WEBVTT NOTE 5. Involuntary Servitude 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000 Chapter 5 Involuntary Servitude 2 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:19.000 If there is anything a libertarian must be squarely and totally against, it is involuntary servitude, forced labor, an act which denies the most elemental right of self-ownership. 3 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:29.000 Liberty and slavery have ever been recognized to be polar opposites. The libertarian, therefore, is totally opposed to slavery. 4 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:37.000 There is one exception, the punishment of criminals who had themselves aggressed against or enslaved their victims. 5 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:47.000 Such punishment in a libertarian system would at least involve forcing the criminal to work in order to pay restitution to his victim. 6 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:52.000 An academic question nowadays, one might object, but is it really? 7 00:00:52.000 --> 00:01:08.000 For what is slavery but a. forcing people to work at tasks the slave master wishes, and b. paying them either pure subsistence or, at any rate, less than the slave would have accepted voluntarily? 8 00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:13.000 In short, forced labor at below free market wages. 9 00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:21.000 Thus, are we really free of slavery, of involuntary servitude in present-day America? 10 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:28.000 Is the prohibition against involuntary servitude of the Thirteenth Amendment really being obeyed? 11 00:01:28.000 --> 00:01:36.000 Significantly, the Thirteenth Amendment's only exception is the punishment of convicted criminals mentioned previously. 12 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:42.000 Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, 13 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:48.060 Whereof the party shall have been duly convicted shall exist within the United States or any 14 00:01:48.060 --> 00:01:53.480 place subject to their jurisdiction. 15 00:01:53.480 --> 00:01:57.820 Conscription Surely, for one example, there can be no more 16 00:01:57.820 --> 00:02:04.560 blatant case of involuntary servitude than our entire system of conscription. 17 00:02:04.560 --> 00:02:10.160 Every youth is forced to register with the selective service system when he turns 18. 18 00:02:10.160 --> 00:02:15.680 He is compelled to carry his draft card at all times, and, at whatever time the federal 19 00:02:15.680 --> 00:02:22.000 government deems fit, he is seized by the authorities and inducted into the armed forces. 20 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:26.240 There, his body and will are no longer his own. 21 00:02:26.240 --> 00:02:31.140 He is subject to the dictates of the government, and he can be forced to kill and to place 22 00:02:31.140 --> 00:02:35.920 his own life in jeopardy if the authorities so decree. 23 00:02:35.920 --> 00:02:41.180 What else is involuntary servitude, if not the draft? 24 00:02:41.180 --> 00:02:46.080 The utilitarian aspect permeates the argument for the conscription system. 25 00:02:46.080 --> 00:02:51.700 Thus, the government uses the argument, who will defend us against foreign attack if we 26 00:02:51.700 --> 00:02:56.280 do not employ coercion and conscript our defenders? 27 00:02:56.280 --> 00:03:01.360 There are several rebuttals for a libertarian to make to this line of reasoning. 28 00:03:01.360 --> 00:03:06.800 In the first place, if you and I and our next door neighbor think that we need defending, 29 00:03:06.800 --> 00:03:12.640 we have no moral right to use coercion, the bayonet or the revolver, to force someone 30 00:03:12.640 --> 00:03:14.920 else to defend us. 31 00:03:14.920 --> 00:03:20.880 This act of conscripting is just as much a deed of unjustifiable aggression, of kidnapping 32 00:03:20.880 --> 00:03:26.040 and possibly murder, as the alleged aggression we are trying to guard ourselves against in 33 00:03:26.040 --> 00:03:27.960 the first place. 34 00:03:27.960 --> 00:03:34.380 If we add that the draftees owe their bodies and their lives, if necessary, to society 35 00:03:34.380 --> 00:03:42.540 or to their country, then we must retort, who is this society or this country that is 36 00:03:42.540 --> 00:03:46.980 being used as a talisman to justify enslavement? 37 00:03:46.980 --> 00:03:54.980 It is simply all individuals in the territorial area except the youths being conscripted. 38 00:03:54.980 --> 00:04:01.500 and Country are in this case mythical abstractions that are being used to cloak the naked use 39 00:04:01.500 --> 00:04:06.300 of coercion to promote the interests of specific individuals. 40 00:04:06.300 --> 00:04:12.960 Secondly, to move to the utilitarian plane, why is it considered necessary to conscript 41 00:04:12.960 --> 00:04:14.660 defenders? 42 00:04:14.660 --> 00:04:17.460 No one is conscripted on the free market. 43 00:04:17.460 --> 00:04:23.420 Yet on that market people obtain through voluntary purchase and sale every conceivable manner 44 00:04:23.420 --> 00:04:34.860 On the market, people can and do obtain food, shelter, clothing, medical care, etc. 45 00:04:34.860 --> 00:04:37.660 Why can't they hire defenders as well? 46 00:04:37.660 --> 00:04:44.220 Indeed, there are plenty of people being hired every day to perform dangerous services. 47 00:04:44.220 --> 00:04:50.680 Forest firefighters, rangers, test pilots, and police and private guards and watchmen. 48 00:04:50.680 --> 00:04:54.760 Why can't soldiers be hired in the same way? 49 00:04:54.760 --> 00:05:00.280 Or to put it another way, the government employs countless thousands of people for all sorts 50 00:05:00.280 --> 00:05:05.080 of services, from truck drivers to scientists to typists. 51 00:05:05.080 --> 00:05:08.960 How is it that none of these people have to be conscripted? 52 00:05:08.960 --> 00:05:14.560 Why is there no shortage of these occupations to supposedly force the government to resort 53 00:05:14.560 --> 00:05:17.760 to compulsion to obtain them? 54 00:05:17.760 --> 00:05:23.460 To go a step further, even within the army, there is no shortage of officers and no need 55 00:05:23.460 --> 00:05:25.220 to draft them. 56 00:05:25.220 --> 00:05:28.840 No one conscripts generals or admirals. 57 00:05:28.840 --> 00:05:31.600 The answer to these questions is simple. 58 00:05:31.600 --> 00:05:36.380 There is no shortage of government typists because the government goes out on the market 59 00:05:36.380 --> 00:05:39.140 and hires them at the market wage. 60 00:05:39.140 --> 00:05:44.060 There is no shortage of generals because they are paid handsomely in salaries, perquisites 61 00:05:44.060 --> 00:05:46.020 and pensions. 62 00:05:46.020 --> 00:05:52.860 There is a shortage of buck privates because their pay is or was until very recently abysmally 63 00:05:52.860 --> 00:05:55.780 below the market wage. 64 00:05:55.780 --> 00:06:01.800 For years, even including the monetary value of the free food, shelter and other services 65 00:06:01.800 --> 00:06:07.540 supplied the GIs, the earnings of the buck private were something like one-half the salary 66 00:06:07.540 --> 00:06:10.700 he could have earned in civilian life. 67 00:06:10.700 --> 00:06:15.420 Is it any wonder that there has been a chronic shortage of enlistees? 68 00:06:15.420 --> 00:06:21.180 For years it has been known that the way to induce people to volunteer for hazardous jobs 69 00:06:21.180 --> 00:06:24.900 is to pay them extra as compensation. 70 00:06:24.900 --> 00:06:31.020 But the government has been paying the men half of what they could earn in private life. 71 00:06:31.020 --> 00:06:36.340 There is also the special disgrace of the doctor's draft, in which physicians are subject 72 00:06:36.340 --> 00:06:40.620 to the draft at ages far beyond anyone else. 73 00:06:40.620 --> 00:06:46.160 Are doctors then to be penalized for their entry into the profession of medicine? 74 00:06:46.160 --> 00:06:51.640 What is the moral justification for onerous burdens placed on this particular and vitally 75 00:06:51.640 --> 00:06:53.980 important profession? 76 00:06:53.980 --> 00:06:57.300 Is this the way to cure the shortage of doctors? 77 00:06:57.300 --> 00:07:02.820 To put every man on notice that if he becomes a physician, he will be sure to be drafted, 78 00:07:02.820 --> 00:07:05.780 and at a specially late age? 79 00:07:05.780 --> 00:07:11.260 Once again, the armed forces need for doctors could easily be satisfied if the government 80 00:07:11.260 --> 00:07:16.020 were willing to pay physicians the market salary, plus enough to compensate them for 81 00:07:16.020 --> 00:07:18.220 the hazardous labor. 82 00:07:18.220 --> 00:07:23.940 If the government wishes to hire nuclear physicists or think tank strategists, it finds ways of 83 00:07:23.940 --> 00:07:27.340 doing so at extremely handsome salaries. 84 00:07:27.340 --> 00:07:32.260 Are doctors lower forms of humanity? 85 00:07:32.260 --> 00:07:34.580 The Army 86 00:07:34.580 --> 00:07:40.040 While conscription into the armed forces is a blatant and aggravated form of involuntary 87 00:07:40.040 --> 00:07:46.420 servitude, there is another, far more subtle and therefore less detectable form, the structure 88 00:07:46.420 --> 00:07:49.160 of the army itself. 89 00:07:49.160 --> 00:07:50.440 Consider this. 90 00:07:50.440 --> 00:07:55.720 In what other occupation in the country are there severe penalties, including prison and 91 00:07:55.720 --> 00:08:02.920 in some cases execution, for desertion, that is, for quitting the particular employment? 92 00:08:02.920 --> 00:08:07.560 If someone quits General Motors, is he shot at sunrise? 93 00:08:07.560 --> 00:08:13.640 It might be objected that in the case of enlistees, the soldier or officer has voluntarily agreed 94 00:08:13.640 --> 00:08:19.440 to serve for a certain term, and he is therefore obligated to continue in service for that 95 00:08:19.440 --> 00:08:21.440 term of years. 96 00:08:21.440 --> 00:08:26.760 But the whole concept of term of service is part of the problem. 97 00:08:26.760 --> 00:08:31.940 Suppose for example that an engineer signs a contract with Aramco to serve for three 98 00:08:31.940 --> 00:08:34.700 Three years in Saudi Arabia. 99 00:08:34.700 --> 00:08:39.460 After a few months, he decides that the life is not for him, and he quits. 100 00:08:39.460 --> 00:08:45.300 This may well be a moral default on his part, a breach of moral obligation. 101 00:08:45.300 --> 00:08:49.200 But is it a legally enforceable obligation? 102 00:08:49.200 --> 00:08:55.060 In short, can he or should he be forced by the monopoly of weaponry of government to 103 00:08:55.060 --> 00:08:58.640 keep working for the remainder of his term? 104 00:08:58.640 --> 00:09:03.120 If so, that would be forced labor and enslavement. 105 00:09:03.120 --> 00:09:09.100 For while it is true that he made a promise of future work, his body continues in a free 106 00:09:09.100 --> 00:09:13.320 society to be owned by himself alone. 107 00:09:13.320 --> 00:09:19.440 In practice and in libertarian theory as well, then, the engineer might be morally criticized 108 00:09:19.440 --> 00:09:20.640 for the breach. 109 00:09:20.640 --> 00:09:23.720 He might be blacklisted by other oil firms. 110 00:09:23.720 --> 00:09:29.200 He may be forced to return any advance pay tendered to him by the company, but he will 111 00:09:29.200 --> 00:09:35.160 not be enslaved to Aramco for the three-year period. 112 00:09:35.160 --> 00:09:41.060 But if this is true of Aramco, or of any other occupation or job in private life, why should 113 00:09:41.060 --> 00:09:43.240 it be different in the army? 114 00:09:43.240 --> 00:09:48.440 If a man signs up for seven years and then quits, he should be allowed to leave. 115 00:09:48.440 --> 00:09:53.400 He will lose pension rights, he will be morally criticized, he may be blacklisted from similar 116 00:09:53.400 --> 00:10:06.080 It may be protested that the armed forces is a peculiarly important occupation that 117 00:10:06.080 --> 00:10:11.440 needs this sort of coercive sanction that other jobs do not have. 118 00:10:11.440 --> 00:10:17.040 Setting aside the importance of such occupations as medicine, agriculture and transportation 119 00:10:17.040 --> 00:10:22.740 that need not resort to such methods, let us consider a comparable defense occupation 120 00:10:22.740 --> 00:10:26.100 in Civilian Life, the police. 121 00:10:26.100 --> 00:10:30.820 Surely the police perform an equally and perhaps more vital service. 122 00:10:30.820 --> 00:10:36.080 And yet every year people join the police and quit the force and there is no coercive 123 00:10:36.080 --> 00:10:40.600 attempt to bind their labor through years of enlistment. 124 00:10:40.600 --> 00:10:46.100 In addition to demanding the end of conscription then, the libertarian also proposes to do 125 00:10:46.100 --> 00:10:52.080 away with the entire concept of a term of enlistment and the practice of slavery this 126 00:10:52.080 --> 00:10:59.320 This implies, let the armed forces operate in ways similar to police, firemen, rangers, 127 00:10:59.320 --> 00:11:07.280 private guards, etc., free of the blight and the moral crime of involuntary servitude. 128 00:11:07.280 --> 00:11:12.680 But there is more to be said about the Army as an institution, even if it were made completely 129 00:11:12.680 --> 00:11:14.960 voluntary. 130 00:11:14.960 --> 00:11:19.760 Americans have almost totally forgotten one of the noblest and strongest elements in the 131 00:11:19.760 --> 00:11:27.760 and the Original American Heritage, Determined Opposition to the Entire Institution of a Standing Army. 132 00:11:27.760 --> 00:11:34.760 A government that has a permanent standing army at its disposal will always be tempted to use it, 133 00:11:34.760 --> 00:11:39.760 and to use it in an aggressive, interventionist, and warlike manner. 134 00:11:39.760 --> 00:11:46.760 While foreign policy will be dealt with below, it is clear that a permanent army is a standing temptation 135 00:11:46.760 --> 00:11:52.840 to the state to enlarge its power, to push around other people as well as other countries, 136 00:11:52.840 --> 00:11:56.640 and to dominate the internal life of the nation. 137 00:11:56.640 --> 00:12:02.560 The original aim of the Jeffersonian movement, a largely libertarian factor in American political 138 00:12:02.560 --> 00:12:08.420 life, was to abolish the standing army and navy altogether. 139 00:12:08.420 --> 00:12:13.560 The original American principle was that if the nation was attacked, then the citizens 140 00:12:13.560 --> 00:12:20.200 would hasten to join to repel the invader. A standing armed force, then, could only lead 141 00:12:20.200 --> 00:12:26.600 to trouble and to the aggrandizement of state power. In the course of his trenchant and 142 00:12:26.600 --> 00:12:32.560 prophetic attack on the proposed Constitution in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Patrick 143 00:12:32.560 --> 00:12:39.440 Henry warned of a standing army. Congress, by the power of taxation, by that of raising 144 00:12:39.440 --> 00:12:56.080 Any standing army, then, poses a standing threat to liberty. 145 00:12:56.080 --> 00:13:01.440 Its monopoly of coercive weapons, its modern tendency toward creating and supporting a 146 00:13:01.440 --> 00:13:07.860 military-industrial complex to supply that army, and, last but not least, as Patrick 147 00:13:07.860 --> 00:13:14.340 Dr. Henry notes, the taxing power to finance that army pose a continuing threat of the 148 00:13:14.340 --> 00:13:18.980 army's perpetual expansion in size and power. 149 00:13:18.980 --> 00:13:24.700 Any tax-supported institution, of course, is opposed by the libertarian as coercive, 150 00:13:24.700 --> 00:13:31.380 but an army is uniquely menacing for its amassing and collecting into one set of hands the massive 151 00:13:31.380 --> 00:13:35.860 power of modern weaponry. 152 00:13:35.860 --> 00:13:38.080 Laws. 153 00:13:38.080 --> 00:13:45.220 On October 4, 1971, President Nixon invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to obtain a court injunction 154 00:13:45.220 --> 00:13:50.140 forcing the suspension of a dock strike for 80 days. 155 00:13:50.140 --> 00:13:55.940 This was the ninth time the federal government had used the act in a dock strike. 156 00:13:55.940 --> 00:14:00.060 Months earlier, the head of the New York City Teachers' Union went to jail for several 157 00:14:00.060 --> 00:14:05.060 for Defying a Law Prohibiting Public Employees from Striking 158 00:14:05.060 --> 00:14:11.060 It is no doubt convenient for a long-suffering public to be spared the disruptions of a strike. 159 00:14:11.060 --> 00:14:16.060 Yet the solution imposed was forced labor, pure and simple. 160 00:14:16.060 --> 00:14:21.060 The workers were coerced against their will into going back to work. 161 00:14:21.060 --> 00:14:27.060 There is no moral excuse in a society claiming to be opposed to slavery 162 00:14:27.060 --> 00:14:33.740 is slavery and in a country which has outlawed involuntary servitude for any legal or judicial 163 00:14:33.740 --> 00:14:40.480 action prohibiting strikes or jailing union leaders who fail to comply. 164 00:14:40.480 --> 00:14:45.580 Slavery is all too often more convenient for the slave masters. 165 00:14:45.580 --> 00:14:50.240 It is true that the strike is a peculiar form of work stoppage. 166 00:14:50.240 --> 00:14:53.220 The strikers do not merely quit their jobs. 167 00:14:53.220 --> 00:15:00.540 They also assert that somehow, in some metaphysical sense, they still own their jobs and are entitled 168 00:15:00.540 --> 00:15:05.180 to them and intend to return to them when the issues are resolved. 169 00:15:05.180 --> 00:15:10.180 But the remedy for this self-contradictory policy, as well as for the disruptive power 170 00:15:10.180 --> 00:15:15.460 of labor unions, is not to pass laws outlawing strikes. 171 00:15:15.460 --> 00:15:22.100 The remedy is to remove the substantial body of law, federal, state and local, that confers 172 00:15:22.100 --> 00:15:28.820 Special Governmental Privileges on Labor Unions All that is needed, both for libertarian principle 173 00:15:28.820 --> 00:15:35.440 and for a healthy economy, is to remove and abolish these special privileges. 174 00:15:35.440 --> 00:15:40.740 These privileges have been enshrined in federal law, especially in the Wagner-Taft-Hartley 175 00:15:40.740 --> 00:15:48.460 Act, passed originally in 1935, and the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1931. 176 00:15:48.460 --> 00:15:54.880 The latter prohibits the courts from issuing injunctions in cases of imminent union violence. 177 00:15:54.880 --> 00:16:00.780 The former compels employers to bargain in good faith with any union that wins the votes 178 00:16:00.780 --> 00:16:07.000 of the majority of a work unit, arbitrarily defined by the federal government, and also 179 00:16:07.000 --> 00:16:12.380 prohibits employers from discriminating against union organizers. 180 00:16:12.380 --> 00:16:20.420 It was only after the Wagner Act and its predecessor, the NIRA, in 1933, that labor unions were 181 00:16:20.420 --> 00:16:24.640 able to become a powerful force in American life. 182 00:16:24.640 --> 00:16:32.260 It was then that unions skyrocketed from something like 5% to over 20% of the labor force. 183 00:16:32.260 --> 00:16:39.100 Furthermore, local and state laws often protect unions from being sued, and they place restrictions 184 00:16:39.100 --> 00:16:44.860 focuses on the employer's hiring of strike-breaking labor, and police are often instructed not 185 00:16:44.860 --> 00:16:50.780 to interfere in the use of violence against strikebreakers by union pickets. 186 00:16:50.780 --> 00:16:56.140 Take away these special privileges and immunities, and labor unions would sink back to their 187 00:16:56.140 --> 00:17:00.940 previous negligible role in the American economy. 188 00:17:00.940 --> 00:17:06.420 It is characteristic of our statist trend that when general indignation against unions 189 00:17:06.420 --> 00:17:10.260 was led to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. 190 00:17:10.260 --> 00:17:14.140 The government did not repeal any of these special privileges. 191 00:17:14.140 --> 00:17:20.420 Instead, it added special restrictions upon unions to limit the power which the government 192 00:17:20.420 --> 00:17:23.380 itself had created. 193 00:17:23.380 --> 00:17:29.380 Given a choice, the natural tendency of the state is to add to its power, not to cut it 194 00:17:29.380 --> 00:17:30.620 down. 195 00:17:30.620 --> 00:17:36.260 And so we have the peculiar situation of the government first building up unions and then 196 00:17:36.260 --> 00:17:42.980 Howling for Restrictions Against Their Power. This is reminiscent of the American farm programs, 197 00:17:42.980 --> 00:17:48.580 in which one branch of the Department of Agriculture pays farmers to restrict their production, 198 00:17:49.140 --> 00:17:56.900 while another branch of the same agency pays them to increase their productivity. Irrational, surely, 199 00:17:56.900 --> 00:18:02.340 from the point of view of the consumers and the taxpayers, but perfectly rational from the point 200 00:18:02.340 --> 00:18:08.340 The point of view of the subsidized farmers and of the growing power of the bureaucracy. 201 00:18:08.340 --> 00:18:18.340 Similarly, the government's seemingly contradictory policy on unions serves, first, to aggrandize the power of government over labor relations, 202 00:18:18.340 --> 00:18:29.340 and, second, to foster a suitably integrated and establishment-minded unionism as junior partner in government's role over the economy. 203 00:18:29.340 --> 00:18:30.340 Tax System 204 00:18:30.340 --> 00:18:38.380 In a sense, the entire system of taxation is a form of involuntary servitude. 205 00:18:38.380 --> 00:18:41.300 Take in particular the income tax. 206 00:18:41.300 --> 00:18:46.940 The high levels of income tax mean that all of us work a large part of the year, several 207 00:18:46.940 --> 00:18:52.940 months, for nothing, for Uncle Sam, before being allowed to enjoy our incomes on the 208 00:18:52.940 --> 00:18:54.700 market. 209 00:18:54.700 --> 00:19:00.020 Part of the essence of slavery, after all, is forced work for someone at little or no 210 00:19:00.020 --> 00:19:01.660 pay. 211 00:19:01.660 --> 00:19:07.780 But the income tax means that we sweat and earn income only to see the government extract 212 00:19:07.780 --> 00:19:12.100 a large chunk of it by coercion for its own purposes. 213 00:19:12.100 --> 00:19:16.640 What is this but forced labor at no pay? 214 00:19:16.640 --> 00:19:22.180 The withholding feature of the income tax is a still more clear-cut instance of involuntary 215 00:19:22.180 --> 00:19:23.180 servitude. 216 00:19:23.180 --> 00:19:29.460 For, as the intrepid Connecticut industrialist Vivian Kellums argued years ago, the employer 217 00:19:29.460 --> 00:19:35.840 is forced to expend time, labor, and money in the business of deducting and transmitting 218 00:19:35.840 --> 00:19:39.960 his employees' taxes to the federal and state governments. 219 00:19:39.960 --> 00:19:44.340 Yet the employer is not recompensed for this expenditure. 220 00:19:44.340 --> 00:19:50.020 What moral principle justifies the government's forcing employers to act as its unpaid tax 221 00:19:50.020 --> 00:19:52.280 collectors? 222 00:19:52.280 --> 00:19:58.360 The withholding principle, of course, is the linchpin of the whole federal income tax system. 223 00:19:58.360 --> 00:20:03.440 Without the steady and relatively painless process of deducting the tax from the workers' 224 00:20:03.440 --> 00:20:08.920 paycheck, the government could never hope to raise the high levels of tax from the workers 225 00:20:08.920 --> 00:20:11.560 in one lump sum. 226 00:20:11.560 --> 00:20:17.120 Few people remember that the withholding system was only instituted during World War II and 227 00:20:17.120 --> 00:20:20.560 was supposed to be a wartime expedient. 228 00:20:20.560 --> 00:20:26.180 Like so many other features of state despotism, however, the wartime emergency measure soon 229 00:20:26.180 --> 00:20:30.500 became a hallowed part of the American system. 230 00:20:30.500 --> 00:20:35.140 It is perhaps significant that the federal government, challenged by Vivian Kellems to 231 00:20:35.140 --> 00:20:41.820 test the constitutionality of the withholding system, failed to take up the challenge. 232 00:20:41.820 --> 00:20:48.780 In February 1948, Ms. Kellems, a small manufacturer in Westport, Connecticut, announced that she 233 00:20:48.780 --> 00:20:55.340 She was defying the withholding law and was refusing to deduct the tax from her employees. 234 00:20:55.340 --> 00:20:59.660 She demanded that the federal government indict her so that the courts would be able to rule 235 00:20:59.660 --> 00:21:03.540 on the constitutionality of the withholding system. 236 00:21:03.540 --> 00:21:10.700 The government refused to do so, but instead seized the amount due from her bank account. 237 00:21:10.700 --> 00:21:16.180 Miss Cullums then sued in federal court for the government to return her funds. 238 00:21:16.180 --> 00:21:21.840 When the suit finally came to trial in February 1951, the jury ordered the government to 239 00:21:21.840 --> 00:21:23.820 refund her money. 240 00:21:23.820 --> 00:21:28.360 But the test of constitutionality never came. 241 00:21:28.360 --> 00:21:34.800 To add insult to injury, the individual taxpayer, in filling out his tax form, is also forced 242 00:21:34.800 --> 00:21:40.300 by the government to work at no pay on the laborious and thankless task of reckoning 243 00:21:40.300 --> 00:21:43.380 how much he owes the government. 244 00:21:43.380 --> 00:21:48.500 Here again, he cannot charge the government for the cost and labor expended in making 245 00:21:48.500 --> 00:21:50.220 out his return. 246 00:21:50.220 --> 00:21:56.620 Furthermore, the law requiring everyone to fill out his tax form is a clear violation 247 00:21:56.620 --> 00:22:01.580 of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, prohibiting the government from forcing anyone 248 00:22:01.580 --> 00:22:04.260 to incriminate himself. 249 00:22:04.260 --> 00:22:10.140 Yet the courts, often zealous in protecting Fifth Amendment rights in less sensitive areas, 250 00:22:10.140 --> 00:22:15.940 have done nothing here, in a case where the entire existence of the swollen federal government 251 00:22:15.940 --> 00:22:18.580 structure is at stake. 252 00:22:18.580 --> 00:22:24.180 The repeal of either the income tax or the withholding or self-incriminating provisions 253 00:22:24.180 --> 00:22:29.700 would force the government back to the relatively minor levels of power that the country enjoyed 254 00:22:29.700 --> 00:22:33.740 before the 20th century. 255 00:22:33.740 --> 00:22:39.740 Retail sales, excise and admission taxes also compel unpaid labor. 256 00:22:39.740 --> 00:22:45.100 In these cases, the unpaid labor of the retailer in collecting and forwarding the taxes to 257 00:22:45.100 --> 00:22:47.420 the government. 258 00:22:47.420 --> 00:22:53.740 The high costs of tax collecting for the government have another unfortunate effect, perhaps not 259 00:22:53.740 --> 00:22:57.020 unintended by the powers that be. 260 00:22:57.020 --> 00:23:03.620 These costs, readily undertaken by large businesses, impose a disproportionately heavy and often 261 00:23:03.620 --> 00:23:07.320 crippling cost upon the small employer. 262 00:23:07.320 --> 00:23:13.220 The large employer can then cheerfully shoulder the cost, knowing that his small competitor 263 00:23:13.220 --> 00:23:17.920 bears far more of the burden. 264 00:23:17.920 --> 00:23:23.780 The Courts Compulsory labor permeates our legal and judicial 265 00:23:23.780 --> 00:23:24.780 structure. 266 00:23:24.780 --> 00:23:31.280 Thus, much-venerated judicial procedure rests upon coerced testimony. 267 00:23:31.280 --> 00:23:37.300 Since it is axiomatic to libertarianism that all coercion, in this case, all coerced labor 268 00:23:37.300 --> 00:24:00.300 In recent years, it is true, the courts have been alive to the Fifth Amendment protection that no alleged criminal be forced to testify against himself, to provide the material for his own conviction. 269 00:24:00.300 --> 00:24:06.900 The legislatures have been significantly weakening this protection by passing immunity laws, 270 00:24:06.900 --> 00:24:13.860 offering immunity from prosecution if someone will testify against his fellows, and, furthermore, 271 00:24:13.860 --> 00:24:19.780 compelling the witness to accept the offer and testify against his associates. 272 00:24:19.780 --> 00:24:26.800 But compelling testimony from anyone for any reason is forced labor, and, furthermore, 273 00:24:26.800 --> 00:24:32.840 is akin to kidnapping, since the person is forced to appear at the hearing or trial and 274 00:24:32.840 --> 00:24:37.260 is then forced to perform the labor of giving testimony. 275 00:24:37.260 --> 00:24:40.760 The problem is not only the recent immunity laws. 276 00:24:40.760 --> 00:24:47.880 The problem is to eliminate all coerced testimony, including the universal subpoenaing of witnesses 277 00:24:47.880 --> 00:24:52.400 to a crime, and then forcing them to testify. 278 00:24:52.400 --> 00:24:57.840 In the case of witnesses, there is no question whatever of their being guilty of a crime. 279 00:24:57.840 --> 00:25:03.480 So the use of compulsion against them, a use that no one has questioned until now, has 280 00:25:03.480 --> 00:25:08.820 even less justification than compelling testimony from accused criminals. 281 00:25:08.820 --> 00:25:15.800 In fact, the entire power to subpoena should be abolished, because the subpoena power compels 282 00:25:15.800 --> 00:25:18.400 attendance at a trial. 283 00:25:18.400 --> 00:25:24.480 Even the accused criminal or tortfeasor should not be forced to attend his own trial, since 284 00:25:24.480 --> 00:25:27.240 he has not yet been convicted. 285 00:25:27.240 --> 00:25:33.560 If he is indeed, according to the excellent and libertarian principle of Anglo-Saxon law, 286 00:25:33.560 --> 00:25:39.420 innocent until proved guilty, then the courts have no right to compel the defendant to attend 287 00:25:39.420 --> 00:25:41.140 his trial. 288 00:25:41.140 --> 00:25:47.220 For remember, the only exemption to the Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition of involuntary servitude 289 00:25:47.220 --> 00:25:54.320 is except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. 290 00:25:54.320 --> 00:25:58.080 An accused party has not yet been convicted. 291 00:25:58.080 --> 00:26:02.960 The most the court should be able to do then is to notify the defendant that he is going 292 00:26:02.960 --> 00:26:07.500 to be tried and invite him or his lawyer to attend. 293 00:26:07.500 --> 00:26:13.460 Otherwise, if they choose not to, the trial will proceed in absentia. 294 00:26:13.460 --> 00:26:19.460 And of course, the defendant will not enjoy the best presentation of his case. 295 00:26:19.460 --> 00:26:24.440 Both the Thirteenth Amendment and the libertarian creed make the exception for the convicted 296 00:26:24.440 --> 00:26:26.080 criminal. 297 00:26:26.080 --> 00:26:31.220 The libertarian believes that a criminal loses his rights to the extent that he has aggressed 298 00:26:31.220 --> 00:26:36.240 upon the rights of another, and therefore that it is permissible to incarcerate the 299 00:26:36.240 --> 00:26:43.020 convicted criminal and subject him to involuntary servitude to that degree. 300 00:26:43.020 --> 00:26:48.400 In the libertarian world, however, the purpose of imprisonment and punishment will undoubtedly 301 00:26:48.400 --> 00:26:49.960 be different. 302 00:26:49.960 --> 00:26:55.180 There will be no district attorney who presumes to try a case on behalf of a non-existent 303 00:26:55.180 --> 00:27:01.460 society, and then punishes the criminal on society's behalf. 304 00:27:01.460 --> 00:27:07.440 In that world, the prosecutor will always represent the individual victim, and punishment 305 00:27:07.440 --> 00:27:12.260 will be exacted to redound to the benefit of that victim. 306 00:27:12.260 --> 00:27:18.340 Thus a crucial focus of punishment will be to force the criminal to repay, make restitution 307 00:27:18.340 --> 00:27:20.740 to, the victim. 308 00:27:20.740 --> 00:27:24.620 One such model was a practice in colonial America. 309 00:27:24.620 --> 00:27:29.860 Instead of incarcerating, say, a man who had robbed a farmer in the district, the criminal 310 00:27:29.860 --> 00:27:37.020 was coercively indentured out to the farmer, in effect enslaved for a term, there to work 311 00:27:37.020 --> 00:27:40.340 for the farmer until his debt was repaid. 312 00:27:40.340 --> 00:27:46.940 Indeed, during the Middle Ages, restitution to the victim was the dominant concept of punishment. 313 00:27:46.940 --> 00:27:53.940 Only as the state grew more powerful did the governmental authorities, the kings and the barons, 314 00:27:53.940 --> 00:27:57.940 encroach more and more into the compensation process, 315 00:27:57.940 --> 00:28:04.940 increasingly confiscating more of the criminal's property for themselves and neglecting the hapless victim. 316 00:28:04.940 --> 00:28:17.940 And as the emphasis shifted from restitution to punishment for abstract crimes committed against the state, the punishments exacted by the state upon the wrongdoer became more severe. 317 00:28:17.940 --> 00:28:28.940 As Professor Schaeffer writes, as the state monopolized the institution of punishment, so the rights of the injured were slowly separated from penal law. 318 00:28:28.940 --> 00:28:34.440 Or, in the words of the turn-of-the-century criminologist William Tallac, 319 00:28:34.440 --> 00:28:41.440 It was chiefly owing to the violent greed of feudal barons and medieval ecclesiastical powers 320 00:28:41.440 --> 00:28:45.440 that the rights of the injured party were gradually infringed upon, 321 00:28:45.440 --> 00:28:50.440 and finally, to a large extent, appropriated by these authorities, 322 00:28:50.440 --> 00:28:54.440 who exacted a double vengeance, indeed upon the offender, 323 00:28:54.440 --> 00:28:58.440 by forfeiting his property to themselves instead of to his victim, 324 00:28:58.440 --> 00:29:04.440 and then punishing him by the dungeon, the torture, the stake, or the gibbet. 325 00:29:04.440 --> 00:29:09.440 But the original victim of wrong was practically ignored. 326 00:29:09.440 --> 00:29:14.440 At any rate, while the libertarian does not object to prisons per se, 327 00:29:14.440 --> 00:29:20.440 he does balk at several practices common to the present judicial and penal system. 328 00:29:20.440 --> 00:29:26.440 One is the lengthy jail term imposed upon the defendant while awaiting trial. 329 00:29:26.440 --> 00:29:38.440 The constitutional right to a speedy trial is not arbitrary, but a way of minimizing the length of involuntary servitude before conviction for a crime. 330 00:29:38.440 --> 00:29:47.440 In fact, except in those cases where the criminal has been caught red-handed and where a certain presumption of guilt therefore exists, 331 00:29:47.440 --> 00:29:54.440 it is impossible to justify any imprisonment before conviction, let alone before trial. 332 00:29:54.440 --> 00:30:08.440 And even when someone is caught red-handed, there is an important reform that needs to be instituted to keep the system honest, subjecting the police and the other authorities to the same law as everyone else. 333 00:30:08.440 --> 00:30:22.440 As will be discussed further below, if everyone is supposed to be subject to the same criminal law, then exempting the authorities from that law gives them a legal license to commit continual aggression. 334 00:30:22.440 --> 00:30:35.440 The policeman who apprehends a criminal and arrests him, and the judicial and penal authorities who incarcerate him before trial and conviction, all should be subject to the universal law. 335 00:30:35.440 --> 00:30:48.440 In short, if they have committed an error and the defendant turns out to be innocent, then these authorities should be subjected to the same penalties as anyone else who kidnaps and incarcerates an innocent man. 336 00:30:48.440 --> 00:31:00.440 Immunity and pursuit of their trade should no more serve as an excuse than Lieutenant Calley was excused for committing atrocities at me lie in the course of the Vietnam War. 337 00:31:00.440 --> 00:31:12.440 The granting of bail is a half-hearted attempt to ease the problem of incarceration before trial, but it is clear that the practice of bail discriminates against the poor. 338 00:31:12.440 --> 00:31:20.440 The discrimination persists even though the rise of the business of bail bonding has permitted many more people to raise bail. 339 00:31:20.440 --> 00:31:29.440 The rebuttal that the courts are clogged with cases and therefore cannot grant a speedy trial is of course no defense of the system. 340 00:31:29.440 --> 00:31:36.440 On the contrary, this built-in inefficiency is an excellent argument for the abolition of government courts. 341 00:31:36.440 --> 00:31:37.440 Courts. 342 00:31:37.440 --> 00:31:43.840 Furthermore, the setting of bail is arbitrarily in the hands of the judge, who has excessive 343 00:31:43.840 --> 00:31:49.120 and little checked power to incarcerate people before they are convicted. 344 00:31:49.120 --> 00:31:54.500 This is particularly menacing in the case of citations for contempt of court, because 345 00:31:54.500 --> 00:32:00.880 judges have almost unlimited power to slap someone into prison after the judge himself 346 00:32:00.880 --> 00:32:08.400 has acted as a one-man prosecutor, judge and jury in accusing, convicting and sentencing the culprit, 347 00:32:08.400 --> 00:32:14.800 completely free from the ordinary rules of evidence and trial, and in violation of the fundamental 348 00:32:14.800 --> 00:32:22.480 legal principle of not being a judge in one's own case. Finally, there is another cornerstone 349 00:32:22.480 --> 00:32:28.480 of the judicial system which has unaccountably gone unchallenged even by libertarians for far 350 00:32:28.480 --> 00:32:30.400 are too long. 351 00:32:30.400 --> 00:32:33.640 This is compulsory jury service. 352 00:32:33.640 --> 00:32:38.740 There is little difference in kind, though obviously a great difference in degree, between 353 00:32:38.740 --> 00:32:42.280 compulsory jury duty and conscription. 354 00:32:42.280 --> 00:32:48.200 Both are enslavement, both compel the individual to perform tasks on the state's behalf and 355 00:32:48.200 --> 00:32:54.760 at the state's bidding, and both are a function of pay at slave wages. 356 00:32:54.760 --> 00:33:00.040 Just as the shortage of voluntary enlistees in the army is a function of a pay scale far 357 00:33:00.040 --> 00:33:06.840 below the market wage, so the abysmally low pay for jury service ensures that even if 358 00:33:06.840 --> 00:33:11.440 jury enlistments were possible, not many would be forthcoming. 359 00:33:11.440 --> 00:33:18.240 Furthermore, not only are jurors coerced into attending and serving on juries, but sometimes 360 00:33:18.240 --> 00:33:24.440 they are locked behind closed doors for many weeks and prohibited from reading newspapers. 361 00:33:24.440 --> 00:33:30.680 What is this but prison and involuntary servitude for non-criminals? 362 00:33:30.680 --> 00:33:35.760 It will be objected that jury service is a highly important civic function and ensures 363 00:33:35.760 --> 00:33:41.440 a fair trial which a defendant may not obtain from the judge, especially since the judge 364 00:33:41.440 --> 00:33:46.440 is part of the state system and therefore liable to be partial to the prosecutor's 365 00:33:46.440 --> 00:33:47.440 case. 366 00:33:47.440 --> 00:33:48.860 Very true. 367 00:33:48.860 --> 00:33:55.220 But precisely because the service is so vital, it is particularly important that it be performed 368 00:33:55.220 --> 00:33:59.080 by people who do it gladly and voluntarily. 369 00:33:59.080 --> 00:34:04.720 Have we forgotten that free labor is happier and more efficient than slave labor? 370 00:34:04.720 --> 00:34:10.860 The abolition of jury slavery should be a vital plank in any libertarian platform. 371 00:34:10.860 --> 00:34:15.740 The judges are not conscripted, neither are the opposing lawyers, and neither should the 372 00:34:15.740 --> 00:34:17.940 jurors. 373 00:34:17.940 --> 00:34:23.400 It is perhaps not a coincidence that throughout the United States, lawyers are everywhere 374 00:34:23.400 --> 00:34:26.320 exempt from jury service. 375 00:34:26.320 --> 00:34:31.880 Since it is almost always lawyers who write the laws, can we detect class legislation 376 00:34:31.880 --> 00:34:37.260 and class privilege at work? 377 00:34:37.260 --> 00:34:39.900 Compulsory Commitment 378 00:34:39.900 --> 00:34:45.280 One of the most shameful areas of involuntary servitude in our society is the widespread 379 00:34:45.280 --> 00:34:52.580 Practice of Compulsory Commitment or Involuntary Hospitalization of Mental Patients. 380 00:34:52.580 --> 00:34:57.760 In former generations, this incarceration of non-criminals was frankly carried out as 381 00:34:57.760 --> 00:35:02.560 a measure against mental patients to remove them from society. 382 00:35:02.560 --> 00:35:08.040 The practice of 20th century liberalism has been superficially more humane, but actually 383 00:35:08.040 --> 00:35:10.400 far more insidious. 384 00:35:10.400 --> 00:35:17.480 Now physicians and psychiatrists help incarcerate these unfortunates for their own good. 385 00:35:17.480 --> 00:35:23.140 The humanitarian rhetoric has permitted a far more widespread use of the practice and, 386 00:35:23.140 --> 00:35:28.480 for one thing, has allowed disgruntled relatives to put away their loved ones without suffering 387 00:35:28.480 --> 00:35:31.320 a guilty conscience. 388 00:35:31.320 --> 00:35:37.160 In the last decade, the libertarian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Thomas S. Szasz has 389 00:35:37.160 --> 00:35:43.880 has carried on a one-man crusade, at first seemingly hopeless, but now increasingly influential 390 00:35:43.880 --> 00:35:48.660 in the psychiatric field against compulsory commitment. 391 00:35:48.660 --> 00:35:53.560 In numerous books and articles, Dr. Szasz has delivered a comprehensive and systematic 392 00:35:53.560 --> 00:35:56.000 attack on this practice. 393 00:35:56.000 --> 00:36:01.480 He has insisted, for example, that involuntary commitment is a profound violation of medical 394 00:36:01.480 --> 00:36:03.160 ethics. 395 00:36:03.160 --> 00:36:07.020 Instead of serving the patient, the physician here serves others. 396 00:36:07.020 --> 00:36:12.860 The Family, The State, to act against and tyrannize over completely the person he is 397 00:36:12.860 --> 00:36:15.340 supposed to be helping. 398 00:36:15.340 --> 00:36:20.700 Compulsory commitment and compulsory therapy, moreover, are far more likely to aggravate 399 00:36:20.700 --> 00:36:24.740 and perpetuate mental illness than to cure it. 400 00:36:24.740 --> 00:36:30.020 All too often, Szasz points out, commitment is a device for incarcerating and thereby 401 00:36:30.020 --> 00:36:37.020 by disposing of disagreeable relatives rather than a genuine aid to the patient. 402 00:36:37.020 --> 00:36:42.000 The guiding rationale for compulsory commitment is that the patient might well be dangerous 403 00:36:42.000 --> 00:36:45.000 to himself or to others. 404 00:36:45.000 --> 00:36:51.380 The first grave flaw in this approach is that the police or the law, in stepping in not 405 00:36:51.380 --> 00:36:56.660 when an overt aggressive act is in the process of occurring, but on someone's judgment that 406 00:36:56.660 --> 00:37:00.660 But such an act might someday take place. 407 00:37:00.660 --> 00:37:05.420 But this provides an open sesame for unlimited tyranny. 408 00:37:05.420 --> 00:37:11.220 Anyone might be a judge to be capable of or likely to commit a crime someday, and therefore 409 00:37:11.220 --> 00:37:15.380 on such grounds anyone may legitimately be locked up. 410 00:37:15.380 --> 00:37:21.020 Not for a crime, but because someone thinks he might commit one. 411 00:37:21.020 --> 00:37:27.560 This sort of thinking justifies not only incarceration but permanent incarceration of anyone under 412 00:37:27.560 --> 00:37:29.160 suspicion. 413 00:37:29.160 --> 00:37:34.440 But the fundamental libertarian creed holds that every individual is capable of free will 414 00:37:34.440 --> 00:37:40.680 and free choice, that no one, however likely to commit a crime in the future based on a 415 00:37:40.680 --> 00:37:48.000 statistical or any other judgment, is inevitably determined to do so, and that in any case 416 00:37:48.000 --> 00:37:55.360 It is immoral and itself invasive and criminal to coerce anyone who is not an overt and present 417 00:37:55.360 --> 00:37:59.400 rather than a suspected criminal. 418 00:37:59.400 --> 00:38:04.680 Recently Dr. Szasz was asked, but don't you think that society has the right and the duty 419 00:38:04.680 --> 00:38:10.600 to care for those individuals adjudged to be dangerous to themselves and others? 420 00:38:10.600 --> 00:38:16.760 Szasz cogently replied, I think the idea of helping people by imprisoning them and doing 421 00:38:16.760 --> 00:38:22.360 Saving terrible things to them is a religious concept, as the idea of saving witches by 422 00:38:22.360 --> 00:38:25.520 torture and burning once was. 423 00:38:25.520 --> 00:38:31.200 As far as dangerousness to self is concerned, I believe, as did John Stuart Mill, that a 424 00:38:31.200 --> 00:38:35.360 man's body and soul are his own, not the state's. 425 00:38:35.360 --> 00:38:40.260 And furthermore, that each individual has the right, if you will, to do with his body 426 00:38:40.260 --> 00:38:46.260 as he pleases, so long as he doesn't harm anyone else or infringe on someone else's 427 00:38:46.260 --> 00:38:47.740 right. 428 00:38:47.740 --> 00:38:53.740 As far as dangerousness to others goes, most psychiatrists working with hospitalized patients 429 00:38:53.740 --> 00:38:56.380 would admit this is pure fantasy. 430 00:38:56.380 --> 00:39:01.040 There have, in fact, been statistical studies made which show that mental patients are much 431 00:39:01.040 --> 00:39:05.760 more law-abiding than the normal population. 432 00:39:05.760 --> 00:39:08.800 And Civil Liberties lawyer Bruce Ennis adds that, 433 00:39:08.800 --> 00:39:15.560 We know that 85% of all ex-convicts will commit more crimes in the future, and that ghetto 434 00:39:15.560 --> 00:39:20.880 residents and teenage males are far more likely to commit crime than the average member of 435 00:39:20.880 --> 00:39:22.720 the population. 436 00:39:22.720 --> 00:39:28.200 We also know from recent studies that mental patients are statistically less dangerous 437 00:39:28.200 --> 00:39:30.520 than the average guy. 438 00:39:30.520 --> 00:39:37.320 So if what we're really worried about is danger, why don't we first lock up all former convicts, 439 00:39:37.320 --> 00:39:43.840 and then lock up all ghetto residents, and then why don't we lock up all teenage males? 440 00:39:43.840 --> 00:39:49.720 The question Zaz has been asking is, if a person hasn't broken a law, what right has 441 00:39:49.720 --> 00:39:53.920 society to lock him up? 442 00:39:53.920 --> 00:39:58.520 The involuntarily committed may be divided into two classes. 443 00:39:58.520 --> 00:40:02.380 Those who have committed no crime, and those who have. 444 00:40:02.380 --> 00:40:07.580 For the former, the libertarian calls unconditionally for their release. 445 00:40:07.580 --> 00:40:09.080 But what of the latter? 446 00:40:09.080 --> 00:40:14.820 What of criminals who, through insanity or other pleas, supposedly escape the brutality 447 00:40:14.820 --> 00:40:21.260 of prison punishment, and instead receive medical care at the hands of the state? 448 00:40:21.260 --> 00:40:27.320 Here again, Dr. Szasz has pioneered in a vigorous and devastating critique of the despotism 449 00:40:27.320 --> 00:40:33.680 of Liberal Humanitarianism First, it is grotesque to claim that incarceration 450 00:40:33.680 --> 00:40:41.080 in a state mental hospital is somehow more humane than equivalent incarceration in prison. 451 00:40:41.080 --> 00:40:46.880 On the contrary, the despotism of the authorities is likely to be more severe, and the prisoner 452 00:40:46.880 --> 00:40:53.120 is likely to have far less recourse in defense of his rights, for as someone certified as 453 00:40:53.120 --> 00:40:59.200 Mentally ill, he is placed into the category of a non-person, whom no one feels obliged 454 00:40:59.200 --> 00:41:02.120 to take seriously any longer. 455 00:41:02.120 --> 00:41:07.480 As Dr. Szasz has jocularly said, being in a state mental hospital would drive anyone 456 00:41:07.480 --> 00:41:09.240 crazy. 457 00:41:09.240 --> 00:41:14.640 But furthermore, we must question the entire notion of taking anyone out from under the 458 00:41:14.640 --> 00:41:17.240 rule of objective law. 459 00:41:17.240 --> 00:41:23.040 To do so is far more likely to be damaging than helpful to the people thus singled out. 460 00:41:23.040 --> 00:41:33.040 Suppose, for example, that two men, A and B, commit an equivalent robbery, and that the usual punishment for this crime is five years in prison. 461 00:41:33.040 --> 00:41:42.040 Suppose that B gets off this punishment by being declared mentally ill and is transferred to a state mental institution. 462 00:41:42.040 --> 00:41:53.040 The liberal focuses on the possibility, say, that B may be released in two years by the state psychiatrist through being adjudged cured or rehabilitated. 463 00:41:53.040 --> 00:42:01.040 But what if the psychiatrist never considers him cured, or does so only after a very long time? 464 00:42:01.040 --> 00:42:09.040 Then B, for the simple crime of theft, may face the horror of lifelong incarceration in a mental institution. 465 00:42:09.040 --> 00:42:27.040 Hence, the liberal concept of indeterminate sentence, of sentencing someone not for his objective crime, but on the state's judgment of his psyche or spirit of cooperation, constitutes tyranny and dehumanization in its worst form. 466 00:42:27.040 --> 00:42:44.040 It is a tyranny, furthermore, which encourages the prisoner into deceptive behavior to try to fool the state psychiatrist, whom he perceives quite correctly as his enemy, into thinking that he is cured so that he can get out of this incarceration. 467 00:42:44.040 --> 00:42:52.040 To call this process therapy or rehabilitation is surely cruel mockery of these terms. 468 00:42:52.040 --> 00:42:58.480 It is far more principled, as well as more truly humane, to treat every prisoner in accordance 469 00:42:58.480 --> 00:43:00.360 with objective criminal law.