WEBVTT

NOTE Reparations

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Welcome to the very, very, very last session of this week of seminars on Austrian economics and libertarian theory.

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Let's start with just a brief moment of silence.

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Today, we're going to talk about reparations.

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But before I get into reparations, I have one or two little things that I just have to get off my chest.

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One of them is an article by your friend in mind, Paul Krugman, genius economist.

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I mean, they have recalls for tires and recalls for everything.

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Why do they have recalls for economists?

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If anyone needs a recall, it's this guy.

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He's a pretty famous economist.

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He got his PhD some good place.

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And I think he teaches at Columbia, which is supposedly a good school.

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I got my PhD there, so I'd better not deprecate it too much, but this guy, I mean, it's sort of economic illiteracy runner-mock.

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He had a series on health care, and for those of you who are here next week, I'll be doing the economics of health, where I jump on him for his socialized medicine things.

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Today he has an article in the July 29th New York Times, French Family Values, and he says that the French are better than us because their government has orchestrated things such that they have limited work weeks, they can only work 30 hours a week or 35 or something like that,

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And the average American gets four weeks off a year, whereas the average French full-time worker gets seven weeks off a year, and obviously seven is better than four, and 30 is better than 40.

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And individuals, a quote here, this is the sort of a deal that an individual would find hard to negotiate.

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Of course, an individual would find it hard to negotiate that if everyone else in the company gets three or four weeks off a year and works 40 hours a week.

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And this individual wants to get 10 weeks off a year and work 30 hours a week would be hard, not impossible, but hard.

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But suppose a lot of people wanted that.

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Wouldn't it pay for an employer to say, okay, I'm setting up a new company and I give 10 weeks off a year and you only have to work 30 weeks.

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Under this assumption that there are vast numbers of people that want it, but there's this unrequited demand on the part of employees for this, and employers are too hard-hearted or too stupid, he would take all their workers away.

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These guys who are incompatible with what the workers want, they would lose their workers. At the very least, a new company could even say, look, I'll give you 1% lower wages per hour.

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Now, obviously there'd be a pay cut, but if this is what people wanted, they'd get it. The market works. News to Krugman.

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Okay, enough ranting and raving off the subject. Let's rant and rave now on the subject.

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Before I get into reparations, I want to talk a little bit about libertarian punishment theory.

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because reparations are a subset of punishment theory.

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And what is libertarian punishment theory?

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Libertarian punishment theory is two teeth for a tooth.

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We go one better than the Bible.

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Plus costs of capturing, plus scaring,

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if that's appropriate, let me explain.

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Okay, so what happens is that Matt and I, I steal his pen.

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So what should my punishment be? Well, the first thing that ought to be done is I ought to be forced to give him back his own pen. That's the first tooth.

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The second thing that ought to be done, if justice is to be upheld and justice is doing what's right, is what I try to do to him, namely steal his pen, ought to be done to me, namely he ought to get my pen.

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That's the second tooth. Not 1.9 teeth, not 2.1 teeth, but 2.0 teeth exactly.

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Who says Austrians aren't mathematically sophisticated?

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Okay, now, if I turn myself into the police right away, and there's no cost of capturing me,

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then there are no payments that I have to make there.

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But if I try to elude capture, and you know, you've got to search for me and you find me a week later,

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I've got to pay for that too but now there's also the scaring issue now if

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what I did is I pickpocketed it right out of his back pocket and he didn't even

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notice then there's no scaring he didn't even know but somebody else saw it and

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you know got the pen back on the other hand if I went to his house when he was

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out then there's a little scaring because he no longer sees his house as safe as

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On the other hand, if I came when he was there, then it's a lot more dangerous, and if I came when he was there with a gun, and I didn't use it and I didn't see it a little bit more dangerous, and if I came with a gun and I said, give me your pen or I'll plug you, now, you know, it's really scary.

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So, since I scared him, I should be scared twice as much. And how should the scaring take place? Well, there are various options.

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One of the best options, one of them is, I ought to be made to play Russian roulette

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with the number of chambers in the gun and the number of bullets in the chambers

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proportionate to how much I scare them.

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Namely, the more I scare them of the sort that I just mentioned,

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the more bullets in the few of the chambers,

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or the higher the proportion of bullets to chambers.

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That's libertarian punishment theory.

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With it, we can prove that the death penalty is justified because what does murder consist of, if not stealing a life?

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So if I murder Matt, what I did is I stole his life. I sort of took his life out of him and I ought to be made to do two things.

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One, put his life back into him and two, give him a second life of my own.

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Now, if this is true, of course it's hard to be putting lives back and forth in between people because we don't have the technology,

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but here I'm inspired by Robert Nozick who comes up with all sorts of machines,

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and here's a machine that I invented but based on his path-breaking work in justice machines,

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and here we have the murderer

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and we put him smiling since he's still alive

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and here is the dead victim who we put

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frowning since he's now dead

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and we then get the machine to working and the machine's got a lever here

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and what the machine does is it takes the life out of him

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And it puts it into him, so after the machine is, the lever is snapped, we now have a dead murderer and a live victim.

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Isn't that just? I mean, what could be more just, right? I mean, the murderer took a life, it's got to give it back.

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If it was an accident, he only has to give one life back, not two.

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Motive is important, but not all important.

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If there's an accidental death, I'm cleaning my gun and all of a sudden I shoot Rosemary.

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I'm innocent, there's no mens rea.

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I'm sorry, I'm late.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Compensation.

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The point is that I owe her a life.

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I'm not a bad guy, I was just cleaning my gun innocently and somehow I dropped it and it went off and it hit her.

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But I owe her something.

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I just can't say, you know, sorry, or sorry to her heirs, I mean, that's nice, I should say that too.

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But I owe her something, or if I inadvertently break her TV, then I don't owe her two TVs, but I owe her one TV,

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and I don't owe her for scaring her, and I don't owe her for cost of capture because I'm an honest person and it's just an accident.

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Okay, so that's roughly what an overview of libertarian punishment theory.

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But the key is, return of stolen property, make the victim whole insofar as possible, and it's not always possible because psychological damage can't be erased, but you do the best you can.

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Okay, now let's get back to this case where I stole a pen from Matt. I've got his pen.

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And now I die and he dies of natural causes, and what's your name? Dan is my son, and Lisa is Matt's daughter, okay?

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Now if we were both alive, we saw that justice consisted of me giving him back his own pen plus my own, me giving him back his pen plus punishment, my own pen.

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but we're both dead now and Dan has got the pen and Lisa would have got it

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because Matt would have given it to her he gave everything else to her that he

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had when because she's his dad and Lisa is the heir so it doesn't just as

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consist of going over to Dan and saying Dan sorry you're not a criminal we're

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not going to give you any two teeth for a tooth or anything but you've got a pen

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And that you inherited it from Walter?

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That you never in justice should have inherited from Walter

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because he wasn't the rightful owner of it?

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He stole it?

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Wouldn't justice consist of taking the pen from Dan

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and giving it to, well, Matt's gone so we can't give it to him,

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and giving it to Lisa, who's his heir?

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Seems to me that that would be just.

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And that if Dan said, no, no, no, too bad, I'm not giving it up,

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Then he's starting to take on the aspects of criminal,

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because he's holding on to stolen property

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when the forces of law and order are saying,

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hey, you know, you're not the rightful owner of it,

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give it to Lisa, because Lisa is the rightful owner of it.

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Now, would it matter if it was one son,

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or one generation, or two, or 10, or 20, or 50, or 100?

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No, no statute of limitations on justice.

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Justice is justice is justice.

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It's timeless. It's just as bad for the caveman to hit someone as for the star man to hit someone.

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Justice is timeless. It doesn't matter how many generations.

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Of course, the burden of proof is always on the person who wants to overturn extant property rights.

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Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Dan's got the pen. Give it back. Dan's got the pen.

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So it's up to Lisa to prove that that pen was her dad's, and that I stole it from him and gave it to him, and he's now the 25th generation later.

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So there is no legal statute of limitations, but there's a natural statute of limitations.

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What's the natural statute of limitations?

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The natural statute of limitations is that the more generations that go by,

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the harder it is to meet the proof, the burden of proof of possession.

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The more generations that go between me and Matt to our great, great, great, great grandchildren,

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the harder it is for them to know this or to prove it,

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especially if in the old generation was before language,

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like if you're talking about Indians or someone like that,

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or black slaves that loved his language but much less,

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much less writing ability, no computers.

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Okay, so that I think is the, you know, who's got who's pens,

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but I don't want to, I don't want anyone to knock out my teeth.

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Okay, so that is an introduction

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to libertarian punishment theory as it applies to reparations.

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Reparations are just, justified if and only if

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The person who wants to get the stuff

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can meet the burden of proof.

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What is the burden of proof?

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That's a gray area.

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That's a continuum problem.

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I'm not getting into that.

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But in clear cut cases, maybe not with pens,

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but say with jewelry.

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Let's say my picture is on the ring

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or my initials are on the ring or something,

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or a picture of me with the ring and the initials.

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And now it's 50 generations later,

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and you still can have proof.

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Well, 50 generations you transplant the ring

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from the heir of the thief to the heir of the victim.

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Okay, now let's talk about the modern discussion

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of reparations.

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Most people, when they hear about black reparations

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or reparations for slavery, they immediately assume

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that this is anti-private property rights.

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But as we've just seen, this is not only pro-private property rights, but is required by private property rights.

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And indeed, if it's not upheld, private property rights are denigrated or abnegated or whatever.

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Okay, so who are the ballplayers? There are three sets of ballplayers here.

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the first is the liberal leftists who want to have reparations for blacks these

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are people like Randall Robinson your man and my man Jesse Jackson who's all

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over the place John Conyers a Democratic congressman from Michigan who's I think

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the leader of the black caucus in in the Congress Henry Lewis Gates the black

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The Black Studies Theoretician at Harvard, and their idea is that we should have a trillion dollars taken from the government through taxes, paid for by everybody or maybe paid for by whites and given to all blacks.

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That's their view.

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The objections to this, and there are many objections to this because this is not exactly two teeth for a tooth, this is not exactly reparations,

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The objections come from conservatives, who you think are sort of upholding private property rights.

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People like David Horowitz, Mike Levin, Paul Craig Roberts and Fred Reed.

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Some of these people are contributors to the rockwell.com, so they're not all bad.

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But here I think they're mistaken because what they do is they throw out the baby with the bathwater.

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They say, in effect, just because the leftist black case is wrong, therefore no reparations are justifiable.

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And the third ball player, I guess, is me, because I'm criticizing both of those other two.

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It's interesting, when Murray Rothbard was a student at Columbia, he wasn't sure which school of thought he would adhere to.

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This is before he came in Austrian.

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What he said was, he agrees with each schools of thought criticism of the other school of thought,

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but he doesn't agree with anything positive that any of them said.

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Well, similarly here, I agree with each of the two schools of thought,

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the left liberal black and the right wing or conservative reaction.

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I agree with each of them when they criticize the other,

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but I don't agree with anything that either of them say in the positive case.

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What are the specifics?

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Well, the first objection, here's what Fred Reed says. Let me quote you, Fred Reed.

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On the web, I find that Henry Louis Gates, the guy I mentioned, the chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, is demanding that whites pay reparations to blacks.

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It's because of slavery, see? This guy's a beautiful writer.

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He is joined in this endeavor by a gaggle of other professional blacks. I guess he'll send me a bill, huh?

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I feel like saying, let me get this straight, Hank. I'm slow. Be patient. You want free money because of slavery, right?

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I don't blame you. I'd like some free money, too. Tell you what, I believe in justice.

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I'll give you a million dollars for every slave I own and another million dollars for every year you were a slave.

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Fair enough? But tell me, Hank, how many slaves do you suppose I have?

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In round numbers, I mean, say to the nearest dozen.

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And how long were you a slave?

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Oh, in other words, I owe you reputations for something that I didn't do and didn't happen to you.

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That makes sense, like lug nuts on a birthday cake.

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Now this is a typical conservative reaction and it's funny and it's witty, but it's wrong.

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That is just because Gates is wrong doesn't mean Rita's right, they're both wrong.

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The libertarian theory comes riding to the rescue.

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Here's what Levin says. Levin says, back pay for manumitted slaves is owed only by their former owners,

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not by anyone now living because there are no slaveholders in the United States.

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So in other words, what they're saying is, yes, I stole Matt's pen,

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And if I were around, if we can go back in a time machine to the slave owners, we could get them.

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But since I gave my pen to Dan, Lisa doesn't own the pen. That's just bloody wrong.

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Horowitz has ten critiques of this. I don't know that I'll go through all ten, but I'll give you a flavor of what Horowitz says.

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says first of all blacks enslaved other blacks true right before they got on the

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ships for the middle passage other blacks captured the first blacks or the

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slave blacks and that's a reductio yes it's a good reductio against the Henry

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Lewis Gates and and reynolds robinson's case where all whites are innocent all

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blacks are all blacks are innocent all whites are guilty but it's got nothing

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You don't know whether I or Matt are black or white or green or blue. It's rather thief and non-thief.

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So, if we had God's eye view and we could tell exactly who done what and who is whose heir and who is whose grandson,

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we'd go to some blacks and we'd say you are the great-grandson of a thieving black

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And some of the money that your thieving black grandfather gave you really belonged to the grandson of this victim, black, and you, black, have to give it to you, Mr. Black Person.

204
00:19:51.120 --> 00:20:06.120
So there's nothing racist about this. I'm not talking about race. I'm talking about returning property from grandchildren who never should have got it to grandchildren who should have got it, had justice been done.

205
00:20:06.120 --> 00:20:18.560
Second one, Randall Robinson says, all whites benefited from slavery and blacks were harmed, therefore, all whites should pay and all blacks should be benefited.

206
00:20:18.560 --> 00:20:24.960
Horowitz says, well, the whites didn't benefit and the blacks weren't harmed.

207
00:20:24.960 --> 00:20:27.960
Let's take each one of these separately.

208
00:20:27.960 --> 00:20:31.160
First of all, the whites didn't benefit.

209
00:20:31.160 --> 00:20:32.960
Well, I disagree.

210
00:20:32.960 --> 00:20:36.960
Some whites did benefit, but benefit is not the key.

211
00:20:36.960 --> 00:20:39.860
Just because you benefit doesn't mean you're guilty of something.

212
00:20:39.860 --> 00:20:44.660
You have to initiate violence to be a perpetrator.

213
00:20:44.660 --> 00:20:51.460
For example, the orange grower in Florida benefits when there's a frost in California,

214
00:20:51.460 --> 00:20:57.360
and half the grapefruit crop in California is unusable,

215
00:20:57.360 --> 00:21:01.260
and the grapefruits in Florida rise in price because of less supply.

216
00:21:01.260 --> 00:21:04.260
So they benefit. Does that mean they should go to jail? No.

217
00:21:04.260 --> 00:21:07.260
Just because you benefit from something doesn't mean anything.

218
00:21:10.260 --> 00:21:12.260
How about black incomes?

219
00:21:13.260 --> 00:21:18.260
Isn't it true that black, the children of black slaves are better off here

220
00:21:19.260 --> 00:21:21.260
than they would have been had they stayed in Africa?

221
00:21:22.260 --> 00:21:25.260
If they had stayed in Africa, they might have been killed in some tribal war.

222
00:21:25.260 --> 00:21:27.260
Here they're safer and they're richer.

223
00:21:28.260 --> 00:21:30.260
Blacks in America are richer than blacks in Africa.

224
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Presumably, if there had not been any black slavery, and this isn't exactly politically correct, but what the heck, you know, we're just trying to get to the truth here,

225
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and this is a point that Walter Williams makes, and several other black conservatives, namely that the children of the black slaves are better off here than they would have been there.

226
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The slaves themselves, okay, fair enough, they were worsened, otherwise they would have volunteered to be slaves, I guess.

227
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Suppose a man rapes a woman, and it's later proven that had he not raped her, she would have been hit by a truck and killed.

228
00:22:06.060 --> 00:22:12.660
Did the rape benefit her? Yeah, given that she'd rather be raped than killed.

229
00:22:12.660 --> 00:22:17.220
But does that mean that the rapist is innocent? No.

230
00:22:17.220 --> 00:22:27.820
So, you have to be careful about benefit or harm on the one hand, and on the other hand, invasion, violation of rights.

231
00:22:27.820 --> 00:22:39.780
Okay, now, the conservatives say that there are some reparations that are justified, even Horowitz and Reid and these, Mike Levin and these other people, for example,

232
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Jewish reparations from Germany or Japanese-American reparations, they do justify those, but not blacks, not blacks and whites. Why?

233
00:22:51.880 --> 00:23:07.280
Well, it's hard to see. Maybe the black ones occurred 150 years ago or, yeah, about 150 years ago, whereas these others were World War II stuff, so it's more recent.

234
00:23:07.280 --> 00:23:18.280
But the Japanese and the Jewish things were in the 40s and 50s and surely there are some people who were alive then that are now dead and it's their children that are getting it.

235
00:23:18.280 --> 00:23:22.480
So you're really arguing over one generation versus, say, three or four generations.

236
00:23:22.480 --> 00:23:26.780
I don't see any principled issue here.

237
00:23:26.780 --> 00:23:30.780
I mean, if it was the same people, then I can see a relevant difference.

238
00:23:30.780 --> 00:23:33.580
It's the same person versus his heir.

239
00:23:33.580 --> 00:23:38.860
But even there, I wouldn't accept it, because I think the heirs deserve what their parents would have given them,

240
00:23:38.860 --> 00:23:51.100
especially if they gave them everything else, then they should, they would have, I extrapolate, they would have given them the stolen thing as well.

241
00:23:51.100 --> 00:23:54.860
Another one is that there are lots of rich blacks.

242
00:23:54.860 --> 00:24:01.940
For example, Oprah Winfrey is rich, and therefore to give her reparations is wrong.

243
00:24:01.940 --> 00:24:10.140
But this comes from the conservative side, but this is a wrong argument, this is an unjustified argument,

244
00:24:10.140 --> 00:24:18.740
because justified creditors can be rich, just because you're rich doesn't mean you can't be a creditor, doesn't mean you have to be a debtor.

245
00:24:18.740 --> 00:24:24.340
This is Marxist egalitarianism and it's coming from the conservatives.

246
00:24:24.340 --> 00:24:29.440
Another point, if you give money from all whites to all blacks, there are some whites in this country,

247
00:24:29.440 --> 00:24:35.440
who just came here, you know, a year ago, Maximilian, where are you from? Italy.

248
00:24:35.440 --> 00:24:43.440
Italy, he's from Italy, he's got nothing to do with slavery and now there might be some other guy who just came from Nigeria a month ago

249
00:24:43.440 --> 00:24:50.440
and somehow Maximilian, the Italian, owes the Nigerians money for stuff that occurred 150 years ago

250
00:24:50.440 --> 00:24:54.440
when neither they nor their grandparents had anything to do with it.

251
00:24:54.440 --> 00:25:04.440
This is a valid point that the conservatives make against the liberals.

252
00:25:04.440 --> 00:25:11.040
Okay, another one is, well, we've already had a welfare system, or we have an ongoing welfare system,

253
00:25:11.040 --> 00:25:15.940
and the blacks are overrepresented statistically as welfare recipients.

254
00:25:15.940 --> 00:25:20.240
Therefore, we've already made reparations to blacks.

255
00:25:20.240 --> 00:25:24.880
Well, there are problems here, and this is a Horowitz kind of an argument.

256
00:25:24.880 --> 00:25:28.640
First of all, welfare is not the same as reparations.

257
00:25:28.640 --> 00:25:36.120
Reparations is payment from the heirs of the thief to the heirs of the victim.

258
00:25:36.120 --> 00:25:40.720
Welfare is taking money from everyone and giving it to poor people.

259
00:25:40.720 --> 00:25:48.000
Now, it's possible that some of the money came from the heirs of the perpetrators and went to the heirs of the victim,

260
00:25:48.000 --> 00:25:50.760
but it's not the same thing.

261
00:25:53.220 --> 00:25:56.560
It wasn't from illegitimate owners to legitimate owners

262
00:25:56.560 --> 00:25:58.160
and there were all sorts of strings attached.

263
00:25:58.160 --> 00:26:01.680
So it wasn't really clear that it was reparations in any way.

264
00:26:01.680 --> 00:26:03.820
Now, there are two kinds of welfare.

265
00:26:03.820 --> 00:26:05.660
We talked about international welfare

266
00:26:05.660 --> 00:26:10.180
and I gave you the Peter Bauer thing about the three Ms,

267
00:26:10.180 --> 00:26:12.560
monuments, Mercedes and machine guns.

268
00:26:13.500 --> 00:26:15.440
Let me talk a little bit about welfare now.

269
00:26:15.440 --> 00:26:21.240
And here, I'm getting my stuff from Charles Murray, his book Losing Ground.

270
00:26:21.240 --> 00:26:26.840
Now, I don't know if this is true, the biologist in the room will correct me if I'm wrong,

271
00:26:26.840 --> 00:26:35.040
but my understanding is that if you put a frog in boiling water, it jumps out,

272
00:26:35.040 --> 00:26:38.540
and doesn't do any real harm to the frog.

273
00:26:38.540 --> 00:26:43.340
Whereas if you put a frog in cold water, and you boil it gradually,

274
00:26:43.340 --> 00:26:48.420
Its metabolism is such that it really can't tell the difference between small degrees of temperature,

275
00:26:48.420 --> 00:26:53.620
so it stays in there and it gets boiled alive.

276
00:26:53.620 --> 00:26:59.180
Slavery is like boiling water.

277
00:26:59.180 --> 00:27:04.580
Slavery did not ruin the black family.

278
00:27:04.580 --> 00:27:09.860
The black family was as intact as the white family within a percentage or two points

279
00:27:09.860 --> 00:27:19.260
in 1890, 1900, 1910, in 1870, in 1880, there were ads in the papers, Emily Lou looking for Joe,

280
00:27:19.260 --> 00:27:25.360
I was on this plantation, where are you? And vice versa, the families were trying to get back together.

281
00:27:25.360 --> 00:27:33.560
Slavery did not ruin the black family. The black family was a going concern up until about 1970,

282
00:27:33.560 --> 00:27:44.120
when welfare got going, because welfare is like boiling the frog slowly, it's much more insidious.

283
00:27:44.120 --> 00:27:51.640
Now the family is very important, an intact family is very important, most of the indices of disarray,

284
00:27:51.640 --> 00:28:00.760
unemployment, drug use, illegitimacy, being in jail, are highly correlated with lack of a family.

285
00:28:00.760 --> 00:28:08.200
One of the reasons that blacks are in such trouble now is there's no male adult in the family, or very, very few.

286
00:28:08.200 --> 00:28:15.520
And as a result, the society resembles what a 17-year-old boy would like.

287
00:28:15.520 --> 00:28:24.120
There was a movie that resembled what society would be like if the 10- and 12-year-old boys were ruling things.

288
00:28:24.120 --> 00:28:25.560
What was that movie?

289
00:28:25.560 --> 00:28:30.960
Lord of the Flies. Lord of the Flies depicted a society run by 12-year-old boys.

290
00:28:30.960 --> 00:28:38.720
The black family or the black community almost looks like a family run by 18-year-old boys or 16-year-old boys.

291
00:28:38.720 --> 00:28:42.320
Pretty gruesome in a slightly different way.

292
00:28:42.320 --> 00:28:45.400
They're pretty gruesome no matter what.

293
00:28:45.400 --> 00:28:51.000
Whereas when there are intact black families with a father present, the kids don't become unemployed,

294
00:28:51.000 --> 00:28:53.920
they don't go to jail, they don't get into drugs, they don't get into prostitution,

295
00:28:53.920 --> 00:28:56.120
Now, don't get into this, that or the other.

296
00:28:56.120 --> 00:28:57.620
Welfare was very insidious.

297
00:28:57.620 --> 00:29:06.020
It made the pregnant black girl an offer that the boy who impregnated her couldn't come within a million miles of matching.

298
00:29:06.020 --> 00:29:13.620
It gave her a lot of money, it gave her an apartment, it gave her medical service, it gave her baby services, all sorts of things.

299
00:29:13.620 --> 00:29:16.820
And what it did is it split up the black family.

300
00:29:16.820 --> 00:29:25.420
So, to say that welfare was a form of reparations is a horror on several different dimensions.

301
00:29:25.420 --> 00:29:32.620
It wasn't. It was a bad thing. If you want to ruin people, give them welfare.

302
00:29:32.620 --> 00:29:37.220
Don't tell me that welfare is a reparation.

303
00:29:37.220 --> 00:29:43.420
Okay, another one is, another reason why we don't have to give blacks any blacks reparation,

304
00:29:43.420 --> 00:29:53.020
Even the children of blacks who were slaved and even from the children or the grandchildren of whites who were slave owners.

305
00:29:53.020 --> 00:30:04.540
Another reason is that, well, we had a civil war, which is the war of northern aggression, and it was over slavery and whites fought to free blacks.

306
00:30:04.540 --> 00:30:08.580
Now, if this were true, there'd be some sort of coherence to it.

307
00:30:08.580 --> 00:30:12.180
I mean, a lot of whites lost their lives on both sides.

308
00:30:12.180 --> 00:30:14.040
So you could have some sort of case.

309
00:30:14.040 --> 00:30:16.900
I wouldn't agree with it, but at least there'd be some case.

310
00:30:16.900 --> 00:30:21.700
However, the research of Tom DiLorenzo and Tom Woods

311
00:30:21.700 --> 00:30:26.700
shows that the war that started in 1861 was not over slavery.

312
00:30:28.040 --> 00:30:30.240
Lincoln favored slavery.

313
00:30:30.240 --> 00:30:31.980
He wanted to preserve the Union.

314
00:30:31.980 --> 00:30:35.040
He said, if I can preserve the Union by keeping slavery,

315
00:30:35.040 --> 00:30:36.040
I'll preserve the Union.

316
00:30:36.040 --> 00:30:38.420
If I can preserve the Union by getting rid of slavery,

317
00:30:38.420 --> 00:30:43.620
I'll do that. I don't care about slavery. I just want to preserve the Union.

318
00:30:43.620 --> 00:30:46.220
So the fight was over preserving the Union.

319
00:30:46.220 --> 00:30:52.220
And the main problem or the main dispute between the Northern and the Southern colonies

320
00:30:52.220 --> 00:30:56.220
was not over slavery. They had all sorts of compromises worked out.

321
00:30:56.220 --> 00:31:01.420
The big fight was, you know, should Kansas be slaved and the deal was to make sure

322
00:31:01.420 --> 00:31:07.520
that the voting power was equal. The big fight was over the tariff.

323
00:31:07.520 --> 00:31:17.960
The Tariff of Abominations, where the North insisted that the South buy stuff from New England instead of England, even though it was twice as expensive.

324
00:31:17.960 --> 00:31:30.480
Okay, so this is unjustified racism. All whites are alike, just because some whites, northern soldiers, help black grandfathers doesn't mean that other whites,

325
00:31:30.480 --> 00:31:36.800
the grandsons of the plantation owners, don't owe money. They still owe money.

326
00:31:36.800 --> 00:31:48.000
Okay, talking about racism, Walter Williams tells the story of going into a room and seeing a tiger on a couch,

327
00:31:48.000 --> 00:31:51.160
and he now has two courses of action.

328
00:31:51.160 --> 00:32:00.720
One, he can be a racist or a tigerist and go by past experiences with tigers and get the hell out of there.

329
00:32:00.720 --> 00:32:06.000
or he can be open and not be based on empirical evidence

330
00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:11.240
and march up to the tiger and, you know, offer to shake hands and see if it's a friendly tiger

331
00:32:11.240 --> 00:32:13.760
and what he says is, you know, this is lunacy

332
00:32:13.760 --> 00:32:20.000
and what racism is, is just induction from past experiences

333
00:32:20.000 --> 00:32:23.000
nothing wrong with that sort of racism

334
00:32:23.000 --> 00:32:26.960
wrong to lynch people who are innocent but not wrong to

335
00:32:26.960 --> 00:32:38.720
Walk on certain streets that are safer than others, and if there are certain ethnic groups that are in the unsafe streets, it's not just a coincidence.

336
00:32:38.720 --> 00:32:47.160
Okay, here is Paul Craig Roberts, and here is a quote from him.

337
00:32:47.160 --> 00:32:51.480
Consider how nonsensical is the reparations argument.

338
00:32:51.480 --> 00:32:56.760
Whites, none of whom were slave owners, would be making transfer payments to blacks,

339
00:32:56.760 --> 00:33:02.000
none of whom were slaves, very similar to the Fred Reed point.

340
00:33:02.000 --> 00:33:06.920
Not even a sins of the fathers rationale justifies race reparations.

341
00:33:06.920 --> 00:33:13.160
A majority of white Americans are descendants of people who immigrated to these shores after slavery had come to an end.

342
00:33:13.160 --> 00:33:18.520
Similarly, many blacks are descendants of people who arrived in the United States in the post-slavery era.

343
00:33:18.520 --> 00:33:21.480
This is that case of Italy and Nigeria.

344
00:33:21.480 --> 00:33:26.120
Indeed, the millions of preferred minorities who have arrived in the last three decades

345
00:33:26.120 --> 00:33:28.800
are legally privileged compared to native-born whites.

346
00:33:28.800 --> 00:33:32.080
Well, that's true with affirmative action.

347
00:33:32.080 --> 00:33:38.000
To find descendants of slave owners and descendants of slaves would require more extensive racial genealogies

348
00:33:38.000 --> 00:33:43.440
and Nazi Germany and South Africa were able to assemble for their race-based policies.

349
00:33:43.440 --> 00:33:47.040
And how would we classify people with ancestors in both camps?

350
00:33:47.040 --> 00:33:48.880
Would they pay reparations themselves?

351
00:33:48.880 --> 00:33:53.840
Would black descendants of black slave owners pay reparations? End quote.

352
00:33:53.840 --> 00:34:01.680
So you get the same sort of, what I would regard as, how shall I say it and be nice,

353
00:34:01.680 --> 00:34:07.360
superficially sensible criticisms but really don't match up to the libertarian insight?

354
00:34:07.360 --> 00:34:14.360
Because we're not talking about all whites and all blacks, we're talking about me and Matt, whatever color we are is irrelevant,

355
00:34:14.360 --> 00:34:21.360
and our two grandchildren, or granddaughter and grandson in this case, it's got nothing to do with race,

356
00:34:21.360 --> 00:34:29.360
it's just got to do with return of stolen property.

357
00:34:29.360 --> 00:34:36.360
I once got into a debate with Milton Friedman at some conference

358
00:34:36.360 --> 00:34:43.920
And Milton Friedman, and I was giving him this idea, and he said,

359
00:34:43.920 --> 00:34:53.080
Look, Block, putting me in my place. Land only counts about 10% of the GDP.

360
00:34:54.840 --> 00:34:58.960
And I think at this time, we weren't talking about blacks and talking about Indians, but it doesn't matter.

361
00:34:59.520 --> 00:35:03.200
They'd be much better off if they insisted that we get a free enterprise system.

362
00:35:03.200 --> 00:35:09.280
They'd get much more out of free enterprise than they would out of reparations.

363
00:35:09.280 --> 00:35:12.480
I said, you know, is it empirical statement? You're probably right.

364
00:35:12.480 --> 00:35:17.840
The land is not that important. It's going to cost a lot of money to figure out who gets what.

365
00:35:17.840 --> 00:35:21.920
If they just had free enterprise, they'd make out much better.

366
00:35:21.920 --> 00:35:28.320
I agree. However, but isn't it just that they also get what is owed?

367
00:35:28.320 --> 00:35:33.720
And he looked at me and he repeated the whole thing again, as if I didn't understand.

368
00:35:33.720 --> 00:35:37.520
Because for him, the word justice doesn't mean anything.

369
00:35:37.520 --> 00:35:39.080
There's only GDP.

370
00:35:39.080 --> 00:35:42.560
And he just proved that GDP will be higher if they do this than that.

371
00:35:42.560 --> 00:35:45.360
So what am I talking about this for?

372
00:35:45.360 --> 00:35:51.520
But we who can see out of both eyes, out of an empirical eye and out of a just eye

373
00:35:51.520 --> 00:35:57.880
or out of a normative and a positive eye can see that even though he's right, we're not wrong.

374
00:35:57.880 --> 00:36:02.880
We're both right. He sort of thought that because he was right, I was wrong.

375
00:36:02.880 --> 00:36:06.320
It doesn't follow. Yes, he was right.

376
00:36:06.320 --> 00:36:10.560
The welfare of the, the true welfare of these people would be better if they just

377
00:36:10.560 --> 00:36:14.120
forgot about the reparations and just worked for a free society.

378
00:36:14.120 --> 00:36:17.960
If they had a free society, they'd do very well.

379
00:36:17.960 --> 00:36:21.840
But, as a matter of justice, they are entitled to

380
00:36:21.840 --> 00:36:25.000
land that was stolen from their grandparents because their grandparents

381
00:36:25.000 --> 00:36:33.000
They just worked on the land, they homesteaded the land, in effect, and they weren't able to give it to their grandchildren.

382
00:36:33.000 --> 00:36:39.000
Now, this sounds very radical, but it's not, in the case of black slavery.

383
00:36:39.000 --> 00:36:44.000
Because you just don't go to any plantation in Alabama or South Carolina and say,

384
00:36:44.000 --> 00:36:49.000
Hey you, get out. And you don't go to any guy in Harlem or Atlanta and say,

385
00:36:49.000 --> 00:36:52.500
Okay, have we got a plantation for you.

386
00:36:52.500 --> 00:36:54.800
There's a burden of proof.

387
00:36:54.800 --> 00:36:59.800
And the more years that go by, the harder it is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

388
00:36:59.800 --> 00:37:02.100
And I'm not going to get into what the proof would constitute,

389
00:37:02.100 --> 00:37:05.500
because that's a question for lawyers and judges beyond my ability,

390
00:37:05.500 --> 00:37:07.200
but I'm giving a principle.

391
00:37:07.200 --> 00:37:09.800
If they can prove that there's stuff in the Bible and says,

392
00:37:09.800 --> 00:37:12.500
yes, he was on that plantation,

393
00:37:12.500 --> 00:37:18.500
and if there were 500 people on the plantation, he only gets one 500th of it.

394
00:37:18.500 --> 00:37:24.500
doesn't get the whole thing, so we're not really, we're not really being very

395
00:37:24.500 --> 00:37:29.780
radical in practice, not much would change and even less so for the Indians

396
00:37:29.780 --> 00:37:33.780
because at least for the black slaves there was written language, the white

397
00:37:33.780 --> 00:37:37.340
slave masters had some sort of records, these records might be found in some

398
00:37:37.340 --> 00:37:41.900
courthouses or in some library somewhere, in the case of the Indians there was no

399
00:37:41.900 --> 00:37:47.180
language, it's even further back, in the case of the Jews and the Palestinians

400
00:37:47.180 --> 00:37:55.120
Plantations only God himself could sort it out, so we go back to the burden of proof

401
00:37:55.120 --> 00:37:59.940
is on he who would overturn property rights and the accident owner is presumed to be the

402
00:37:59.940 --> 00:38:04.660
rightful owner unless there's some change.

403
00:38:04.660 --> 00:38:08.460
Let's take another complication.

404
00:38:08.460 --> 00:38:16.980
Suppose what happened is that the plantation was sold to someone else.

405
00:38:16.980 --> 00:38:42.580
So we have A is the rightful owner of the property, B is the thief, and what B does is he sells it to C.

406
00:38:42.580 --> 00:38:56.340
C is the innocent buyer, and now we, the forces of law and order and justice, come along and say,

407
00:38:56.340 --> 00:39:07.460
the grandchild here, the grandkid, is the rightful owner, so you, innocent buyer or grandchildren of the innocent buyer,

408
00:39:07.460 --> 00:39:10.580
have to give this property back to the grandchild

409
00:39:10.580 --> 00:39:17.380
because we know that we now have proof.

410
00:39:17.380 --> 00:39:19.700
We've matched the burden of proof.

411
00:39:19.700 --> 00:39:23.060
Should we take it away from C?

412
00:39:23.060 --> 00:39:24.820
Yes.

413
00:39:24.820 --> 00:39:29.860
The property goes back to the rightful owner, the rightful or his heirs.

414
00:39:29.860 --> 00:39:31.740
C was victimized by B.

415
00:39:31.740 --> 00:39:35.220
C should go out and find B and get it out of him.

416
00:39:35.220 --> 00:39:40.180
Two Teeth and All and Torture and Scaring and Whatever

417
00:39:40.180 --> 00:39:43.740
And while I'm talking about that, you know, now

418
00:39:43.740 --> 00:39:48.980
if I steal someone's TV and I get caught, what happens is I go to a comfortable jail

419
00:39:48.980 --> 00:39:53.020
with air conditioning and a color TV

420
00:39:53.020 --> 00:39:56.180
and a weight room and psychological counseling

421
00:39:56.180 --> 00:40:02.220
and who pays for this? Among others, the victim that I stole from

422
00:40:02.220 --> 00:40:09.760
Where's the justice there? Surely the libertarian punishment theory would be that what I'm going to do is work off my debt.

423
00:40:09.760 --> 00:40:16.860
Debtors' prison. I am now owed a debt, two TVs or whatever it is, two cars or a million dollars or whatever I owe.

424
00:40:16.860 --> 00:40:25.260
And I go to a place where I work 16 hours a day, think slavery, and I get whipped if I don't work.

425
00:40:25.260 --> 00:40:28.620
And there's no air conditioning, no color TV and no psychological counseling.

426
00:40:28.620 --> 00:40:37.620
The psychological counseling goes to the victim, not to the perpetrator, and what the perpetrator does is work off his debt until it's paid.

427
00:40:37.620 --> 00:40:44.620
Now you might think that a rich guy, Bill Gates, could go out and commit all sorts of crimes, and if he gets caught, well, so he pays two teeth and big deal.

428
00:40:44.620 --> 00:40:53.620
But if he has to play Russian roulette, he can then say to the victim, hey look, you know, I don't really want to play Russian roulette,

429
00:40:53.620 --> 00:40:56.620
How about if I give you a million dollars and you let me out of it?

430
00:40:56.620 --> 00:41:11.620
So you get compensation that way and you're not subject to the objection that rich guys will be able to get away with crimes or get away with murder or whatever.

431
00:41:11.620 --> 00:41:22.620
Okay. I've now discussed libertarian punishment theory. I've applied it to reparations.

432
00:41:22.620 --> 00:41:34.320
I want to end with yet another thought completely divorced and that is to ask why is it that we have such an uphill battle?

433
00:41:34.320 --> 00:41:41.020
Not so much in convincing people of reparations or abortion versus eviction or any of those tough ones.

434
00:41:41.020 --> 00:41:46.920
And you can see why we have trouble with that. We're not even convinced here. Those are toughies.

435
00:41:46.920 --> 00:41:57.920
But why do we have such trouble with things that are much more simple, like the minimum wage, or free trade, or rent control, or unions, or, you know, the stuff that's in the Hazlitt book?

436
00:41:57.920 --> 00:42:13.920
Why is it that every time I get a new freshman class, they come in with the most idiotic views, deeply embedded in them, and they're ready to fight to the death to keep them, and I have to struggle to overcome them?

437
00:42:13.920 --> 00:42:20.920
Why is that? Why is it that people vote for minimum wage by two to one or three to one?

438
00:42:20.920 --> 00:42:29.920
Why do we have the politicians we have where, you know, all they do is promise to promote socialism or fascism and yet people go, yeah, yeah?

439
00:42:29.920 --> 00:42:41.920
Why is that? Well, there are probably many reasons, but one of them that I think is undercredited is a thing called sociobiology,

440
00:42:41.920 --> 00:42:48.920
sometimes called evolutionary psychology.

441
00:42:49.320 --> 00:42:53.280
And what sociobiology is, is a theory that says we are the way we are

442
00:42:53.280 --> 00:42:56.480
now because of what it meant to survive

443
00:42:56.480 --> 00:43:01.880
a million years ago. And what you do is you picture two tribes, one

444
00:43:01.880 --> 00:43:05.320
with a certain characteristic, one with another characteristic,

445
00:43:05.320 --> 00:43:09.440
and if the attribute of the characteristic

446
00:43:09.440 --> 00:43:14.240
leads to survival, that's the way we are, because we are the children of survivors.

447
00:43:14.240 --> 00:43:24.240
So for example, we are the species that, when a baby smiles, we're very happy.

448
00:43:24.240 --> 00:43:27.340
When a baby cries, we rush to the aid of the baby.

449
00:43:27.340 --> 00:43:31.540
Suppose there were two humanoid groups a million years ago.

450
00:43:31.540 --> 00:43:37.240
One exactly alike in every other way, except one of them, our grandparents,

451
00:43:37.240 --> 00:43:40.240
When a baby's small, we're happy. When it cries, we rush to their aid.

452
00:43:40.240 --> 00:43:42.240
And the other didn't really give a rat...

453
00:43:42.240 --> 00:43:46.240
Didn't really care about babies.

454
00:43:46.240 --> 00:43:49.240
Well, which group is going to survive?

455
00:43:49.240 --> 00:43:52.240
I mean, they had opposable thumbs, we had opposable thumbs.

456
00:43:52.240 --> 00:43:54.240
Their brains were as big as our brains.

457
00:43:54.240 --> 00:43:57.240
Every other way, their physical ability to fight tigers was the same.

458
00:43:57.240 --> 00:44:01.240
But they had this one difference in characteristic.

459
00:44:01.240 --> 00:44:04.240
It's easy to see that they would not long survive.

460
00:44:04.240 --> 00:44:06.240
Because if you don't take care of babies,

461
00:44:06.240 --> 00:44:12.240
We Plunish Yourselves and You Die Off. That's an easy one.

462
00:44:12.240 --> 00:44:19.740
Take another one. The business of sexism and why is it?

463
00:44:19.740 --> 00:44:23.040
I have a boy and a girl. They're now 27 and 25.

464
00:44:23.040 --> 00:44:29.740
But when they were young, two and four, the little girl would play with dolls

465
00:44:29.740 --> 00:44:32.240
and her and her friends, you'd hardly know what they were there

466
00:44:32.240 --> 00:44:36.240
and they would switch, you know, dresses on the dolls or something

467
00:44:36.240 --> 00:44:39.840
and the boys were racing around killing each other.

468
00:44:39.840 --> 00:44:42.840
They were much more aggressive.

469
00:44:42.840 --> 00:44:50.540
Sometimes we would try to reverse toys and give the boy a doll

470
00:44:50.540 --> 00:44:52.840
and what he would do is take the doll and make into it a gun

471
00:44:52.840 --> 00:44:55.540
and they would shoot the other boys with the doll

472
00:44:55.540 --> 00:45:00.140
and you give a girl a truck and, you know, start decorating the truck.

473
00:45:00.140 --> 00:45:10.340
Why is this? Is it culture? I don't think so. My wife was not into sexism, you know, and this is before they really got into TV.

474
00:45:10.340 --> 00:45:14.540
It's not culture. Even the children of the feminist women are like that.

475
00:45:14.540 --> 00:45:18.740
Well, why? Why are boys much more aggressive than girls?

476
00:45:18.740 --> 00:45:25.840
Well, it's got to do with sociobiology, or at least sociobiology offers one explanation as to why this could be true.

477
00:45:25.840 --> 00:45:30.540
Take, again, let's go back a million years now, there were two societies just like ours,

478
00:45:30.540 --> 00:45:35.840
equal ability, brains, brawn, opposable thumbs, whatever.

479
00:45:35.840 --> 00:45:40.340
Only in one of them, they're the Amazon society.

480
00:45:40.340 --> 00:45:46.840
They're the women or, you know, macho and they go out and fight the tigers and they go hunting

481
00:45:46.840 --> 00:45:55.040
and the men stay in the back of the cave with the babies and they bury pick and they live more safe lives.

482
00:45:55.040 --> 00:46:00.640
Now, let me clue you in on the economics of sex.

483
00:46:00.640 --> 00:46:08.340
Why is it that the farmer keeps one bull and 50 cows, and not 50 bulls and one cow?

484
00:46:08.340 --> 00:46:11.640
I'll tell you, since you ask.

485
00:46:11.640 --> 00:46:15.040
The reason is bulls are superfluous.

486
00:46:15.040 --> 00:46:18.740
One bull can do all the business that's necessary.

487
00:46:18.740 --> 00:46:23.640
Maybe you need two for 50 cows, I'm a little weak on bull theory, but...

488
00:46:23.640 --> 00:46:26.640
You don't need as many bulls as you need cows.

489
00:46:26.640 --> 00:46:29.640
Females are the limitation on population.

490
00:46:29.640 --> 00:46:33.640
Females are important.

491
00:46:33.640 --> 00:46:37.640
Males are drones. Males are cannon fodder.

492
00:46:37.640 --> 00:46:43.640
If you're a central planner, you send the men out to fight the tigers and go hunting, which is a very dangerous thing.

493
00:46:43.640 --> 00:46:49.640
You don't send a precious woman out there, because every woman you send out is one less baby-maker.

494
00:46:49.640 --> 00:46:56.640
And you need each and every one of them to survive. Remember what sociobiology is. The theory is who survives.

495
00:46:56.640 --> 00:47:06.640
Let me give you another instance. Germany and Russia fought a ferocious battle in World War II. They beat the crap out of each other.

496
00:47:06.640 --> 00:47:16.640
At the end of the war, there were hardly any men from age, what, 18 to 50 who were all there.

497
00:47:16.640 --> 00:47:22.640
And yet, the next generation of Germans and Russians, it's as if those guys were never missing.

498
00:47:22.640 --> 00:47:28.640
Evidently, all the women that wanted to become impregnated could find someone, and men are willing to share their sperm.

499
00:47:28.640 --> 00:47:32.640
And the two countries went on.

500
00:47:32.640 --> 00:47:36.640
But suppose the war were fought between German women and Russian women.

501
00:47:36.640 --> 00:47:40.640
And at the end of the war, there were no Russian women hardly, and no German women hardly.

502
00:47:40.640 --> 00:47:42.640
There were plenty of men around.

503
00:47:42.640 --> 00:47:48.640
If you think about the survival of these two countries, they'd be gone.

504
00:47:48.640 --> 00:47:57.640
So, if there were ever a feminist or a society similar to us where the women were the Amazons

505
00:47:57.640 --> 00:48:00.640
and they went out and fought, they'd be long gone.

506
00:48:00.640 --> 00:48:07.640
They couldn't survive, they couldn't compete with us, even though in every other way they were equivalent to us.

507
00:48:07.640 --> 00:48:17.640
Okay, so that's what sociobiology is, it's a theory that says the reason we are the way we are is because of what it meant to survive millions of years ago.

508
00:48:17.640 --> 00:48:34.640
Okay, well how did we live millions of years ago? We lived in groups of 20, 30, 40, 50, not much more, not 5,000, maybe 200, I don't know, I wasn't there and I'm not into this stuff, but small groups.

509
00:48:34.640 --> 00:48:40.640
And in a small group, if you live in an isolated small group for your whole life, you get to know everyone intimately.

510
00:48:40.640 --> 00:48:45.640
They're your cousins, they're your uncles, they're your mother, your father, your children.

511
00:48:45.640 --> 00:48:53.640
Every once in a while there's a stranger from another tribe, but he's been there 10 years, so you get to know him too.

512
00:48:53.640 --> 00:48:58.640
Now let's talk about price gouging when the Florida hurricane hits,

513
00:48:58.640 --> 00:49:09.640
And the market raises prices on things like milk and water and orange juice and flashlights, batteries and candles, and people are outraged.

514
00:49:09.640 --> 00:49:15.640
And when the governor says we're going to throw people in jail who price gouge, everyone says, yay, you know, let's throw them in jail.

515
00:49:15.640 --> 00:49:23.640
Because, sociobiologically, we're used to groups of 25, and in a group of 25, when Matt is having a rough time,

516
00:49:23.640 --> 00:49:31.640
At the same time, Maximilian doesn't raise the price on the ratio of trade. He helps him. He's his cousin or his brother.

517
00:49:31.640 --> 00:49:39.640
So we're hardwired for thinking in terms of groups of 50 people.

518
00:49:39.640 --> 00:49:45.640
And if we had a society of 50 people and there was a hurricane in Florida,

519
00:49:45.640 --> 00:49:51.640
the people in Texas and North Carolina would bring stuff down there out of benevolence because they're their cousins.

520
00:49:51.640 --> 00:50:04.640
The problem is that we now live in a society of 300 million or 6 billion, and we're hardwired for groups of 25, and the only thing that'll save us is the market, but the market isn't in our gut.

521
00:50:04.640 --> 00:50:20.640
We're not hardwired for the market. Adam Smith just came along in 1776, and okay, there were a few precursors to him, you know, maybe another 50 years, 100 years before, but it's not in our reptilian part of our brain yet.

522
00:50:20.640 --> 00:50:28.640
So we have a hard slog, not just to convince people of the finer points of advanced libertarian theory,

523
00:50:28.640 --> 00:50:32.640
but just the most basic things, property rights and prices and profits.

524
00:50:32.640 --> 00:50:36.640
What? You're making a profit off of me? You dirty rat, yeah?

525
00:50:36.640 --> 00:50:39.640
That's the way we're hard-wired.

526
00:50:39.640 --> 00:50:48.640
Now one counterexample to what I'm saying is, well, how do I account for the U.S. from 1789 to, I don't know,

527
00:50:48.640 --> 00:50:54.640
Forgetting about slavery until World War I, when we're a pretty free society.

528
00:50:54.640 --> 00:51:00.640
The way I account for that, remember we're not talking praxeology here, we're talking an empirical theory.

529
00:51:00.640 --> 00:51:04.640
The way I account for that is I ignore it. It's an aberration.

530
00:51:04.640 --> 00:51:10.640
Looking over the past history for the last 10, 20,000 years of all the people on the earth,

531
00:51:10.640 --> 00:51:15.640
there was just a little teeny bit of a couple of years in England and a couple of years in the United States

532
00:51:15.640 --> 00:51:21.440
in the United States, where people acted in a market-oriented economic freedom way.

533
00:51:21.440 --> 00:51:27.840
But for the rest of the time, in the rest of the world, this is just a little drop in the bucket.

534
00:51:27.840 --> 00:51:41.140
So as empirical scientists, we ignore it, and we rely on a theory that explains 98% of human activity or 99.9% of human activity.

535
00:51:41.140 --> 00:51:43.740
I've got some great jokes for you.

536
00:51:43.740 --> 00:51:48.740
First of all, the one by Maximilian and Rosemaria.

537
00:51:48.740 --> 00:51:50.940
They made me handsomer than I really am.

538
00:51:50.940 --> 00:52:06.940
Here's a joke.

539
00:52:06.940 --> 00:52:12.260
A little boy wanted $100 so badly that he prayed for two weeks.

540
00:52:12.260 --> 00:52:15.820
He prayed and he prayed and he prayed, but nothing happened.

541
00:52:15.820 --> 00:52:20.720
So he decided to write God a letter asking for the money.

542
00:52:20.720 --> 00:52:25.900
When the postal authorities received the letter addressed to God, USA,

543
00:52:25.900 --> 00:52:31.180
they decided to send it to President Bush.

544
00:52:31.180 --> 00:52:34.420
George was so impressed, touched, and amused

545
00:52:34.420 --> 00:52:38.460
that he instructed his secretary to send the boy a $5 bill.

546
00:52:39.380 --> 00:52:41.940
The little boy was delighted with the $5

547
00:52:41.940 --> 00:52:44.300
and sat down to write a thank you note to God,

548
00:52:44.300 --> 00:52:46.420
which read, dear God,

549
00:52:46.420 --> 00:52:48.180
thank you very much for sending me the money.

550
00:52:48.180 --> 00:52:50.780
However, I noticed that for some reason

551
00:52:50.780 --> 00:52:52.620
you sent it through Washington, D.C.

552
00:52:52.620 --> 00:52:56.860
And as usual, those blankety blanks deducted $95.

553
00:52:56.860 --> 00:53:01.860
I'm going to treasure this.

554
00:53:04.420 --> 00:53:14.420
Okay, we now have time for questions and I'd be delighted, Prem.

555
00:53:14.420 --> 00:53:22.420
So this has to do with reparations. I come up with three scenarios and then I want you to help me figure out what to do with them.

556
00:53:22.420 --> 00:53:32.420
The assumption is that A dies after doing something to B and leaves everything to little a and that little a doesn't know anything about big A's evils.

557
00:53:32.420 --> 00:53:44.420
Scenario 1. A steals property X from B. A's child, little A, used X to make money and no longer has X, so he traded it, sold it, did something with the property.

558
00:53:45.420 --> 00:53:46.420
Scenario 2.

559
00:53:51.420 --> 00:53:56.420
Okay, so B's kid comes and says to A's kid,

560
00:53:56.420 --> 00:54:09.420
Give me the stuff that you had, it didn't belong to you in justice, and A's kid said I'd like to, but I've already forded it away.

561
00:54:09.420 --> 00:54:17.420
Well, it seems to me that he owes it to him.

562
00:54:17.420 --> 00:54:25.420
He had stuff that was improperly his, stolen property, and he just threw it away.

563
00:54:25.420 --> 00:54:33.420
I think we should be gentle with him. We shouldn't say, okay, you're paying right now, otherwise you're going to jail.

564
00:54:33.420 --> 00:54:39.420
But we should maybe garnish his salary, or say over the next ten years you've got to pay a little bit of a ton,

565
00:54:39.420 --> 00:54:51.420
because your dad never should have left that to you. He did. You spent it or gave it away in charity or something, but you were giving my money away in charity and I want it back.

566
00:54:51.420 --> 00:55:02.420
You're totally innocent, but on the other hand, my money is gone thanks to you. Second case.

567
00:55:02.420 --> 00:55:12.420
Alright, this is a little harder. A steals property X from B, and this scenario, I guess an example could be an organ, and uses the organ on little a so that little a can survive.

568
00:55:12.420 --> 00:55:18.420
An organ like a kidney? Not an organ that you're playing with.

569
00:55:18.420 --> 00:55:47.420
Well, I guess it's the same thing. That kidney or heart or lung or whatever it is that was stolen belongs to the heir of the victim,

570
00:55:47.420 --> 00:55:57.420
Not to the heir of the thief, and the heir of the thief has to die, assuming that he can't do without it, or be put on a kidney dialysis machine, or whatever.

571
00:55:57.420 --> 00:56:06.420
There's only one heart, there are two kids that need it. One's got it, but he's the child of the thief.

572
00:56:06.420 --> 00:56:14.420
The other one needs it, and he's the child of the victim. Seems to me clear that that organ has got to go to the other kid.

573
00:56:14.420 --> 00:56:19.420
Must be catching. You're sitting next to Carrie Anne, I noticed. What's the third one?

574
00:56:19.420 --> 00:56:40.420
Alright, A kills B, little a exists, little b exists, but big A dies. Does little a inherit little, inherit little b's, like, some sort of right to kill little a, since big A had no justice?

575
00:56:40.420 --> 00:56:44.420
No, that would be visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons.

576
00:56:44.420 --> 00:56:47.060
The son is totally innocent.

577
00:56:47.060 --> 00:56:50.060
The only thing the son of the bad guy has to do

578
00:56:50.060 --> 00:56:53.380
is give up property he was given improperly.

579
00:56:53.380 --> 00:56:55.020
But he doesn't have to die.

580
00:56:55.020 --> 00:56:56.980
He is innocent.

581
00:56:56.980 --> 00:56:59.740
It's just that he's holding on to an organ

582
00:56:59.740 --> 00:57:02.060
or to a pen that he shouldn't have gotten.

583
00:57:02.060 --> 00:57:05.220
But his life, he never killed anyone.

584
00:57:05.220 --> 00:57:06.060
So he's okay.

585
00:57:06.060 --> 00:57:12.060
Thanks. Very good, thoughtful questions. Yeah?

586
00:57:12.060 --> 00:57:19.060
Regarding sociobiology, what you specifically applied to, I think, is pretty much correct.

587
00:57:19.060 --> 00:57:26.060
But the thing is, is that sociobiology really has one critical assumption that I think is obviously false.

588
00:57:26.060 --> 00:57:30.060
It basically assumes that all traits were at one time adaptive.

589
00:57:30.060 --> 00:57:31.060
,"

590
00:57:31.060 --> 00:57:36.840
whereas you actually only have to be marginally more adaptive than the other thing that you

591
00:57:36.840 --> 00:57:37.840
meet.

592
00:57:37.840 --> 00:57:41.180
And so you know it doesn't actually, you don't have to be the most adaptive thing, you just

593
00:57:41.180 --> 00:57:44.180
have to be a little bit more adaptive than the other guy.

594
00:57:44.180 --> 00:57:48.740
And so I think a lot of times they make, they try to make everything have to be some sort

595
00:57:48.740 --> 00:57:52.500
of adaptation when it's not.

596
00:57:52.500 --> 00:57:58.380
Well I might be guilty of saying it loosely, I'm not a sociobiologist, I'm not a biologist,

597
00:57:58.380 --> 00:58:01.980
I'm just borrowing this I might have said it not precisely I think your way of

598
00:58:01.980 --> 00:58:07.700
saying is better than way I might have said it the tape will tell us I didn't

599
00:58:07.700 --> 00:58:13.980
mean to say that the what do you call the feminists the Amazons were totally

600
00:58:13.980 --> 00:58:18.100
non-adoptive and we were totally adopted just that we were more adoptive than

601
00:58:18.100 --> 00:58:20.380
them

602
00:58:20.380 --> 00:58:48.380
I agree with you. Nowadays, I mean, many years ago, having, say, polio would be maladaptive. Now having polio, you just get the salt vaccine. Many years ago, before penicillin, a lot of people died who now would live. So, the whole adaptiveness has changed.

603
00:58:48.380 --> 00:58:51.100
There are now many people who can live and have children,

604
00:58:51.100 --> 00:58:53.740
living alone is not good enough, you have to have children,

605
00:58:53.740 --> 00:58:58.300
who couldn't before, so what's adaptive now is different than what's then.

606
00:58:58.300 --> 00:59:01.180
But there are things that occurred many years ago,

607
00:59:01.180 --> 00:59:05.260
that we're hardwired for, because through many generations we live that way,

608
00:59:05.260 --> 00:59:10.140
and people who weren't compatible with that didn't leave as many heirs,

609
00:59:10.140 --> 00:59:12.060
not no heirs, but as many heirs.

610
00:59:12.060 --> 00:59:17.580
So I accept your qualification, and if I put it in all-or-none form,

611
00:59:17.580 --> 00:59:24.580
I was wrong, I should have said more or less adaptive, so I accept that point.

612
00:59:24.580 --> 00:59:25.580
Kevin.

613
00:59:25.580 --> 00:59:30.580
I actually want to combine two examples you gave with the lead in my view and a pretty interesting question.

614
00:59:30.580 --> 00:59:33.580
Suppose we have the case of slave reparations.

615
00:59:33.580 --> 00:59:37.580
We've actually found that all of them have gone through.

616
00:59:37.580 --> 00:59:41.580
And the question is, what has to be given back?

617
00:59:41.580 --> 00:59:45.580
Now the difficulty is that some people, when they talk about reparations, say,

618
00:59:45.580 --> 00:59:54.580
All the wealth you have came from this original land. You have benefited at our expense through time.

619
00:59:54.580 --> 01:00:00.580
And so the idea is that they want to take all the interest and all the investments for the results of it and make that go back too.

620
01:00:00.580 --> 01:00:05.580
And I think the way you get around that is the same way you talked about reputations and libel,

621
01:00:05.580 --> 01:00:12.580
which is that the value that it had came because there were attitudes that other people had toward the thing, which was not something they're owed.

622
01:00:12.580 --> 01:00:23.580
So, it seems like when you have something that's stolen, what you owe them is some actual, tangible object, not some kind of subjective value, but the difficult, yeah, so...

623
01:00:23.580 --> 01:00:33.580
I would agree. You owe the plantation. Let's say the plantation only had one slave on it, for simplicity, and it's a 50-acre plantation.

624
01:00:33.580 --> 01:00:39.580
You can't have much more for one person working it, or 100 acres or something. Well, you owe that 100 acres.

625
01:00:39.580 --> 01:00:48.580
On the other hand, if it was a vast plantation and there were 500 slaves and you're the great grandson of just one of them, the most you get is one 500th.

626
01:00:48.580 --> 01:00:56.580
The white grandson keeps 499 out of 500ths of it. So it's not very radical.

627
01:00:56.580 --> 01:01:02.580
And if they sold the plantation and then they became investment bankers, they get nothing?

628
01:01:02.580 --> 01:01:11.580
Oh, no, I think if they sold it, they got money for it.

629
01:01:11.580 --> 01:01:16.580
But do you take the value then? Or do you have the value increased over time?

630
01:01:16.580 --> 01:01:20.580
Well, these are tough questions that we need more research and more papers on.

631
01:01:20.580 --> 01:01:26.580
But a first cut at this would be make believe you didn't sell it and go back.

632
01:01:26.580 --> 01:01:31.580
And what's that 50 acres worth now on the market? And that's it.

633
01:01:31.580 --> 01:01:34.580
That would be my first approximation.

634
01:01:34.580 --> 01:01:36.580
Now, you had a question.

635
01:01:36.580 --> 01:01:40.580
Why are there no black people in this audience?

636
01:01:40.580 --> 01:01:43.580
Why are there no black people in this audience?

637
01:01:43.580 --> 01:01:47.580
Well, before that, why are there so few females?

638
01:01:47.580 --> 01:01:52.580
There are only about five and there are about 30 people in the room, or give or take?

639
01:01:52.580 --> 01:01:55.580
I don't know. I guess males are more interested.

640
01:01:55.580 --> 01:01:59.580
Whenever I go to a libertarian meeting, it's almost as if it's a gay liberation.

641
01:01:59.580 --> 01:02:09.180
guys if you're trying to pick up a girl don't come here girls if you want to

642
01:02:09.180 --> 01:02:15.340
meet some nice guy there are zillions of them around why is this I don't know

643
01:02:15.340 --> 01:02:24.620
it's an interesting question but now to get closer to your question in past years

644
01:02:24.620 --> 01:02:29.460
and I've been coming to these meetings for 20 25 years I think ever since it's

645
01:02:29.460 --> 01:02:34.460
When I first started, I might have missed a year or two, but I've been at virtually every one of them.

646
01:02:34.460 --> 01:02:44.460
And I can certainly say that if blacks are 12% of the population, there have not been anything like 12% of the population of the invitees or the participants.

647
01:02:44.460 --> 01:02:49.460
But there have been some. Every year or so, there are one or two or three blacks.

648
01:02:49.460 --> 01:02:55.460
Maybe not in this small group, but next week during the Mises University, there'll be 120, 130 people.

649
01:02:55.460 --> 01:02:59.740
I'd be surprised if there weren't one or two or three blacks.

650
01:02:59.740 --> 01:03:02.700
Look at how blacks vote.

651
01:03:02.700 --> 01:03:05.340
Most of them don't vote for libertarians.

652
01:03:05.340 --> 01:03:08.020
There are very few blacks in libertarian meetings.

653
01:03:08.020 --> 01:03:12.820
Walter Williams was once offered the presidency of the libertarian party candidate.

654
01:03:12.820 --> 01:03:16.740
He declined to take it, but they would have been very happy to have him.

655
01:03:16.740 --> 01:03:20.420
So I don't think it's certainly not that if a black person applies, the Mises says,

656
01:03:20.420 --> 01:03:24.220
what, a black? No, you can't come. That's silly.

657
01:03:24.220 --> 01:03:29.980
It's very few black people apply for reasons of culture or biology.

658
01:03:29.980 --> 01:03:30.700
I don't know.

659
01:03:33.940 --> 01:03:39.300
I had this black kid, one of my very best students at Loyola.

660
01:03:39.620 --> 01:03:42.540
One of my very, very best students, one of the best students I've ever had.

661
01:03:42.940 --> 01:03:49.860
And I was dying to get him to become a austro-libertarian, if I can conflate normative and positive.

662
01:03:49.860 --> 01:03:54.860
But Wall Street made him a big, big offer and he's off Wall Streeting it up

663
01:03:54.860 --> 01:04:00.860
and I was trying to tell him that Walter Williams gets 20,000 a speech

664
01:04:00.860 --> 01:04:06.860
and I think this kid was of the genre where he could be like that in 10-15 years

665
01:04:06.860 --> 01:04:09.860
but my best efforts failed.

666
01:04:09.860 --> 01:04:13.860
The way I see it, to have a black person here would be great

667
01:04:13.860 --> 01:04:17.860
because there are so few and they can benefit so much from it

668
01:04:17.860 --> 01:04:26.360
And sometimes you need a black spokesman who can say things to a black audience that a white person would find it harder to say or harder to be received.

669
01:04:26.360 --> 01:04:30.060
So all I can say, I mean, I can't speak for the Mises Institute.

670
01:04:30.060 --> 01:04:38.260
I'm just not an employee, but rather a part-time employee, one or two weeks a year or something like that.

671
01:04:38.260 --> 01:04:45.360
But I think I speak for them when I say that they would be deliriously happy to have more black people

672
01:04:45.360 --> 01:04:49.860
and more oriental people, you know, the more the merrier.

673
01:04:49.860 --> 01:04:51.420
We wanna get the message out

674
01:04:51.420 --> 01:04:52.500
and we're certainly not gonna say,

675
01:04:52.500 --> 01:04:55.200
oh no, we're not gonna get the message out to you.

676
01:04:57.420 --> 01:04:58.820
John?

677
01:04:58.820 --> 01:05:02.020
As an aside, when our campaign for governor ran last time,

678
01:05:02.020 --> 01:05:05.180
we had a couple of black candidates that were very good

679
01:05:05.180 --> 01:05:08.380
and then they went out there and slugged it for liberty.

680
01:05:09.700 --> 01:05:11.840
You know, the libertarians were the ones out there

681
01:05:11.840 --> 01:05:41.840
championing and tying this out with reparations over something called the Williams case here in Alabama and basically the State Lands Division just decided to take some land from a black family that could show title back to 1872 and go back and look at the records, they simply were taking it because they could and they were black, they said that they could live on the land but couldn't farm or log on it until they died, well does that sound like swamp land to y'all?

682
01:05:41.840 --> 01:05:57.840
So, the day before the Democratic primary, we made such a stink about it as libertarians that the governor patented the land back to this black family the day before the primary and made a great big ordeal about it.

683
01:05:57.840 --> 01:06:01.840
Well, I promise you, that wasn't going to happen if it wasn't the libertarians that were championing it.

684
01:06:01.840 --> 01:06:14.840
So when we do that, the IJ goes out and does that, you know, finally you've got, you know, blacks and Hispanics and other typically discriminated against groups saying, gee, maybe this liberty thing is the way to go.

685
01:06:14.840 --> 01:06:19.840
Maybe we would be better off, you know, in a world where folks are camping liberty for everybody.

686
01:06:19.840 --> 01:06:27.840
Let me just say that this is John Sophocles and he ran for governor on the Libertarian Party for Alabama the last time out.

687
01:06:27.840 --> 01:06:41.840
Walter Williams and Thomas Soule are not exactly libertarians. They're libertarian on economics and on affirmative action. They're sound as a bell. On foreign policy there are differences.

688
01:06:41.840 --> 01:06:50.840
All I can say is that most of me and my colleagues look up to them very highly on these economic issues and quote them and cite them and support them.

689
01:06:50.840 --> 01:06:53.840
So I hope that answers your question.

690
01:06:53.840 --> 01:07:06.840
I have two questions on your theory of punishment. The first one is why don't you apply it also to accidents as well?

691
01:07:23.840 --> 01:07:39.840
I certainly have to repay one tooth, namely I have to make good all the damage, but we don't punish me, because I'm not a criminal, because I didn't mean to, but I am responsible for the damages caused by the accident.

692
01:07:39.840 --> 01:07:49.840
And if I'm cleaning my gun and I shoot an innocent person, and there is a life transfer machine, I owe a life. I should be more careful when I clean my gun.

693
01:07:49.840 --> 01:07:54.840
When without the life transfer machine, I owe something big.

694
01:07:54.840 --> 01:08:00.840
Maybe I kill a young husband and his wife and three kids. I've got to support that wife and three kids.

695
01:08:00.840 --> 01:08:05.840
It's a serious thing to shoot someone accidentally, but it's not a crime.

696
01:08:05.840 --> 01:08:22.640
Second question. Given your opinion about alienability of self ownership, would you say that a

697
01:08:22.640 --> 01:08:38.640
Could a martyr repay for his crime being given as a slave to the heirs of his victim?

698
01:08:38.640 --> 01:08:49.640
Yeah, given my views on inalienability, would I say that the perpetrator of a crime could be made a slave to the heirs of his victim?

699
01:08:49.640 --> 01:08:52.040
You don't even need my views on inalienability.

700
01:08:52.040 --> 01:08:56.540
You see, the dispute I'm having with people like Rothbard and Kinsella

701
01:08:56.540 --> 01:09:02.140
and other very good libertarians is over me selling myself as a slave.

702
01:09:02.140 --> 01:09:07.340
But if I commit a crime, certainly Kinsella and all of us would say that

703
01:09:07.340 --> 01:09:11.540
if it's a very serious crime, that I should be enslaved until I pay off the debt.

704
01:09:11.540 --> 01:09:15.340
And if it's murder, it might be my whole life as a slave,

705
01:09:15.340 --> 01:09:17.500
as a person in jail working hard

706
01:09:17.500 --> 01:09:21.020
and not getting a color TV and an air conditioner

707
01:09:21.020 --> 01:09:22.100
and stuff like that.

708
01:09:23.180 --> 01:09:24.340
Carrie Ann.

709
01:09:24.340 --> 01:09:26.180
I have a mother-baby question.

710
01:09:26.180 --> 01:09:27.020
Sure.

711
01:09:27.020 --> 01:09:28.740
I guess depending on how you answer the question,

712
01:09:28.740 --> 01:09:30.380
I may have a follow-up question,

713
01:09:30.380 --> 01:09:33.260
but we talked about the other day

714
01:09:33.260 --> 01:09:36.980
about how you think it would be,

715
01:09:36.980 --> 01:09:38.940
if you have a case where the baby's either gonna starve

716
01:09:38.940 --> 01:09:41.340
to death and suffer, or you can kill it immediately,

717
01:09:41.340 --> 01:09:44.140
it would be child abuse to let the baby starve

718
01:09:44.140 --> 01:10:13.140
Let me just say that on the first point about killing the baby painlessly, if the only choice by stipulation is a slow and tortured death or a clean quick death, my rabbi friend, my Hasidic rabbi friend tells me, and I cited in my paper, that part of the Talmud supports this.

719
01:10:13.140 --> 01:10:19.300
not that I argued from authority but just that it's interesting that it has

720
01:10:19.300 --> 01:10:28.980
some support from what might not be considered a libertarian source no I

721
01:10:28.980 --> 01:10:34.020
don't think it's child abuse if no one wants the child there are no positive

722
01:10:34.020 --> 01:10:39.180
obligations to bring up the child the only stipulation is that if you can't

723
01:10:39.180 --> 01:10:42.660
hog the child you can't hide the child you can't force all others from taking

724
01:10:42.660 --> 01:10:47.860
in the Child, but if you announce it, and no one in the whole world wants to take care of this baby,

725
01:10:47.860 --> 01:10:56.860
then the lack of positive obligations in libertarianism kicks in, and it's not a crime for anyone not to take care of this one baby.

726
01:10:56.860 --> 01:11:04.660
I think it would be rare, but if it happened, theoretically, that would be the way I would analyze it.

727
01:11:04.660 --> 01:11:10.360
My follow-up question, I guess I could be missing some link somewhere, but it seems like then it's never child abuse,

728
01:11:10.360 --> 01:11:13.720
and it's never not okay to relinquish your rights

729
01:11:13.720 --> 01:11:15.880
to bring up the child at any...

730
01:11:15.880 --> 01:11:19.280
Well, go ahead, I'm sorry.

731
01:11:19.280 --> 01:11:22.240
I mean by that rationale, I mean, you know,

732
01:11:22.240 --> 01:11:23.880
if you have a bomb that's ready to go off,

733
01:11:23.880 --> 01:11:26.680
can you relinquish your ownership over the bomb

734
01:11:26.680 --> 01:11:27.760
a second before it goes off

735
01:11:27.760 --> 01:11:29.200
and you're not liable for the damages?

736
01:11:29.200 --> 01:11:33.080
Just like you can relinquish your right to bring up the baby,

737
01:11:33.080 --> 01:11:35.480
you know, right before it's gonna die

738
01:11:35.480 --> 01:11:38.280
and now all of a sudden you're not guilty of child abuse.

739
01:11:38.280 --> 01:11:40.080
Well, I think there's a disanalogy there.

740
01:11:40.080 --> 01:11:44.400
If you relinquish your rights over a bomb that's about to explode, you're a murderer.

741
01:11:44.400 --> 01:11:48.440
You can't relinquish your rights over something that's going to explode.

742
01:11:48.440 --> 01:11:52.640
But with regard to the baby, now I think it's immoral to do this.

743
01:11:52.640 --> 01:11:56.760
I think it's pretty nasty to give birth to a baby and then abandon it.

744
01:11:56.760 --> 01:12:01.560
I mean, there's probably lower rungs in hell reserved for worse people than that,

745
01:12:01.560 --> 01:12:03.640
but that's a pretty low rung in hell.

746
01:12:03.640 --> 01:12:07.080
But we're not talking about rungs in hell and we're not talking about morality.

747
01:12:07.080 --> 01:12:10.040
We're talking about libertarian law.

748
01:12:10.040 --> 01:12:16.680
And the libertarian law confines itself to punishing people who initiate violence against another person or their property.

749
01:12:16.680 --> 01:12:24.840
And by failing to rescue a drowning victim or a baby or another helpless person, you're not initiating violence.

750
01:12:24.840 --> 01:12:29.440
So therefore, the law must leave you alone according to libertarian law.

751
01:12:29.440 --> 01:12:34.440
But that doesn't make you a nice guy, similarly with libel and slander.

752
01:12:34.440 --> 01:12:40.120
Just because I don't advocate putting you in jail or blackmail doesn't mean I think it's a great idea.

753
01:12:40.120 --> 01:12:43.120
Similarly with prostitution or taking drugs.

754
01:12:43.120 --> 01:12:50.520
Just because you shouldn't go to jail for these things doesn't mean that you're a great guy.

755
01:12:50.520 --> 01:12:51.720
Yes.

756
01:12:51.720 --> 01:12:55.000
I just wanted to concur with what this gentleman over here said.

757
01:12:55.000 --> 01:13:00.760
I thought that your sociological and biological speculations were superb speculations, I enjoyed them.

758
01:13:01.200 --> 01:13:13.200
However, I wanted to put in the caveat that if you bring these kinds of speculations into too close proximity with Austrian and economic type of reasoning,

759
01:13:13.200 --> 01:13:22.200
that it tends to videate the formalism of the Austrian or the logical kind of reasoning.

760
01:13:22.200 --> 01:13:29.200
And that's why I think you have to make a clear distinction between what I was talking about in my talk, the ontological levels.

761
01:13:29.200 --> 01:13:41.200
The sociobiological level and the level of Austrian discourse are quite distinct, and you have to worry about people getting confused when you start mixing these things up.

762
01:13:41.200 --> 01:13:48.200
Not that both aren't good, so that's one concern I have about this sort of thing.

763
01:13:48.200 --> 01:14:01.200
this sort of thing. Again, like for example, simple example, Gossens law of satisfaction wants is not the same thing as the law of marginal utility, but people confuse this all the time, including myself, you know, this is easy to do.

764
01:14:01.200 --> 01:14:08.200
I agree with you totally and completely, and I thank you for the intervention because I might not have been as clear as I should have been.

765
01:14:08.200 --> 01:14:14.200
Certainly, I was not speaking as an Austrian praxeologist when I spoke about sociobiology.

766
01:14:14.200 --> 01:14:23.200
That's an empirical claim about biology and Austrianism or praxeology is a very different universe of discourse.

767
01:14:23.200 --> 01:14:27.200
True, I spoke about him in the same lecture, although, no, this lecture I didn't really talk about Austrianism.

768
01:14:27.200 --> 01:14:35.200
Remember, the morning it's economics or Austrian economics, in the afternoon it's libertarianism.

769
01:14:35.200 --> 01:14:43.200
But, you know, as a person who's an Austrian and a libertarian, sometimes I speak about both, hopefully not in the same sentence, but in next sentences.

770
01:14:43.200 --> 01:14:50.200
And I'm hoping that the emphasis that I placed on the distinction between normative and positive will carry through

771
01:14:50.200 --> 01:14:58.200
and people will realize that Austrianism is a praxeological science, whereas everything else is an empirical science.

772
01:14:58.200 --> 01:15:05.200
This is empirical stuff, so thanks for making it even more clear that there is that distinction.

773
01:15:05.200 --> 01:15:09.200
Anyone else before we get to the second round? Yes, in the back.

774
01:15:09.200 --> 01:15:25.200
I've got one case of abortion. One case of abortion. What will happen if your wife, for example, goes to the hospital and the doctor says that if she has the baby, she will die?

775
01:15:25.200 --> 01:15:34.200
Well, remember, you can evict the baby for whatever reason you want, to save the mother's life or just out of a whim.

776
01:15:34.200 --> 01:15:40.200
So, if the baby is, say, six months old and it stays one more day, it'll kill her.

777
01:15:40.200 --> 01:15:48.200
She has the choice to die and maybe be a vegetable and keep the baby going.

778
01:15:48.200 --> 01:15:53.200
And she might take that if she has cancer and is going to die a month later anyway.

779
01:15:53.200 --> 01:15:57.200
But if she wants to evict the baby, she can evict the baby for any reason.

780
01:15:57.200 --> 01:16:00.200
And certainly she can evict the baby to save her own life.

781
01:16:00.200 --> 01:16:10.200
She can't kill it, but she can evict it, and if evicting means killing, well then that's the way it is.

782
01:16:10.200 --> 01:16:19.200
But in a hundred years from now, if medical technology prediction increases, she will be able to evict it and it'll stay alive.

783
01:16:19.200 --> 01:16:27.200
Ten years ago or now, at a certain time, four months old, the baby might not be able to live outside the womb.

784
01:16:27.200 --> 01:16:34.200
The baby can be evicted, never murdered, not aborted, just evicted.

785
01:16:34.200 --> 01:16:37.200
Kevin?

786
01:16:37.200 --> 01:16:44.200
When you're talking about the 7th evolution of biology, you strike me, and Hayek talks a bit about this.

787
01:16:44.200 --> 01:16:52.200
And he talks about how people confuse the sort of moral laws of the small and the moral laws of the large.

788
01:16:52.200 --> 01:17:22.200
large. So for instance, you know, we still often have little reprised, little groups, extended family. It's really a little more nuclear now. But so it seems like what we might just do is not so much spend our time trying, I mean, we don't ever say, let's have property rights in the home. We're not interested in saying that. So the main thing, it seems like to have an emphasis on is, look, just, you know, keep your midst to your family, basically, when you're a socialist.

789
01:17:22.200 --> 01:17:32.200
Keep your socialism in the home, you know, I don't mind what two socialists do behind closed doors, you know, sort of that kind of thing.

790
01:17:32.200 --> 01:17:37.200
And to just say, you know, be willing to leave well enough alone on the outside.

791
01:17:37.200 --> 01:17:49.200
So, you know, that sort of emphasis, I think, could appeal to people because if they realized their ethical inclinations toward the people that they're most in contact with were right,

792
01:17:49.200 --> 01:17:54.000
but that proximity made a huge amount of moral difference,

793
01:17:54.000 --> 01:17:56.800
then I think they might be able to process that to some degree.

794
01:17:56.800 --> 01:17:59.600
No, I agree with you entirely and I think I said, you know,

795
01:17:59.600 --> 01:18:02.000
if the socialists want to have socialized medicine

796
01:18:02.000 --> 01:18:04.500
and they want to do it on their own, God bless them.

797
01:18:04.500 --> 01:18:07.000
Maybe I'll even join, who knows, maybe not,

798
01:18:07.000 --> 01:18:09.300
but they have a right to do that.

799
01:18:09.300 --> 01:18:12.600
If they want to have any group on their own

800
01:18:12.600 --> 01:18:14.600
and they don't force other people into it,

801
01:18:14.600 --> 01:18:17.400
God bless them as far as the law is concerned.

802
01:18:17.400 --> 01:18:25.200
Now in terms of strategic things, as to how to promote liberty, justice, Austrian economics,

803
01:18:25.200 --> 01:18:32.400
I've made a case for the academic life as opposed to using violence.

804
01:18:32.400 --> 01:18:39.200
And I suppose I could talk a little bit about techniques that have been used, like the libertarian party,

805
01:18:39.200 --> 01:18:42.900
which I'm a fan of, although the latest thing with Iraq I didn't really like,

806
01:18:42.900 --> 01:18:47.000
and Lew Rockwell wrote this magnificent thing, attacking them for saying,

807
01:18:47.000 --> 01:18:53.080
Well, yeah, we should pull out of Iraq and we should put the soldiers in Syria or somewhere else or I forget where that I don't know

808
01:18:53.640 --> 01:18:58.480
Maybe the Martians are taking over in the Libertarian Party. That was grotesque

809
01:18:59.080 --> 01:19:02.000
but by and large I favor the Libertarian Party and

810
01:19:02.560 --> 01:19:07.120
Then there's this group in New Hampshire where they're all trying to gather in New Hampshire

811
01:19:07.800 --> 01:19:13.460
Free State Project. Well, you know, God bless them if that works. That's that's good, too

812
01:19:14.320 --> 01:19:16.320
Institutes like the Mises Institute

813
01:19:17.000 --> 01:19:22.000
People getting PhDs and going to teach in schools and then bringing their students here.

814
01:19:22.000 --> 01:19:24.000
Lots of these techniques.

815
01:19:24.000 --> 01:19:27.000
Then there's this other whole motif.

816
01:19:27.000 --> 01:19:30.000
We tried this when I was in Vancouver, British Columbia.

817
01:19:30.000 --> 01:19:33.000
There were a bunch of libertarians who were tenants.

818
01:19:33.000 --> 01:19:37.000
And they started this group called Tenants Against Rent Control.

819
01:19:37.000 --> 01:19:40.000
It's sort of like Man Bites Dog.

820
01:19:40.000 --> 01:19:46.000
You know, Doctors Against Socialized Medicine, Farmers Against Farm Subsidies,

821
01:19:46.000 --> 01:19:50.400
groups like that, some of these things might help as well. These are just

822
01:19:50.400 --> 01:19:55.920
techniques of organizing and getting publicity and Lord knows we we could use

823
01:19:55.920 --> 01:20:02.280
more publicity and I think we deserve it. Dan? I have another strategic question in

824
01:20:02.280 --> 01:20:07.240
regards to you legitimize the death penalty through Nozick's murder machine

825
01:20:07.240 --> 01:20:15.980
but kind of drawing on the value of a socio-biology kind of evolutionary

826
01:20:15.980 --> 01:20:45.980
Process. If we view the current death penalty's usage as an implement of, say, socialized justice services, can we see that while the Nozick example legitimizes a usage of the death penalty, does it necessarily legitimize the current application of the death penalty? So, as a libertarian, are we called to speak out against the state's usage of the death penalty or

827
01:20:45.980 --> 01:20:54.980
All I think I've shown with this machine based on the Nozickian inventiveness is that a death penalty could be justified.

828
01:20:54.980 --> 01:20:57.980
Not that any specific death penalty could be justified.

829
01:20:57.980 --> 01:21:04.980
I mean, to leave it to the state is to leave it to the people who are screwing up the post office and the motor vehicle bureau and socialism and everything else.

830
01:21:04.980 --> 01:21:08.980
And they probably kill more people that are innocent than are guilty.

831
01:21:08.980 --> 01:21:14.980
So I'm certainly not supporting governmental death penalties, although sometimes they probably get it right.

832
01:21:14.980 --> 01:21:21.020
All I was doing is making a theoretical libertarian case that the death penalty

833
01:21:21.020 --> 01:21:25.380
should not be ruled inconsistent with libertarianism. So you're quite right to

834
01:21:25.380 --> 01:21:32.580
emphasize that I'm not favoring or ask if I am and I'm certainly not. Well we're

835
01:21:32.580 --> 01:21:37.420
coming to the end of 10 lectures and I'm a little bit more tired than I was when

836
01:21:37.420 --> 01:21:43.380
I started, but it's been just magnificent interacting with you, the

837
01:21:43.380 --> 01:21:47.380
Question Periods, and I've had a great time, and I hope you have had too.
