WEBVTT

NOTE The Imprisoner's Dilemma

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:21.080
I'm sitting here with Dan D'Amico, a professor of economics at Loyola University.

2
00:00:21.080 --> 00:00:24.280
I think for many people, this is the first time they've ever seen you on camera, at

3
00:00:24.280 --> 00:00:25.280
least in this format.

4
00:00:25.280 --> 00:00:26.280
So, welcome.

5
00:00:26.280 --> 00:00:27.280
It's great to be here.

6
00:00:27.280 --> 00:00:29.280
Now, how long have you been teaching at Loyola?

7
00:00:29.280 --> 00:00:30.480
This is my third year.

8
00:00:30.480 --> 00:00:31.480
Okay, fantastic.

9
00:00:31.480 --> 00:00:32.480
We were just a kid.

10
00:00:32.480 --> 00:00:33.480
All right.

11
00:00:33.480 --> 00:00:34.480
Thanks, Jeff.

12
00:00:34.480 --> 00:00:38.800
Now, we remember you from when you used to come to Mises University.

13
00:00:38.800 --> 00:00:39.800
How long...

14
00:00:39.800 --> 00:00:40.800
Absolutely.

15
00:00:40.800 --> 00:00:41.800
When was your first time?

16
00:00:41.800 --> 00:00:48.680
First time was my summer of junior year of undergrad, so probably 2000 or 2003, 2000.

17
00:00:48.680 --> 00:00:49.680
Yeah.

18
00:00:49.680 --> 00:00:54.680
Well, it's so great where your career has gone and I should mention right at the outside

19
00:00:54.680 --> 00:00:58.160
that you won an extraordinary honor, I guess, this year.

20
00:00:58.160 --> 00:01:00.460
Do you just mention something about that paper on public choice?

21
00:01:00.460 --> 00:01:01.620
Sure.

22
00:01:01.620 --> 00:01:04.620
I wrote a paper called The Prison and Economics,

23
00:01:04.620 --> 00:01:07.820
sort of modeled after Ronald Coase's The Lighthouse

24
00:01:07.820 --> 00:01:08.500
in Economics.

25
00:01:08.500 --> 00:01:11.540
And the subtitle was Private and Public Incarceration

26
00:01:11.540 --> 00:01:12.300
in Ancient Greece.

27
00:01:12.300 --> 00:01:17.740
And it describes the transition that the Athenian system

28
00:01:17.740 --> 00:01:23.260
of law undergoes after they basically invent prisons.

29
00:01:23.260 --> 00:01:27.140
They basically utilize this new technology

30
00:01:27.140 --> 00:01:34.060
of Enforcing Punishments by Means of Incarcerating People, by Holding Them Captive.

31
00:01:34.060 --> 00:01:41.460
And it has this entire series of sort of domino effects on the legal system after that because

32
00:01:41.460 --> 00:01:44.860
it gives the state an incredible new power.

33
00:01:44.860 --> 00:01:49.100
And so all of the subsequent descriptions that many Austrian economists have noticed

34
00:01:49.100 --> 00:01:57.380
over the years about the role of warfare as well as monetary policy and the subsequent

35
00:01:57.380 --> 00:02:01.380
effects that that had on the collapse and the eventual collapse of the Athenian Empire and

36
00:02:01.380 --> 00:02:07.100
other empires was actually, it appears as far as the historical record that the invention

37
00:02:07.100 --> 00:02:13.460
of the prison system sort of preceded that and I sort of trace out an explanation as

38
00:02:13.460 --> 00:02:15.880
to how those things are related.

39
00:02:15.880 --> 00:02:20.160
So within the prison system you have the fundamental claim of the state, you know, which is that

40
00:02:20.160 --> 00:02:26.440
we can take you, take your life and stick you away for any period of time which is according

41
00:02:26.440 --> 00:02:29.440
to whatever we happen to believe.

42
00:02:29.440 --> 00:02:34.840
So ultimately it establishes even more profoundly than something like the income tax.

43
00:02:34.840 --> 00:02:37.720
We own, we own you, we own potentially everybody.

44
00:02:37.720 --> 00:02:42.280
Well, not only that, but in the Athenian case what it really, the power it gives to the

45
00:02:42.280 --> 00:02:44.720
state is personhood.

46
00:02:44.720 --> 00:02:51.520
It gives the government the ability to decide who is and who is not a legitimate citizen.

47
00:02:51.520 --> 00:02:58.920
I mean, essentially, the notion of citizenship gets redefined as to those who are subject

48
00:02:58.920 --> 00:03:06.720
to sort of the private functions of enforcement, like you being liable to me as an indentured

49
00:03:06.720 --> 00:03:10.880
servant if you fail to pay your debts to me.

50
00:03:10.880 --> 00:03:18.040
That gets monopolized by the state and the state is the only person who is then allowed

51
00:03:18.040 --> 00:03:27.040
to use that form of force to threaten a last line of threat to ensure contracts.

52
00:03:27.040 --> 00:03:30.640
Basically takes all of that mechanism out of the hands of these private individuals.

53
00:03:30.640 --> 00:03:34.460
It then gives it that ability, it's almost like a gerrymandering system.

54
00:03:34.460 --> 00:03:40.560
They can now control who it is who votes and who it is contributes to the public contribution

55
00:03:40.560 --> 00:04:10.560
of Law. Yeah, I should mention, really, that this is a line of research for you. This is a field of study for you, and it's completely innovative, at least in modern history for Austrians. So it's an extraordinary thing, very creative, what you're doing, which is difficult enough to come up with a unique research program in this day and age. But what you're talking about, as you were speaking, it suddenly strikes me just how profound this is for libertarian research.

56
00:04:10.560 --> 00:04:11.560
Research Program.

57
00:04:11.560 --> 00:04:12.560
Well, certainly.

58
00:04:12.560 --> 00:04:19.440
I mean, basically, in graduate school, I thought there's sort of two ways to go about being

59
00:04:19.440 --> 00:04:20.440
a scholar.

60
00:04:20.440 --> 00:04:25.520
You can be sort of a theorist and have a unique contribution of a particular perspective or

61
00:04:25.520 --> 00:04:31.440
model or theory, and then find lots of applications for that theory and ways to sort of bring

62
00:04:31.440 --> 00:04:32.920
it to life.

63
00:04:32.920 --> 00:04:41.020
Conversely, I'm not particularly innovative as far as like unique theoretical contributions,

64
00:04:41.020 --> 00:04:46.560
but I'm very much fascinated with this one topic, mainly the historical origins and subsequent

65
00:04:46.560 --> 00:04:49.600
manifestations of prisons and incarceration.

66
00:04:49.600 --> 00:04:55.540
And when I read those literatures, it's either that thinkers like Mises and Hayek and Kirzner

67
00:04:55.540 --> 00:05:03.700
Center and their perspectives are either ignored or just sort of dismissed.

68
00:05:03.700 --> 00:05:07.780
And I think that their insights, like sort of Austrian perspectives of spontaneous order

69
00:05:07.780 --> 00:05:13.580
and public choice perspectives of rent-seeking and bureaucracy, are the critical tools that

70
00:05:13.580 --> 00:05:18.660
we should be using in order to understand these social phenomenon through history and

71
00:05:18.660 --> 00:05:19.660
today.

72
00:05:19.660 --> 00:05:22.260
And when you're talking about prisons, you're really talking about the teeth of the state,

73
00:05:22.260 --> 00:05:23.260
right?

74
00:05:23.260 --> 00:05:24.260
I mean, the fundamental thing.

75
00:05:24.260 --> 00:05:30.980
So, I mean, what inspired me to this topic was sort of my libertarian biases, absolutely.

76
00:05:30.980 --> 00:05:36.500
True love of liberty. But what's striking about that is that, you know, the history of liberalism

77
00:05:36.500 --> 00:05:41.060
has had this, there's an Achilles heel, I guess you could say that there's always been a belief

78
00:05:41.060 --> 00:05:46.900
out there that if you could just limit the state to specific functions, namely, the police powers,

79
00:05:46.900 --> 00:05:53.860
right, adjudication issues, things like this, then it could otherwise, you should otherwise

80
00:05:53.860 --> 00:05:58.460
Let's control it and you can have a free side, but what your research is showing is something

81
00:05:58.460 --> 00:06:04.860
much more fundamental, that it's this precise power that is the core power.

82
00:06:04.860 --> 00:06:05.860
Right.

83
00:06:05.860 --> 00:06:12.420
I think that there's a degree of inevitable growth that occurs when you reserve the right

84
00:06:12.420 --> 00:06:14.900
of force to the state.

85
00:06:14.900 --> 00:06:19.380
There's also, I think, some very interesting implications about constitutional political

86
00:06:19.380 --> 00:06:24.700
Political Economy, that I haven't had the opportunity to fully flesh out, but it's sort

87
00:06:24.700 --> 00:06:30.220
of sitting in the background as I'm continuing to do research, which is if the implications

88
00:06:30.220 --> 00:06:35.220
here are correct, that this is the inevitable sort of source of growth in the state, then

89
00:06:35.220 --> 00:06:39.480
the question of constitutional political economy should be that the goals of constraining the

90
00:06:39.480 --> 00:06:45.340
state have to be focused on constraining the forceful powers of police domestically and

91
00:06:45.340 --> 00:06:48.300
the forceful powers of military abroad.

92
00:06:48.300 --> 00:07:00.300
Yeah, and if you look at the growth of the state, even in our times, and we all draw on our own experience, our own lifetimes to understand things, this is the critical area of the growth of the state and its police powers. It's astonishing.

93
00:07:00.300 --> 00:07:20.300
I mean, I think so. I was more as a lover of liberty and concern for the state of society. I mean, to me, it's a notion of the thing that actually threatens liberty in the day-to-day lives of many Americans is the police state more than anything else.

94
00:07:20.300 --> 00:07:25.660
And we know this, we know this in our rig, and we all try to drive in a way that avoids the police.

95
00:07:25.660 --> 00:07:26.700
That's the last thing you want to do.

96
00:07:26.700 --> 00:07:30.940
And when you are targeted by the police in some way, you're shocked.

97
00:07:30.940 --> 00:07:33.020
It's just the arbitrary nature of everything.

98
00:07:33.020 --> 00:07:37.340
And if you ever find yourself wrapped up in the criminal justice system, I mean, forget it, right?

99
00:07:38.700 --> 00:07:46.260
I mean, the other sort of obvious parallel that came out of doing the work on Athens is many historians

100
00:07:46.260 --> 00:07:51.820
Let's just look at the process of indentured servitude and describe sort of a feudal serfdom

101
00:07:51.820 --> 00:07:57.640
arrangement where people are trapped in cycles of debt.

102
00:07:57.640 --> 00:08:03.460
If you borrow off of your labor and then you're sort of perpetually indentured to someone,

103
00:08:03.460 --> 00:08:06.340
you become essentially a de facto slave.

104
00:08:06.340 --> 00:08:13.420
Well, that in a lot of ways, our contemporary criminal justice system functions very similarly.

105
00:08:13.420 --> 00:08:17.980
And middle class, upper class people sort of ignore this when you get a speeding ticket

106
00:08:17.980 --> 00:08:21.660
for a couple hundred dollars.

107
00:08:21.660 --> 00:08:26.240
It's pretty obvious to recognize that if you put yourself in the position of someone who

108
00:08:26.240 --> 00:08:31.340
makes significantly less money than you and how difficult it might be to pay that several

109
00:08:31.340 --> 00:08:32.340
hundred dollars.

110
00:08:32.340 --> 00:08:36.920
Well, what happens if you don't pay that several hundred dollars and then sort of have an altercation

111
00:08:36.920 --> 00:08:39.580
or get pulled over again or something?

112
00:08:39.580 --> 00:08:45.660
turns into a criminal offense, and then you can end up being trapped in the system, so

113
00:08:45.660 --> 00:08:51.180
to speak, for something as menial as traffic violations.

114
00:08:51.180 --> 00:08:59.940
Or what I've seen in times, the judge will say, okay, you owe $500, you owe $800, whatever,

115
00:08:59.940 --> 00:09:03.500
and in addition to that, I suspend your driver's license, and in addition to that...

116
00:09:03.500 --> 00:09:05.900
And it inhibits your ability to earn again.

117
00:09:05.900 --> 00:09:10.620
Right. So, and who cares, you know, about this? And where's the appeal? I mean, there's no appeal.

118
00:09:11.820 --> 00:09:18.860
And the people who it harms the most are the least politically empowered. So, it's not surprising

119
00:09:18.860 --> 00:09:24.700
that they're sort of put upon with this burden. Yeah. So, when you hear people talk about

120
00:09:25.420 --> 00:09:31.900
the American system, it's cruel to the poor, it's cruel to minorities, we've got a whole

121
00:09:31.900 --> 00:09:35.700
The whole sector out there of second class citizens, you're listening to this, you're

122
00:09:35.700 --> 00:09:36.700
not dismissing it.

123
00:09:36.700 --> 00:09:38.700
You're thinking, yeah, that's really true.

124
00:09:38.700 --> 00:09:39.980
There's something to this.

125
00:09:39.980 --> 00:09:41.100
I definitely think that's true.

126
00:09:41.100 --> 00:09:44.140
I think that sort of accusation is strange.

127
00:09:44.140 --> 00:09:45.300
There's almost two fronts.

128
00:09:45.300 --> 00:09:49.940
There's people I think who recognize what you and I just sort of described that, yes,

129
00:09:49.940 --> 00:09:52.900
the criminal justice system is inherently biased.

130
00:09:52.900 --> 00:10:00.020
But then there's also this strange sort of perception that capitalism induces inequality

131
00:10:00.020 --> 00:10:03.460
and that that's really what's driving this notion.

132
00:10:03.460 --> 00:10:08.880
And I think that that's a very odd perspective because aside from there being like no real

133
00:10:08.880 --> 00:10:18.380
theoretical explanation as to why that's happening, I think that it ignores this role of the police

134
00:10:18.380 --> 00:10:19.380
state.

135
00:10:19.380 --> 00:10:25.820
I mean, if you just sort of just talk to a person who is poor and living in an urban

136
00:10:25.820 --> 00:10:32.420
Environment and ask them, well, are you frustrated because capitalism has created this system

137
00:10:32.420 --> 00:10:35.500
of inequalities for you?

138
00:10:35.500 --> 00:10:39.420
I don't think they're going to necessarily say, yes, it's the fat cats in the corporate

139
00:10:39.420 --> 00:10:41.980
offices that have made my life difficult.

140
00:10:41.980 --> 00:10:45.220
But if you ask them what they think about the police that are in their neighborhood,

141
00:10:45.220 --> 00:10:48.660
they'll probably give you a very straightforward answer.

142
00:10:48.660 --> 00:10:53.060
Can you throw out some numbers here about our incarceration rates in the United States

143
00:10:53.060 --> 00:10:54.700
so that we can have some perspective?

144
00:10:54.700 --> 00:10:55.980
I don't think about this much.

145
00:10:55.980 --> 00:10:59.480
Our per capita rate is higher than any other country around the world.

146
00:10:59.480 --> 00:11:02.600
It's about one in a hundred people.

147
00:11:02.600 --> 00:11:06.420
Greater populations are currently in jail in the United States than populate the cities

148
00:11:06.420 --> 00:11:10.280
of Los Angeles and Miami combined.

149
00:11:10.280 --> 00:11:16.140
It's an unprecedented magnitude around the world and through history, as well as today

150
00:11:16.140 --> 00:11:19.280
compared to yesterday.

151
00:11:19.280 --> 00:11:25.240
Most of this growth has occurred since the late 1970s.

152
00:11:25.240 --> 00:11:28.820
It's extremely expensive.

153
00:11:28.820 --> 00:11:34.520
Over six billion dollars of resources are usually expended in the various components

154
00:11:34.520 --> 00:11:35.520
of the criminal justice system.

155
00:11:35.520 --> 00:11:39.800
I read just this morning that our prison population is actually larger than the slave population

156
00:11:39.800 --> 00:11:42.000
before 1860.

157
00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:45.360
I would believe that, yes.

158
00:11:45.360 --> 00:11:50.320
It is a government program, and it has all the failings that you expect of a government program, right?

159
00:11:50.320 --> 00:11:57.680
And those numbers are explicitly biased. The proportions, as far as race is concerned, is

160
00:11:59.360 --> 00:12:05.120
African American men have a higher probability of going to jail than they do college.

161
00:12:05.120 --> 00:12:07.760
Yeah. And the drug war?

162
00:12:08.560 --> 00:12:10.880
That's sort of the fat elephant in the room.

163
00:12:10.880 --> 00:12:21.160
System. It's over a third of that growth since the 1970s is drug violations and it's difficult

164
00:12:21.160 --> 00:12:29.000
to disaggregate those numbers because much of the violent crime that is now sort of plaguing

165
00:12:29.000 --> 00:12:35.000
our cities and plaguing our criminal justice system is in conjunction with the drug war

166
00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:38.800
for both enforcement reasons, right? They don't have legitimate means of enforcing

167
00:12:38.800 --> 00:12:46.160
for monopoly reasons, that they fight over locations to sell and distribute drugs, but

168
00:12:46.160 --> 00:12:52.120
also there's sort of relative price issues, Alchin and Allen effects, if you will.

169
00:12:52.120 --> 00:12:58.360
If you're entirely enmeshed in a criminal lifestyle through prohibition, then the relative

170
00:12:58.360 --> 00:13:05.640
costs of being criminal on other margins in more libertarian crimes become sort of, well,

171
00:13:05.640 --> 00:13:06.640
more opportune.

172
00:13:06.640 --> 00:13:11.040
Right. If you're a meth dealer, it's just not that big a deal to go steal a ham sandwich from Walmart.

173
00:13:11.040 --> 00:13:11.840
Exactly.

174
00:13:11.840 --> 00:13:18.960
Yeah. I can't say I've had a lot of experience in this world, but that's definitely the little I've had.

175
00:13:18.960 --> 00:13:20.320
Back when you sold meth.

176
00:13:20.320 --> 00:13:23.760
Yeah. Well, I mean, in the prison system and it's related to...

177
00:13:23.760 --> 00:13:28.560
But that did happen. You like ran a stop sign and they took you and your bow tie right to jail.

178
00:13:28.560 --> 00:13:31.840
I did time in the big house myself and I got to know a lot.

179
00:13:31.840 --> 00:13:32.400
I've never.

180
00:13:32.960 --> 00:13:34.240
So you've never had this?

181
00:13:34.240 --> 00:13:36.080
Yeah. You're like, you've got more street cred than me, Jeff.

182
00:13:36.640 --> 00:13:41.200
I actually wrote an essay, maybe you read it, about what happens to you in jail.

183
00:13:41.200 --> 00:13:43.200
Yeah, I read every word. It was fascinating.

184
00:13:43.200 --> 00:13:45.040
It still intrigues me because...

185
00:13:45.040 --> 00:13:47.280
At the end, I was sort of, did this happen to Jeff?

186
00:13:47.840 --> 00:13:51.440
Yeah, I didn't reveal it when I wrote the essay because it was kind of embarrassing,

187
00:13:51.440 --> 00:13:54.880
which please don't let me forget that point because I really want to go back to this point

188
00:13:54.880 --> 00:14:02.080
about social embarrassment associated with going to jail. But the thing that struck me the most,

189
00:14:02.080 --> 00:14:06.400
and it's what I tried to convey, maybe I didn't do a good job of it, was something happens to

190
00:14:06.400 --> 00:14:36.400
When you're in jail, because you suddenly are not surrounded by anybody who values you, and the wardens look at you like a burden, you know, and so you just, you might as well just, you feel like everybody wants you to go away, to not exist, you know, and it's a strange thing, very different being in jail versus being in the outside world where your employers fulfill employees' values, your family, you know, to be valued and loved,

191
00:14:36.400 --> 00:14:43.200
and to have relational control over your human body as the essence of life.

192
00:14:43.200 --> 00:14:51.360
I mean, I think that the social science and sort of psychological insights that have come out of

193
00:14:51.360 --> 00:14:56.960
penology or studying the prison experience is that human beings are social animals.

194
00:14:56.960 --> 00:15:03.200
That one of the scariest elements of our current criminal justice system and mass incarceration is

195
00:15:03.200 --> 00:15:09.800
is the new growth of what are called solitary housing units or solitary housing facilities,

196
00:15:09.800 --> 00:15:13.480
maximum security prisons.

197
00:15:13.480 --> 00:15:19.280
In those facilities, inmates are not, they do not share rooms, they do not have social

198
00:15:19.280 --> 00:15:23.880
space, they do not interact with even other inmates.

199
00:15:23.880 --> 00:15:28.000
They are isolated completely to the individual level.

200
00:15:28.000 --> 00:15:35.120
where you have no opportunity to experience human contact other than very rare experience

201
00:15:35.120 --> 00:15:38.440
with guards.

202
00:15:38.440 --> 00:15:43.600
And the psychological ramifications for that for many people in solitary housing units,

203
00:15:43.600 --> 00:15:45.920
which it's extended periods of time.

204
00:15:45.920 --> 00:15:51.800
I mean, as an enforcement to deter gang activity in prison facilities, they've used this device.

205
00:15:51.800 --> 00:15:56.400
And so if you have a 20-year sentence, they can convert the remainder of your sentence,

206
00:15:56.400 --> 00:16:01.280
be that however many years to purely solitary confinement.

207
00:16:01.280 --> 00:16:03.560
And as if that's going to break up gangs.

208
00:16:03.560 --> 00:16:04.560
Right.

209
00:16:04.560 --> 00:16:05.560
Right.

210
00:16:05.560 --> 00:16:09.320
But, I mean, the mental effects that it has on those inmates is pretty obvious.

211
00:16:09.320 --> 00:16:17.940
I mean, their writing becomes incoherent, their speech begins to deteriorate, I mean,

212
00:16:17.940 --> 00:16:19.760
it basically drives them insane.

213
00:16:19.760 --> 00:16:24.640
How much do you think society loses by having all these people locked up?

214
00:16:24.640 --> 00:16:34.640
I mean, the costs are obvious, but then, I mean, the other costs that we don't notice are more things like, well, what could they be producing and exchanging with us?

215
00:16:34.640 --> 00:16:38.640
Now, a lot of people have a difficult time sort of wrapping their head around that.

216
00:16:38.640 --> 00:16:47.640
Like, if you presume that all of these people belong in those prison systems, then you fear the things that they would be doing were they not locked up.

217
00:16:47.640 --> 00:17:17.640
I think if we recognize that people are much more adaptable to the incentives that they're placed within, that if we had a system that was rewarding better behavior and actually effective at deterring the bad types of behavior, then these people could easily be turned into productive members of society. That they could be contributing to an advanced division of labor. If you expect, if society expects something from people, sometimes people rise to the occasion.

218
00:17:17.640 --> 00:17:22.840
To a large extent, we are benefiting from a form of the extended division of labor that

219
00:17:22.840 --> 00:17:24.320
they do contribute to.

220
00:17:24.320 --> 00:17:30.160
I mean, to ignore the black markets and the underground economy is pretty naive, significant

221
00:17:30.160 --> 00:17:36.440
portions of wealth, significant portions of cooperation, of social bonds, of spontaneous

222
00:17:36.440 --> 00:17:42.000
norms that we recognize as things like money systems and property rights in the legitimate

223
00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:47.920
Economy and the underground economy, the stakes are all that much higher and their institutional

224
00:17:47.920 --> 00:17:52.600
norms are all that much more sort of functional and adaptable.

225
00:17:52.600 --> 00:18:02.240
And to a large extent, that's a stock of knowledge of not only evading the state, but of cooperating

226
00:18:02.240 --> 00:18:08.040
under with potentially hostile agents that maintains a degree of peace that we should

227
00:18:08.040 --> 00:18:13.940
should actually be looking more at to learn how it is that, how significant the potential

228
00:18:13.940 --> 00:18:16.800
for human cooperation and peaceful association really is.

229
00:18:16.800 --> 00:18:25.940
I mean, if rival drug-dealing gangs and sort of murderous mafia types have discovered mechanisms

230
00:18:25.940 --> 00:18:34.280
to maintain peace across themselves, why is it that our nations sort of can't fulfill

231
00:18:34.280 --> 00:18:35.280
those rules?

232
00:18:35.280 --> 00:18:41.360
You know, you're talking about these descriptions of murderous, violent people and antisocial

233
00:18:41.360 --> 00:18:42.360
people.

234
00:18:42.360 --> 00:18:46.400
You know, I think it's important for people to realize that that's a tiny number of the

235
00:18:46.400 --> 00:18:49.400
prison population.

236
00:18:49.400 --> 00:18:54.720
Most people who are embroiled in this have had various misfortunes in life for the most

237
00:18:54.720 --> 00:18:55.720
part.

238
00:18:55.720 --> 00:19:02.920
And, you know, the idea that one in ten people, you know, should be separated out, no, one

239
00:19:02.920 --> 00:19:10.920
should be separated out from the rest of society. That's a vast number of people. That's humongous.

240
00:19:10.920 --> 00:19:19.920
I mean, I also just think it's incredibly not creative. It strikes me as odd, even libertarians who I talk to.

241
00:19:19.920 --> 00:19:26.920
Well, if you do X, you should go to jail and insert any number of sort of obvious crimes that we really don't like.

242
00:19:26.920 --> 00:19:31.640
violence, murder, rape, etc., fine. But it's the second part of that sentence that I really

243
00:19:32.280 --> 00:19:39.160
am very discomforted by. Why is it so presumed that the notion of putting people in boxes

244
00:19:39.800 --> 00:19:45.400
is an effective means of responding to crime? Isn't it part of it that we can just forget,

245
00:19:45.400 --> 00:19:49.800
it allows us just to forget about them? I mean, that's what we really want to do, isn't it? We

246
00:19:49.800 --> 00:19:53.880
want to forget about these people. And when you hear that somebody's in jail, you're like,

247
00:19:53.880 --> 00:20:02.380
Oh, well great. You know, let's not talk anymore about that. Let's just treat that person as if he's dead. And that's what happens. They're treated as if they're dead by society.

248
00:20:02.380 --> 00:20:16.880
It sort of warps the creative process. There's no entrepreneurship in criminal justice. There's no one thinking hard and strategically about how to better react to crime.

249
00:20:16.880 --> 00:20:46.880
You know, Dan, maybe it's obvious to you, I'm very excited about what you're doing and I'm excited that you're young, I'm excited that you're just starting this because you've got a whole lifetime doing this research and you know it's possible that you're going to come out with a great book on the topic that nobody else has done, I mean this is extraordinary, the way you're thinking and what you're doing, but it's especially interesting to me that you seem to be more or less the first guy to get into this area

250
00:20:46.880 --> 00:21:16.880
Well, I was really inspired and a tremendous fan of sort of the hardcore wing of Austrian economics and libertarian research, Bruce Benson, David Friedman, Murray Rothbard. But when when I was reading those literatures, and they were taking head on this sort of question of, well, the difference between, like, minarchism and anarchism is police courts and prison systems. So I was really inspired by that.

251
00:21:16.880 --> 00:21:25.580
and even the most radical and consistent applications of markets to these legal

252
00:21:25.580 --> 00:21:34.280
phenomenon seem to go very quickly over this particular aspect of prisons. There's lots of

253
00:21:34.280 --> 00:21:38.960
work on policing, there's lots of work on roads, there's lots of work on now even national defense,

254
00:21:38.960 --> 00:21:45.920
but it seemed like that the real enforcement mechanism, to me when you go around and you say,

255
00:21:45.920 --> 00:22:15.920
Well, why, why do people pay their taxes? And they say, Oh, well, it's voluntary. You're afraid that you'll go to jail. And I think it's not even just that the police will come and get you. Because if they just came and got you and took you to court, and then you got a cent, you were said that you're wrong, and they raise your taxes even more, then you go home and you just don't pay that. It's really the aspect of being taken away, of being forgotten.

256
00:22:15.920 --> 00:22:21.740
Yeah, yeah, just dispensable, made dispensable by the state, and the potential for research

257
00:22:21.740 --> 00:22:27.840
here is, you know, it's unlimited because it's so unexplored, and yet, there's a lot

258
00:22:27.840 --> 00:22:35.000
of work done in this area, not from the point of view of the liberal tradition, but from

259
00:22:35.000 --> 00:22:43.240
criminology, sociology, all these others, so you've got a wealth of material there to draw

260
00:22:43.240 --> 00:22:49.320
attention to these broader themes. You know, as you were speaking about this, I'm realizing

261
00:22:49.320 --> 00:22:53.800
there's some parallels with the work you're doing and what many people today are doing in the area

262
00:22:53.800 --> 00:22:57.720
of IP, for example. It's one thing to have a theory, okay, patents for government monopoly,

263
00:22:57.720 --> 00:23:02.120
but the application of the theory, the real world is where it gets... I mean, the theory is

264
00:23:02.120 --> 00:23:05.480
essential without which you can't have the application, but it's the application in which

265
00:23:05.480 --> 00:23:14.000
you really begins to take flight. You begin to see how a theory of liberty can really

266
00:23:14.000 --> 00:23:20.140
illuminate the social workings and political workings in a way in which nothing else can.

267
00:23:20.140 --> 00:23:24.640
I also see a lot of overlap between the topic I work on and intellectual property rights

268
00:23:24.640 --> 00:23:31.360
because I think that the IP arena is really sort of this one of the scariest realms where

269
00:23:31.360 --> 00:23:36.600
The unintended consequences of excessive law enforcement occur because when you're talking

270
00:23:36.600 --> 00:23:39.920
about intellectual property, you're talking about the body of knowledge that we have to

271
00:23:39.920 --> 00:23:41.920
work with as a society.

272
00:23:41.920 --> 00:23:48.200
And so, if there are deterrent effects, if excessively incarcerating people does keep

273
00:23:48.200 --> 00:23:54.460
people from trading, in a sense, it also keeps people from thinking, it keeps people from

274
00:23:54.460 --> 00:23:57.920
innovating, it keeps people from being creative, from learning.

275
00:23:57.920 --> 00:23:58.920
Yeah.

276
00:23:58.920 --> 00:24:03.640
Well, so, I don't know if it's possible to frame this up, but, I mean, I'm looking at

277
00:24:03.640 --> 00:24:05.200
the big picture here.

278
00:24:05.200 --> 00:24:09.160
The problem with classical liberalism has been traditionally, there have been a number

279
00:24:09.160 --> 00:24:11.180
of problems with traditional classical liberalism.

280
00:24:11.180 --> 00:24:13.920
One is to grant the need for the police, right?

281
00:24:13.920 --> 00:24:19.320
Oh, we've got to have a state, however minimal, because we've got to have that police force.

282
00:24:19.320 --> 00:24:21.880
Another one has been confusion over intellectual property.

283
00:24:21.880 --> 00:24:26.480
And sure enough, these are the two areas where you combine the two and you'll find the essence

284
00:24:26.480 --> 00:24:47.480
I think that's absolutely true and I also think that the Austrian perspective is the sort of best tooled at being able to do that because we spend so much time thinking in terms of knowledge and we spend so much time thinking in terms of incentives in ways that sort of mainstreamer or neoclassical economists don't.

285
00:24:47.480 --> 00:24:53.480
Now there's a possibility that you're going to go ahead and plunge into teaching a course on the Mises Academy?

286
00:24:53.480 --> 00:24:58.980
I'd love to. I'd love to. I mean, I am a tremendous fan of the Institute, Jeff, and all the work that you do.

287
00:24:58.980 --> 00:25:02.980
And in any way that I can be of support or assistance, I'm happy to.

288
00:25:02.980 --> 00:25:08.980
Well, that's wonderful. We're big fans of you. And I tell you, I can't be more excited about your research program.

289
00:25:08.980 --> 00:25:17.480
I think this is very, very, very interesting. And I hope that your work gets out as well-read and that you stick with it,

290
00:25:17.480 --> 00:25:20.980
because I think there's a lot we can learn from you. Thank you so much, Professor Domingo.

291
00:25:20.980 --> 00:25:22.480
Thank you for having me, Jeff.

292
00:25:23.480 --> 00:25:41.480
www.fieggen.com