I was wondering, we firmly established that protectionism is wrong, but what about the possibility of threatening protectionism in order to prevent another country from engaging in protectionism against you?
Let me first correct the question very slightly.
We haven't established that protectionism is wrong.
Well, I guess we have.
At the beginning, I said it was wrong.
But mainly, I try to work on why it was inefficient and all.
But I guess I'll accept wrong, so I'm correcting my correction.
That was a very interesting question.
I was asked this in between sessions, and I really don't know the answer.
but the reason I wanted it to be asked publicly is 35 other people will think about it and whoever
hears this will think about it and my theory is that the more people that turn around in their
minds difficult questions the more likely we ought to arrive at an answer. So let me give what I think
is my first impression of an answer because I've never really been asked this and it's very tempting
to say yes because just the mere threat of protectionism might get those guys to stop their
protectionism. Now just because we in the great and glorious free enterprise U.S.
were reverting to the U.S. so we're leaving Canada, favor free enterprise and free
trade, ha ha ha, it doesn't mean that we, it doesn't mean that Japanese or Mexicans
or whoever not allowing us to trade with them is good. So if we can threaten them
I tell them that if you don't get your tariffs off, we'll put tariffs on you, not intending to do it, but they don't know it, this is sort of an aside, they can't hear this, it might have some good, so it's tempting, but my thought is, as a libertarian, now this is a, as an economic issue, it might be good, it might be efficient to do that, because if you define efficiency as free trade, it might work, but as a libertarian, I ask myself, can you threaten things
that you have no right to do. And my analysis of that is you can only threaten things that you have a right to do and you only have a right to do things that you have a right to threaten.
In other words, the two go together, you can't rip them apart. So for example, I have no right to threaten to punch you in the nose because I have no right to punch you in the nose.
To go together. I have a right to threaten you that I won't be your friend, because you have no right against me that I be your friend.
And also, not only do I have a right to threaten not to be your friend, but I have a right not to be your friend.
So the two go together, the threat and the action go together. And that's my first hack at this.
But please think about it, and if anyone has a better answer or, you know, tomorrow, it might be a good subject to write about even.
I'm sure lewrockwell.com is always looking for good essays, so this might be one.
Okay, I want to get into defending the undefendable, but before I do, I thought I would tell you just a little bit about my history and how I got into this movement.
Movement. I was a pinko commie type, hippie, hard to believe, but true. When I was at Brooklyn
College in 1962, I was a senior and I come from a Jewish background. I live in New York City. The air
Where I breathed was left liberalism, and my theory was that if we had free enterprise,
the mass starvation and the idea of babies starving in the street was just a bit too
much. I was a humanist in those days. Now I'm a bit hard-hearted about such things,
but in those days I was sort of pinkish, and Ayn Rand came to lecture at Brooklyn College.
So I came to Boo and Hisar, because she was the incarnate of evil. She was in favor of
freedom and laissez-faire, capitalism, it was just horrible stuff.
So I booed and booed and hissed and hissed along with all the other Brooklyn pinkos.
And at the end of the seminar, and there must have been 4,000 kids in a big gym,
at the end of the seminar, the people that had invited her there,
the Ayn Rand Study Club or something like that, said that there's a luncheon in her honor,
and anyone can come whether you agree or not.
I hadn't gotten enough booing and hissing yet, so I figured I'd go and, you know, give her the what for.
So I went there, and it was a big, long, long table, maybe the length of this room.
And Ayn Rand was sitting at the head, and Nathaniel Brand, and then Picoff.
I don't know if Alan Greenspan was there or not. He might well have been.
That was before he became Alan Greenspan.
And I was relegated to the foot of the table.
So I turned to my neighbor and I said, what is this capitalist crap? It's evil, it's fascism, you know, the usual stuff.
And he said, well, you know, I don't really know, but the people who do are at the other end of the table.
So I went up, I was a chutzpahnik in those days.
I went up there and I stuck my head between Einz and Nathaniel's and I said,
there's a socialist here who wants to debate someone about socialism and capitalism.
And I said, well, who is it? And I said, it was me.
I was 22, a senior in college, and Brandon was very gracious.
He said, I'll come to the other end of the table and sit next to you and we'll talk on two conditions.
One, that you don't let the conversation lapse with this one discussion, but we keep going until one of us convinces the other.
That's what he said. And secondly, you have to read two books that I'll mention to you.
One was Atlas Shrugged, the other was Economics and One Lesson by Henry Haslett.
Well, to make a long, long story short, I read the two books, I went to his house, I went to Ayn Rand's house, and in about two or three sessions I was convinced, I was converted, I was now a free enterpriser.
I was never a randroid. I went to the NBI lectures in various hotels and then in the basement of the, what is that building, the big building, the one that didn't get knocked down? Empire State Building.
and but I was always on the outskirts because you know the free enterprise
stuff was great but then they give you A is A and B is B and and and Mozart was
evil and you know I just couldn't connect with that stuff and the metaphysics and
philosophy my mother used to call it foolosophy majoring in philosophy so I
was sort of a free enterprise and then the next step in my education is I was a
I was a student at Columbia University, and I absolutely hated economics, but I was too busy for the first year to realize that I hated it, because they really pumped it into you, it was just math and stat, it had nothing to do with Hazlitt and Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrug, which is what I loved about economics, but there was a war in Vietnam and I figured, you know, might as well stick it out, but it was boring and hateful and evil and all sorts of stuff,
He was a fellow student of mine, and he kept approaching me saying, well, based on the questions I would be asking, he'd say, you've got to come meet this Murray Rothbard, and finally I did, and I met Murray and I got Rothbard eyes, there's something like that.
Now, how did I start writing the Defending the Undefendable? The way I did is I was writing a dissertation on rent control, which is a perfectly reasonable subject that any libertarian or Austrian could get into.
I wasn't really an Austrian then, but you know, I was still free enterprise enough.
Hazlitt had a chapter on rent control and I was sort of
doing a Hazlitt on stuff, but it was all
econometric equations and statistics and it was boring as
sin. So what I did is I promised myself that if I wrote
ten pages of the dissertation or if I did this regression or whatever, I'd reward myself.
And what was my reward? My reward was I could take a whole day or two and write
exactly what I wanted.
And I'd write about what a great guy the pimp was, or how everyone should blackmail everyone.
And by the time I finished the dissertation, I had about 30 of these little essays.
And I put them together in a book, and I sent it out to various publishers.
I must have sent it out to about 10 publishers, got rejections, and then I must have sent it out to maybe another 100 rejections.
and then what I did is I got this list of all book publishers and I got rid of the ones that specialize in children's books or Bible books or art books and any every other publisher I sent well now would be too expensive to send the whole book out so I just sent out a letter saying here is the table of contents here's what it's about here's a chapter or two if you like it let me know and I'll send you the whole kit and caboodle and I got three people out of about 500 to say yes
sent me it and one person actually published it, Fleet Press in 1976, I got my PhD in 72, it took a while for me to get a publisher because there was just rejections all over the place.
Now the reaction of the mainstream press, this publisher sent out review copies all over the place, the reaction of the mainstream press was either not to review it, as you know utterly ridiculous,
or if they reviewed it it was just scathing like I remember the the New
York London Literary Times Sunday supplement or something reviewed it and
said the book is complete crap the only good thing about it is the cartoons and
naturally I hadn't done the cartoon so it was a pretty critical thing the
reaction of the libertarian press and there was even then such a thing as the
The libertarian press, now there's a lot more, was bimodal.
Either they hated or they loved it.
There was hardly any middle ground.
No one said, you know, it was pretty good, but there were these errors.
It was either very, very good, or it was horrible.
Why was it horrible?
The reason it was horrible was it was too radical.
One commentator said, you'd need a cast iron stomach to read this book.
Another one said it'll turn off libertarians, you know, if you give this, it's a good way of keeping people from becoming libertarians.
Well, I'm sort of a methodological individualist on this issue as I am on every other issue.
Is Adam here? Oh, there he is.
He wrote a magnificent piece just within the last week or two on individualism, on methodological individualism from an Austrian point of view, and I highly recommend that.
My own theory on this was different strokes for different folks.
Some people need a gradual process where you show them why rent control is no good,
why you show them why profits allocates resources, and you sort of take them along very, very slowly.
And if you smack them in the face with a wet fish, they'll say, yeah.
On the other hand, some people need a smack in the face with a wet fish, figuratively, you know,
The coercion, you know, to hit somebody, but some people need the shock treatment.
It's like shock therapy.
And I don't know, I've had some success in converting people with the use of this book,
and other people who have adopted this for classes report success.
I'm sure there are failures, and I'm sure there are other ways of going about this,
like the Hazlitt book, which isn't really shocking, it's not in your face.
And nobody's going to say, ah, Haslett, this is horrible, he's a Nazi or something, whereas...
Well, there are some that would, but many fewer, whereas this book is, you know, just sort of over the top and out of control, so people are very critical of it.
And as I say, it works for some people, it doesn't work for other people, and maybe at different times, some people will be susceptible to it and other people will not be susceptible to it.
In any case, to me it was sort of a payback to Hazlitt. I mean, I read that book, that converted me.
I meant it to be in that pattern. Namely, Hazlitt had a thesis or a theme, the broken window fallacy and alternative costs and stuff like that.
The broken window fallacy. And then he illustrated it with 35 chapters, give or take.
Well, this book is built along the same pattern. It, too, has a thesis, the non-aggression axiom of libertarianism, and then it applies it to 30, 35 different chapters.
So, it's sort of my homage to his book, and I was very gratified when he was one of the people who gave a testimonial to it.
Hasslett also gave a testimonial to it, and I thought he was drunk when he did it, because he compared me to Mises, and I was just this punk kid, you know, sort of saying,
Well, you know, I learned from this book just like I learned from my teacher Mises, you know, that was lunatic, but I was very delighted to have it and obviously Murray Rothbard and Nozick and a few other people also gave testimonials to it.
So, what is libertarianism? What is this thesis that underlies the book? Well, it's libertarianism, as you know, is the non-aggression axiom that you can do anything you damn well please, you just got to keep your midst to yourself.
You can't keep your midst to yourself. You can't put your hands on other people or their property without their permission.
Now if you tell this to most people, they'll say sure, libertarianism is not off the wall.
I mean, most people in their everyday lives keep their midst to themselves.
Very few people are rapists or murderers or thieves or anything like that.
Most people you meet, your neighbors, the people that you play ball with or you go to picnics with or whatever,
None of them will bash you in the nose if you have a different view than theirs or anything like that.
This is the view that most people espouse.
So there's nothing really radical or indeed out of the ordinary about the libertarian non-aggression axiom.
However, what did I say? The devil is in the details.
When you start applying it to things, people start saying, whoa, you're a maniac.
You can't apply it to that.
Now, libertarianism is not a philosophy of life.
It doesn't say, you know, eat good foods or don't eat good foods or it doesn't say exercise or not exercise.
It has nothing to do with religion. It's not a philosophy of life.
It's a very, it focuses on a very, very narrow, limited part of life.
Just what should the law be?
Libertarianism asks one question, what should the law be, and gives one answer.
The law should incorporate the non-aggression axiom and all of its implications.
And that's it. It's very simple.
Again, the interesting part is when you come to apply it to things.
It's got nothing to do with morality, or at least we have to distinguish between morality and libertarianism.
Libertarianism is a small subset of morality. In other words, if morality is the big circle, then libertarianism is some small part of morality.
Maybe it extends there, I'm not sure. But it's a very small part of morality. Like, it has nothing to do with being nice to your friends.
I mean, being nice to your friends and not committing suicide and taking care of your body and things like that
are all part of morality and they're all important. I don't deny that they're important. It's just that, given the division of labor, I'm focusing on a very narrow subset of morality.
So as a libertarian, I don't address issues of morality. I only address issues of what the law should be.
Sort of like George Washington Carver, the black inventor of the peanut, once prayed to God.
I'm not the inventor of the peanut, that was, boy, I'm losing, pretty soon I'll start drooling, then you'll know you're in trouble.
He's not the inventor of the peanut, he rather invented all sorts of ways to deal with the peanut.
And the story goes, you know, he prayed to God, give me knowledge of everything.
God said, you know, forget it. And then George Washington Carver said, well, give me knowledge of all biology.
And he said, no, no, no. Well, how about all plant life? No, no, no. Finally all the peanut, and then he said, okay.
So, in like manner, we libertarians are modest types. We don't have a theory of everything.
We just have a theory of what the law should be. It only concerns what just law is.
Now, we have to distinguish the normative from the positive because libertarianism is a normative science
or a normative discipline or a normative concern where the positive economics is not.
So don't confuse libertarianism and Austrianism. You can be both or not.
You can be a libertarian and an Austrian as I am or you could be a libertarian and not an Austrian.
For example, David Friedman and Brian Kaplan are notable libertarians, solid libertarians, as solid as anyone else
And then there are people who are Austrians, but not libertarians.
Now I'm not an expert on this, but my friend Richard Ebeling and maybe Joe Salerno, who are much more expert than I in the history of thought,
and Bob Murphy is also expert in this field, they tell me that there are lots of, well not lots,
And some Nazi types who are Austrians in good standing but not at all libertarians. For
example, you could take the view as an Austrian non-libertarian that you favor rent control
and minimum wage in Israel. Why? Because you're an anti-Semite and you want to ruin the Israeli
and you advocate things that will ruin their economy. It's a perfectly coherent position, not a very nice position, but it's a coherent position.
You're not committing a contradiction by saying that you want inflation and regulation just for Jews or just for blacks or whoever it is that you don't like.
And there are some people, as I understand it, from these other sources who are Austrians in good standing, as good an Austrian as anyone else,
But they're just not libertarian, they're anti-libertarian.
So don't confuse the two, even though the Mises Institute is really both,
where most of the people associated with the Mises Institute, certainly all the faculty, are both.
But the two are very different sorts of things.
So not only do we have to distinguish between libertarianism and morality,
we also have to distinguish between Austrianism and libertarianism.
And there I don't think that there's any overlap.
I'm still a little puzzled by Hans Hoppe's argument from argument.
The idea is that the only way you can, I'm not puzzled by the argument, I agree with
it wholeheartedly, I'm just puzzled by whether he's bridged the gap between Austrianism
and libertarianism, namely whether he's bridged the gap between the odd and the is.
What he argues, brilliantly I think, is that the only way you can get to the truth in anything
Arguing is through a process of arguing. You say thesis amongst his antithesis, you get synthesis, people have to argue, and if you can't argue, you can never attain the truth.
But arguing itself implies, and that was a positive statement, but arguing itself implies certain things, like you let the other guy speak, you don't grab him by the neck and throttle him,
You concede to him the right to use his tongue and his larynx and his body.
You have to concede to him the right to stand somewhere or sit somewhere, which means property rights.
So I'm a little puzzled as to whether Hans has bridged this gap. I don't know. He denies it.
I think it has been, but that's sort of a complexity that I leave for your thinking about.
I'm not clear in my own mind about that.
Okay, the next thing I want to mention is that the book Defending the Undefendable is motivated by a desire to match the libertarian axiom against not easy cases, but hard cases.
In other words, if you can use libertarianism and say, show that we should privatize the post office or something like that, fine, that's all well and good.
That's all well and good, and I'm not against that, and certainly I applaud people that have done that, and I've contributed to that effort as well.
One of my own interests is a little bit more radical, privatizing roads and highways and stuff, but that's all well and good.
Well, I guess that's pretty radical, privatizing highways, roads, streets, sidewalks.
Most people say, what? You know, loony tunes.
But I don't think we should shrink from the hard cases.
If libertarianism can't match the hard cases, then to the extent that it can't, it's a weaker philosophy,
and it's a stronger philosophy to the extent that it can.
So I think we have to apply this theory to the hard cases.
Let's talk a little bit more about the non-aggression axiom.
Suppose I go up to Dan here and I grab his pen and I run away with it.
Have I violated his rights?
It's not clear.
Superficially I have, because I said it was his pen, I should have said the pen that's sitting in front of him that he's grabbing.
But it might be that yesterday he stole that pen from me and I'm the rightful owner.
So there are really two axioms here, it's just not the non-aggression axiom, it's rather the non-aggression axiom is one side of the coin,
And on the other side of the coin is a theory of property rights.
Suppose I punch him in the mouth. I'm not going to. He's a little bigger than I am.
Is this a rightful act or not?
Well, it's possible that it could be a rightful act if he were my slave,
and if slavery were justified.
In other words, to say that it's not right for me to hit him in the nose
is to say that he has a right to the nose which gets you into a theory of property rights.
So we libertarians not only have to have a theory
of Non-Aggression. We also have to have a theory of property rights.
What is the libertarian theory of property rights?
It's pretty much homesteading. It stems from Locke
and Rothbard and Hoppe have done the most work of libertarians in
extending and exemplifying this theory.
I happen to have become friends with a Hasidic rabbi in
Vancouver and he and I discussed the Talmud
and the Holocaust. And there's an eerie, eerie overlap between libertarian theory and libertarian theory.
You know, sometimes when I'm having troubles puzzling about libertarian theory, I resort to other things in order to clarify things for myself, for example, utilitarianism,
which is not exactly libertarianism, but it's not totally unrelated either. And sometimes if you don't see your way clear to arguing here,
You go there and then that's clear and then maybe you apply it here with a better insight.
Well, the Torah also is eerily libertarian, not a hundred percent, but there's like a ninety-eight percent overlap.
And they've done much, much more work than we, we being Locke and Rothbard and Hoppe and such people, about homesteading.
One of the earliest parts of the Torah is this thing called Baba Metzia where two people
grab a cloth at the same time and now how do you determine who owns it? It's very fascinating
stuff. In any case, to get back to homesteading, the Lockean theory is if you mix your labor
with the land, you own the land. You put in a crop or two, you plant the seeds, you clear
You own the land, you plant the seeds, you get the crop in, you own the land.
And if someone owns the land and now has wheat, based on that, and someone else captured a cow and domesticated the cow,
through a process of trade, you can now have legitimate title ownership to stuff you didn't produce.
For example, the wheat farmer trades his wheat for the milk, and now he has milk even though he didn't produce it.
but he can still trace his ownership back to some sort of legitimate process
including homesteading or trading or gift giving or what have you.
Now the homesteading theory is by no means cut and dried.
For example, well just how long do you have to homestead the land before you can say you own it?
It's unclear. Is it a year? Is it two years? Is it five years?
Just how extensive or intensive does the farming have to be?
If you put in a corn plant, if you go out into Iowa somewhere or Illinois, you'll see corn plants and they're about this far apart from each other.
Well, how about if they were that far apart? How about that far apart? How about if you planted one corn plant every square mile?
Would you own it?
This is a continuum problem and my claim is that there is no real answer to any continuum problems.
For example, if I'm over here and I go like this to Dan, does he have a right to shoot me?
If we were in a crowded bar in a different context and I were this close to him and I was shaking my fist at him, he would.
On the other hand, in an academic discourse and I'm further away from him, if he shot me now it would be murder.
But just how close do I have to be, and how bad does the context have to be, is a continuum problem.
Another continuum problem is the age of majority. Statutory rape is obviously justified for three-year-old girls.
If you rape, or if you have sexual intercourse with a three-year-old girl, it's rape.
Because the three-year-old girl is too young to give consent.
A thirty-year-old girl, a woman, is obviously old enough such that if it's consensual sex, it's not statutory rape.
Well, where's the cutoff point? Is it 13, 15, 17, 19, 21?
No matter what age you mention, there's someone younger who's more mature.
So what's the right answer? There is no right answer that I know of for any of these continuing problems.
So we have to sort of accept the homesteading theory as a work in progress.
Murray says that it's based on custom, which seems very reasonable.
Well, for example, east of the Mississippi, it's more fertile, so the plants are typically closer together.
West of the Mississippi, it's less fertile, less water there, so you wouldn't have to plant as intensively.
Now, I'll do a bit more on this homesteading theory when I get into reparations, but I just wanted to introduce it to you now
as an example of how, of what the libertarian theory is. The libertarian theory
is the non-aggression axiom, but it's buttress, though the other side of the coin of it
is property rights, because before you can determine whether something is
aggression or not,
you have to know
who owns it.
Why be libertarian?
This is sort of introduction to the book, I'll get to the book eventually, but
I just had a list here of why I'm a libertarian and I wanted to share it with you and maybe you can add more reasons to it
and we can co-author an article on it. I'm big into co-authoring. I don't know if you've noticed that.
But if you look at my CV, I've probably co-authored more articles with more people than a lot of people.
Sort of a way of becoming friendly. You make friends when you co-author stuff.
One is to have a better world for ourselves and our children. It's an obvious one.
Another is to promote justice. A third is nose tweaking. I love nose tweaking.
You know, you sort of take a snout and you tweak it.
Especially pompous ones who win Nobel prizes in economics and then pontificate about things.
It's just great to get them with a good libertarian smack, theoretical in writing, you know.
Another one is to give back what my mentors and teachers have so generously given me, mainly Murray Rothbard, although there are others.
I sort of think of him up there in heaven looking down on me and smiling if I do something good and not if I don't, and I want to give back to him.
Perhaps the most important reason for me is just pure aesthetic enjoyment.
To me, the libertarian theory is beautiful. It out-Mozart's Mozart. I mean, and I'm a big Mozart fan, but libertarian theory is more beautiful than Mozart.
And I can't say more about the beauty of it than that. It's just a gorgeous thing, and I thank my lucky stars that I was, well, not born a libertarian, but I became one.
And I enjoy every day as a libertarian. It's just a big turn-on.
How should we promote libertarianism? Well, there are two ways, violent and non-violent.
Should we pick up a gun and assassinate people? Well, I don't think that's a great idea.
Even assuming that the government was totally beyond whatever, the Nazi government, the Soviet government,
The Soviet government, the North Korean, the Cuban, whatever.
Even there it would not be justified.
On one ground is specialization in division of labor and comparative advantage.
We types, I know you went out shooting somewhere,
Lauren was saying that you've been going to a shooting range, but still,
you shouldn't do it even if you're expert marksman, it's not a good idea.
A friend of mine, Jeff Hummel, says that the pen is mightier than the sword.
Now if you think of a pen and a sword dueling, obviously the sword is bigger than the pen.
How's the pen going to beat the sword?
The answer is that the pen that is writing and theoretical knowledge and publishing
determines which way the sword is pointing.
So instead of picking up the sword or the gun, you do the academic thing
and you get the chance to determine which way the sword or the gun is pointed.
a much more, well, interesting to me personally, way of going about it.
In other words, I'm into, and I suggest that you get into, and to a great degree you already are,
into the battle not of bullets, but of ideas.
We're in a battle of ideas with the forces of unreason and injustice.
And our weapons are books and articles and speeches and getting PhDs
and getting law degrees and things like that.
Now, there are some fallacies
that have to do with libertarianism. Let me go over some of them.
One of them is that there's such a thing as living libertarianism.
You can't live a libertarianism. All living libertarian means sensibly is don't aggress.
But what these people mean by it is kill a bad guy or assassinate somebody or do drugs.
In other words, since we favor the legalization of drugs, if you don't do drugs,
and I don't mean by this penicillin or aspirin, you're somehow not a libertarian.
Isn't that weird? And yet there are people that actually say that, that you can live libertarianism and, you know, I wear a shirt and ties so I'm not a libertarian because shirts and ties are against libertarianism.
I mean, it's just the most nonsense on stilts.
Another one is that libertarianism is against authoritarianism.
Libertarianism and authoritarianism are very different things.
We're not against authoritarianism.
You know, they say that you should have, not hierarchies, we're against hierarchies, only hippies are against hierarchies, libertarians aren't hippies, necessarily, some of them are, but you need not be.
Look, the employer-employee relationship is a hierarchical one, is it therefore non-libertarian? That's silly.
I used to be in an orchestra, I play the violin, I'm what's called a hit violinist, if you hate your neighbor you hire me to play near his house.
And every time I played a bad note or out of time or off time, the conductor would hit his podium and go like this and say block, shape up or I'm kicking you out.
Do you know what they did with the wind players? They told them when to breathe.
Anyone here play a wind instrument in an orchestra? You know that. I mean there's a certain time when you're supposed to breathe and if you breathe at the wrong time, the guy hits the podium with his little thing
And he yells at you, you breathe at the wrong time. Now come on, that's pretty totalitarian.
I mean, even the Nazis, even the slave owners, they didn't tell their slaves, you know, you want to breathe.
But the conductor tells you you want to breathe. Now that's pretty authoritarian.
Is it non-libertarian? No. It's perfectly libertarian because you're there voluntarily.
So don't confuse libertarianism and anti-authoritarianism.
Another fallacy, and I got these, actually there are people that see these things, is individualism, that libertarians are individualists.
Now we're methodological individualists as Austrians, but we're not individualists in any other way.
For example, this guy, he was running for, God help me, President of the U.S. on the libertarian ticket, he didn't make it happily,
and make it happily, but he was telling me that track and swimming are more libertarian than basketball and football.
Why? Because track and swimming are individual sports,
whereas basketball and football and soccer are team sports and we're against socialism and team sports are socialism.
My jaw dropped, you know, I sort of felt like taking him and shaking him or slapping some sense into him.
This is a total misinterpretation of libertarianism.
Look, I forgive you. If you play team sports, it's okay.
It's just as libertarian as an individual sport.
The key is, is it voluntary? Not whether you're cooperating with other people.
I mean, that is, you know, I used to have a full head of hair before I heard this stuff.
Now look at me. It's just horrible stuff.
Another one is tolerance.
You've heard that, we have to be, you don't have to be tolerant.
You can be a curmudgeon, you can be a hater.
You can hate everyone, be an equal opportunity hater.
You can hate certain racial or ethnic groups.
I hate blacks, I hate Jews, I hate homosexuals, I hate, hate, hate, hate.
Hate is fine, just keep your myths to yourself.
I travel in weird circles and one time I gave a lecture
I was trying to convert them to libertarianism, as is my want, and my argument was, as far as I said, look, we'll give you a better deal than those guys, well, you can sing all the songs you want, you can goose-step, you can have the swastika, you can have ovens, you just can't put people in there without their consent, but you can have ovens, you can do whatever you want, you can do whatever you want, you can do whatever you want, you can do whatever you want, you can do whatever you want.
But you just have to keep your midst to yourself. Whereas those guys, they won't even let you
sing or, you know, dance or whatever. Well, remember that springtime for Hitler where
they danced in the swastika, the producers? I mean, we'll let them do that. Whereas the
people who are against hate, you know, hate crimes and hostile environments and all that
crap, they won't let them do that. So I try to convert them. I don't think I succeeded,
You know, at least I had something in my repertoire to try to convert them.
Another one is that religion is evil. If you're a religious person you can't be a libertarian.
Where do we get this from? From Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand probably even more than Murray Rothbard is responsible for more libertarians being libertarians.
She's converted a lot of people and she's a hater of religion and somehow a lot of people who are libertarians were affected or influenced by her and think that if you're religious you can't be a libertarian. That's crazy.
Tom Woods was here a couple of weeks ago. He's written several magnificent books on the school of Salamanca and other religious people who have contributed mightily to the libertarian enterprise.
So don't swallow that myth either, or that you can't be an altruist.
Another Ayn Rand thing, that if you give charity...
I mean, the way she would couch it was, we won't have a law against charity.
But, you know, I think charity is a virtue as a moral claim, not as a libertarian.
So I don't think you have to shrink from being a charitable person.
Another is libertinism. Some people confuse libertarianism with libertinism.
They sound alike. They use many of the same letters. So does librarianism.
So you don't have to love libraries either. But nobody really convinces us with librarian theoreticians.
But they do convince us with libertines. They say, oh, you...
Ayn Rand used to call us hippies of the right. She would say, hippies of the right.
because we favored legalizing drugs and porn and this and that and the other
and some of us favored using them
and somehow conflated that with libertarianism
that if you don't act in porn films you're not really a libertarian
well, you know, those people were hippies to the right
but libertarians, properly understood, don't have to be porn actors or anything like that
or porn watchers or you don't have to be involved in it all
All you have to do is say that you don't want to throw them in jail for consensual acts between adults.
So these are some of the misinterpretations of libertarianism that I would warn you against.
Let me get back to defending the undefendable because these comments were sort of background to the book.
What I'm trying to do is list groups and actors and people who do not violate the libertarian axiom.
I've got about 30 chapters. Let me read them very quickly.
the prostitute, the pimp, the male chauvinist pig, drug pusher, drug addict, blackmailer, slanderer, libeler, denier of academic freedom, advertiser, person who yells fire on a crowded theater, one of my favorites.
Not a one of these violates or necessarily violates the libertarian code. Now there are pimps who beat up their prostitutes, but they don't have to, and they can still be pimps without doing it.
For example, there are bakers and candlestick makers who engage in violence, but that doesn't impugn baking and candlestick making, right?
The gypsy cab driver, ticket scalper, dishonest cop, I'll get into that one.
Non-government counterfeiter, Bob and I have got a... did you ever get that thing published on the counterfeiter?
It was accepted.
It'll come out, so Bob and I are going to have a little friendly debate on that.
And by the way, I pride myself on having friendly debates with people.
Bob and I have been buddies for years and he's criticizing this chapter of mine.
And we're still very good friends. I'll get him on his book, Chaos, but no.
The miser, inheritor, money lender, non-contributor to charity,
curmudgeon, slumlord, ghetto merchant, speculator, importer, middleman, profiteer,
Strip Miner, Literar, Waste Maker, Fat Capitalist Pig Employer, another favorite of mine, Scab, Rate Buster and Employer of Child Labor
So these are the chapters in the book and I won't be able to go over all the chapters but I'll try to leave some time for questions
although this morning's experience convinces me I'm not going to get too many questions but maybe I'll get more out of this session
maybe the free trade was you know too much mainstream libertarianism another
fallacy of libertarianism is that somehow libertarians are capitalists
remember I gave you this bit with voluntary socialism before I find these
These sort of tables are helpful and what I do is I say that the real debate is not between socialism and capitalism but rather between voluntarism and coercivism, if I can coin two phrases, because you can have voluntary socialism, the kibbutz, the commune, the family, take the family.
Now, if you define socialism, not as state ownership of the means of production, which is one reasonable definition of socialism, but in a different way, from each according to his ability to each according to his need, which is another Marxist philosophy.
Well, the three-year-old girl, does she eat in accordance with her ability to produce income or in accordance with her need? Obviously in accordance with her need.
So there's egalitarianism. So there's nothing wrong with egalitarianism as long as it's done by a voluntary group.
So if people want to have socialized medicine and they just include those who want to be in on it, libertarianism has no objection.
We only object when they force you, when they draft you into the voluntary socialist commune or whatever it is that they're getting up.
So there's nothing wrong, per se, with socialized medicine if it's limited to people who voluntarily subscribe to it.
If Hillary wants to have Hillary care and she signs up people, God bless her.
But let her not force others into it, which is the way the state does it.
The kibbutz, the commune, the Jesuits have a monastery or whatever it is, nunnery.
All these groups operate according to socialist principles.
The kibbutz sometimes get subsidies from the Israeli government, but it's possible to imagine a kibbutz that didn't.
The hippie commune, perfectly libertarian, or at least consistent with libertarianism.
On the other hand, obviously laissez-faire capitalism is fine also, and you can be in any of the top row and be a libertarian,
of the Libertarian, whereas the bottom row is the bad stuff. There you have coercive socialism, or welfare state, or fascism, or what have you.
Proudhon, a famous philosopher, said that property is theft.
This is a problem for libertarians, because remember we're basing our theory on private property rights.
I would say Proudhon is wrong. It's not that property is theft, it's rather that you can't have theft without property in the first place,
because theft is the taking of legitimately owned property.
So if there were no such thing as legitimately owned property, there couldn't be theft.
If I take the can of coke that's sitting in front of Dan, or I take the shoes that he's got on, or if I grab him, it's not theft or assault and battery or anything, because theft and assault and battery and murder are only dependent upon property rights in the first place.
So Proudhon has got it backwards six ways, I think. He's all wrong.
Okay, not only do I say with regards to all these chapter headings that they are not necessarily guilty of initiation of aggression and therefore they shouldn't be jailed, but I also say they're heroic.
Now what's with this heroic business? Why is the pimp not only should stay out of jail, but why is he actually heroic?
The reason I think he's heroic is because he's violating an illegitimate law.
You know, the people on the left are always having these marches against Jim Crow laws.
Well, the pimp or the guy who charges whatever he wants for his apartment or pays whatever he can agree to with an employee
and violates the minimum wage law, is heroically violating the law.
No, I don't advocate that you do this.
Again, we have specialization in division of labor and I don't think ours, if I can speak for you, is to violate the law.
But if people do violate the law, I can say they're heroic.
Look, right now it's legal to wear a blue tie.
Suppose they pass the law, blue ties are illegal to wear.
And suppose I now wore it. Wouldn't that be heroic?
Not saintly, there's nothing intrinsically, I'm not claiming too much for myself.
But as a protest against an unjust law, if, as I say, if the law says you can't wear a blue tie and I wear a blue tie,
I'll put in the next issue of defending the undefendable, the blue tie wearer.
Now it sounds silly because, you know, anyone can wear a blue tie, but if the law was that you couldn't wear a blue tie,
and I persisted in wearing one, seems not only that I shouldn't go to jail, but I'm doing something, a mitzvah,
Okay, let me get into some of the chapters, and the first chapter that I want to get into is libel and slander, and I'm going to be libeling and slandered some of you good people, so don't take it personally, and if it's true, I don't mean it, but here we go.
here we go and if I've left you out it's because you weren't on a list that I
was given by Pat so don't take it as an insult but come see me later I'll add
you on in the next session Prem Barbosa pervert Simon Bielo or Bielo not here
Bill O'Connor, Steve Berger, weirdo, Rosemary Bittetti, pinko, Mike Blakeney, takes candy
Money from Babies, Christopher Brandt, rubber fetishist, Julie Brandt, sicko, Lenka Kamrova, sadist,
Lisa Casanova, Nazi, Dick Clark, masochist, you should see him, Nicholas Carrot, heroin
addict, Dan D'Amico, pornographer, sorry it came out, I meant to keep your secret but
Ken Garshina, a former student of mine at Holy Cross who will be coming in a day or so, lesbian.
Ben Kilpatrick, who will be here in a day or so, pimp.
Vladimir Krauss, slumlord.
Eric Kubinski, Eric, is he here? Is he married? Because he's an adulterer. I hope he's single.
Dan Curry, rapist, Carlo Lottieri, murderer, Matt Machock, thief, Adam Morton, blackmailer,
Dan McCarthy, extortionist, Gabriel Mercado, drug dealer, Adrian Ravier, highway robber,
Carrie Anne Citrin, pirate, Matthew Skelton, prostitute, Nick Snow, gigolo, sorry Nick, you know, the truth is the truth,
Maximilian Travato, porn star, I guess you work with Dan, Noah Tyler, watermelon.
Watermelon is someone who's red on the inside and green on the outside.
You know, one of these environmental-o, pink-o commies.
Marcus Verhey, randried.
Alexander Villacampa, takes a bath with a rubber ducky.
Who else do we have here? Wait.
Murray Rothbard, nymphomaniac, Lew Rockwell, leather fetishist, Jeff Tucker, plays with blow-up rubber sex toys, Dick Clark, wimp,
Look, the truth will out. Chad Parrish is a sissy, Mark Thornton is a wuss, Bob Murphy is a mama's boy, and Pat Barnett is a crybaby.
Now, for the rest of you who I haven't covered, you're either tattletales, weenies, infomaniacs, schizophreniacs,
Where's diapers, bed wetter, nose picker, transvestite peterist, bad breath, thumb sucker, hypocrite, whiner, bully and rotten kid.
That's what you guys are.
Okay, now what have I done here? What have I done?
I'm going to be sued by everyone.
What I've done is I've engaged in libel and slander.
And the argument against this is that I violated property rights in your reputation because if I'm the New York Times and I said that or I'm a big shot or something and I say, you know, that this one plays with a rubber ducky and this one's a weirdo and a pervert, people will reason, well, you know, whether smoke this fire, you know, Block can't be wrong on all these accusations. Some of them must be true. And this will ruin your reputation. It's a small town. We all live in Auburn, say.
You know, you have a restaurant and I say, you know, you wear diapers or something and people aren't going to come to your restaurant.
Or people won't employ you. They'll say, well, there's smoke, there's fire. So I've ruined your reputation.
And reputation is a very important thing.
You know, you can sell a business where the break-up value of it is $100,000, but the goodwill is $500,000 and you can sell it for $600,000.
And now I've taken away 500,000 of goodwill. It's true you still have the fixed capital
and the fixtures and the tables or whatever it is, but I've taken away five-sixths of
the value of your company. And since you own your reputation and I just stole something
of great value to you, I mean if I stole the chairs and the tables from the Mises Institute,
it wouldn't be worth as much as their good name. And if I said that they're a cult and
And they're Nazis and, you know, pederasts or whatever it is that I'm accusing them of.
And if it sticks and people, you know, distance themselves from the Mises Institute, I've
really done them some harm. So did I violate their property rights, which is the key for
libertarians, not whether you do harm. It's okay to do harm. We can do harm. It's rather
rights violations that are against libertarianism. How can you do harm that's compatible with
Libertarianism. Well, if there's a boy and a girl and the boy's trying to date
the girl and then the girl goes off with another boy, the second boy hurt the
first boy, didn't he, by taking his girlfriend away? He harmed him in a very
important way. Or if you have a grocery store and I open up a grocery store
right across the street and I steal half your customers, did I harm you? Yeah, I
harmed you. Do I have a right to do that? Yes, I have a right to compete. So
So harming is not the key. Don't make that mistake. It's rather rights violations, and
the rights violation has to constitute a property rights violation, where we look at property
rights in a widespread way. So McDonald's and Burger King can compete. McDonald's can
have Ronald McDonald, they can have a Whopper Wednesday, but they can't firebomb each other's
premises. That's not legitimate competition.
Okay, so now let's get back to reputation. And my claim in this chapter is paradox upon paradox.
The first paradox is even though you benefit from your reputation, you work hard to get a good reputation,
still you don't own your reputation because your reputation consists not of your thoughts,
which we can say by some extension that you own, but rather your thoughts consist of our,
Rather, your reputation consists of our thoughts. So, Rosa Maria's reputation consists of what we all think about her.
Maximilian's reputation consists of what we think about him.
Now, let's take that clearly, or carefully, or slowly. Maximilian's reputation, sitting here, consists of what we think about him.
His reputation, in here is in us, or is in our heads in some poetic way.
We own those thoughts, he doesn't own those thoughts, so who owns his reputation if his reputation consists of my thoughts and Dan's thoughts and Dick's thoughts?
Well, we own his reputation. I own a little bit of it, Dan owns a little bit of it, Prem owns a little bit, all of Maximilian's reputation.
So that's the first paradox. You don't own your reputation even though you work for your reputation, even though you benefit from your reputation
when you sell it in the form of goodwill but you still don't own it because it
consists of our thoughts so I haven't stolen anything from you when I called
you all those names even if I succeeded in ruining your reputation and we say
your reputation it's sort of like we say my tailor I'm going to my tailor doesn't
mean I own him if he if it if I really owned him as a tailor and he closed up
My tailor, what is he thinking of closing down, right? Or since I'm his customer, if I go somewhere else, he can sue me. So the possessive pronoun, my, doesn't mean ownership. My reputation, my wife, my tailor, my customer, you don't really own it. It's just sort of a trick of language. So that's the first paradox. The second paradox is that reputations would be safer
in a regime where we have full free speech and no libel laws.
Safer. Paradox, big paradox, because look, right now if somebody says that Simon is a bum,
people start saying, maybe Simon is a bum. But under a regime of freedom, you know,
right now you go to the newspapers and you see help wanted ads and cars for sale
houses for sale and kittens to, you know, roommates wanted, whatever. We'd have libel sections, you know, this one's a bum, this one's a pervert, this one's a commie, and no longer would a mere allegation suffice to ruin a reputation.
Now, people would read that Nick Snow is a pornographer, or whatever he is, gigolo, I think.
Forgot. And no longer would they say, hey, I didn't know that about Nick, he doesn't look that way, but you know, maybe he is.
People would say, well, that's silly, or where's the proof, where's the evidence?
Because everyone would be calling everyone something. It would sort of get lost in the static.
I hate to sound in favor of the poor, God forbid, but right now if you besmirch the reputation of a poor person, not much he can do about it. He can't afford to sue you. The New York Times and people like that get away with an awful lot. So right now it sort of favors the rich in a bad way or an improper way.
So we have paradox after paradox after paradox. We'd be better off if we had freedom.
Now these blonde jokes will be on the exam, so you better take them down.
How does a man show he is planning for the future? He buys two cases of beer.
Remember these are payback for blonde jokes. What is the difference between men
and government bonds? The bonds will eventually mature. Why are blonde jokes
so short? So that men can remember them. How many men does it take to change a
roll of toilet paper? We don't know, it has never happened. Why is it difficult
It's difficult for women to find men who are sensitive, caring and good-looking.
They all already have boyfriends.
What do you call a woman who knows where her husband is every night?
A widow.
Why are married women usually heavier than single women?
Single women come home, see what's in the fridge, and go to bed.
Married women come home, see what's in bed, and go to the fridge.
How do you get a man to do sit-ups?
Tape the remote control between his toes.
Okay, Chad, are these stupid jokes on the tape? Great. Let her roll. Total honesty, that's our motto.
Okay, the next one I'm going to do is blackmail, and I'm going to stop after I do blackmail.
And I've got whole bunches of more, and I can do them.
I think tomorrow's lesson is sort of like defending the undefendable too, and I want to have questions and discussion.
But if there aren't, then I'll just keep going, but I'll just do the blackmail and then call for questions and see how it goes.
Maybe I'm just saying stuff that's, you know, just obvious to everyone and, you know, you're wondering when I'm going to get to the controversial stuff, but...
Okay, here we go, blackmail.
Now, blackmail is against the law in every state and every country.
It's sort of like a no-brainer in law school.
You're in law school, you can probably verify this.
There's a crucial distinction that has to be made and that's between blackmail
on the one hand and extortion on the other hand. Both of them
threaten something and both of them demand something.
The demand is usually for money but it could be for money or sexual services or
anything and they both threaten.
The difference is that the blackmailer threatens a legitimate act, whereas the extortionist threatens an illegitimate act.
For example, if I blackmail you, I say, unless you give me a hundred bucks, I'm going to tattle and tell that you're a pederast or that you cheat on your wife.
Now, do I have a right to tell other people that you cheat on your wife?
Yeah, it's gossip. It's free speech. I'm not violating your rights when I say that you cheat on your wife or you do any of these other things.
You're a transvestite or a nose picker or you wear diapers or whatever it is. You take a bath with a rubber ducky. It's just gossip.
Would anyone put me in jail for gossiping? We haven't got to that point yet in this country. It is still legal to gossip.
You see two women over the laundry talking and they're gossiping, men too. Everyone gossips.
Gossip makes the world go round. Gossip performs an important sociological function of keeping people in line,
keeping them civilized, because if you're uncivilized people will gossip about you and your reputation will get out
and people will shun you, which is why we're politer than we would otherwise be had there been no gossip.
So, gossip is a good thing, certainly it shouldn't be against the law, because merely to gossip is not to engage in a physical violation of anyone's rights, like punching or raping or murdering.
So, all I'm doing when I blackmail you is I'm threatening to do that which I have a right to do.
Well, how can it be illegal properly? Remember what libertarianism is, is a theory of what the law should be.
How can it properly be illegal to threaten what I have a right to do?
I have a right to sit down in this chair right next to Dan.
See, I can do it. And by doing it, I didn't violate anyone's rights.
Now, do I have a right to threaten to sit down there? Yeah. It's innocuous.
I have a right to look at the time and to scratch my ear.
Do I have a right to threaten Rosemaria?
Unless you give me a hundred bucks, I'm going to look at my watch.
It's a little weird, but I have a right to do it.
Maximilian, unless you give me a thousand bucks, I'm going to scratch my ear.
Oh, he's going to cough up quick.
Okay, well, now I go to prem and I say, prem, unless you give me money,
I'm going to tell people that you're a wuss or something.
Where did I violate a proper law? I didn't, I don't think.
And yet every jurisdiction, known to man and some unknown to man, kidding, have laws against blackmail.
Now, extortion is very different. If I go to Lauren and I say, Lauren, unless you give me money, I'm going to plug you.
Well, that's extortion. It's a threat of bodily harm.
I should go to jail or be penalized and we'll get into libertarian punishment theory one of these days
but I should certainly be punished for shooting her
and I should also be punished for threatening the shooter
I mean most holdups
guy comes with a gun says give me your money or I'll shoot you
he doesn't usually end up shooting him
most people give up the money and then that's the end of the transaction
so yes extortion should be against the law
I haven't lost leave of my senses
We have to have a law-abiding society. We have to have civilization. Fine.
Extortion is against the law.
Threatening bodily harm.
Threatening something that you have no right to do. I'm going to kidnap your children if you don't give me money.
I'm going to blow your house up if you don't give me money or sexual services or whatever it is that I want.
I can't legitimately threaten something I have no right to do, which gets back to the question that we talked about before,
about threatening and doing, and the two go together.
If you can threaten, you can do,
and if you can't threaten, then you can't do,
and if you can do, you can threaten,
and if you can't do, you can't threaten, four ways.
Hope I said it right.
Yet, this claim was made by Murray Rothbard
in Man Economy and State in one sentence,
And on the basis of that there were various conservative groups that consigned his book to the outer depths.
I think it's Man Economy and State. There's one book where he said this in one sentence.
Pretty sure it's that book. It might have been a different book, but I'm pretty sure it's that one.
And what I did is I've written a lot about this because a lot of law reviews have arguments as to why blackmail should be illegal because of this paradox.
See, what I'm doing is I gave you a paradox that it's licit to do what you can threaten and to threaten what you can do and legal scholars have come up with various theories as to why it should be illegal to blackmail.
Blackmail. Some of the theories are utilitarian. This would be the Coase and the Posner types.
Others, they come up with various reasons which I can't really understand why on non-utilitarian grounds.
It turns out that I think I'm the most heavily published person on blackmail in the known universe
because there was a while where I was going through my blackmail phase. I wasn't blackmailing people
I'm not blackmailing people, but I was writing articles in reply and response to articles in law reviews
where the law reviews said, you know, here's why blackmail should be illegal and what I say is, you know, you're full of beans and here's why.
Which would you rather be in the hands of, a gossip or a blackmailer?
If you were doing something that you shouldn't be doing, and you have two choices.
Now if you're in the hands of a gossip, it's case closed, it's over, you're screwed.
Because the gossip is a big blabber mouth that's going to just blabber.
The blackmailer has the decency, the kindness, the consideration to come to you and say,
Give me money and I'll shut up.
Can you sue them if they remain?
Yeah, sure. It's a contract. It's a services contract.
I promise to keep quiet, John, about the fact that you're a weirdo.
And you give me a thousand bucks and the next thing you know I'm babbling that John is a weirdo.
You come and sue me. Sure. I mean, the secret's already out.
And it'll hurt me because I'll get the reputation of a blackmailer who can't keep his mouth shut.
So the next time I go to Dick and I say, hey, Dick, you know, give me money, or I'll say, you're really a lousy computer person.
Dick will say, you know, take a hike, or publish and be damned is the expression that's sometimes used.
Because Dick will know that what's the point of giving me money? I can't keep my mouth shut.
So, yeah, a blackmailer has the decency to make a commercial deal with you.
And if he reneges or if he changes, he says, okay, it'll be a thousand dollars and that's it.
And then a month later, I come back another thousand, you can sue me.
And now you've got a hook into me because I violated my contract.
And in a free society, if you violate a contract, you can be held responsible.
So what's this asking for another thousand?
There's a line in one of the Sherlock Holmes things.
Moriarty was the bad guy in the Sherlock Holmes.
He was the arch-fiend, the arch-villain.
And what he did is he stole people's souls, according to Arthur Conan Doyle.
Namely, he engaged in blackmail.
So it's not only law professors and legal theoreticians, it's literature, it's just everything.
Everyone says blackmail is the worst thing in the known universe.
But the libertarian analysis leads you to a different conclusion.
So this is powerful stuff.
I started off by saying, you know, everyone would agree, non-aggression, sure, sure.
Now all of a sudden we're keeping blackmailers out of jail and libel is okay, or at least legally okay.
Now look, I'm not saying it's nice to be a blackmailer.
I'm not saying that you should grow up and try to, you know, become a blackmailer.
That this is a virtuous thing. It's not moral to do that.
It's not moral to blackmail. It's not moral to libel.
We're only talking about should you go to jail or should violence be visited upon you.
And we libertarians say that the only time violence should be visited upon you
is if you first engage in something that is equivalent to violence.
For example, fraud, or pickpocketing. Look, pickpocketing is a very delicate thing.
Or bad check writing, there's no violence, but still there's an illicit transfer of property when pickpocketing occurs.
You know, you must have surgeon's hands to pickpocket, or you write a bad check, or you forge a check,
or I sell you 10 pounds of apples and you open it as 10 pounds of rocks, I stole the money from you.
Now, I'm not saying it has to be violent, but there has to be either violence, or a threat of violence, or fraud, or some illicit transfer of property, and then libertarianism kicks in and says, uh-uh, gotta stop you.
But blackmail and libel and slander don't do that. So I think it is incumbent upon us, if we want to be consistent with the libertarian vision, to say, well, you shouldn't go to jail.
Remember, what libertarianism is about is only who goes to jail, or who gets punished, or under what conditions is violence justified, and the answer is when previous violence or the threat occurred.
Okay, we've only got about 15 minutes. Questions? Comments? Dan?
There's a practical question in regards to raising payment, like the blackmailer says initially and in fact, okay, it's going to be $1,000 and then later on they come and raise the states, well, it doesn't.
That's still problematic in the sense that the enforcement, to enforce the contract at that stage of the game where he hasn't revealed anything,
would then kind of hurt the blackmailee in the sense that he doesn't want the information out.
So to go to a third party to arbitrate according to a contract that you've written is just as bad as breaking the contract.
Well, not just as bad, but very bad, okay? In other words, you're trying to keep it secret that you're a weenie and you paid me a thousand dollars and now I'm about, and now I say another thousand.
You say, what do you mean another thousand? The deal is a deal and it was just one thousand. What's the second thousand?
and I say, well, look, pay the second thousand or I'm going public and you're still stuck
but you're in a better position than you were the first time because now at least you've got something on me
it's mutual blackmail, you know, mutual assured destruction, mutual assured blackmail
because now you can blackmail me, you can say, hey look, give me 500 back
You dirty rat, because you're going against your contract, and I'm going public, yes, I'll admit I'm a weenie, but you are a, what's the word, a reneging blackmailer, and if I have any sense of self, position to uphold in the community, or more realistically speaking, if I ever want to blackmail anyone else, the word now gets out that I'm an untrustworthy blackmailer,
any money in the beginning. They might be more likely to say publish and be damned.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with your position, but I wanted to create a sort of hard case to see how
you might respond to it. Suppose that you are blackmailing, you have information on someone
who's committed a murder, and if blackmail is legal, you now have a financial interest in
keeping that information secret and blackmailing the murderer and getting money. If on the other
hand blackmail were illegal, you would have no interest in keeping it secret, basically,
You would have, you could potentially go to the authorities more easily.
You wouldn't be getting a stream of revenue for it, and thus getting an additional incentive to keep it secret.
You might still keep it secret, but there would be less incentive than a blackmail lawyer.
That's a very good point.
Do you call that extortion?
There's no threat of violence, so it's not extortion.
What about the information on the murder against the law?
It is against the law, but is it against the proper law?
Oh, proper law.
Remember, for libertarianism there are no positive obligations.
Now it would be nice, it would be virtuous, we know Dan is a murderer, but he's a nice guy, so far no one is telling.
It would be nice if we went to the cops, private cops or the forces of law and order, whoever they are, let's leave that in abeyance,
and said, look, Dan is a murderer, we've got evidence and here it is, and put him away.
But it's not incumbent upon us as libertarians to do that, there are no positive obligations.
Let me just finish this and then I'll call on other people.
There are no positive obligations, the only obligations are negative.
Remember, if there are positive obligations, then you have to give your money to the poor or something like that.
There are no positive obligations, and when I get to stem cell research and abortion,
I'll be saying something that's seemingly incompatible with that, but I'll...
Well, I want to mention it now just briefly. In the abortion case, the tradition is, not the abortion case, well, in the child abuse case.
If you have a child, the traditional thing from common law is if you didn't want to take care of your child, you put it on the church steps or you bring it to a hospital.
There was an incident in Nash, a TV show in Nash, where they had this Korean, half Korean, half American baby, and nobody wanted to take care of it, and they brought it to the monastery.
Well, suppose they just left it in the back room and let it starve. In other words, is putting the baby on the church steps, is that a positive obligation?
And I'm arguing no, and my argument is, well this is a roundabout way of answering that question, but bear with me, it's a thing called forestalling.
Now you remember, here is a bagel.
Do you remember we were talking about homesteading land as a way of getting to own it and the ideas that all land should be owned?
Locke had some sort of stupid proviso that there has to be as much and as good left around but we libertarians don't buy that part of it.
You homestead and anyone can homestead and the homesteading should end up with all property owned
And if you prevent someone from homesteading, like Dan is trying to plow and I beat him up and I say you can't plow, that's forestalling, that's preventing him from homesteading.
Well, suppose I homestead a bagel-shaped area. I homestead this area, the dotted area, leaving the X area empty.
Am I allowed to do that? My take on this is that I'm not allowed to do that
because I am forestalling, I am acting in such a way as that all property can't be homesteaded.
Now, if it's impossible to tunnel under or bridge over,
let's say we don't have the technology or the rock is too hard or whatever it is,
my claim is that this guy with the bagel-shaped area has to allow
a path into the x area so that people can homestead the inner part of the bagel
because the whole point of ownership is so that we can not have fights.
The reason we have to have ownership, and this is my pen and this is Dan's pen, is so we don't fight over it.
But if there's unowned stuff, then we can fight over it.
So everything has to be privatized.
If it moves, privatize it.
If it doesn't move, privatize it.
Since everything either moves or doesn't move, you privatize everything.
The forestaller is engaged in some sort of illicit activity.
And what I'm claiming is, is that to put the baby on the church steps or notify the hospital that you have an unwanted baby
is absolutely required, and it's not a positive obligation, because if you don't, you're guilty of forestalling the baby.
Not that you can own the baby, but you can own the rights to bring up the baby, by bringing it up?
Okay, so now to get back to your question, there is no positive obligation to tell anyone that someone is a murderer.
And I think your question was intimately dependent upon that.
No, but I think that someone who wants to defend black male laws is going to say that one of the reasons to have them
to make sure that criminal activity is going to be, it may not, you don't necessarily have to insist that there are laws that are going to compel people to reveal criminal activity on another person's part,
but if they're allowed to blackmail, that will give them a financial incentive not to reveal that information.
So it seems like having blackmailed illegal makes it a little more likely that the information will come out.
This is a good utilitarian criticism of my theory.
I mean, we'll have more crime with the libertarian theory and if we keep the law as it is, it'll encourage people to turn in criminals.
So, but it's only a utilitarian argument, mere utilitarianism, and libertarians are not necessarily utilitarians.
I agree with all this, but I'm just not sure that how would you make an argument that interacts at all in an effective manner with the utilitarian argument?
Well, one way is to say that libertarianism is broadly utilitarian, and that if we buy the libertarian principle, even in cases where it seems not to be utilitarian, it's sort of like rule utilitarianism as opposed to act utilitarianism, which what you have is an act utilitarian argument, Kevin you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong on this rule versus act utilitarianism,
But you could defend against the act utilitarian attack. Please don't talk while I'm talking because I have a very weak voice and I don't want to talk over it.
What I'm saying is you are now launching an act utilitarian attack on my position and I'm saying I have in my control a rule utilitarian answer, namely act according to the rule which will maximize utility.
And the rule is Libertarianism.
Kevin.
This is something new. I wonder, are you going to talk about child support?
Because if you are, I'll wait, but I have a question if you want.
Well, go ahead, shoot.
I've heard some people argue that child support could be legitimate under Libertarianism
because there are types of implicit contracts and bans.
I will be talking about this at greater length when I talk about abortion, but let me just answer now since it's been asked, I don't think that it's just to compel people to take care of children.
First of all, the child who's the product of rape can't within a million miles be considered to be a voluntary mother.
And if you believe that all children have equal rights because they're all equally innocent,
she certainly has no obligation there and therefore no one else does either, is one way to go at it, if all children have equal rights.
And she, the rape victim, has no obligation to take care of this particular raped child or product of raped child?
Well, then no child has a duty that any parent has to support.
Second is this implicit contract business. Now, I'm a fan of implicit contracts.
If I go to a restaurant and I order a cup of coffee and I drink it, and then they present me with a bill for a million dollars,
I say, uh-uh, if you want to charge me that, it's your responsibility to tell me that this is a special cup of coffee.
So I agree with implicit contracts, but I insist that for there to be an implicit contract, there has to be at least two parties to it.
And at the time of intercourse, forgetting about the father for the moment, let's suppose he's out of the picture, there aren't two parties.
Namely, there's only the mother with an egg here and a sperm over there.
So at this point, before the egg and the sperm meet, now even when they meet, it's hard to see how you can have an implicit contract with a fertilized egg.
Although I'm maybe sympathetic to that, because at least it's an entity if not an adult.
But before the egg and the sperm meet, there's no one that you can have a contract with.
and my view is that for there to be an implicit contract you have to have at least two people.
Okay, just briefly. Of course the rate case would be distinguishable from the others
by saying there's obviously no ground for implicit contract in that case.
So responding to the second one, the argument would be that it's an obligation to the child.
It would be an argument that it was an obligation to the other parent, say, a husband or something like that.
Well, Murray would probably say there was no consideration passed and also if the implicit contract is just between the mother and the father, what does that have to do with the baby?
See, you have to have, if you want to have the baby protected by an implicit contract, the baby has to be part of the implicit contract.
And if you're just talking about the mother and the father, you don't reach the baby.
And then there's all this stuff about Mary Beth White or somebody like that who was paid to have a man's baby.
And there there's a contract, now you have a contract between the mother and the father, but again it has nothing to do with the baby.
We're out of time and I understand that you're supposed to keep to the strict
hour and a half, so is that right Chad? Okay, so let's end now and we'll continue
tomorrow.