I'm very pleased to have this forum to talk to you guys and it's, as Dr. Berzer told me
that you apparently do the readings for your classes unlike the students in my classes
so I'm going to assume that you have read that and that'll be sort of a background.
The point for having that, actually what I'm going to talk about today, I'm going to try
to tailor it to be relevant to your particular class and so that, the purpose of me giving
you guys that handout was not so much that I want to talk about that in the Q&A if you
The Theory of Money and Credit
The reason I'm handing that out is because I want you to see that if somebody says I'm against the government providing a particular service such as police or military defense, it doesn't therefore mean that that person says so because it's unnecessary.
So just for an analogy, if I say, whether or not you agree with me, if I say I don't think the government has a role in higher education and we should just leave that to voluntary transactions in the private sector, it would be unfair to say to me, oh no, because education is very important.
And that's, you know, so what you're saying people don't need to be educated and schools
aren't important.
Well, no, it's just, I think that the government doesn't do a good job of providing that very
important service.
Okay.
So that's why I was giving that just to show you the mechanics of it.
But like I said, my talk right now, I'm going to try to tailor more towards this specific
class.
It let me know upfront, I have never read Kirk before, I've heard of him, but Dr. Berger
gave me this book just yesterday and so I...
The Theory of Money and Credit
In a few moments I'll come back to this idea just to show you in different areas why that's
not so crazy that there's plenty of things that you are going to agree with me when I
give you the examples that you wouldn't want one person or one group or one institution
to be in charge and have everyone else be subordinate to it.
But let me just finish going through, just outlining some of the different types of anarchist
thoughts.
And that is one traditional meaning of the word, and obviously that's not the sort of
anarchist that I am myself, or at least I wouldn't tell you that if I were, and actually
on Thursday. You don't need to be committed to violent revolution in order to think that
the current system is illegitimate or unjust. Just like you could be a monarchist at heart
and think that, you know, I really think we ought to go back to the way it used to be
when there was one person in charge. If he screwed up, everybody knew whose fault it
was, whereas with his representative democracy people, there's no accountability and that
Socialists.
So not all socialists are anarchists but some anarchists are socialists and it gets a little
bit confusing with the terminology.
But the prime example would be Pierre Proudhon, the guy on property stuff, the French thinker
who says that.
He, I don't know very much about that or certainly I'm not comfortable to get up here and lecture
about it.
I have done a little research and I've gone on various websites and argued with people
in this tradition, and let me just say for our purposes here, just to warn you that these
people aren't stupid, all right, that when you think about a socialist, you're thinking,
oh, come on, who could possibly be a socialist, and you have in mind, you know, some Hollywood
person and, you know, and you hear them, you know, get around O'Reilly and they give some
interview about globalization and you're just thinking, what idiots, all right, that is,
that's not a fair representation of this line of thought, okay, I disagree with this line
of Thought.
But it's surprisingly difficult if you're going to engage these people in an argument
and you get somebody who knows what he's talking about, it would be really hard to catch them
making a contradiction.
So I just want to warn you, and that goes for Marxists as well, in my history of economic
thought class that's why I always stress that don't dismiss Marxists as complete idiots
even though there's plenty of Marxists who are idiots, that you could be a very intellectual
of the Land.
So if I am starving and he's got an apple tree across this imaginary boundary and I cross
it to get it, he has the right to shoot me according to you capitalists.
That just offends my sense of justice and I'm an anarchist and so why would I say that
this guy Bill Smith has a sense of power or a hierarchy over me?
Why should his arbitrary win?
Because if he says, oh go ahead and have that apple, that's fine, then according to the
The Time Commandments certainly presuppose the existence of property, and so if the property
is inherently unjust, I don't see why God would have said don't steal, okay?
So anyway, like I said, it's not that I was beaten in the argument, don't misunderstand
me, but I couldn't beat the other person, we sort of had a draw, and so I'm not used
to drawing with people when I argue, so anyway, I was surprised by that.
So that's where you could be coming from if you are an anarchist and you're a socialist.
And those people, if they read the thing I handed out to you, they would laugh and say
this guy's kidding himself, he's calling himself an anarchist, and no he's not because
he believes in private property, he should stop using that term, we're the true anarchists.
And so I say there is some justification for that because they, I think, did probably have
that term first before the last group that I'm going to talk about, the one that I'm
a member of and the one that I'm most familiar with and that would be what's been called
various things, individualist anarchists or David Frieden calls it propertarian anarchists,
Murray Rothbard who was a disciple of Ludwig von Mises calls it anarcho-capitalism and
the term that I've now adopted just because I think it's the most informative for Americans
is a free market anarchist, and so the idea is, in the same way that you've heard arguments
about why we should privatize the postal service or roads or education, those types of arguments
are what I would use to say, yep, and we should also privatize the police and the military
defense services and even the creation of the legal structure, all right?
And so that's the type of spirit in which these arguments lie, and so that's why I think
and Free Market Anarchist is the best description, at least for an American audience.
On that subject, let me just mention one thing because I was looking at, as I was looking
through Kirk very quickly, you might have the idea that, oh, this is going to be, you
know, someone is a free market anarchist because they have a very utilitarian outlook and they
think that, you know, you add up the costs and benefits and therefore this is the most
efficient outcome but it's overlooking morality and things like that.
And it is true that plenty of economists who fall into this category are utilitarians and
they make no apologies for it, but that need not be the case.
In fact, Murray Rothbard, who is the one, the single most influential person in my own
views on this area, he was a natural law theorist and he had complete scorn for utilitarianism
and wrote tons of essays mocking Bentham and so forth and saying how horrible it was that
the utilitarianism swept the economics profession.
And so, just to understand where we're coming from, you could, as I say, Rothbard has a
natural law approach and he comes up with his system of what he thinks are property
rights and so on.
And so then, why is he an anarchist?
Well, because if he, for example, if I own my body and if I own my property, my income
and so forth, and if we agree that somebody couldn't just come up to me and stick a gun
at me and say, give me 10% of your income or else I'm going to shoot you, and you say,
The Theory of Money and Credit
One of the things I'm talking about are the different
justifications.
So, as I say, there are plenty of free market anarchists who are utilitarians, there are
plenty who are Randians in terms of Ayn Rand's objectivism, and there are plenty who are
natural law theorists.
And so, part of the reason I wrote the thing that you guys read was I was trying to appeal
to any one of those groups.
I was trying to say, okay, can I take the insights from all these different groups and
not erect a structure assuming that my reader is a Randian or assuming that the reader is
is a Natural Law Theorist, or a Utilitarian, or a Christian, or whatever, because if you
looked at the values I presupposed, it was things like fewer murders is a good thing,
and people not starving is a good thing, and prisoners not being tortured by sadistic guards
is a good thing, and there's more agreement on those basic value judgments than on the
particular tenets of Murray Rothbard's Natural Law deductions, or Rand's Objectivism, and
so forth.
That was my attempt. Now, of course, whether or not I convinced you was one thing, but I was trying to appeal to someone without presupposing that they had a particular system of building up their theory of justice.
And so some people were reading it and thinking I was a nihilist and that I didn't have my own system of values, and that wasn't the case at all, but I'm a Christian.
And obviously if I wrote and said, okay, I want Christians to consider whether government
is good or bad, then automatically I'd be eliminating 90% of the audience.
So let me now come back to, I promised in the beginning, I want to give you a few examples
of things where there's certainly an order, there's a pattern that's very orderly and
yet nobody is in charge.
And so one thing would be, science in general, let's just take physics as a particular example,
Not merely that we don't need it, but it would be detrimental that if there were some group
that tried to reign in all the physicists and bring them under control and have central
direction that in fact physics would stagnate because then all these different people who
have all these brilliant ideas on their own would have to first get it approved by the
central command before they could go out and work on them and so ultimately rather than
having the discovery procedure of all these people out there who just might stumble upon
Another example, and this one might be more relevant in some respects to a system of private
law or decentralized legal systems, would just be something like the English language.
If I said, who's in charge of the English language, again, nobody is, no group is, and
you could say, well, you know, let me put it this way, what if I said, whose job is
it to define words?
You might say, okay, we've got you there, the people who write dictionaries, they're
the ones who define what words mean, and if you think about it, that's not true either.
They certainly codified the prevailing accepted definitions, but the people who write dictionaries
and publish them are not actually in charge of telling people what the word means.
And just to give you an obvious example, if all the dictionary writers got together and
said in our dictionaries, when we write up, let's put as the definition moving towards
the ground, it's not that everyone said, oh, I guess up means down now.
No, we would just say, okay, everyone published the wrong definition in the book.
And you would stop buying from that publisher and somebody else would start up a rival dictionary
that has the correct definition.
So if you think about it like that, there's nobody who's in charge of it.
And yet it's also, though, it's a little bit subtler than that because you could say, well,
there's nobody in charge of how trees grow or if the nature's in charge or God's in charge.
But there is a sense in which humans collectively or English speakers are in charge of what
English words mean.
So that the prevailing definitions do change over time, that if you try to read Shakespeare
in the original, he doesn't use the same English that we use today.
And so there's a sense in which all of us are all English speakers collectively interact
with each other and there emerges the commonly accepted definitions of words and there are
rules of grammar and so on.
And that's why people can codify grammar books and write up definitive style manuals.
How do you write a term paper?
Oh, this is how you do it.
These are the rules of the English language.
Okay, so it's not pure nihilism. I'm not saying, oh, you can just say whatever you want, and that's English, and that you're speaking, you know, it's up to you.
That's not true, but it's also, the opposite isn't true, that you need to use words in conformity with what this guy over here says.
Alright, so that's just two quick examples to show you that it's least possible that in social systems, there are certain types of institutions, or whatever you want to call it, that possess some sort of internal order.
to Merge.
How can that be?
That's impossible.
There needs to be one person or one group in charge to which all the other ones can
appeal.
And as I'm showing you, well, no, that's not true.
That sort of thinking is wrong when it comes to science and spoken languages.
And so maybe it's also wrong when it comes to a system of property rights.
Let me talk a little bit about what I think Kirk, what his view would be on this sort
of issue.
Issue, and in particular, what would his reaction be if somebody forced him to read what you
had to read for today?
I imagine, and I said, I just glanced through this, he would probably say something like
this.
First of all, he'd be very amused that a graduate student in economics, no less, is going to
pontificate upon how we're going to reorder society, and that would probably amuse him.
But beyond that, I think more seriously, he would say, look, history is full of examples
of Money, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money
This guy, first of all, where does this person so young get off trying to reorder society?
He obviously, there's so much he hasn't read and so many things he hasn't experienced.
How could he possibly offer such a system, a recommendation?
And beyond that, if we did seriously try to implement this, I am sure something would
go wrong and we would end up with a worse system than the one we have today.
So assuming that that is where he's coming from, what would I say in response?
Well, the one thing that, of course, any would-be reformer says to someone who invokes conservative
tradition and so on is that, well, obviously, it's tradition, there needs to be some sense
of reform or else we would always just stay the same, okay, that even in terms of tradition,
that things are slowly changing over time and that, yeah, if there is a particular institution
or a particular way of doing things, we shouldn't just throw it out because if we think about
The American Revolution wasn't very revolutionary in the same way that the French Revolution was and that actually what the Americans were doing was not creating a new system a priori from the top of their head but rather they were just trying to go back to the traditions of individualism, the rule of law and so forth that they had inherited from England and so really it was more of a conservative revolt, if you will, rather than a true revolution in the sense of the French Revolution, let's say.
So if that is indeed the way you would explain why the American Revolutionaries, why that
was a good event historically, whereas modern reformers, especially in the 20th century,
all the different visions of utopians, why those were all disasters, I would agree with
you for those particular cases, but then I would say, okay, but in a sense, what I'm
advocating in that little handout I gave to you is a more fuller fulfillment of individualism
in the Rule of Law that even is guaranteed under the U.S. system.
Really what I'm doing in there, if you remember, I'm not advocating, let's get rid of law.
I'm saying, no, if you say somebody owns something and there's a certain property right that
somebody possesses, then people can't violate.
It is wrong to steal from him or it is wrong to infringe on his property rights even if
you're the government.
Whereas, if you believe in a system of government and you believe in the rule of law, what you
And what I mean is that individual citizens can't steal from each other. That's wrong, but if the government wants to take 20% of your income and if it passes certain criteria, depending on the system, like if the electoral college elected you or a certain number of Congress voted for this thing, then it's not a crime anymore to have men with guns say, give us 25% of your income. So that would be one thing that I would say.
How true is it that we have the rule of law and the respect for individualism in the United States after all?
Because, for example, Bill Clinton was not subject to the rule of law in the same way that people in my theoretical system would be.
Now you could say my system couldn't be realized, but that's a separate objection.
If you could see for the moment if that could work, you could see the sense in which I would say,
Which I would say, yeah, I believe in the rule of law and individualism, the traditions
of liberty derived from England, let's say.
And that's why I think my system better fulfills those than the current U.S. system or Franklin
Roosevelt.
In what sense was he subject to the law the same way that any average citizen was?
And you can see now there's a real sense in which he was above the law.
It doesn't mean he had complete arbitrary power the way that people in other countries
did, but certainly he could do a lot more and get away with a lot more than the average
I see where you're coming from, but as a Christian, I can't subscribe to your notion of anarchy
because Paul, for example, in Romans says submit to the authorities and that they are
placed there because of God's plan and that they are in a sense representatives of God's
justice on earth.
And as long as you do what you're supposed to do, you don't need to fear punishment.
And if you are being punished by the authorities, it's because you've done something wrong.
And so therefore, whatever your secular arguments might be, ultimately, since Paul said that,
How can I possibly subscribe to your view?
So let me not dance around the issue, that's certainly, that's the most troubling passage
for me as a self-described Christian and anarchist, how do you reconcile that?
But at the same time, I don't think I'm just ignoring a blatant contradiction because, let
me give you some examples, if certainly many evangelical Christians supported George Bush's
Therefore, you can never object or try to overthrow, whether you do it with violence
or just in terms of writing and try to erode the intellectual support for a particular
system of government, that it doesn't necessarily follow that you need to support all particular
people in power.
Now maybe you do think that, but then like I said, you can see where I'm not necessarily
being hypocritical for not thinking that since plenty of Christians who believe in the literal
Interpretation of the Bible also supported what we did in Iraq.
And then, you know, you could even make it more ridiculous, like Nazi Germany, things
like that.
And also, the fact that Paul himself clearly spent a lot of time in prison, and so it's,
I just, I've always been, myself just been a little bit confused, perhaps, or I'm wondering,
you know, I'm not a biblical scholar, so maybe if I read it in the original it would make
more sense, but I always have had trouble understanding exactly what he meant by that,
The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and
The Theory of Money and Credit
I withdraw my consent, to put it that way, intellectually.
And so, if you see that, then we sort of backed up the argument, and now we're just arguing over,
okay, well, Iraq was a bad government, and our government is good, or our government is not nearly as objectionable,
and so that's the difference.
And once we've reduced it to there, then it's not a matter of absolute principle, it's just a matter of a disagreement
And let me just end with the prepared remarks and then I'll open up for questions.
Where do I get off saying that our particular government, in a sense, is illegitimate and
let me just deal with the most common defense of it as a social contract that, look, in
a sense, we're all agreeing to be living under these laws and if you don't like it, you can
leave.
Any government that doesn't prevent emigration could say the same thing and then even within
that you can make an analogy and say, well suppose I like to live in a certain area of
Manhattan where the mafia is strong and they come up and they have protection money for
my shop and I pay that week after week because I would rather still live there and pay them
the protection money rather than have to move my family somewhere else.
We wouldn't then say, okay so in a sense you're really agreeing to that and they're not really
The Constitution and our ancestors, they sort of set up this system and we inherited it and so on.
And I said, okay, well, if that's your view, that there's an implicit contract between the government and the people,
well, the government certainly hasn't lived up to its end. The government doesn't obey the Constitution at all.
And so if you do adhere to the justification of this system because of this alleged contract
that actually none of us have ever signed, then again, I'd say, okay, well, the government
has them with it up to its end, so why am I bound by this system?
So anyway, that would be my response on that point and I'll let people go to mass and then
entertain any questions.
Question and a comment. The first question is, in history it seems to me that governments
of one form or another seem to rise up, in almost every case I can think of, and so they
The classical Christian understanding would limit government by a standard of natural
law and justice, that the government is being unjust if it is taking your money when it
is not to serve the common good.
And so I guess that's question two, how do you conceive of the common good?
So okay, as far as the first question, I'm sure you guys know more historical examples
than I do.
But just in terms of definition, I mean, if everyone really, truly voluntarily all agreed
to a certain thing that they call the government, it would be a club, it would be an association
and that a government by definition imposes a monopoly and there needs to be some sort
of uniformity that, no, this is the group in charge.
So again, I'm not sure, I think any particular example that you give, for example, not everybody
with the American founding agreed with it, not everyone agreed with the Constitution
when that was imposed, and so you could say, well that word imposed, a lot of people voted
The idea of the common good that, let's say, in a medieval framework of justice, not historically but philosophically,
that they would say that you have certain rights to property or life and so on and so forth,
that are inalienable, and by inalienable, at least in some optimistic thinking that I've read,
They mean that that right can be taken away or abrogated in some way for the sake of the common good.
For example, if taking away some of my money could better serve the whole, then that is an appropriate trade-off in that medieval framework.
And it seems to me that that's something that I was always thinking when reading your pieces, where is the common good in all of this?
Because there does seem to be some things that the market would not provide for that
I think are very good things.
Okay, again, I don't know that I'm going to satisfy you with this, but let me put it
this way, I can't give you a list of necessary insufficient conditions for what I think the
common good is, but I would say that I would rather live in the type of society that I'm
sketching in that piece than in the current one.
In terms of, well, what if we all thought that there were certain things that it is okay to take people's money for spending on the so-called common good?
Again, if we all believed that, if we all agreed on it, then you wouldn't need force to do it, right?
You could even, strictly speaking, within that system, we could all sign contracts pledging, you know, we're going to all chip in money to the central committee and then they're going to spend it a certain way, you know, pay dues into a club and they're going to spend it a certain way.
So, I mean, that's, you know, in a sense, you know, providing the meals for the Kappa
House, you know, they're all chipping in for the common good of their little community,
but you don't need force to do that.
It's the member of, so people who think like you do, and I'm not saying it's wrong, could
coalesce into their own community and set up whatever sort of system they want, but,
so I guess, you're sort of asking, you know, what is going to be the complete definition
of the specific property rights, and I don't know, and my point is nobody can know that's
And that's going to be a spontaneous outcome.
So that's how it is.
Do you believe you have the right to exit?
Well, a lot of this stuff, it's hard to, you know, like, for example, do I believe in the right to free speech?
Well, in the way people mean it, yes I do, but it doesn't mean, obviously, that you have the right to have a newspaper print your views.
and so really everything is sort of reduced to property rights and that yeah that you know there can be no group that sort of silenced me with force because they think my views are dangerous but if you are a newspaper owner you don't have to print my letter to the editor and so in the same way the right to exit in the abstract yes of course I would agree with that and that's important but does that mean you know that the guy who owns the property that's right next to the harbor if I want to leave he has to let me go through his property to get to the ocean well technically no so
It's once you get specific like that, abstract rights, it's difficult to say in practice
what would that translate into, but certainly I would say that if the type of society I'm
picturing existed, that yeah, in a sense people would have the right to exit.
Yeah.
From a scriptural basis apart from Paul's argument about converting, man is small and
man is simple.
And how would, I mean, government's bad because man is simple, it'll never be perfect, but
The Standard Way Anarchists Answer That is to say exactly, men are sinful and fallen and want to dominate others, so why in the world would you give this one group of individuals all the guns and all the authority and say, now please take care of us?
and I tried to sketch like I said in that little pamphlet the way that I think certain rules would emerge and that people would sort of be able to punish law breakers.
Again, am I saying that there would be no murder in this world? Of course not, but there's murder right now, even with governments.
And so I'm just making a prediction that I think that a lot of the root causes, if you want to use that leftist term of crime right now, it can be traced to the institutions and the policies of the government.
But did that government emerge because of that demand, though?
This, I guess, is kind of going back to your question. Again, you guys know more history
than I do, but certainly with certain specific governments, there was some element of conquest
involved or some element of coercion being involved with people who disagreed with that
particular formation. So when you say did it emerge, I definitely agree with you that
People at the time who, you know, 60% or 70% of them wanted to form a particular thing
and so let's call this a government or it wasn't like that, but what we would label
now as a government, that they were doing so in response to things that they perceived
as trends that, you know, we need to do this or else it's not going to affect them.
But in the same way, you know, the people in the Soviet Union, when they went communist,
they thought it's because look at what's happening, you know, we've tried this other system, it's
not working.
So even though a group of people think that they need to adopt a certain measure because
of the calamity that would otherwise happen, it doesn't mean they were right in that belief.
So I do agree with you that historically most people have thought government is necessary,
but I would just say that doesn't mean therefore that it was.
And again, I agree that human nature is sinful and that's exactly why I don't want to give
one group of people the powers of rule over others.
One thing that was a little bit confusing to me is when you talked about insurance companies and how we would basically get insurance so that we wouldn't do bad things.
I don't really understand how that works, simply because we're making insurance firms responsible for our own simple nature so that if they are in charge of, oh, do we do what things are wrong?
And then I understand after that you said, okay, well then they won't, arbitrary payments will be raised, but can you just explain that a little bit more?
The Theory of Money and Credit
If I understand you, yeah, I mean, so I don't know if this is answering, but clearly all
The point is, over time, when they're dealing with other people, we can see their record
and they wouldn't have a big name unless they had a history of dealing fairly with other
people.
Even today, I could just turn around and say, oh, well, how are we going to have a system
where you're going to have judges and courts and so on, but if man's fawn, how can we trust
the judge?
Ultimately, if there's going to be any way in which we try to influence what others do,
some sort of intermediate system of incentives or punishments or what have you, and yes,
no individual is ever fully trustworthy, but that's why you have the system in place to
hopefully get rid of such people when they do something wrong.
Yeah.
I was in high school today and they had a resolution to ask whether tyranny or anarchy
is a preferable situation, and I think I was trying to come up with some examples in about
Historically, we have examples of anapes that were successful and I think there are some theories that perhaps during the Articles of Confederation, the United States was something like an anapy and Iceland perhaps in the past.
But I'm wondering if you have any examples of successful anapes that have been in history?
No, the ones you mentioned are the only ones that people ever bring up, and even there
I would say that those don't totally live up to the sort of thing that we have in mind.
And so there's different, so one sort of glib response would be to say, look, suppose I tell
you that I wish we could live in a world where there wasn't rape and murder, and then you
say, oh, can you point to a society where there's never been rape and murder and therefore
And you told people, no, we don't need to have guilds telling everyone what their occupation
is.
Just let everyone choose whatever job they want and wage rates will adjust to make sure
that there's enough bread being made and enough shoes and so on.
People would think you were crazy and that you were a utopian dreamer and that we need
to make sure, that's nice in theory, but let's make sure that these things get satisfied.
So to answer your question, no, Medieval Iceland is, David Freeman wrote a few articles on
that and that's probably the closest thing to what I'm talking about here.
I would just say no, nothing has ever really approximated this. We can see historically
the case that the U.S. is in some sense better than other systems of government and I don't
think it's because of the Constitution or whatever is so good in terms of its positive
features but that it limits government. So I do think historically it's true that government
is best which governs least and so therefore energy doesn't govern at all. So that should
to be the best of all. And I know that argument in general isn't valid, but that's what I
would say in terms of historical evidence. And also just any particular thing you want
to talk about, I can certainly say to you why I think the government is messing up that
one area. It's not that the government right now does anything that I think it's doing
a good job in. And so those would be my arguments as to why, therefore, I think that the governments
that were gone would be a lot better. Not that it would be perfect, but there would
be a lot of things that currently happen that wouldn't happen.
A lot of things I'm sympathetic with in the article, but it would be cool if 500 me and
my friends went out and did something like this, but what I think about is large-scale
military action.
I don't think you'd ever say that the whole world is going to do this at the same time.
Let's just say France does this, how are they going to be able to deal with the armies outside
and so on and so forth.
Because it seems to me like the early Middle Ages is a decent example of almost total decentralization.
What happened was all bullies went around and oppressing people and they weren't able
to handle huge Vikings and Magyars and Muslims and stuff.
So that's my impression.
Well, you should have gone to my talk a few weeks ago on privatizing the military.
But let me just try to give you a quick answer.
So, like I said, I was just answering the last question. I meant it when I said no matter
what the government does right now, I think it botches the job and it even comes to the
military and you can say, what are you talking about? We went over there, look what we did
in Iraq. We certainly, in terms of the military confrontation, we beat them. There's no doubt
about that. And so, yeah, the U.S. government is good at fighting other governments and
so that doesn't prove that government is a good thing to wage war. And look at how much
The Federalized Approach to Defense also didn't work for France against Nazi Germany.
Am I saying that if the French had been organized along these lines that they would have been able to repel a Nazi invasion?
I don't know, but I think they would have been better than they were.
I just think about under what happened on their system that imagine a line that one guy had an idea and that's what they threw everything behind and that idea didn't work and then they were in trouble.
and that would sort of be like in the Soviet Union when it comes to something like bread
production that you know the central plan so this is the way bread is going to work
and it didn't work out and then millions of people starve whereas you know that doesn't
happen in the US because even if one particular grocery store screws up then you just go somewhere
else to get your bread and so the same way if there's not one group or one body of individuals
in charge of defending the country then there's a bunch of different competing ones they all
have different ideas when the war happens if a few of them guess wrong then they're
The colonies were able to defeat the British Empire, or fend off the British Empire, the
strongest thing in the world at the time, and they were in a sense anarchy, but it certainly
wasn't a centralized system, there were many militias and so on, whereas during the Civil
on paper, plenty of people right at the outset thought the South was easily going to survive.
Just in terms of how big the South is and they have the access to the oceans and so on.
If the South used the tactics that the American Revolutionaries used against the British,
of course the South was going to repel Northern attacks.
But what did the South do? It had generals trained at West Point.
And if you think about it, they took their own people with guns and they pointed at all their able-bodied men and said,
Okay, get in line and go march against Union cannons.
And so in terms of is that really the smartest way to use your resources to organize your
defense against a stronger opponent, then no, I think the draft is the absolute stupidest
thing to do, that you're literally taking your most important resources, your able-bodied
men and sending them off against cannons.
So to answer your question, no, I think for given other things equal, in particular wherever
I'm back to one of your points, and you said that our government is not just, because just
Okay, well if what you mean is the insurance company, you know, we had an agreement that
I was going to pay them $100 a month and they were going to insure me and then I get into
it and they start sending me bills for $200 a month and then I am, you know, it's just
It's not worth the hassle of me switching companies and you're saying, yeah, I would
say yeah, they're stealing $100 a month from me.
So I think I'm being consistent and the point is just a company that did that is going to
go out of business because people don't think that private companies have that right to
do that.
Everyone would recognize that as outright theft or fraud and that company is going to
go out of business.
Even if I don't do it myself, enough customers are going to switch that presumably that's
not going to happen over time.
Well, if we can leave an insurance company because we are dissatisfied with it, well,
So we can also leave a country because we're dissatisfied, but you said that, well, just
because we're staying here doesn't mean we're giving implicit consent.
But I would argue that if you're going to put yourself under a system where you are
giving implicit consent to these different insurance companies, you're doing the same
thing on a small scale.
You wouldn't be doing it in, say, America by staying here.
So are you just treating it all with power of propriety?
Exactly.
Okay, I think I see what you're saying. Let me just try one time to say in different words.
So again, the claim is I'm saying, look, I don't agree with this system right now. And
so someone would say to me, well, then why are you staying here? And since you do agree
with it. And I want to say, no, I want to say, because I don't like what's going on,
just the fact that it's not worth it to me to leave doesn't therefore mean that I agree
with it and it's not, and therefore it's just. So I'm saying the exact same way. If I'm getting
ripped off by an insurance company and I'm complaining at lunch, if someone said to me,
Well, if they're bothering you so much, why don't you switch companies?
I would say, oh yeah, you're right.
I guess they're really not stealing from me.
I'd say, no, they're stealing from me.
I'm not going to switch companies, but they're still stealing from me.
So I think I'm being consistent.
And then just the empirical or pragmatic argument is, I'd rather much rather have a bunch of
little companies, any one of which might steal from me, and I can switch pretty simply rather
than saying, if the government starts mass murdering people, then we can all move to
Canada.
And that's the ultimate check on why our government doesn't set up concentration camps,
From reading the essays in your lecture, I noticed two themes really.
One, consent, and two, sort of a state of nature theory that you have, in that a man
Man is born in this world apart from any sort of responsibility to other men or institutions.
And I'm wondering how you respond to someone like Kirk, who would argue from Berkian's
standpoint that man is born into certain responsibilities, that you're arguing that the government is
stealing from you because you never consented to that government.
How do you respond to someone who would say, no, that's not your choice.
Part of the state of nature is being born into a government institution and certain other
responsibilities.
For example, parents, you're born under your parents' rule, it's not your choice, but you're
still obligated to them.
How would you respond to someone like Burke who would say, yes, the same goes for the
government, but the same goes for certain other responsibilities.
The state of nature is entirely different from all other institutions.
Right, okay, that's a good question. All of them have been good questions.
So one quick thing would be to say, obviously, again, it was sort of the answer I gave before about trying to address what Paul says,
that, you know, you wouldn't say that to necessarily people in Iran or Iraq that, you know, stop complaining about the people in charge of you
because you were born in that system and you have responsibilities to Saddam.
and more generally, it was difficult to write this because of the contract stuff. How can you talk about what voluntary is or what consent is unless you know going into it who owns what or what people's rights are and so don't you need this whole body of a priori deduced rights theories or at least something you have in mind in order to say what do we all start out with at the outset and then we can do voluntary trades and of course that doesn't make sense because like you're saying you never start at the outset.
And so, I'm not denying that you have responsibilities that you didn't necessarily choose and you were born into them, but I do think that there is a consensus on certain issues of justice that even Christians would agree with, in other contexts, and I'm just trying to show why is it qualitatively different when the government does it, until the extent that people think, well, because we need a government, otherwise there'd be chaos. That's what I was trying to argue in that pamphlet that, not necessarily.
Thank you for watching!