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NOTE Culture and Liberty

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Okay, the question I want to consider this morning is whether libertarianism requires widespread acceptance of certain cultural values.

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And this is something that libertarians have been long divided on across the spectrum.

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At one end of the spectrum, you have someone like Ayn Rand who thinks that in order to have a free society,

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You have to have agreement on a fairly specific set of cultural values, that certain views about the nature of reality, of knowledge and of value

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have to be fairly widespread in order for you to have a successful free society.

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And one of Rand's criticisms of the libertarian movement is that the libertarian movement tries to focus directly on

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on the other hand you can have the view that libertarianism doesn't really require any particular set of cultural values

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that is equally consistent with any view that doesn't specifically require you to initiate force against people

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and Walter Block has defended something like this view

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It's not part of libertarianism to advocate any other particular set of values.

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You can certainly advocate other sets of values, but it's not as a libertarian to do that, it's just sort of an extra.

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And that libertarianism itself is not committed to any particular story about even about what values make libertarianism true.

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All that libertarianism is committed to is simply the view that people have a right not to have force initiated against them.

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Well, I'm going to defend a kind of intermediate view, which I call generic universalism and specific pluralism,

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by which I mean that I think that there's a broad family of values,

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such that a libertarian society is going to need fairly widespread acceptance of values from that set.

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But by specific pluralism, I mean that it's not the case that you need most people in society to be converted to some very specific version of those values.

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There can be disagreement on all sorts of things, but there are limits.

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Now, when I say that a libertarian society is going to need agreement, I obviously don't mean...

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I say obviously, but people sometimes thought I was meaning that libertarian society is going to have to require people to have values from this set.

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Well, no, if they're requiring people to have certain values, it's not libertarianism.

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So when I say that libertarianism requires this, I don't mean that you go around and force this by law.

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I just mean that libertarianism is, for one reason or another, going to need these values.

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But let me be more explicit about exactly what that means.

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What exactly does it mean to say that if you're a libertarian, you need to favor or advocate or promote certain other values?

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Well, here I'm going to draw from a distinction that Charles has drawn between different forms of thickness,

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in the sense of this distinction that some people use between thick and thin libertarianism,

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where thin libertarianism is that you advocate, libertarianism is just about advocating a particular doctrine like non-aggression, not aggressing against person and property.

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Whereas going to thick libertarianism, libertarian values are or need to be embedded in some broader framework of values needed to promote the whole package.

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The question of exactly what is meant by thick libertarianism Charles draws a distinction among five things that might mean.

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So the first one is entailment thickness, and there the idea is simply that libertarian principles directly entail some value.

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And this is the sort of thickness that, you know, the thin libertarians are generally going to have no problem with.

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You could wonder whether it's even a form of thickness or not, but just to make sure that we have all the possible meanings on the table so we don't confuse them with each other.

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There's just some case where libertarianism directly requires you to have some value.

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An example Charles gives is that if you're in a culture that practices human sacrifice, or at least involuntary human sacrifice,

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Then, adopting libertarianism requires you to give that up.

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A different case is application thickness.

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This is going to be cases where, although the value may not be directly entailed by libertarianism,

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Unless people have the value, they're going to have a hard time seeing how or why to apply libertarianism.

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They're not going to understand, even if they accept the principle, they're not going to be able to see how to apply it.

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So, for example, certain kinds of collectivist ideologies, even though not strictly consistent with libertarianism,

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Libertarianism, you could be a collectivist who's simply against promoting collectivism by coercive means.

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Nevertheless, a certain kind of collectivism might make it very hard for you to recognize taxation, say,

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or conscription, say, as a form of aggression.

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In fact, there's a famous Supreme Court case where, I don't remember the name of it,

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There was a case where the question of whether military conscription counts as involuntary servitude under the 13th Amendment

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And the court said something like, to suggest that the duty to serve your country in battle counts as involuntary servitude is absurd on its face

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Well, so if someone holds a view like that, they can accept the principle.

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You can't force, you know, you can't aggress against people, you can't, you know, force them to serve you and so forth.

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But if for some reason you're in the grip of some collectivist ideology that prevents you from seeing that conscription is a form of force,

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then you're going to have trouble applying that principle.

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Likewise, I was recently having a debate by email with someone who was saying,

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there's nothing in the Bible that says anything against taxation.

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And so I was saying, well, what about, how shall it not steal?

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And he said, anyone who thinks that taxation is theft is just, that's just crazy.

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No one could think that.

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Well, you could have some kind of argument that it's theft, but it's justified,

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or you could have some argument that it's not really theft,

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In this case, it isn't really the person's property or it ceases being their property once the government needs it or something.

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You could run some kind of story, but he wasn't running any kind of story.

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It's just that he was so in the grip of a certain way of looking at things that he couldn't even see how anyone could think that taxation was that.

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So, I gave you a case where you could accept the principle that no one should have things forced on them.

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You shouldn't force people to do what you want.

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You shouldn't aggress against people.

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So you shouldn't take their property. You can get lots of people to a sense of those principles, but for various ideological reasons, they don't see how they apply.

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You can even get them to a sense of the principle that people in government should be bounded by the same moral rules as everyone else.

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A lot of people happily nod their heads. But, you know, they accept the premises, but they just don't see how the conclusion applies.

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You know, it's pretty easy to find statements of libertarian justice all over the place.

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If you go and look at Justinian's Digest, the Byzantine collections and codifications of Roman law,

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if you look at the open preamble to it, it describes what justice is all about,

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about giving each his own and protecting people against violence and so forth.

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Well, it sounds very libertarian, but then you go and read the rest of the Digest

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and it's clear that they weren't seeing how to apply this.

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Another version is instrumental thickness. This is a case where, unless there's a widespread acceptance of certain values, you're going to have a hard time implementing libertarianism.

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This might not be stable, because in many cases it's going to be difficult for people to maintain their commitment to libertarianism if there's something else they care about that is going to sorely tempt them to violate libertarian rights.

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might not strictly entail that they do, but in a society where people are firmly convinced that the best thing possible is something or other that they suddenly seek to be easily brought about just by doing a little coercion, it's going to be hard to resist that temptation.

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Or likewise, if you've got a society where people place great stress on values like conformity and obedience and so forth,

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where there's no strict conflict with libertarianism there, you could embrace values like conformity and obedience

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and get nevertheless, well, I won't obey any commands to violate rights, but I'll obey all the rest of the time, and so on.

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Now, you can do that. It's not logical and consistent, but it's going to be hard for society to maintain the kind of vigilance you need to prevent government from extending its power or re-establishing itself if you think that, you know, if your main focus is on these values.

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So it's a little bit different from application thickness. It's related to it, but application thickness is thickness where you accept the principle, but these other values you've got make it hard for you to see how to apply it.

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In the case of instrumental thickness, people accept the principle, but these other values they have are going to tend to undermine their commitment to the principle.

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So it's a subtle distinction, but they're both there.

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A different, though again closely related, kind of thickness is grounds thickness.

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This is a case where there's some value that is not itself entailed by libertarianism,

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but that it is entailed by perhaps the best reasons for being a libertarianism, for being a libertarian.

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So for example, suppose that you, you know, suppose that you're a certain kind of environmentalist

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The Human Race is a cancer upon the earth and that everything would be better if the human race were wiped out.

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But you're a libertarian and you think we will not use any coercive methods to wipe up the human race.

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We will try to persuade people to commit suicide.

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Every member of this group takes a vow that I will commit suicide within 10 years,

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but during those 10 years I will do my best to persuade as many other people to also undertake this commitment.

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So you try to bring about a kind of voluntary euthanasia of the entire human race,

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but you're committed to doing it by strict libertarian means.

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Well, that is logically consistent.

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You could have those values and be committed to solely libertarian means of doing it,

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but it would be odd.

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It would be odd to care so much about respecting people's rights

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if you think that it would be better if people didn't exist than if they did.

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That's going to apply to both application thickness and...

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That's going to apply to both instrumental thickness and grounds thickness.

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In the case of instrumental thickness, what it means is

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in a society where most people are convinced that it would be better for the human race to be wiped out,

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They're going to have trouble having a stable commitment to libertarian values.

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That would be instrumental thickness.

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But it's also the case that, and that's sort of a causal worry,

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that you're going to have a hard time causally keeping libertarianism going if people have these values.

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But also, this sort of more purely logical point, that even if you don't have the causal worry,

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you might think it's irrational to be a libertarian

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if you think that the human race should be better off wiped out.

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It's not inconsistent, but it just doesn't make any sense

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to have such a strong commitment to something if you think the most important value

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is something that goes completely against it.

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So it's not just that it will be unstable, which is the instrumental point,

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but in some sense it ought to be unstable, which is the grounds point.

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Then finally, there's conjunction thickness, which isn't suggesting any particular connection

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between the value and libertarianism, but just saying that there's some value in addition

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to liberty that's also good, and that you should promote both.

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You might say, well, how is that a kind of thickness, you know, just as very few thin

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Thin libertarians are going to deny entailment thickness, so very few thin libertarians are going to deny conjunction thickness.

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Well, true enough, but nevertheless you could say, well look, at least it's going to have this implication.

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You don't necessarily want to make common cause with the pro-universal death libertarians.

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You want to sort of welcome the movement and stand side by side with them.

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Certainly, it makes sense. You don't want to take sort of the strict Randian position that you shouldn't make alliances with anyone whose values differ from your own.

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But if it gets extreme enough, you say, well look, yeah, you guys are libertarians, but you don't want to, if what they're advocating is really bad, then you don't want to ally too much with them.

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and you don't want to start borrowing their arms.

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Suppose they come up with some argument that in fact you could more efficiently wipe everyone out if you accepted it to market for your market.

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It doesn't seem obviously true to me, but suppose someone comes up with a clever argument like that.

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We don't want to start using that as part of your argument for libertarianism, just by buying.

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So certainly it can be possible for people to miss the entailment thickness or conjunction thickness points.

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But I think it's the other three that are sort of the main things that I think people might miss.

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Because in all these cases, in application, instrumental and grounds thickness,

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in all these cases it concerns values that are perfectly consistent with libertarianism,

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but never as some kind of other conflict.

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So the idea is that there can be a tension between libertarianism and another value,

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Even if libertarianism doesn't actually entail that that other value is wrong,

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nevertheless, either that value is going to make it hard to implement,

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either it's going to make it hard for people to see how to apply their libertarian values,

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or it's going to make it hard for people to have libertarian values in the first place,

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or it's going to make it hard to see why you ought to have libertarian values,

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and rightly so, it's just going to make it seem odd.

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So it seems that there might very well be some values that are going to be ones that a libertarian, as a libertarian, ought to adopt.

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Just obviously, if you think that people's welfare is of no value,

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I think that people's well-being doesn't matter.

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Again, it would be very odd to have this kind of commitment

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to libertarianism.

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Well, so there are some fairly straightforward values

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like rationality and toleration

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that were not strictly entailed by libertarianism,

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except perhaps in the sense that rationality

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is entailed by everything in some sense.

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But there are some things that it would be very odd for a libertarian to consistently not care about.

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Now, Chris Cabara talks about what he sees as the radical and dialectical aspects of libertarian tradition.

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What does he mean by radical and dialectical?

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Well, by radical, he doesn't just mean thorough going.

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So it's not just that a radical libertarian is one that's more thorough going, more thoroughly pro-liberty than a non-radical one.

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And that's certainly one way of using the term radical, and I think it's connected to the meaning he has in mind, too.

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But he's thinking of radical in the sense...

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because the word radical is going down to the root.

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He thinks that part of the idea of radical is seeing that you can't regard social change

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as a matter of some merely local fix, where you can make some slight adjustment to keep

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everything else just the way it is.

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The part of the idea of it being radical is that social change is going to involve change

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all over the place, that in order to bring about a political change, there have to be economic and cultural changes as well.

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And I think one reason someone might want to resist that is they might think,

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oh, that just makes it sound even harder to bring about libertarianism.

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Can't we just, you know, get some libertarians elected and they'll fix everything we've done?

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And if it turns out that in addition, you have to engage in this, you know,

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This attempt to change the culture, I think it just seems more daunting.

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But of course, again, remember that I'm not saying that, and I don't think that

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Scabara would say that it has to be the kind of thoroughgoing change

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in detail that some Randians have held.

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Scabara is a Randian, but I don't think he holds a view as extreme as...

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Summary is really unless everyone is converted to romanticism in art and rejects both intrinsicism and subjectivism and value theory and various things,

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unless they hold a bunch of fairly specific values that you're not going to be able to implement liberty.

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You're not going to be able to, or it's not going to be worth doing, or whatever.

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But it's not necessarily anything that specific.

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With regard to the notion of dialectical, well, excuse me, a lot of people associate the term dialectical with marks,

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As does Skabara, but Skabara thinks that a number of libertarian thinkers can also be found in this tradition.

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In fact, his first book, which is on Marx and Hayek, argues that Hayek actually does a better job of implementing the dialectical method that Marx recommends.

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He thinks that Marx recommends a dialectical method, but doesn't actually follow through with it.

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So what's a dialectical method? Well, part of the idea of it is attention to context, not ripping things out of context, not thinking you can understand something all by itself apart from its broader relations.

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If you try to rip something out of context, you get sort of a fragmentary abstraction that doesn't really capture the nature of the whole.

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And so if you try to focus on political relations as if they were just matters of what politicians are doing,

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you don't see how what politicians are able to do supported by economic factors and by cultural factors and so on.

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Or if you just focus on some cultural factor and you ignore the way in which that's influenced by economics and politics,

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then you are being undialectical.

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So, for Scarbera, this notion of radical, this notion of dialectical go together.

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If you have to understand something in terms of its relationship to a broader whole, in terms of its relationship to other things.

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Now, Scarbera warns against, you know, trying to extend this too far.

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If you get to some sort of Hegelian picture where you can't understand the nature of this glass unless you understand the nature of the history of the Byzantine Empire or something where everything is internally connected to everything else.

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And so, you can't understand anything without somehow being omniscient.

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He thinks that there's always a danger of falling into that sort of view.

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And that's not what he's saying.

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But he's saying that you should always be alert for context.

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And he thinks that those versions of libertarianism that have had this kind of alertness to context

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are the ones he favors, and ones that he thinks have not had this kind of other, it's the context of ones that he, to some extent, criticizes.

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So he thinks that there's this interaction with political, economic, psychological, cultural factors.

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Well, I want to connect this with the 19th century libertarians, and have in mind, on the one hand, classical liberals like

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These are people like Herbert Spencer and they want to hand individuals to anarchists like Benjamin Tucker.

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These are people who likewise thought that state oppression was part of an interlocking system with non-state forms of oppression.

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And I'll say in a minute what I mean by non-state forms of oppression.

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But they thought, for example, they were racial, sexual and managerial non-state forms of oppression.

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Before I explain non-state forms of oppression, let me first explain what I mean by interlocking system.

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Well, you could have the view that some of these things just go one way.

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You could say, you know, there are these bad things in society, but they're all caused by something the state is doing.

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And if you could just stop the state from doing these things, then these bad things in society would completely vanish.

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You know, libertarians sometimes think that, and I think it's often true about many things.

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I don't think it's necessarily true about everything.

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On the other hand, you could think that these bad things in society are completely independent of what the state is doing.

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And sometimes that's true too, but often it's not.

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Often it's the case that there'll be bad features of society that draw some of their strength from what the state is doing,

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but they also have some independent strength, and that likewise these reinforce what the state is doing.

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State is doing. So the state is partly enabled by the existence of these economic and cultural

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factors. It's better enabled to do what it's doing. So the state depends to some extent

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on these other things, but it doesn't depend solely on them. So they're not so mutually

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dependent that if you zapped one, the other one instantly, poof, out of existence. On

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the other hand, they're not so independent that if you could zap one, the other one would

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would stand unchanged, it's more of a mutual determination, but each one has some nature of its own.

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Well, if you accept these notions of application and instrumental and grounds thickness,

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it seems that you're going to be led to embrace the value of having generally an aversion

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into dependence and conformity.

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Now again, there's nothing directly inconsistent

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between libertarianism on the one hand

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and the values of dependence and conformity on the other.

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You could have the view that we should all be timid conformists

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and we should all depend on some sort of authority,

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but that it should all be done through non-coercive means.

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But I think that there's application, instrumental, and grounds conflict in all these cases.

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If you embrace these values of dependence and conformity, you're going to have a hard time remaining committed to libertarian values.

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You're going to have a hard time seeing how to apply them.

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And it's not going to be clear that it would make sense to be committed to libertarian values if these other values really are genuinely valuable.

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Likewise, it seems that libertarianism tends to favor an aversion to some people having a dominant say over other people's lives.

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Now again, there's no direct conflict there.

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There are cases where one person can have a dominant say over another person's life in a way that does not strictly violate any libertarian rights,

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and that therefore it's a way that should not be combated by force.

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But you might still think it's something bad, but you might not.

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You might think, you know, it's bad when authority is backed up by force,

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but as long as the authority is merely backed up by economic pressure and things like that,

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it's just fine and dandy.

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Well, I mean, that's a consistent view, but I think it's going to be unstable,

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both causally and conceptually.

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It's going to be hard for society to maintain a commitment to libertarian values

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so they don't see anything wrong with dependence and conformity.

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It's also going to be easier for these non-state forms of authority to become or give rise to

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state forms of authority or violent forms of authority if people generally don't have objection to them.

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And also, on sort of the ground-sickness point, it would be odd for you to think it's so important for people to be free from government control.

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And yet think that other forms of people having a dominant state over people's lives is completely unobjectionable.

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Yeah, it's consistent, but it's sort of odd.

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Part of the reason people find libertarianism attractive is they don't like being pushed around and told what to do.

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You know, being literally compelled by force isn't the only way of being pushed around and compelled what to do.

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Now sometimes libertarians resist the notion that we should care about forms of being pushed around other than actual violence or coercion or aggression.

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Because they think that if you care about those, that means you have to be committed to using state or violent means of combating them.

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Of course, that doesn't follow either. You could think that violent forms of oppression commit by violence and non-violent forms of oppression commit with something else.

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Now, see, people sometimes say that libertarianism doesn't include any of the reasons, either

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the economic or the philosophical reasons that are being offered in favor of non-aggression.

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Libertarianism simply includes the non-aggression principle and whatever it entails, but it

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But it doesn't include the reasons for accepting the non-aggression principle.

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I think Walter Block holds that, although yesterday I said Stefan Kinsella holds something

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and I got an email from him saying, why, that's not precisely what I hold.

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So I don't know whether, you know, so all my attributions should be taken with a grain

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of salt.

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I'm relying on the murky contents of my memory.

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But anyway, some libertarians do hold that none of the arguments for the non-aggression principle are themselves part of libertarianism.

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And I think I understand why they say this, because they're thinking,

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well look, if you say that the arguments for the non-aggression principle,

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that any particular argument for the non-aggression principle is part of libertarianism,

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then you're going to have to say that someone isn't a libertarian unless they hold the principle for that reason.

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like the wrong thing to say. We don't want to deny that someone is a libertarian simply because their argument for libertarianism is utilitarian when we're not utilitarians, or it's not utilitarian when we are, or whatever.

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But there would be something odd if you want to say that really all there is to libertarianism is just the non-aggression principle and what it directly entails, and not any of the ethical or economic arguments for it.

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Because that means that most of what we think of as libertarian literature is not actually, you know, part of libertarianism at all.

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You know, we've got these thick volumes of human action and man economy and state and so forth.

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You thought that was part of the literature of libertarianism.

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But, you know, if, for example, you could say, well look, isn't someone a libertarian if they think, if they hold the economic view

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They knew that freedom would cause poverty, but they're in favor of poverty.

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Suppose I think there'd be mass impoverishment if libertarianism were enacted,

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but I'm in favor of mass impoverishment, and therefore, would someone like that be a libertarian?

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Yes, they're not, probably not the ones that we should invite onto our lecture circuit,

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but they would be libertarians, and so you could say,

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Well, that shows that free market economics is not part of libertarianism.

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Well, I would say that libertarianism is a body of thought, and I think that libertarianism is a body of thought

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that includes all the major arguments that have been made for it.

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Some of those arguments may contradict each other, but there's a difference between saying something is a part of libertarianism

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I think it's an essential part, non-aggression is an essential part of libertarianism.

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Maybe some of the arguments that are offered for it are not essential,

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but something can be part of you without being an essential part.

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If I've got a tumor, that tumor is part of me, it's just not an essential part of me.

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So I'd be willing to say that libertarianism is a historical doctrine that has an essential core.

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An essential core is in some sense ahistorical.

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Nothing at any time or place could count as libertarianism if it didn't have the central core.

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But in its historical contingency, it also has these other things, some of which may be good,

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some of which may be bad, some of which may be sort of more libertarian and others less so,

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just in the sense that they cohere better with libertarianism than other things.

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So I think that the major works of libertarianism count as being part of libertarianism.

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Now, I think that there are two kinds of mistakes that people can make about non-state or, more broadly, non-initiatory force forms of oppression.

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And it's worth saying that those aren't the same things either.

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After all, there may be forms of oppression that are violent and are actually violations of libertarian rights that are not by the state.

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Violence can occur outside the state.

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For example, if domestic violence against women, if you think that's part of what sustains

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a certain kind of social inequality between men and women, well that's not by itself a state form of oppression,

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but it is a non-initiatory force, I mean it is an initiatory force form of oppression.

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But I want to talk about things that are neither state nor initiatory force forms of oppression.

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Although I think those things are often closely linked in interesting ways with the other kind.

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But I think there's an error that tempts statists and then there's a related error that tempts libertarians.

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The error that tempts statists is to say, well, first of all, any form of oppression is a rights violation.

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If I'm oppressing you, then I'm violating your rights. Let's take that as the first premise.

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Second premise is to say, look, there are non-initiatory force forms of oppression.

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There are lots of power relations in society that don't actually depend on anybody using violence.

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Well, therefore, there are rights violations, the conclusion would go, that do not involve the initiation of force.

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And then from that, it's a short step to saying, therefore, the law should do more than simply protect people's libertarian rights.

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and Rights, the law should also protect these other rights,

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not just rights against being aggressed against,

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but rights against these other non-violent forms of oppression.

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Once you do that, then you're well on the way to endorsing

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all kinds of government programs.

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Now, there's a different argument

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that I think tempts libertarians,

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but I think is also erroneous.

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This starts with the same first premise,

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All forms of oppression are rights violations.

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And it says, look, there's no such thing as a rights violation that doesn't involve the initiation of force.

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And they feel, too, you know, standard libertarian arguments as to how you got the right to do whatever you want,

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as long as you're not initiating force against anyone else.

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And from those premises, the conclusion follows that there are no forms of oppression that don't involve the initiation of force.

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Well, I think both these arguments are mistaken.

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And I think they're mistaken in the same place.

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They're mistaken in the first premise.

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Once you identify oppression with a particular form of oppression,

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mainly oppression involves violence, then you're going,

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then that sort of forces you either to want to treat all power relations

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on the same model as violent ones.

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and therefore, you know, start wanting legal control over all sorts of things

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or else you just want to deny the existence of them, but I think that if you deny the first premise

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then you can easily recognize the existence of non-state forms of oppression or non-violent forms of oppression

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without thinking they're rights violations and without thinking that, therefore,

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without thinking that these are things that should be competitive by force of law.

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Now again, some people are going to say that that would be an odd position to hold because let's say, well look,

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if you hold this, if you hold the view that there are forms of oppression, genuine serious forms of oppression,

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that are not violations of libertarian rights and therefore that cannot be combated by law,

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then you're saying we've got a problem when we're not allowed to solve it.

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It seems as though it might be much more attractive to say, either, yes, these forms of oppression are a problem but we are allowed to solve it because we can make more things illegal than just aggression and so we can have lots of government programs.

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Or, on the other hand, to say, you know, that would be a problem if they existed but we're not allowed to solve problems like that and therefore it's much more comforting to think that they don't exist.

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However, I think that this, this conclusion seems, this argument seems to rest on an un-libertarian premise, namely the premise that the only way to solve serious problems is through the use of force.

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I'm so surprised the statists would think that, that's the sort of thing statists think, but it seems as though libertarians have good reason to think otherwise.

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Part of libertarian social theory is precisely to show that violent solutions are much less effective and voluntary solutions are much more effective than we thought.

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And that's what a lot of libertarian social and economic analysis is devoted to showing.

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To showing that government works less well than you might have thought and that private solutions, market solutions, voluntary solutions work better than you might have thought.

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Alright, well what implications might this have?

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Well, let's take the case of the workplace.

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A case of what someone might want to call oppression there.

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What do you mean by that? Well, being pushed around,

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we're given lots of stupid arbitrary commands, having your life made unpleasant.

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made unpleasant and we know that this is a pervasive feature of the workplace.

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One reason that the cartoon strip Dilbert is so popular is because it's so familiar.

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That's what life in the workplace is often like. Not always, but often. Often you have these petty tyrannical rules that make no sense being imposed on you.

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Now, sometimes libertarians want to resist that idea because they think either this would, if that exists, that would show that the market doesn't work, and as libertarians you don't want to say that,

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or you think it means that you're asking the government to step in and do something about it, and we don't want to do that, but it doesn't necessarily have either of those implications.

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For one thing, a libertarian can think, and I think there are good libertarian reasons

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for thinking, that partly, not entirely, but in large part, this situation depends in various

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ways on government intervention.

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As I was saying, I think it was yesterday, the more that government regulation intervenes

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is in ways that systematically benefit employers at the expense of employees, the more this

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sort of thing is likely to happen. For example, if you pass regulations that make it harder

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for poor people to start their own businesses because you have all these regulatory hoops

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they have to jump through. I mean, a perfect example would be a taxi service. A taxi service

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is an ideal form of work for a person that doesn't have much capital to get into because

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doesn't acquire a lot of capital, you know, you need a car and a phone, but a lot of places where a license to start a taxi company costs $100,000, which a lot of poor people don't have handy lying around, well that makes it easier to start a taxi service if you're rich than if you're poor, but like with lots of things, licensing, there are lots of cases where you can't start doing something unless you get a license, you can't get a license until you take a course of a certain kind and the course is often very expensive,

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And then the license fee is expensive.

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And another perfect example is hair braiding services

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in the inner city.

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A lot of people offering those services

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have been shut down by the government on the grounds

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that you can't offer hair braiding services

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unless you have a license as a hairdresser.

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You can't get a license as a hairdresser

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unless you take a hairdressing course,

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which includes not only hair braiding,

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but lots of other things that they actually weren't

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especially interested in doing.

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And that costs money, and then the license costs money, and so on.

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In Louisiana, you can't be a florist unless you have a license,

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because God forbid that you should get a flower arrangement from an unlicensed florist.

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It might explode.

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And, of course, in Louisiana, Mises was a story like a year or so ago.

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I don't know whether anything's changed since.

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The story was that in order to pass the very demanding floral arrangement test,

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You had to pass that in order to get the license, and it turns out to be very difficult to pass that because the judges, as to whether you've succeeded or failed in passing the flower arrangement test, are existing florists.

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So the florists are in charge of licensing the competition, and that's why it turns out to be such a gruelingly difficult task to figure out how to arrange flowers in Louisiana.

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Well, so the harder it is to start your own business, the more you're forced to work for someone else, and so that obviously makes it harder for you to quit your job.

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Likewise, the less competition there is among employers, the harder it is for you to quit your job.

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So anything that slows down the economy, anything that makes it harder to start new businesses and so forth,

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that's obviously going to make it harder for workers to quit their job.

393
00:42:39.180 --> 00:42:55.180
And that in turn means that employers can get away with more irrational behavior and more abusive treatment and so forth.

394
00:42:55.180 --> 00:43:06.180
Now the status solution is to keep all those laws in place, but to bring in other laws that are supposed to restrict the employer's options.

395
00:43:06.180 --> 00:43:22.180
And so you get some laws oppressing employees, you get other laws oppressing employees, and then each side says that the other side is doing more oppressing, and well, there are better ways than that.

396
00:43:22.180 --> 00:43:33.180
So what I want to say is that some of this oppression in the workplace depends on government intervention, but I don't think it all does.

397
00:43:33.180 --> 00:43:42.180
For one reason, we think about things like the optimal size of firms.

398
00:43:42.180 --> 00:43:47.180
I think this is a good illustration both of how government is partly responsible for the problem

399
00:43:47.180 --> 00:43:52.180
and an example of how it's not completely so.

400
00:43:52.180 --> 00:43:58.180
In the size of a firm, there are both economies of scale and diseconomies of scale.

401
00:43:58.180 --> 00:44:06.180
Up to a certain limit, companies can get bigger and become more efficient by getting bigger.

402
00:44:06.180 --> 00:44:18.180
A big factory can make a thousand of something for less than a thousand times as much as a small factory can make a hundred of them.

403
00:44:18.180 --> 00:44:29.180
But there are also diseconomies of scale, and one reason for the diseconomies of scale is Mises' Socialist Calculation Argument.

404
00:44:29.180 --> 00:44:37.180
Mises showed that when you depart too far from a price system, you have no rational means of allocating resources.

405
00:44:37.180 --> 00:44:43.180
Well, that's true in a state socialist economy, but also to some extent true in a corporation.

406
00:44:43.180 --> 00:44:48.780
The fact that the state socialist economy is coercive is not the decisive fact there.

407
00:44:48.780 --> 00:44:54.580
Because you can imagine a voluntarily formed corporation that would be the size of Soviet Russia.

408
00:44:54.580 --> 00:45:00.680
And although it might not have been established by violence,

409
00:45:00.680 --> 00:45:07.380
still you'd have very much the same kind of calculational problems.

410
00:45:07.380 --> 00:45:15.380
You have certain things you have to allocate to one department, certain resources you have to allocate to the other, and how much of which should you do?

411
00:45:15.380 --> 00:45:26.380
For the same familiar reasons that you run into problems with the state, you also run into problems with the corporation.

412
00:45:26.380 --> 00:45:31.380
You could say, well, yeah, but the corporation has external market signals. Well, so did the Soviet Union.

413
00:45:31.380 --> 00:45:38.380
It's because of the external market signal the Soviet Union had that it was able to survive as well as it did.

414
00:45:38.380 --> 00:45:42.380
If the Soviet Union had covered the entire globe, it would have melted down much more quickly.

415
00:45:42.380 --> 00:45:51.380
Not that the Soviet Union ever entirely succeeded in abolishing market relations internally either.

416
00:45:51.380 --> 00:45:56.380
To some extent, the black market may have been able to survive.

417
00:45:56.380 --> 00:46:11.380
But nevertheless, the constraints on bureaucratic growth, the constraints on non-market allocation apply as much within firms as within the state.

418
00:46:11.380 --> 00:46:25.380
Therefore, under market system, you'd naturally expect that firms would increase, to tend to increase so long as the economies of scale offset the diseconomies of scale.

419
00:46:25.380 --> 00:46:29.380
When they get to the point when this economies of scale starts setting in,

420
00:46:29.380 --> 00:46:32.380
then it will be much harder for them to increase in size beyond that point.

421
00:46:32.380 --> 00:46:36.380
They tend to start competing less well once they reach that sort of size,

422
00:46:36.380 --> 00:46:39.380
and then they have to scale back.

423
00:46:39.380 --> 00:46:45.380
However, anything that government does to insulate a firm from competition

424
00:46:45.380 --> 00:46:50.380
will encourage it to grow beyond its optimum efficient size.

425
00:46:50.380 --> 00:47:10.380
So, in taxes, regulations, and cartelization, and monopoly privileges, and subsidies, anything that makes it harder to compete against a firm is going to make it tend to grow beyond the point of its efficiency.

426
00:47:10.380 --> 00:47:20.980
And so that is certainly a case where government intervention is relevant to explaining this sort of power.

427
00:47:20.980 --> 00:47:30.740
However, I think that there's also a sense in which there would be room for a certain kind of problem without government intervention.

428
00:47:30.740 --> 00:47:37.660
People sometimes say, well, look, you're never going to have the problem of...

429
00:47:37.660 --> 00:47:43.900
In a free market, you're never going to have the problem of systematic discrimination or systematic underpayment and that sort of thing of employees

430
00:47:43.900 --> 00:47:50.060
because employees' wages are going to be determined by their marginal revenue productivity.

431
00:47:50.060 --> 00:47:55.620
And if one employee is more productive than another, then you're going to have an economic incentive to pay them more.

432
00:47:55.620 --> 00:48:01.100
And if you don't, then you're going to get zapped by competition.

433
00:48:01.100 --> 00:48:08.100
Well, I think that what that ignores is that within a firm,

434
00:48:08.100 --> 00:48:13.100
the market signals don't generally come in and point to some particular employee.

435
00:48:13.100 --> 00:48:19.100
The market signals tell you that your firm as a whole is doing something right or something wrong.

436
00:48:19.100 --> 00:48:24.100
But they don't tell you exactly which of your employees are more productive and which ones aren't.

437
00:48:24.100 --> 00:48:32.100
Now, you can experiment, but you can't try to serve every possible combination and move all your employees around.

438
00:48:32.100 --> 00:48:35.100
Doing all that would have effects on their productivity too.

439
00:48:35.100 --> 00:48:44.100
So, employers often have to go on their best guess as to who's more productive and who's not.

440
00:48:44.100 --> 00:48:55.100
and their guess might be influenced by racial bias or gender bias or cultural bias or who knows what.

441
00:48:55.100 --> 00:49:04.100
Also, of course, it's not the case that every inefficiency is immediately directly punished by the market.

442
00:49:04.100 --> 00:49:10.100
If you're a boss, you will spend some of your revenue in consumption goods.

443
00:49:10.100 --> 00:49:18.100
You might have a fancy carpet for your office and so on, and nothing wrong with that.

444
00:49:18.100 --> 00:49:25.100
You don't expect all the people working in the firm to huddle in little hovels.

445
00:49:25.100 --> 00:49:32.100
But the fact that you can afford some consumption goods, well, certain kinds of discrimination could be your consumption good.

446
00:49:32.100 --> 00:49:39.100
And as long as you don't do so much of it that you wreck your company's productivity,

447
00:49:39.100 --> 00:49:49.100
Because firms are not sort of instantly zapped every time they depart from maximum market efficiency,

448
00:49:49.100 --> 00:49:57.100
there are room for various kinds of adverse power relations within the firm that the market will not automatically correct.

449
00:49:57.100 --> 00:50:02.100
I don't think the solution is that we have to bring in the government,

450
00:50:02.100 --> 00:50:06.100
particularly because I don't think the government is going to be a very efficient solution.

451
00:50:06.100 --> 00:50:14.100
We've got this hierarchical and oppressive system here, so let's bring in this other, much more hierarchical and oppressive system to fix it.

452
00:50:14.100 --> 00:50:19.100
Well, it just doesn't seem very plausible.

453
00:50:19.100 --> 00:50:24.100
It's like taking one poison to drive out another.

454
00:50:24.100 --> 00:50:47.100
So, there's going to be room for, you know, building, you know, certain kinds of institutional structures, you know, you could say unions, but what I have in mind by unions is not exactly the sorts of things that pass as unions today, which I think partly for reasons of governmental intervention,

455
00:50:47.100 --> 00:50:58.100
And partly for various sorts of cultural reasons and economic reasons have largely become co-opted into the state apparatus.

456
00:50:58.100 --> 00:51:09.100
But various sorts of mutual aid among workers, various sorts of cultural things that make it easier for workers to cooperate with each other,

457
00:51:09.100 --> 00:51:16.100
make them more willing to resist certain kinds of things, make employers more embarrassed at requiring certain kinds of things.

458
00:51:16.100 --> 00:51:30.100
So it's sort of a combination of economic and cultural and ideological movement and that's why I think a lot of these 19th century libertarians saw themselves as part of the labor movement.

459
00:51:30.100 --> 00:51:41.100
Although they were sort of, to some extent, oddball members of the labor movement compared to some of the other folks who had more authoritarian plans in mind.

460
00:51:41.100 --> 00:51:53.100
Now, Spencer draws a nice distinction between three kinds of other regarding virtue.

461
00:51:53.100 --> 00:52:00.100
I think it may not be sort of as nuanced and rich as something like Aristotle's list of the virtues,

462
00:52:00.100 --> 00:52:03.100
but I think you can combine it with that.

463
00:52:03.100 --> 00:52:07.100
Spencer distinguishes between justice, negative beneficence, and positive beneficence.

464
00:52:07.100 --> 00:52:11.100
So, justice is not violating people's rights.

465
00:52:11.100 --> 00:52:14.100
Negative beneficence is not harming people.

466
00:52:14.100 --> 00:52:16.100
Well, that's a different concept.

467
00:52:16.100 --> 00:52:18.100
It's one of the reasons I like Spencer more than Mill.

468
00:52:18.100 --> 00:52:20.100
Mill was kind of shaky on the difference between

469
00:52:20.100 --> 00:52:23.100
not violating people's rights and not harming them.

470
00:52:23.100 --> 00:52:26.100
I think that Mill sometimes grasped the distinction,

471
00:52:26.100 --> 00:52:30.100
but other times not as well.

472
00:52:30.100 --> 00:52:32.100
There are lots of ways you can harm people

473
00:52:32.100 --> 00:52:35.100
that don't violate their rights.

474
00:52:35.100 --> 00:52:38.100
and lots of ways you can make people worse off.

475
00:52:38.100 --> 00:52:43.100
And positive benevolence is offering people positive help.

476
00:52:43.100 --> 00:52:55.100
Now, I think these virtues involve different sorts of requirements.

477
00:52:55.100 --> 00:53:02.100
For example, justice is a fairly absolute prohibition on aggressing against people.

478
00:53:02.100 --> 00:53:07.100
Negative beneficence, I think, is not going to have a prohibition on harming people.

479
00:53:07.100 --> 00:53:11.100
It's going to have a prohibition on harming people wrongly.

480
00:53:11.100 --> 00:53:14.100
But there are lots of cases where, if by harming you're just making someone worse off,

481
00:53:14.100 --> 00:53:18.100
there are lots of cases where you can legitimately make someone worse off.

482
00:53:18.100 --> 00:53:24.100
You know, if two people want to marry the same person,

483
00:53:24.100 --> 00:53:28.100
and the person marries one of them, the person in some sense makes the other one worse off.

484
00:53:28.100 --> 00:53:39.100
Now, it makes them worse off in a way that they, you know, can indirectly endorse from the interneutral standpoint and so forth, but nevertheless, you know, they are worse off.

485
00:53:39.100 --> 00:53:48.100
So not all making is worse off. So I think what negative beneficence requires is weaker than what justice requires.

486
00:53:48.100 --> 00:53:58.100
Justice is new. No rights violating ever. Negative beneficence requires something weaker. It doesn't say no harms ever, but it says, you know, try to avoid harms if you can.

487
00:53:58.100 --> 00:54:05.100
I think positive beneficence is still weaker. I think that we have a duty to help other people. It would be odd if we didn't.

488
00:54:05.100 --> 00:54:11.100
It would be odd that people's interests matter so much that we should not, you know, steal even a penny from them.

489
00:54:11.100 --> 00:54:19.100
and yet so little that we're not obligated to throw them a rope if they're falling into a well.

490
00:54:19.100 --> 00:54:24.100
Now again, when I say obligated to help them, I don't mean that we should be forced to help them,

491
00:54:24.100 --> 00:54:28.100
because that would be a violation of justice, but that we ought to help them.

492
00:54:28.100 --> 00:54:36.100
But again, I think that's going to be weaker than negative beneficence in the sense that the number of harms you ought to refrain from

493
00:54:36.100 --> 00:54:40.100
is probably greater than the number of cases where you ought to help people.

494
00:54:40.100 --> 00:54:50.100
You can't help as many people as you possibly could, or you just have to spend every waking hour helping people.

495
00:54:50.100 --> 00:54:55.100
It's much easier to avoid harming people than it is to actually give them positive help.

496
00:54:55.100 --> 00:55:00.100
So I think that positive beneficence is not as demanding as negative beneficence.

497
00:55:00.100 --> 00:55:03.100
Negative beneficence is not as demanding as justice.

498
00:55:03.100 --> 00:55:09.100
But I think it's a mistake to think that this difference is based on the seriousness of these things.

499
00:55:09.100 --> 00:55:29.100
People sometimes think, not just libertarians, I think libertarians too, often think that the reason justice is more demanding is that it's more important, or that it's worse to violate rights than it is to harm in another way, or that it's worse to harm than it is to fail to benefit.

500
00:55:29.100 --> 00:55:35.100
I think it's often going to be true, especially if you think of some sort of paradigm cases, but not always.

501
00:55:35.100 --> 00:55:45.100
Suppose I spend years systematically undermining your confidence, systematically tearing away at your self-confidence in subtle ways

502
00:55:45.100 --> 00:55:50.100
so that you become less and less sure what you should do, you gradually become more and more dependent on me,

503
00:55:50.100 --> 00:55:55.100
you don't go and seek the career you want to because I sort of subtly convinced you that you'd be no good at it,

504
00:55:55.100 --> 00:56:06.100
And gradually you become sort of my, you know, my cringing, fawning servant, but I haven't violated your rights, but I've done some bad stuff.

505
00:56:06.100 --> 00:56:18.100
Suppose on the other hand that I go into Kroger and I steal a grape. Stealing a grape is a rights violation. Systematically undermining your confidence is not.

506
00:56:18.100 --> 00:56:26.100
But it seems that this story of this non-rights-fighting thing I did is much worse than stealing the grape.

507
00:56:26.100 --> 00:56:33.100
I think the reason people often want to think the reverse is they tend to think that if you think it's worse, then you think it's more justified to use force to stop it.

508
00:56:33.100 --> 00:56:41.100
But I think that's a mistake. The wrongness of using force against an evil is not because the evil is not so serious.

509
00:56:41.100 --> 00:56:46.100
Sometimes, though, well, well, anything that doesn't involve force is not that important.

510
00:56:46.100 --> 00:56:52.100
But, you know, the reason that you should have the right to force me not to steal the grape,

511
00:56:52.100 --> 00:56:54.100
but you shouldn't have the right to force me to do this other thing,

512
00:56:54.100 --> 00:56:58.100
isn't because stealing a grape is really, really important and everyone isn't,

513
00:56:58.100 --> 00:57:01.100
but rather because stealing a grape is itself an act of force.

514
00:57:01.100 --> 00:57:10.100
By stealing a grape, I am, you know, forcing my way into the rights boundary of whoever runs Kroger, actually.

515
00:57:10.100 --> 00:57:16.100
If I look more closely into the title of Kroger, it might become very murky, but I assume an ideal Kroger.

516
00:57:16.100 --> 00:57:25.100
I forced my way into the rights boundary of Kroger, and so it's legitimate for them to force me out again.

517
00:57:25.100 --> 00:57:30.100
Whereas in the case where I systematically undermine your self-esteem, I haven't forced my way anywhere,

518
00:57:30.100 --> 00:57:34.100
and so you're not justified in forcing me out.

519
00:57:34.100 --> 00:57:44.100
Now, I think that also there are consequentialist reasons for dealing with force by means of force and dealing with non-force evils by means of non-force.

520
00:57:44.100 --> 00:57:51.100
But I think even apart from consequentialist reasons, there's just this kind of a symmetry.

521
00:57:51.100 --> 00:58:01.100
It's not that we should meet force. It's not that the reason we should ban certain things by force is because they're so evil.

522
00:58:01.100 --> 00:58:08.100
It's just that evils that involve force should be met with force, and evils that don't involve force should be fought with other methods.

523
00:58:08.100 --> 00:58:14.100
Now, as I said, I think it's not just libertarians who sometimes make this mistake.

524
00:58:14.100 --> 00:58:16.100
I don't think libertarians ever make this mistake.

525
00:58:16.100 --> 00:58:21.100
I don't think libertarians very often make this mistake sort of fully or thoroughly.

526
00:58:21.100 --> 00:58:30.100
I think most libertarians, if pressed, will say, of course there are wrong things other than using force.

527
00:58:30.100 --> 00:58:31.100
and Force.

528
00:58:31.100 --> 00:58:33.860
People often accuse Walter of having the view that nothing is wrong other than the

529
00:58:33.860 --> 00:58:34.860
initiation of force.

530
00:58:34.860 --> 00:58:35.860
That's not true.

531
00:58:35.860 --> 00:58:40.740
If you ask him, he'll definitely say, of course there are wrong things other than force.

532
00:58:40.740 --> 00:58:45.020
So I'm not saying that libertarians are ever likely to make that mistake and serve a thorough

533
00:58:45.020 --> 00:58:46.020
going way.

534
00:58:46.020 --> 00:58:50.740
But nevertheless, you'll find throughout libertarian literature, phrases like, well, there's nothing

535
00:58:50.740 --> 00:58:55.740
wrong with it so long as it doesn't involve force or so long as it doesn't involve the

536
00:58:55.740 --> 00:58:56.740
state.

537
00:58:56.740 --> 00:58:58.940
And if you press them, they'll say, well, what they mean by nothing wrong with it is

538
00:58:58.940 --> 00:59:04.620
is Nothing Rights Violating. That's fine. But sort of the flavor of the tone suggests

539
00:59:04.620 --> 00:59:13.060
that they're tending to emphasize the importance of rights violations and other things. You

540
00:59:13.060 --> 00:59:18.100
have to say, well, it can be misleading to use the phrase, there's nothing wrong with

541
00:59:18.100 --> 00:59:22.740
it as long as it doesn't involve force, because there are lots of things that there's nothing

542
00:59:22.740 --> 00:59:27.420
wrong with in that, in the sense of nothing unjust, but nevertheless might be very wrong.

543
00:59:27.420 --> 00:59:33.100
And it certainly can sound to people as though we are indifferent to all sorts of people

544
00:59:33.100 --> 00:59:36.700
if we think that we say things like there's nothing wrong with them.

545
00:59:36.700 --> 00:59:42.460
But statists also make this mistake, and I think statists often make it much more thoroughly.

546
00:59:42.460 --> 00:59:47.540
Statists often think that to say that you don't want to deal with something by force

547
00:59:47.540 --> 00:59:50.420
just is to say that you don't think it's important.

548
00:59:50.420 --> 00:59:52.860
And so statists think that anything that's important is something they want to deal with

549
00:59:52.860 --> 00:59:54.820
by force.

550
00:59:54.820 --> 00:59:59.740
And since they rightly think that lots and lots of things are important, they quite naturally

551
00:59:59.740 --> 01:00:05.220
draw the horrendous conclusion that government force should be sort of all-pervasive in our

552
01:00:05.220 --> 01:00:14.220
lives. Every time there's a problem, violence is the solution. Though for reasons of, I

553
01:00:14.220 --> 01:00:19.380
think, application thickness, they often don't recognize themselves as people who are saying

554
01:00:19.380 --> 01:00:27.260
saying that violence is the solution and most status would think that they're against violence

555
01:00:27.260 --> 01:00:32.720
but they have trouble seeing state violence as violence because they've accepted this

556
01:00:32.720 --> 01:00:39.560
sort of an incantational picture of the state where when the state decrees something it

557
01:00:39.560 --> 01:00:43.180
just happens and of course they know in principle it happens because people are forcing it but

558
01:00:43.180 --> 01:00:48.260
they have this idea that somehow things happen if the state says so and it's just sort of

559
01:00:48.260 --> 01:01:18.260
There's a lot of random if things happen without the state saying so and so status often want to know well what guarantees that this would happen without the state and so the state saying something guarantees it you know there are lots of things the state would like to guarantee but can't manage to do you know so of course status think that you know have great faith in violent methods and very little faith in non-violent methods and so of course

560
01:01:18.260 --> 01:01:24.260
From their point of view, a serious evil should be fought with force, whether it's an evil that involves force or not.

561
01:01:24.260 --> 01:01:33.260
If you really care about some problem, if you really think it's worth addressing, then you need to address it by prohibitive means.

562
01:01:33.260 --> 01:01:44.260
But if you're a libertarian, you think, well, you know, you have greater faith in voluntary means.

563
01:01:44.260 --> 01:01:47.260
I think there's a question of exactly what voluntary means means.

564
01:01:47.260 --> 01:01:49.260
Voluntary means means.

565
01:01:49.260 --> 01:01:52.260
Because on the one hand you might think, well,

566
01:01:52.260 --> 01:01:54.260
by voluntary means you mean the market.

567
01:01:54.260 --> 01:02:01.260
By the market you mean sort of the sum total of voluntary human interaction.

568
01:02:01.260 --> 01:02:05.260
But then you could think, by market we mean buying and selling.

569
01:02:05.260 --> 01:02:08.260
But I think there's sort of a broad and a narrow sense of the market,

570
01:02:08.260 --> 01:02:10.260
and we need to be careful not to confuse them.

571
01:02:10.260 --> 01:02:13.260
There's a broad sense in which the market just means the entire range of voluntary transactions,

572
01:02:13.260 --> 01:02:30.260
There is a narrow sense in which by the market we mean voluntary exchange, cash exchange, prices, commercial transactions.

573
01:02:30.260 --> 01:02:44.260
And then somehow comes the danger is that non-coercive but organized and in some sense political modes of organization become invisible.

574
01:02:44.260 --> 01:02:53.260
There's an old joke, I don't know, probably not that old, but anyway, well, it goes back to the last century.

575
01:02:53.260 --> 01:02:57.260
There's a joke, how many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb?

576
01:02:57.260 --> 01:03:00.460
The answer is none, the market will take care of it.

577
01:03:00.460 --> 01:03:05.260
Well, there's certainly something right about that.

578
01:03:05.260 --> 01:03:09.860
Libertarians understand the power of invisible hand solutions.

579
01:03:09.860 --> 01:03:12.360
They understand that there are lots of things that will,

580
01:03:12.360 --> 01:03:14.060
there are lots of good results that will be brought about

581
01:03:14.060 --> 01:03:15.960
without anyone consciously aiming at them,

582
01:03:15.960 --> 01:03:18.860
as long as you simply let people freely interact.

583
01:03:18.860 --> 01:03:22.960
And that's something that statists have a very hard time understanding.

584
01:03:22.960 --> 01:03:25.660
So it's certainly appropriate for libertarians to sort of

585
01:03:25.660 --> 01:03:35.660
specialize in pointing out that there are these ways of bringing about results that don't involve consciously aiming at things,

586
01:03:35.660 --> 01:03:41.660
but simply allowing them to arise through spontaneous order.

587
01:03:41.660 --> 01:03:48.660
However, focusing on that very important insight, because then there's blindness to another important insight,

588
01:03:48.660 --> 01:03:57.200
Insight, which is that invisible hands are not the only hands in the market. There are

589
01:03:57.200 --> 01:04:03.840
visible hands too, namely ours, and that not everything we do is in the market, not everything

590
01:04:03.840 --> 01:04:13.080
we bring about is the result of simply letting market forces operate and let them bring about

591
01:04:13.080 --> 01:04:17.720
results that were no part of our intention. That's an important aspect of the market.

592
01:04:17.720 --> 01:04:20.920
Another important aspect of the market is entrepreneurship.

593
01:04:20.920 --> 01:04:31.120
Another important aspect of the market is that we see a need and we consciously go out and intend to fill it.

594
01:04:31.120 --> 01:04:45.520
Now, Hayek is famous for emphasizing this idea that we shouldn't think that all order in society has to be the product of rational planning.

595
01:04:45.520 --> 01:04:53.360
and he's absolutely right about that but it doesn't follow and I don't think that Hayek intends to infer

596
01:04:53.360 --> 01:04:57.680
although you know I think that you know Rothbard takes to Hayek to task for thinking that sort of

597
01:04:57.680 --> 01:05:01.360
everything just happens sort of robotically and no one plans anything I think Rothbard is a little

598
01:05:01.360 --> 01:05:06.640
too harsh on Hayek but I think he's on to something there is certainly a danger of focusing on that

599
01:05:07.440 --> 01:05:12.080
aspect that Hayek's also you know had such good insight into but focusing on that to the extent of

600
01:05:12.080 --> 01:05:19.280
of downgrading this other sign of things, rational planning, rational coordination of people

601
01:05:19.280 --> 01:05:25.360
consciously getting together and trying to do things. That's not un-libertarian. That's

602
01:05:25.360 --> 01:05:32.360
not un-market. After all, you're not against the firm. You're not against there being such

603
01:05:32.360 --> 01:05:36.880
things as firms, and firms precisely are people rationally coordinating. Of course,

604
01:05:36.880 --> 01:05:40.080
you could say, well, they're rationally coordinating to bring about profit to themselves. They're

605
01:05:40.080 --> 01:05:42.680
You're not rationally coordinating to bring about social goals.

606
01:05:42.680 --> 01:05:46.800
Well, maybe not, but what about the libertarian movement?

607
01:05:46.800 --> 01:05:58.800
The libertarian movement is not primarily about trying to make libertarians richer.

608
01:05:58.800 --> 01:06:00.160
But anyway, think about the libertarian movement.

609
01:06:00.160 --> 01:06:05.480
The libertarian movement is not a movement of people who are hoping that liberty will

610
01:06:05.480 --> 01:06:07.160
emerge without anyone aiming at it.

611
01:06:07.160 --> 01:06:09.160
We're all aiming at it.

612
01:06:09.160 --> 01:06:20.160
Libertarian movement is not primarily about trying to bring out our own personal profit, there might be other more efficient ways of doing that.

613
01:06:20.160 --> 01:06:26.160
So libertarian movement is not something we're just letting the market take care of.

614
01:06:26.160 --> 01:06:30.160
We are the market, we're engaging in a kind of social entrepreneurship.

615
01:06:30.160 --> 01:06:36.160
Libertarian movement might not be the only kind of movement worth engaging in.

616
01:06:36.160 --> 01:06:53.160
Once you think that social goals can be promoted not just by the market automatically doing things, although that certainly is, thank goodness for the market, that certainly is one thing it does, one clang from there.

617
01:06:53.160 --> 01:07:02.600
But also, if you think it makes sense to try and organize people to promote libertarian values,

618
01:07:02.600 --> 01:07:07.360
it also makes sense to organize people to try and promote other kinds of values that you might

619
01:07:07.360 --> 01:07:14.040
think are in some sort of interesting connection in one or another of these kinds of thickness

620
01:07:14.040 --> 01:07:25.040
with Libertarian Values. And that's why I think it makes sense for libertarians to worry about things like

621
01:07:25.040 --> 01:07:33.040
like racial discrimination or gender discrimination or people being pushed around on the job.

622
01:07:33.040 --> 01:07:37.040
A lot of libertarians feel reluctant to worry about those things because they think that,

623
01:07:37.040 --> 01:07:43.040
either they think, oh, well that's what left-wing statists worry about, to which the answer is,

624
01:07:43.040 --> 01:07:46.040
Well, you're not going to let them determine your agenda, are you?

625
01:07:46.040 --> 01:07:49.040
Or they worry, well, that means that we think that there's market failure.

626
01:07:49.040 --> 01:07:52.040
But I don't think it means there's market failure.

627
01:07:52.040 --> 01:07:57.040
Suppose the market by itself can't guarantee good results.

628
01:07:57.040 --> 01:08:00.040
Suppose we had a free market tomorrow and we all just committed suicide.

629
01:08:00.040 --> 01:08:02.040
Which we could do.

630
01:08:02.040 --> 01:08:04.040
And we say, oh, we tried a free market and there were bad results.

631
01:08:04.040 --> 01:08:07.040
They tried a free market and there were bad results.

632
01:08:07.040 --> 01:08:12.040
Well, how good the results are depends not only on what you're free to do

633
01:08:12.040 --> 01:08:29.040
And so, the fact that there are evils that might not just pop out of existence if you get rid of statism, I don't think that's any sort of critique of the market.

634
01:08:29.040 --> 01:08:39.040
It's not as though we're saying that the state methods of combating these evils are especially effective or useful.

635
01:08:39.040 --> 01:08:46.440
So that's that's my brief for trying to promote a package of libertarianism with

636
01:08:46.440 --> 01:08:51.120
other values. Questions? Yes.

637
01:09:09.040 --> 01:09:14.160
and or falls into the era that we described about hunting libertarians.

638
01:09:14.160 --> 01:09:20.340
Especially now schools tend to use the original and the original important and combined.

639
01:09:20.340 --> 01:09:33.340
And also it's unimportant for people of interest in some libertarians such as Emerson and Durel

640
01:09:33.340 --> 01:09:38.880
who emphasize virtue as a part of a larger life path.

641
01:09:38.880 --> 01:10:01.880
All right, so the question is, why might it be that so many libertarians don't see things in terms of this kind of unity of virtue or unity of some values with others and don't specifically lay more stress on people like Emerson and Thoreau who saw virtue as part of the whole package?

642
01:10:01.880 --> 01:10:27.880
Well, I don't have any sort of detailed sociological thesis to offer here, but I can see some, often mistakes, and obviously I think it's a mistake, often mistakes can be motivated by reaction against things that are quite legitimate to react against.

643
01:10:27.880 --> 01:10:45.880
So, given that some of these values I'm talking about, about being concerned about race and patriarchy and the workers and so forth,

644
01:10:45.880 --> 01:10:54.880
have been so long associated in people's minds with the status left and with authoritarian state solutions to these problems,

645
01:10:54.880 --> 01:11:00.180
You can see why, for many libertarians, as soon as you hear anything that sounds like that, you just have this natural reaction, and ehh.

646
01:11:03.680 --> 01:11:14.080
Also, I think, as opposed to sort of the specific content of the values, I think a lot of libertarians had a kind of reaction against the Randians,

647
01:11:14.080 --> 01:11:17.880
because the Randians, I think, they don't make this mistake. I think many Randians make other mistakes,

648
01:11:17.880 --> 01:11:21.680
but they tend not to make this mistake of separating liberty from other values.

649
01:11:21.680 --> 01:11:39.680
They do want liberty to be sort of incorporated into other values, but because many Randians have sort of a very specific set of values and they're very dogmatic about insisting that you're just a whim-worshipper if you don't sign on to the whole package that a lot of libertarians have sort of a reaction against that.

650
01:11:39.680 --> 01:11:56.680
We don't want any more of that. We don't want to be told that we're not allowed to advocate liberty unless we prefer Mickey Spillane to Emile Zola or something.

651
01:11:56.680 --> 01:12:07.680
So I think that's part of it too. In the 19th century libertarians were often much more associated with some of the sort of the lefty values.

652
01:12:07.680 --> 01:12:13.760
values, but the rise of state socialism both in the form of you know Soviet

653
01:12:13.760 --> 01:12:18.400
socialism abroad and then various kinds of well really fascist but often

654
01:12:18.400 --> 01:12:22.980
described as socialist sort of New Deal type stuff at home sort of drove

655
01:12:22.980 --> 01:12:30.440
libertarians and conservatives into an alliance and so I think that sometimes

656
01:12:30.440 --> 01:12:37.320
explains why libertarians had sort of a reaction against the lefty values and

657
01:12:37.320 --> 01:12:52.320
and a lot of them have sort of reaction against the conservative values too is that alliance frayed apart and so they saw this sort of breaking away from all this bad stuff but of course some of it's bad and some of it isn't.

658
01:12:52.320 --> 01:13:06.320
Do you think that will harm the libertarian position if we don't start to see more of the unity of the kind of cases?

659
01:13:06.320 --> 01:13:13.320
What I think is reasonable is a kind of libertarian attitude in true libertarianism.

660
01:13:13.320 --> 01:13:23.320
So the question is, will it harm libertarianism if we don't try to unify it with other values?

661
01:13:23.320 --> 01:13:29.320
I couldn't tell if you were for or against the reason thing.

662
01:13:29.320 --> 01:13:42.320
I think that has a tendency to be a reason for the problem, and it tends to see libertarian action as being a symbol of our acceptance of libertarianism.

663
01:13:42.320 --> 01:13:56.320
And I have a tendency to think that they would see somebody like Madonna as more of a promoter of libertarianism, than somebody like Thoreau, who is very moralistic.

664
01:13:56.320 --> 01:14:13.320
But again, I'm just wondering how much do you think that will keep our use of libertarianism from each other? How deadly is it to each other?

665
01:14:26.320 --> 01:14:30.520
virtue, and then there's the question specifically about reason, whether reason

666
01:14:30.520 --> 01:14:36.200
having a kind of a libertine attitude toward libertarianism and trying to

667
01:14:36.200 --> 01:14:40.640
think that sort of generally libertine values are more supportive of

668
01:14:40.640 --> 01:14:45.600
libertarianism so they would tend to see Madonna as a more libertarian figure

669
01:14:45.600 --> 01:14:49.920
than a stern moralist like Thoreau.

670
01:14:52.280 --> 01:14:54.520
Well, the reason thing is complicated

671
01:14:56.880 --> 01:15:01.880
because I don't think either emphasis on libertinism

672
01:15:05.200 --> 01:15:08.040
or emphasis on anti-libertinism is either of those

673
01:15:08.040 --> 01:15:12.040
is exactly sort of libertinism I would most like to see.

674
01:15:12.040 --> 01:15:29.040
But, yeah, Reason's version of libertarianism is often pretty watered down, but I think one of the main things is that just in terms of trying to,

675
01:15:29.040 --> 01:15:35.040
you know, if you just leave aside the question of what's right, just think in terms of trying to convince people,

676
01:15:35.040 --> 01:15:49.040
A lot of people think that, a lot of people's main objection to libertarianism is that we don't care about the poor, we don't care about these non-state forms of oppression, we deny their existence, or we say, so what if they exist, it's fine, whatever.

677
01:15:49.040 --> 01:15:59.040
And I think that that, just purely on strategic grounds, if nothing else, I think that hurts us, I think that hurts us a lot.

678
01:15:59.040 --> 01:16:04.040
Now, I've been told when I push my sort of lefty libertarian line, a lot of people say to me,

679
01:16:04.040 --> 01:16:13.040
yeah, well, you know, to the extent that that's really strategic, you know, maybe if you think of values or genuine values, go ahead and embrace them, which I do.

680
01:16:13.040 --> 01:16:16.040
But to the extent that it's really strategic, it's hopeless, people tell me.

681
01:16:16.040 --> 01:16:20.040
They say, you know, the leftists don't, you know, are always going to hate you no matter what you advocate.

682
01:16:20.040 --> 01:16:26.040
Which the answer is that I, you know, I think through experience it's not true.

683
01:16:26.040 --> 01:16:31.960
Not true. A lot of people I've talked to who had a fairly negative attitude toward libertarianism

684
01:16:31.960 --> 01:16:36.800
have a much more positive attitude toward it now once I give them the left-lipped song

685
01:16:36.800 --> 01:16:43.400
and dance. So even on purely strategic grounds, I think it's more effective than people think.

686
01:16:43.400 --> 01:16:49.240
But in the interest of devil's advocacy, let me give you an argument against the libertarianism

687
01:16:49.240 --> 01:16:53.280
that I haven't mentioned. And although I don't think it's right, I think it's worth thinking

688
01:16:53.280 --> 01:17:04.280
Some people have said, look, I think I've given this argument at some point in the past in some other context without thinking about its full implications.

689
01:17:04.280 --> 01:17:17.280
Some people have said, look, one reason that libertarian movements have often failed in the past is that they bundled libertarianism together with a bunch of other goals and then they were always tempted to sacrifice libertarianism if they thought they could promote some of these other goals.

690
01:17:17.280 --> 01:17:21.280
And if all you care about is libertarianism, you're not focusing on all of these other goals,

691
01:17:21.280 --> 01:17:24.280
it's much harder to tempt you away from them.

692
01:17:24.280 --> 01:17:32.280
Spencer, for example, thinks that a danger of traditional liberalism was

693
01:17:32.280 --> 01:17:39.280
it was focused not just on liberty, but it was focused on helping the masses.

694
01:17:39.280 --> 01:17:43.280
And that was why they adopted these various liberal measures, was to help the masses.

695
01:17:43.280 --> 01:17:46.280
And they started thinking about helping the masses as being their goal,

696
01:17:46.280 --> 01:17:54.280
And so then the liberty part drops out and then they start adopting government mechanisms of helping the masses.

697
01:17:54.280 --> 01:18:01.280
That was part of Spencer's diagnosis as to how liberalism moved from a libertarian movement to a status movement.

698
01:18:01.280 --> 01:18:11.280
So that's a kind of argument for thin libertarianism, which is that you're in danger of losing the goal if you lump it with other goals.

699
01:18:11.280 --> 01:18:18.280
So what I would say to that is, well first of all, if you think the other goals are important too,

700
01:18:18.280 --> 01:18:22.280
if that's the reason to dump the other goals, it would be an equally good reason to dump libertarianism,

701
01:18:22.280 --> 01:18:25.280
because libertarianism might distract you from these other goals.

702
01:18:25.280 --> 01:18:28.280
Well I think they're all worth promoting.

703
01:18:28.280 --> 01:18:31.280
Then you should try to promote all of them and just be aware of the danger

704
01:18:31.280 --> 01:18:34.280
that you might end up focusing on some of them and forget the others

705
01:18:34.280 --> 01:18:38.280
and forget the ways in which you think that they go together.

706
01:18:38.280 --> 01:18:43.880
But, you know, if there are two good things, there might be a danger that in pursuing one you'll forget about the other one.

707
01:18:43.880 --> 01:18:49.880
But that doesn't change the fact that they're both good things, and therefore you should, you know, try and keep in mind that they're both worth promoting.

708
01:18:49.880 --> 01:18:50.380
Yeah.

709
01:18:50.380 --> 01:19:20.380
What would you say to this argument that is kind of poorly formed and did not matter to anyone, but I can speak to it in a different way, kind of radical individualism, which is at least a ground business, which is probably an application business, and so that while there may be, if on the set there's a race of worker affection, that banded together in this context is, you know, that's really my say too far, like collective ideology, like, you know,

710
01:19:20.380 --> 01:19:33.180
______

711
01:19:33.180 --> 01:19:35.660
Yeah, so here's a possible objection I'm going to have.

712
01:19:35.660 --> 01:19:41.180
I can say, look, one of the values that, although not strictly entailed by libertarianism,

713
01:19:41.180 --> 01:19:46.060
is going to be related to it through probably applications thickness and instrumental thickness

714
01:19:46.060 --> 01:19:49.340
and grounds thickness, is something like radical individualism.

715
01:19:49.340 --> 01:20:00.340
There's a group for debate on exactly what radical individualism is, but in some sense of radical individualism you might think that's the sort of value that needs to be part of what libertarians are promoting.

716
01:20:00.340 --> 01:20:16.340
But you might think, well, some of these other sort of left libertarian things like combating racism and sexism and bossism and so forth might involve certain kinds of involvement in collective action and interest group politics,

717
01:20:16.340 --> 01:20:24.580
whether on racial or gender or class lines in ways that you might think are at least potentially in conflict or in tension with the radical individualism.

718
01:20:24.580 --> 01:20:29.940
You start thinking of yourself primarily as a member of a certain kind of group rather than as an individual.

719
01:20:29.940 --> 01:20:35.980
You start identifying your interests with a collective or something, isn't that a danger?

720
01:20:35.980 --> 01:20:44.580
Well, certainly I do agree that something like radical individualism is an important part of the libertarian package.

721
01:20:44.580 --> 01:20:54.580
Now, of course, that phrase can mean different things, and certainly I'm defending a version of radical individualism that thinks that other people's interests are incorporated into your own.

722
01:20:54.580 --> 01:21:00.580
So it's certainly not what some people might mean by radical individualism, but I'm happy to call it that.

723
01:21:00.580 --> 01:21:10.580
And that certainly means that there is a possible danger in certain kinds of collective action, but I certainly don't think that it rules them out.

724
01:21:10.580 --> 01:21:18.880
These are reasons for caution and vigilance rather than reasons for avoidance.

725
01:21:18.880 --> 01:21:25.380
I mean, this is a wonderful line from Foucault, who was first an interesting talk about left-libertarian connections.

726
01:21:25.380 --> 01:21:29.380
But Foucault, someone was interviewing Foucault and said,

727
01:21:29.380 --> 01:21:32.580
Foucault was talking about all these different power relations in society and so forth,

728
01:21:32.580 --> 01:21:36.580
and someone said to him, well, you've got a very pessimistic view of society, Foucault.

729
01:21:36.580 --> 01:21:38.780
You think that everything is bad.

730
01:21:38.780 --> 01:21:42.780
And Foucault's answer was, no, I don't think everything is bad. I think everything is dangerous.

731
01:21:42.780 --> 01:21:46.780
Which is an interesting answer. So the idea is, it's an interesting distinction.

732
01:21:46.780 --> 01:21:50.780
If something is bad, that just means, you know, don't do it.

733
01:21:50.780 --> 01:21:54.780
And you might think, well, something's either good or bad. If it's good, then it's fine to do it, no problem, no worries.

734
01:21:54.780 --> 01:21:58.780
If it's bad, then stay away from it. But there may be things that are dangerous, meaning

735
01:21:58.780 --> 01:22:02.780
it's not necessarily the case that you shouldn't do them.

736
01:22:02.780 --> 01:22:06.780
Because there might be the case that, you know, not doing them would be dangerous too. It just might be that

737
01:22:06.780 --> 01:22:09.280
There are certain ways in which you have to be cautious.

738
01:22:09.280 --> 01:22:12.860
Certain things involve certain dangers, and maybe not doing them would involve different

739
01:22:12.860 --> 01:22:14.860
dangers and you just have to pay attention.

740
01:22:14.860 --> 01:22:15.860
Yeah.

741
01:22:15.860 --> 01:22:20.860
I kind of noticed when libertarians argue about this, they seem to have a good connection.

742
01:22:20.860 --> 01:22:26.860
For libertarians, you look at your choices and if you're free to pick among them, then you're free, you're not a threat.

743
01:22:26.860 --> 01:22:32.860
But let this kind of freedom of being a function of the number of choices you have.

744
01:22:32.860 --> 01:22:36.860
And I was wondering, the left libertarian, what do you think?

745
01:22:36.860 --> 01:22:44.860
His oppression, how do we define it? Is it more, I could choose free, or do I have to be the member of options that I have?

746
01:22:44.860 --> 01:23:04.860
Alright, so the question is, should we think of oppression in terms of being able to choose freely, which is the way libertarians often think about it, or should we think about it in terms of the number of options you have, so that a poor person would be more oppressed than a rich one or less free than a rich one, as many left-wing statists think about it?

747
01:23:04.860 --> 01:23:10.580
Well, again, I want to distinguish different senses of oppression.

748
01:23:10.580 --> 01:23:20.580
I think that if your options are limited, not just by, you know, sort of natural facts,

749
01:23:20.580 --> 01:23:27.780
but by various sorts of systematic social relations, I think that counts as a form of

750
01:23:27.780 --> 01:23:33.100
oppression, but it's a different kind of oppression from the specific kind that's rights violating.

751
01:23:33.100 --> 01:23:37.660
Now, not every case where your options are fewer is a form of oppression.

752
01:23:37.660 --> 01:23:55.660
But if the options are fewer because, I mean, there's this example from Marilyn Fry of the, which gives us birdcage example where it's no one bar of the cage that stops the bird from getting out, but it's all the bars together.

753
01:23:55.660 --> 01:24:04.160
Discrimination might not be a serious problem if, say, just a few oddball people practice it.

754
01:24:04.160 --> 01:24:10.160
Suppose that there's one person somewhere who discriminates against people with an even number of freckles on their face.

755
01:24:10.160 --> 01:24:13.160
We won't hire anyone with an even number of freckles, but they hire people with odd number of freckles.

756
01:24:13.160 --> 01:24:18.160
If we found out this person existed, we wouldn't be terribly worried about this regard as a serious social problem.

757
01:24:18.160 --> 01:24:24.660
But if this becomes sort of a pervasive pattern, then people are systematically disadvantaged by it in a way that is not unjust.

758
01:24:24.660 --> 01:24:29.300
It's not rights violating, but nevertheless it's a, you know, it's a bad thing.

759
01:24:29.300 --> 01:24:34.540
It would be better if, you know, we could do things to prevent this.

760
01:24:34.540 --> 01:24:38.100
Free markets certainly give incentives to prevent it.

761
01:24:38.100 --> 01:24:44.620
They don't sort of magically prevent it, but they do kind of give, you know, make it economically

762
01:24:44.620 --> 01:24:49.100
costly for people to engage in discrimination, which suggests it's likely to be less of it,

763
01:24:49.100 --> 01:24:52.460
but nevertheless, you know, people can be willing to pay the costs, and so you might

764
01:24:52.460 --> 01:25:11.660
Looking at liberalism since the middle of the 19th century, there's a progression downward

765
01:25:11.660 --> 01:25:19.660
in human behavior, and that's because these liberals have become pseudo-liberals, but

766
01:25:19.660 --> 01:25:48.660
The pseudo-liberal is just the, I mean he's a phony liberal, and one of the definitions of catholic is liberal, in other words, considering all things in order to make a judgement overall, this is catholic, I mean, that's what catholic means.

767
01:25:49.660 --> 01:26:13.660
considering all things, but these people constantly, they have, first of all, they're, they're, they're, they're poorly educated. Secondly, they take what they, it's, it's, it's infinitely better to learn a few things well and truly than to learn many things badly. And that's what these liberals have, have been doing for years.

768
01:26:13.660 --> 01:26:23.660
Yes, so the point is that from the movement from the 19th century through the 20th and on into our own, there's been a decline in liberalism.

769
01:26:23.660 --> 01:26:31.660
Yes, I certainly agree with that. The classical liberals were much more libertarian and the current ones were much more state intervention.

770
01:26:31.660 --> 01:26:40.660
I wasn't sure whether Catholic with the small c was something you were advocating or something you were against. Which was it?

771
01:26:40.660 --> 01:27:07.660
Well, I mean Catholic, well, the definition of Catholic was a small thing. In other words, the sense of Catholic is all embracing. And they, the liberals, a true liberal, he embraces everything and he thinks deeply about it, then he comes to a conclusion that's much more liable to be right than wrong.

772
01:27:07.660 --> 01:27:24.660
All right, so Catholic means the same thing as dialectical, in the sense I was talking about earlier of Catholic meaning, dialectical meaning refusing to simply consider a few things ripped from their context, but considering them in their relationship to the total context.

773
01:27:24.660 --> 01:27:33.660
No, no, I don't quite understand. You can't take things from their context, otherwise then you stop thinking.

774
01:27:33.660 --> 01:27:44.660
Exactly, yeah, so the dialectical approach advocates viewing things in their context rather than ripping them out, yeah, so dialectical Catholicism.

775
01:28:03.660 --> 01:28:32.660
Yeah so that's a very nice point. The question is,

776
01:28:32.660 --> 01:28:38.660
does the sort of Chris Cabrera dialectical approach necessarily lead to left libertarianism

777
01:28:38.660 --> 01:28:44.660
or might it lead to something very conservative where you talk about the sort of the groundedness of things

778
01:28:44.660 --> 01:28:47.660
and specific time and place and specific cultural context

779
01:28:47.660 --> 01:28:52.660
and that might lead to the view that you should limit the amount of radical change you're asking for

780
01:28:52.660 --> 01:28:57.660
and might that lead to blunting the edge of radicalism?

781
01:28:57.660 --> 01:29:01.660
Yeah, and I think that's right. I think it's a legitimate worry

782
01:29:01.660 --> 01:29:06.660
I don't worry, although obviously I think that the right way to work it out won't have that upshot.

783
01:29:06.660 --> 01:29:11.660
I mean, certainly it's true that you have to take account of these contextual things

784
01:29:11.660 --> 01:29:18.660
and certain kinds of programs for radical reform would be silly.

785
01:29:18.660 --> 01:29:23.660
There's a little question of if there's a button on here that would abolish the government, would I push it?

786
01:29:23.660 --> 01:29:26.660
Well, I need more information. If it just makes the existing government go away

787
01:29:26.660 --> 01:29:30.660
but everyone stayed around with their existing preferences, we'd have a new government very quickly

788
01:29:30.660 --> 01:30:00.660
and who knows what it would be like, you know, I want the button to make it go in, stay away and even then I might want more information, but yeah, so it's certainly true that there are limitations on, you know, the dialectical contextual search of limitations on the kind of radical reform, but yeah, I agree that I don't think it does, you know, require us to, you know, to just sort of resign ourselves to existing

789
01:30:00.660 --> 01:30:07.300
and things, because I think that we should work to overcome existing cultural problems

790
01:30:07.300 --> 01:30:08.300
as well as we can.

791
01:30:08.300 --> 01:30:11.900
And we know we can't achieve it overnight, but that's not a reason for trying to do

792
01:30:11.900 --> 01:30:12.900
less than we can.

793
01:30:12.900 --> 01:30:18.260
And there's the line from William Lloyd Garrison that Rothbard liked to quote, that gradualism

794
01:30:18.260 --> 01:30:19.820
in theory is perpetuity in practice.

795
01:30:19.820 --> 01:30:23.020
And people say we shouldn't agitate for these changes right now, we should do it gradually.

796
01:30:23.020 --> 01:30:27.580
He says, well, it's probably going to be gradual, but I should agitate right now.

797
01:30:27.580 --> 01:30:28.580
And I think we are out of time.

798
01:30:28.580 --> 01:30:30.580
Thank you very much.