back to the baby. What you're doing with that baby that you don't tell anyone else about,

231
00:23:37.860 --> 00:23:43.860
that you're keeping, starving, you're forescaling other people from taking over that baby.

232
00:23:43.860 --> 00:24:13.860
Now we get to the stem cell case. And to me it's a race. If you don't want to take care of a baby or if you don't want to take care of a fertilized egg, what you have to do under the libertarian legal code, as I understand it, is notify other people that here is a human being, a young one, that I have the rights to keep as long as I feed it and care for it, but I'm not going to feed it and care for it. And it's only if no one in the rest of the world wants to take care of it that you're justified in killing it.

233
00:24:13.860 --> 00:24:19.860
There was a case in Canada where a man killed his 10-year-old girl who was very, very sick with all sorts of diseases.

234
00:24:20.860 --> 00:24:25.860
My analysis of that is if he would have first notified everyone else that he no longer wishes to care for her,

235
00:24:25.860 --> 00:24:32.860
and no one else in the 6 billion people on the earth around said, I'll take her, then he could have killed her.

236
00:24:32.860 --> 00:24:34.860
And it would have been consistent with libertarianism.

237
00:24:34.860 --> 00:24:36.860
But he didn't do that notification.

238
00:24:36.860 --> 00:24:42.860
So the stem cell people have to notify the pro-life people and say, look, here we have these fertilized eggs.

239
00:24:42.860 --> 00:24:47.860
If no one takes them, we're going to kill them. We're going to experiment with them.

240
00:24:47.860 --> 00:24:54.860
And now it's a race. Can they build more fertilized eggs than the demand?

241
00:24:54.860 --> 00:24:58.860
It's sort of a race between the supply and the demand side.

242
00:24:58.860 --> 00:25:01.860
And I wrote this on the Lew Rockwell web.

243
00:25:01.860 --> 00:25:06.860
And I got hundreds of letters saying, you know, you're a jerk.

244
00:25:06.860 --> 00:25:09.860
That was the kindest thing.

245
00:25:09.860 --> 00:25:14.860
And there was some young lad whose name I don't remember, but I credit him in the article that I'm writing on this.

246
00:25:14.860 --> 00:25:20.860
If he's here, please let him say who he is. No, I guess he's not here, but it's in my article.

247
00:25:20.860 --> 00:25:25.860
What he said is, look, the pro-life people don't have to promise to bring up all these fertilized eggs.

248
00:25:25.860 --> 00:25:28.860
All they have to do is promise to freeze them.

249
00:25:28.860 --> 00:25:33.860
Freezing them would be to keep them alive and maybe in 20 years we'll have the technology to keep them alive.

250
00:25:33.860 --> 00:25:38.860
So my understanding of the libertarian position on stem cell research is that there will not be any.

251
00:25:38.860 --> 00:25:44.380
because my empirical prediction is that the pro-life types will be able to put

252
00:25:44.380 --> 00:25:52.060
in freezes any number that the experimental types want to create. Okay

253
00:25:52.060 --> 00:25:58.540
another point is on the philosophical business is that all fetuses have the

254
00:25:58.540 --> 00:26:03.540
same rights and in the case of pregnancy due to rape there's not even the

255
00:26:03.540 --> 00:26:08.740
possibility of a contract because rape by definition is coercive activity and

256
00:26:08.740 --> 00:26:14.740
If that baby has rights to live, then all babies have rights to live, since they all have equal rights.

257
00:26:14.740 --> 00:26:23.740
Okay, let me end this section again with my pragmatic point, because I think that's the strongest in somebody's, in many people's view.

258
00:26:23.740 --> 00:26:31.740
It would be better to adopt my eviction, my eviction, the libertarian as I see it, evictionism theory, which was really Murray's theory.

259
00:26:31.740 --> 00:26:35.740
Even if you don't agree with it philosophically, because of the pragmatic elements of it.

260
00:26:35.740 --> 00:26:44.740
I love it. Namely, as time goes on, we will save more and more people, young people, and eventually we'll save them all, medical technology willing.

261
00:26:44.740 --> 00:26:51.740
Okay, my third point is reparations.

262
00:26:51.740 --> 00:27:00.740
Now, this is Guy Randall Robinson floating around, who is saying that all blacks should get reparations, and it's trillions of dollars from all whites,

263
00:27:00.740 --> 00:27:05.740
And all blacks should get reparations from all whites, whether the whites were here or not.

264
00:27:05.740 --> 00:27:11.740
If you're a guy from Portugal and you come over to this country now, you owe reparations since you're white.

265
00:27:11.740 --> 00:27:18.740
If you're a black person who comes from somewhere else, you are owed reparations even though you were never enslaved here, even though your grandparents weren't.

266
00:27:18.740 --> 00:27:27.740
And in reaction, people like David Horowitz, Mike Levin and Paul Craig Roberts have written Mises saying that these people are all wrong.

267
00:27:27.740 --> 00:27:45.740
These people, Horowitz, Levin and Roberts, I take as schmodels. They are right-wing, semi-demi libertarians, and what I'm now going to do is, in a continuing effort to distinguish libertarians from right-wing types or conservatives, is to criticize their views.

268
00:27:45.740 --> 00:27:52.740
I think their views are better than Raynal Robinson's, but just because I don't agree with Raynal Robinson doesn't mean I agree with the conservatives.

269
00:27:52.740 --> 00:27:59.740
Okay, so let's get into this return of stolen property business. What's going on here?

270
00:27:59.740 --> 00:28:08.740
Many of the conservatives think that reparations is anti-property rights. That per se, if you have a reparation, you're against property rights.

271
00:28:08.740 --> 00:28:16.740
To my way of thinking, nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, reparations are part and parcel of private property rights.

272
00:28:16.740 --> 00:28:20.740
Reparations are merely the return of stolen property through time.

273
00:28:20.740 --> 00:28:24.740
If I steal somebody's watch, David is sitting in the front here,

274
00:28:24.740 --> 00:28:29.740
and if I grab his watch and I'm forced to return it,

275
00:28:29.740 --> 00:28:31.740
that would be consistently property rights.

276
00:28:31.740 --> 00:28:35.740
Now suppose I steal his watch, and I keep it, and we both die,

277
00:28:35.740 --> 00:28:40.740
and I give it to my grandson, and his grandson comes to my grandson

278
00:28:40.740 --> 00:28:45.740
and says, you know, that's Grandpa David's watch to my grandson.

279
00:28:45.740 --> 00:28:50.900
give it back. In the ordinary course of events had Walter not stolen the watch

280
00:28:50.900 --> 00:28:54.700
from David, David's grandson would have had it instead Walter's grandson has it.

281
00:28:54.700 --> 00:29:00.140
Now to me it matters not one whit whether I return the watch to David or

282
00:29:00.140 --> 00:29:05.380
my grandson returns the watch to his grandson. In both cases private

283
00:29:05.380 --> 00:29:09.740
property rights are being respected not denigrated. So don't think that

284
00:29:09.740 --> 00:29:15.100
reparations are somehow incompatible with private property rights. Now of course

285
00:29:15.100 --> 00:29:28.100
David's grandson, the burden of proof is upon him if he wants to make this claim, because the burden of proof is on he who wants to overturn property.

286
00:29:28.100 --> 00:29:37.100
Possession is not intensely wrong. The excellent property owner is assumed to be the rightful property owner unless and until someone can undermine this.

287
00:29:37.100 --> 00:29:57.100
And one way to undermine this is to show, you know, a picture of the grandfather with the watch or an inscription or something like that and that would be evidence and then you would have to force my grandson to return the watch to David because we have a picture of David, you know, blatantly wearing his watch, say that would be the evidence.

288
00:29:57.100 --> 00:30:11.100
Okay, it's pretty clear with watches. What about slavery? Well, slavery, and again I'm not talking about voluntary slavery, I'm talking about this slavery that occurred in this country before 1865, was theft.

289
00:30:11.100 --> 00:30:19.100
Libertarians analyze these things, I think, in that way. We regard murder as the theft of a life, we regard slavery as the theft of labor services.

290
00:30:19.100 --> 00:30:24.820
Well, what should have happened in 1866 or 1865 whenever the war of northern

291
00:30:24.820 --> 00:30:29.380
aggression ended or the first war of southern secession I think is as it's

292
00:30:29.380 --> 00:30:39.920
being called now. What should have happened then was that the bad guys, the

293
00:30:39.920 --> 00:30:47.300
slave owners, should have been forced to compensate the slaves. One, the rabid

294
00:30:47.300 --> 00:30:55.300
The vision would have been that they should have been enslaved by the slaves because the, you know, this two teeth for a tooth is punishment theory.

295
00:30:55.300 --> 00:30:59.300
At least the crime for kidnapping is to be kidnapped.

296
00:30:59.300 --> 00:31:03.300
The crime for slave-homing or slave-arming is to be enslaved.

297
00:31:03.300 --> 00:31:05.300
That would seem to be just.

298
00:31:05.300 --> 00:31:07.300
But these people are beyond our reach.

299
00:31:07.300 --> 00:31:09.300
They've all died and it's, you know, 2002.

300
00:31:09.300 --> 00:31:11.300
We can't get them.

301
00:31:11.300 --> 00:31:18.000
But there are plantations, mainly in the South, but few in the North too, it doesn't matter where they are.

302
00:31:18.000 --> 00:31:20.600
There are plantations that those guys had.

303
00:31:20.600 --> 00:31:26.100
When they should have been enslaved, those plantations should have gone to the slaves.

304
00:31:26.100 --> 00:31:32.200
The slaves were the proper owners of it, they built it, or at least large parts of it should have gone to them.

305
00:31:32.200 --> 00:31:37.300
Instead, those plantations and acreages stayed with the white children,

306
00:31:37.300 --> 00:32:07.300
And there are great-grandchildren of black slaves, and if it's justified for David's grandson to come to my grandson and get his grandfather's watch back, then it is also justified, I claim, for the black great-grandchild to come to the white great-grandchild and say, look, those plantations that you got from your grandfather, you never should have got from him in the first place. I don't consider you a criminal.

307
00:32:07.300 --> 00:32:13.300
you didn't engage in slave owning but you're now holding land and property

308
00:32:13.300 --> 00:32:15.940
and plantations that you never should have got from your grandfather in

309
00:32:15.940 --> 00:32:20.060
inheritance and should have gone to my grandfather and he would have given it to

310
00:32:20.060 --> 00:32:26.020
me in inheritance okay what's wrong with this what's some criticisms with this

311
00:32:26.020 --> 00:32:30.740
one of them is that this is ex post facto law because at that time slavery was

312
00:32:30.740 --> 00:32:39.740
is legal, but I don't believe in legal positivism, whatever the law is is right, I'm a libertarian.

313
00:32:39.740 --> 00:32:45.740
I believe that libertarian law is the proper law now and in the future and in the past.

314
00:32:45.740 --> 00:32:49.740
I believe in the Nuremberg trials, which was also ex post facto.

315
00:32:49.740 --> 00:32:54.740
According to Nazi law, it was okay for the Nazis to do, it was a virtue to do, for them to do what they did.

316
00:32:54.740 --> 00:32:58.740
According to US law, it was a virtue to, or at least legal, to own a slave.

317
00:32:58.740 --> 00:33:12.740
I don't give a fig for that law. I have a higher law in mind, it's the libertarian law, and I'm willing to go to any society that's incompatible with libertarian law as a libertarian and say, your law is wrong, the libertarian law is right, we're going to set things right.

318
00:33:12.740 --> 00:33:20.740
And time doesn't matter, there's no statute of limitations on justice. There's another claim of mine which is obviously debatable.

319
00:33:20.740 --> 00:33:25.740
Now this is a very radical philosophical position that I'm putting forth before you.

320
00:33:25.740 --> 00:33:32.740
However, the effects of this would be rather less radical, more conservative.

321
00:33:32.740 --> 00:33:37.740
They don't think that all the property rights that somehow the Indians once had will go back to them,

322
00:33:37.740 --> 00:33:40.740
or that all the plantations will go back to them,

323
00:33:40.740 --> 00:33:45.740
because I return again to the position of possession is nine-tenths of the law,

324
00:33:45.740 --> 00:33:49.740
and the burden of proof is on he who would overturn property rights.

325
00:33:49.740 --> 00:33:55.740
And the point is that 150 years later, it's hard to meet this burden of proof.

326
00:33:55.740 --> 00:34:05.740
There might be a few cases where some black person can come up with a Bible that lists the grandfather and which plantation they were on

327
00:34:05.740 --> 00:34:13.740
and can say, look, you know, this is proof, this is written proof, and we're going to claim our one 500th of that plantation

328
00:34:13.740 --> 00:34:18.740
given that there were 500 slaves and my grandfather or the black grandfather was one of those slaves.

329
00:34:18.740 --> 00:34:32.740
and Slave. Now, the conservatives say it's okay for Japanese Americans, for Cubans, for Soviet people,

330
00:34:32.740 --> 00:34:38.740
the people in East Germany to have reparations for the property that was stolen from them by the communist regimes,

331
00:34:38.740 --> 00:34:42.740
but somehow it's not okay for blacks or Indians or whoever it is.

332
00:34:42.740 --> 00:34:46.740
And it seems to be the idea that if the people are still alive, then you can have it,

333
00:34:46.740 --> 00:34:50.740
But if they've died then somehow the reparations are not valid

334
00:34:50.740 --> 00:34:57.740
But on the assumption that the, what do you call it, the inheritance would go along racial lines

335
00:34:57.740 --> 00:35:01.740
I think it's very clear who is the legitimate owner of those things

336
00:35:01.740 --> 00:35:05.740
I want to read a quote from Murray Rothbard on this

337
00:35:05.740 --> 00:35:12.740
And he says, suppose that Jones, Jones is now the white grandson, although Murray is talking about a watch

338
00:35:12.740 --> 00:35:17.300
Land, and I'll be talking about land.

339
00:35:17.300 --> 00:35:22.260
Suppose that Jones is not the criminal, not the man who stole the watch, but that he had

340
00:35:22.260 --> 00:35:27.220
inherited or had innocently purchased it from the thief.

341
00:35:27.220 --> 00:35:30.780
And suppose, of course, that neither the victim nor theirs can be found.

342
00:35:30.780 --> 00:35:35.420
In that case, the disappearance of the victim means that the stolen property comes properly

343
00:35:35.420 --> 00:35:39.840
into a state of non-ownership, non-ownership.

344
00:35:39.840 --> 00:35:51.840
But we have seen that any good in the state of non-ownership with no legitimate owner of its own, of its title, reverts as a legitimate property to the first person who comes along and uses it.

345
00:35:51.840 --> 00:35:56.840
Would you like a cough drop, sir?

346
00:35:56.840 --> 00:35:59.840
You're welcome.

347
00:35:59.840 --> 00:36:02.840
They don't call me Doc Block for nothing.

348
00:36:02.840 --> 00:36:05.840
You know, they say if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

349
00:36:05.840 --> 00:36:16.840
So all I have is cough drops and I'm trying to cure the ills of the world, where was I?

350
00:36:16.840 --> 00:36:21.240
But we have seen that any good in a state of non-ownership with no legitimate owner of

351
00:36:21.240 --> 00:36:25.600
its title reverts its legitimate property to the first person to come along and use it

352
00:36:25.600 --> 00:36:29.960
to appropriate this now unowned resource for human use.

353
00:36:29.960 --> 00:36:37.560
But this first person is clearly Jones, the white grandson or son, who had been using it all along.

354
00:36:37.560 --> 00:36:43.560
Therefore, we conclude that even though the property was originally stolen, that if the victim or his heirs cannot be found,

355
00:36:43.560 --> 00:36:52.560
and if the current possessor was not the actual criminal who stole the property, then title to that property belongs properly, justly and ethically to its current possessor.

356
00:36:52.560 --> 00:37:04.560
To sum up, for any property currently claimed and used, A, if we know clearly that there was no criminal origin to its current title, then obviously the current title is legitimate, just and valid.

357
00:37:04.560 --> 00:37:15.560
B, if we don't know whether the current title had any criminal origins but can't find out either way, then the hypothetically unowned property reverts instantaneously and justly to its current possessor.

358
00:37:15.560 --> 00:37:31.560
C, if we do know that the title is originally criminal, but can't find the victim or his heirs, then C1, if the current title holder was not the criminal aggressor against the property, then it reverts to him justly as the first owner of the hypothetically unowned property.

359
00:37:31.560 --> 00:37:44.560
But C2, if the current title holder is himself the criminal or one of the criminals who stole the property, then clearly he is properly to be deprived of it, and then it reverts to the first man who takes it out of his unowned state and appropriates it for his use.

360
00:37:44.560 --> 00:37:48.000
And finally, D, here's the relevant case.

361
00:37:48.000 --> 00:37:49.960
If the current title is the result of crime

362
00:37:49.960 --> 00:37:52.200
and the victim of Mises can be found,

363
00:37:52.200 --> 00:37:54.400
then the title properly reverts immediately

364
00:37:54.400 --> 00:37:56.880
to the latter without compensation to the criminal

365
00:37:56.880 --> 00:37:59.800
or to the other holders of the unjust title.

366
00:37:59.800 --> 00:38:04.960
So the white grandson is not a criminal,

367
00:38:04.960 --> 00:38:07.040
but his title to that property is illegitimate

368
00:38:07.040 --> 00:38:10.480
if it can be proved that it was the property of someone else,

369
00:38:10.480 --> 00:38:12.160
would be the way I would interpret that.

370
00:38:14.560 --> 00:38:22.560
Black reparation leaders ought to embrace libertarianism. I'll wait on that.

371
00:38:22.560 --> 00:38:27.560
First, it will help blacks apart from reparations.

372
00:38:27.560 --> 00:38:31.560
See, the view of Milton Friedman and other utilitarians is a weird one.

373
00:38:31.560 --> 00:38:37.560
His view is that, look, land is only 10% of the GDP, give or take.

374
00:38:37.560 --> 00:38:39.560
So why all the fuss over reparation of land?

375
00:38:39.560 --> 00:38:47.080
of Land, let him keep it, you get more welfare, economic benefits for blacks if instead of

376
00:38:47.080 --> 00:38:51.720
worrying about reparations you worry about minimum wages or unions or tariffs or whatever,

377
00:38:51.720 --> 00:38:56.880
then he's probably right. But the word justice and the word Milton Friedman don't belong

378
00:38:56.880 --> 00:39:02.880
in the same sentence. He doesn't understand what justice is. It's true that it may not

379
00:39:02.880 --> 00:39:07.840
be utilitarian to insist upon reparations, but libertarians aren't utilitarians. We don't

380
00:39:07.840 --> 00:39:11.240
I don't care if it's utilitarian, now we're asking is it just?

381
00:39:11.240 --> 00:39:16.840
And I've debated with him on this and he just has the gene for justice missing from him or something.

382
00:39:16.840 --> 00:39:22.240
Okay, so the first reason that they ought to embrace libertarianism, ha-ha,

383
00:39:22.240 --> 00:39:24.840
is that it'll help blacks apart from reparations.

384
00:39:24.840 --> 00:39:31.440
Secondly, it supports their claim on principle, whereas the conservatives reject their claim on principle.

385
00:39:31.440 --> 00:39:35.240
And thirdly, that in some very few cases in practice,

386
00:39:35.240 --> 00:39:41.240
will actually be some transfer of plantations from whites to blacks.

387
00:39:41.240 --> 00:39:47.240
Okay, now I'm going to consider objections from Levin, Horowitz and Roberts.

388
00:39:47.240 --> 00:39:50.240
Quote from Levin, quote,

389
00:39:50.240 --> 00:39:59.240
Payback for manumitted slaves is owed only by their former owners, unquote.

390
00:39:59.240 --> 00:40:04.240
Payback for manumitted slaves is owed only by their former owners.

391
00:40:04.240 --> 00:40:06.240
My claim is, no, grandsons too.

392
00:40:07.240 --> 00:40:15.240
Why not those grandsons? They've got the stuff illegitimately, if it can be proven, which in most cases it can't, but if it can, why not?

393
00:40:16.240 --> 00:40:24.240
Okay, second, Horowitz. Now, Horowitz has ten points, many of which I agree with about it, and I won't mention those, but there's an interesting thing.

394
00:40:25.240 --> 00:40:30.240
Well, I mean, in the interest of time, I don't want to say, oh, point three I agree, point four I agree.

395
00:40:30.240 --> 00:41:00.240
1.4, I agree. Now these 10 points have an interesting background. What he did is he put these, or he didn't put these, he asked the newspapers at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and all those great places to run his 10 points opposing Randall Robinson and they all refused or virtually all refused and then he made a big fuss of this. So conservatives aren't all bad. This was good that he showed the Harvard, Princeton and Yale types for what they are, but now let me talk about the points that he makes. First,

396
00:41:00.240 --> 00:41:09.240
Blacks first enslaved blacks, namely the first enslavers of blacks were blacks.

397
00:41:09.240 --> 00:41:12.240
And for Horowitz, this is a reductio.

398
00:41:12.240 --> 00:41:19.240
Well, it might be a reductio to Randall Robinson's thesis, but it's certainly not a reductio to the libertarian theory of reparations.

399
00:41:19.240 --> 00:41:21.240
So what if blacks owned blacks?

400
00:41:21.240 --> 00:41:25.240
This is not a racist kind of a thing that if you're black you owe or you don't owe.

401
00:41:25.240 --> 00:41:30.040
It's you owe if your grandfather stole from my grandfather.

402
00:41:30.040 --> 00:41:39.240
Well, if a black was a slave owner, then that black's grandson owes the other black who had the grandfather who was the slave.

403
00:41:39.240 --> 00:41:43.240
So it's no reductio for the libertarian position.

404
00:41:43.240 --> 00:41:49.640
The second one is Randall Robinson says all whites benefited from slavery, all blacks for harm.

405
00:41:49.640 --> 00:41:52.540
Horowitz says whites didn't benefit.

406
00:41:52.540 --> 00:41:56.260
My way of thinking is it's irrelevant whether you benefit or not.

407
00:41:56.260 --> 00:41:59.260
Benefit is not the key. Theft is the key.

408
00:41:59.260 --> 00:42:08.300
Look, if there's a frost in California, the orange growers in Florida benefit,

409
00:42:08.300 --> 00:42:11.260
but they don't owe anything just because you benefit.

410
00:42:11.260 --> 00:42:13.100
Right? Isn't that right?

411
00:42:13.100 --> 00:42:16.180
Look, I take a shower once a month whether I need it or not,

412
00:42:16.180 --> 00:42:17.820
and you people benefit.

413
00:42:17.820 --> 00:42:26.820
Benefit, near benefit or loss is irrelevant. It's theft that concerns the libertarian.

414
00:42:26.820 --> 00:42:33.820
Another one is black income in the US is greater than black income in Africa. There's another benefit.

415
00:42:33.820 --> 00:42:39.820
Well, it's true. Black income in the US is better than black income in Africa.

416
00:42:39.820 --> 00:42:46.820
And in some sense, we did the blacks a favor by enslaving them. It's not something that I advocate as a libertarian,

417
00:42:46.820 --> 00:42:51.820
I'm not a libertarian, but it's something that ex post I can look back upon and say, yes, Horowitz is right.

418
00:42:51.820 --> 00:42:54.820
However, this benefit doesn't matter.

419
00:42:54.820 --> 00:43:01.820
Suppose a man rates a woman, and it's later proven that had he not raped her, she would have been run over by a truck.

420
00:43:01.820 --> 00:43:09.820
Well, he benefited her, right?

421
00:43:09.820 --> 00:43:13.820
I mean, this isn't politically correct, so don't tell the people where, you know, you shouldn't.

422
00:43:13.820 --> 00:43:19.820
But, you know, just because he benefited doesn't mean that he's not guilty of rape.

423
00:43:19.820 --> 00:43:24.820
So, benefits benefit. You know, that's irrelevant.

424
00:43:24.820 --> 00:43:29.820
Okay, another one is that there are a lot of rich blacks, according to Horowitz, like Oprah Winfrey.

425
00:43:29.820 --> 00:43:31.820
She's rich. Who could deny that? She's rich.

426
00:43:31.820 --> 00:43:37.820
Therefore, she doesn't deserve to have property returned to her that was stolen from her grandfather?

427
00:43:37.820 --> 00:43:41.820
This is outright Marxist egalitarianism, right?

428
00:43:41.820 --> 00:43:46.420
that if you're rich, you're not owed? You can't be a rich creditor?

429
00:43:46.420 --> 00:43:50.920
I mean, that's the depths of the poverty that these conservatives, these schmodels,

430
00:43:50.920 --> 00:43:56.120
would be dragging us down to. They don't speak for us.

431
00:43:56.120 --> 00:44:01.220
Another one is that welfare has occurred, and this is already...

432
00:44:01.220 --> 00:44:07.520
In other words, what he's saying is that reparations have already taken place in the form of welfare.

433
00:44:07.520 --> 00:44:11.620
And my view is, well, first of all,

434
00:44:11.620 --> 00:44:16.620
This welfare wasn't reparations. It was reparations with an asterisk.

435
00:44:16.620 --> 00:44:21.620
When we gave them this welfare, we insisted that there be no man in the house, which ruined the black family.

436
00:44:21.620 --> 00:44:28.620
And according to Charles Murray, you know that business with the frog, if you put the frog in boiling water, it'll jump out.

437
00:44:28.620 --> 00:44:32.620
Slavery was like boiling water. The black family jumped right out of that.

438
00:44:32.620 --> 00:44:38.620
The black family was just as intact as the white family within a percentage point or two after slavery,

439
00:44:38.620 --> 00:44:45.620
Up until the welfare system came in and that's sort of like boiling the frog slowly and the welfare system ruined the black family.

440
00:44:45.620 --> 00:44:51.620
Now the incidence of illegitimacy in some cities is 70% among blacks.

441
00:44:51.620 --> 00:45:03.620
Also, it wasn't reparations because it came from the entire society and it went to all blacks or went to all poor people and blacks were overrepresented among poor people.

442
00:45:03.620 --> 00:45:13.620
That's not return of stolen property. Return of stolen property is you have to prove with some written proof that your grandfather was a slave here and that this guy has got that plantation and give it back.

443
00:45:13.620 --> 00:45:22.620
Another one is that war was over secession, not slavery as we learned from Tom D'Arenzo and Jeff Hummel and other people.

444
00:45:22.620 --> 00:45:31.620
Another one is that the northern soldiers helped get rid of slavery and therefore that was part of reparations.

445
00:45:31.620 --> 00:45:38.020
Just because some whites help some blacks doesn't mean that the whites who owe money paid the blacks who are owed money.

446
00:45:38.020 --> 00:45:40.220
Again, that's the sort of racism business.

447
00:45:40.220 --> 00:45:45.820
Now, I'm almost out of time and I have this long, long thing about Roberts and I'm going to skip that.

448
00:45:45.820 --> 00:45:49.420
He's a jerk, we don't have to.

449
00:45:49.420 --> 00:45:55.820
And I want to get to my fourth topic and that's this economic schmodels.

450
00:45:55.820 --> 00:46:04.820
Now, the chief economic schmodels from whom we have to distinguish ourselves, especially at George Mason University and other places like that, are the public choices.

451
00:46:04.820 --> 00:46:10.820
Tom DiLorenzo and I have published, I think, three articles on this stuff, and we've got two more in the pipeline.

452
00:46:10.820 --> 00:46:21.820
And one of the things, one of the problems with public choice is they are trying to, or their intellectual strength is having the effect of

453
00:46:21.820 --> 00:46:29.400
of Submerging Austrianism or Submerging Libertarian Economics.

454
00:46:29.400 --> 00:46:34.060
Language is important, and if these guys are perverting language, just like the feminists

455
00:46:34.060 --> 00:46:38.740
are perverting language, then it ties ill for us.

456
00:46:38.740 --> 00:46:44.740
I mean, if the feminists had their way, we couldn't say he, we'd have to say he or she.

457
00:46:44.740 --> 00:46:46.540
Well, that's the modals.

458
00:46:46.540 --> 00:46:50.820
The schmodals are doing something also even more insidious, because I think more people

459
00:46:50.820 --> 00:46:56.820
If you're aware of the danger of he and she and all, then they are of, let me give you a few examples.

460
00:46:56.820 --> 00:47:02.820
What you mean by rent-seeking is theft. The way this word is used is theft.

461
00:47:02.820 --> 00:47:05.820
And yet you're using the ancient and honorable word of rent collection.

462
00:47:05.820 --> 00:47:10.820
You're demeaning landlords or if you're talking about economic rent, you're demeaning economic rent.

463
00:47:10.820 --> 00:47:17.820
You shouldn't call it rent-seeking if what you mean by it is theft or booty-seeking or taking or something like that.

464
00:47:17.820 --> 00:47:25.820
Another one is this political marketplace. This is very, very prevalent in economics, especially among public choices.

465
00:47:25.820 --> 00:47:37.820
There's no political marketplace, that's theft. And they call it political marketplaces to conflate all sorts of, well no, just one distinction between voluntary and coercive action.

466
00:47:37.820 --> 00:47:45.820
But that is the main libertarian distinction between voluntary and coercive action. Another one is they call it conceptual unanimity.

467
00:47:45.820 --> 00:47:50.820
When you hear conceptual unanimity, check your wallet.

468
00:47:50.820 --> 00:47:52.820
There's no conceptual unanimity.

469
00:47:52.820 --> 00:47:55.820
I mean, either the goddamn thing is unanimous or it's not.

470
00:47:55.820 --> 00:48:01.820
And they're trying to get across this justification of the state on the basis of conceptual unanimity.

471
00:48:01.820 --> 00:48:03.820
Others are collective goods.

472
00:48:03.820 --> 00:48:08.820
Collective is, you know, a bunch of friends get together and pool the restaurant bill.

473
00:48:08.820 --> 00:48:12.820
What they mean is that if it's collective, it's, you know, it's government.

474
00:48:12.820 --> 00:48:14.820
Another one is democracy.

475
00:48:14.820 --> 00:48:16.820
They're always on and on about democracy.

476
00:48:16.820 --> 00:48:22.820
Well, Hans Hoppe is the point person, no, not the point person, the point man, on that particular issue.

477
00:48:22.820 --> 00:48:26.820
He's shown very eloquently that, you know, what democracy really is.

478
00:48:26.820 --> 00:48:28.820
Tyranny of the majority.

479
00:48:28.820 --> 00:48:31.820
Public sector is another one.

480
00:48:31.820 --> 00:48:32.820
Collective goods.

481
00:48:32.820 --> 00:48:35.820
Now, the one about human capital I'm not sure of.

482
00:48:35.820 --> 00:48:39.820
I have to think and maybe ask for your advice on this.

483
00:48:39.820 --> 00:48:42.820
On the one hand, you sort of see what it means.

484
00:48:42.820 --> 00:48:53.820
So on the other hand, it was created by Gary Becker, and Gary Becker was my thesis advisor and you know, there's lots of problems there with that, that I'll get into sometime.

485
00:48:53.820 --> 00:49:06.820
On the one hand, you can see what he means. On the other hand, it stills and on the third bad hand, it's denigrating the structure of production and putting it in this neoclassical supply and demand instead of structure of production.

486
00:49:06.820 --> 00:49:12.820
Now, we've been very careful about exploitation of the Marxists and scabs of the leftists,

487
00:49:12.820 --> 00:49:17.820
but I think it behooves us to be careful of the schmodels as well.

488
00:49:17.820 --> 00:49:22.820
Who is it saying the British are coming, the British are coming, Patrick Henry or somebody?

489
00:49:22.820 --> 00:49:26.820
I'm not a historian.

490
00:49:26.820 --> 00:49:31.820
Well, I say the schmodels are coming, the schmodels are coming. Be careful. Thank you.

491
00:49:36.820 --> 00:49:50.820
Well, after such a non-controversial lecture, it's a good time we don't have much time for questions. Tom Wood.

492
00:49:50.820 --> 00:50:02.820
Okay. Dr. Block, my question is as follows. I think it's possible to have something that is basically good, like Rothbardian property rights analysis, but not good in every single situation.

493
00:50:02.820 --> 00:50:09.820
For instance, there are 17th and 18th century philosophers who thought they could use math and geometry to explain morality, for instance.

494
00:50:09.820 --> 00:50:16.820
I mean, that was not helpful. There are economists who think they can use math and calculus today in their field, we know it's not useful.

495
00:50:16.820 --> 00:50:20.820
But they're taking something that we know is good, they're just simply trying to apply it to everything.

496
00:50:20.820 --> 00:50:24.820
Likewise, science is good, but if I wrote my fiancé a letter saying,

497
00:50:24.820 --> 00:50:30.820
Dear Heather, I love you very much and I've organized the 16 ways in which I love you in the four categories.

498
00:50:30.820 --> 00:50:35.820
I get punched in the face.

499
00:50:35.820 --> 00:50:40.820
The love I have for my town, I can't explain with a mathematical equation.

500
00:50:40.820 --> 00:50:45.820
But that doesn't mean math is bad. It simply means you can't extend it to every aspect of life.

501
00:50:45.820 --> 00:50:50.820
So my point is that I don't think that those of us who disagree with your analysis

502
00:50:50.820 --> 00:50:55.820
about women and their children in terms of parasites and eviction,

503
00:50:55.820 --> 00:51:02.820
I completely reject that way of thinking, but I don't think that therefore I'm any less a part of the movement.

504
00:51:02.820 --> 00:51:06.820
Because on that point, I think the extension of property rights analysis is just protest.

505
00:51:06.820 --> 00:51:10.820
You know what I mean? I don't want to feel like I'm being thrumped out of the movement for that.

506
00:51:13.820 --> 00:51:18.820
Well, I'm a big tent kind of guy.

507
00:51:18.820 --> 00:51:30.820
Look, when I first came into this movement, it consisted of people in Murray's living room, and there must have been about 10 or 12 of us in the whole world.

508
00:51:30.820 --> 00:51:38.820
And now there are only tens of thousands. I'd like to see millions. So I'm not trying to say that you're not a libertarian.

509
00:51:38.820 --> 00:51:47.820
I believe that anyone who answers the libertarian quiz, that smallest political quiz in the upper right-hand quadrant,

510
00:51:47.820 --> 00:51:51.820
which I'm sure would encompass everyone here is a libertarian.

511
00:51:51.820 --> 00:51:53.820
I'm not trying to drum anyone out of the movement.

512
00:51:53.820 --> 00:51:59.820
What I'm trying to do, as you accurately see, is to apply Rothbardianism to the ends of the earth.

513
00:51:59.820 --> 00:52:03.820
Now, if I can be shown that it doesn't work, I'll stop.

514
00:52:03.820 --> 00:52:05.820
There are some issues where I disagree with Murray.

515
00:52:05.820 --> 00:52:08.820
I haven't mentioned them here. I didn't think it was the appropriate point.

516
00:52:08.820 --> 00:52:14.820
But you can't get away with the criticism of applying Rothbardianism to everywhere by giving me these analogies.

517
00:52:14.820 --> 00:52:20.820
You have to say, well, look, Rothbardism doesn't work here, and you're not seeing that, or at least you haven't now.

518
00:52:20.820 --> 00:52:26.820
And, you know, I look forward to something, getting something in writing from you. If you can show me I'm wrong, I'm not a Rothbardian on that issue.

519
00:52:26.820 --> 00:52:36.820
So I don't have this religious cultish thing, you know, Rothbard uberallist. You have to apply him, you know, otherwise you're evil.

520
00:52:36.820 --> 00:52:43.820
But on the other hand, Murray is brilliant, and I try to apply him, and if it doesn't work, then I stop.

521
00:52:43.820 --> 00:52:56.820
I'm not going to stop, but until I'm shown that it's wrong, I'm not going to stop because you can't send your fiancé a certain letter, and maybe you're wrong with that. I don't know. There's methodological individualism here.

522
00:52:56.820 --> 00:53:06.820
When you talk about... You shouldn't have called on him.

523
00:53:06.820 --> 00:53:12.820
With reparations, which I prefer to call restitution, it seems to me that you're engaging in theft.

524
00:53:12.820 --> 00:53:18.820
And the reason is that what you want to do is return the land.

525
00:53:18.820 --> 00:53:23.820
Now you said before that that what was stolen was the labor services.

526
00:53:23.820 --> 00:53:35.820
What the normal payment for labor services is money, so it seems to me that if a debt was owed at the time of a plantation, the owner should have had to compensate them in money.

527
00:53:35.820 --> 00:53:42.820
If he had a large enough bank account that he didn't have to sell his land, he gives the slaves the money and that's the end of it.

528
00:53:42.820 --> 00:53:50.820
Now if he dies, the debt passes on down to his children, but provided only that they have inherited more money from him than the debt.

529
00:53:50.820 --> 00:54:19.820
I agree with you partially, insofar as they don't have enough money, then we go to the land. But I would agree with you, if you could get the value of what they stole, with the appropriate interest rate and all, and the grandson had it in money, he could give it to him in money.

530
00:54:20.820 --> 00:54:28.820
So I spoke loosely and I stand corrected by you. It need not be land. It could be any valuable consideration.

531
00:54:28.820 --> 00:54:36.820
I was wondering if your reparations analysis would apply to other instances of theft, for example, taxation.

532
00:54:36.820 --> 00:54:43.820
Can we get our money back from the people who have been receiving the tax money for the past 70 years?

533
00:54:43.820 --> 00:54:54.820
Oh, you're darn tooting. I've got an article coming out of, I forget what I call it, something about stringing them up by certain parts of their anatomy.

534
00:54:54.820 --> 00:55:02.820
And it certainly follows that, yes, taxes are theft and reparations should be made from the ruling class to the victimized group. Absolutely.

535
00:55:02.820 --> 00:55:07.820
I don't regard that as a reductio. I regard that as a wonderful implication of what I'm saying.

536
00:55:07.820 --> 00:55:27.820
Just to follow up a little bit on the first question that some of this is epicycling, trying to apply a concept that is very much at home some place to other places where it's not.

537
00:55:27.820 --> 00:55:43.820
I hate the word eviction. Usually when you evict somebody, you first give them a notice, you have some sort of a relationship where a lease specifies all sorts of procedures and so on, but you can't do that with a fetus or a unborn child or whatever you want to call it.

538
00:55:43.820 --> 00:55:57.820
So this is why some of us are uncomfortable applying those concepts that have a perfectly good natural application in certain contexts with adults negotiating with each other, signing leases, contracts, and so on.

539
00:55:57.820 --> 00:56:12.820
And then suddenly it's being applied to these unconscious beings that are being eventually not evicted but extracted from the womb and put out there to die.

540
00:56:12.820 --> 00:56:20.820
I don't know exactly whether that's a good language, but I do have a sense that the other language is unfitting.

541
00:56:20.820 --> 00:56:27.820
Well, I might be convinced to change the word from eviction to whatever it is we do with trespasses,

542
00:56:27.820 --> 00:56:30.820
and maybe we don't evict trespasses, maybe we expel them.

543
00:56:30.820 --> 00:56:34.820
Judith Jarvis Thompson had this wonderful case where you wake up in the morning

544
00:56:34.820 --> 00:56:38.820
and there's an umbilical cord attached from your kidney to some guy in bed with you,

545
00:56:38.820 --> 00:56:46.820
with you, and you wake him up and you say, you know, how'd you get here? He said, I don't know. I went to bed last night in the hospital and I woke up here. I'm innocent.

546
00:56:46.820 --> 00:56:56.820
Does the person, do you now, who are now attached to this person, have the obligation not to detach yourself from him or evict him from you or expel him from you?

547
00:56:56.820 --> 00:57:03.820
I think you do. I think it's a perfectly good extrapolation of Murray Rothbard's property rights to a very ticklish question.

548
00:57:03.820 --> 00:57:07.820
I've never heard a better analysis of the abortion issue.

549
00:57:07.820 --> 00:57:11.820
I might be convinced that eviction isn't the right word, but then I would use expalation,

550
00:57:11.820 --> 00:57:16.820
or whatever other word that would be like that, what you do to trespassers.

551
00:57:16.820 --> 00:57:18.820
That's all we're talking about.

552
00:57:18.820 --> 00:57:26.820
Applause