Welcome to the very, very, very last session of this week of seminars on Austrian economics and libertarian theory.
Let's start with just a brief moment of silence.
Today, we're going to talk about reparations.
But before I get into reparations, I have one or two little things that I just have to get off my chest.
One of them is an article by your friend in mind, Paul Krugman, genius economist.
I mean, they have recalls for tires and recalls for everything.
Why do they have recalls for economists?
If anyone needs a recall, it's this guy.
He's a pretty famous economist.
He got his PhD some good place.
And I think he teaches at Columbia, which is supposedly a good school.
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.
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.
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,
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.
And individuals, a quote here, this is the sort of a deal that an individual would find hard to negotiate.
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.
And this individual wants to get 10 weeks off a year and work 30 hours a week would be hard, not impossible, but hard.
But suppose a lot of people wanted that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Okay, enough ranting and raving off the subject. Let's rant and rave now on the subject.
Before I get into reparations, I want to talk a little bit about libertarian punishment theory.
because reparations are a subset of punishment theory.
And what is libertarian punishment theory?
Libertarian punishment theory is two teeth for a tooth.
We go one better than the Bible.
Plus costs of capturing, plus scaring,
if that's appropriate, let me explain.
Okay, so what happens is that Matt and I, I steal his pen.
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.
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.
That's the second tooth. Not 1.9 teeth, not 2.1 teeth, but 2.0 teeth exactly.
Who says Austrians aren't mathematically sophisticated?
Okay, now, if I turn myself into the police right away, and there's no cost of capturing me,
then there are no payments that I have to make there.
But if I try to elude capture, and you know, you've got to search for me and you find me a week later,
I've got to pay for that too but now there's also the scaring issue now if
what I did is I pickpocketed it right out of his back pocket and he didn't even
notice then there's no scaring he didn't even know but somebody else saw it and
you know got the pen back on the other hand if I went to his house when he was
out then there's a little scaring because he no longer sees his house as safe as
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.
So, since I scared him, I should be scared twice as much. And how should the scaring take place? Well, there are various options.
One of the best options, one of them is, I ought to be made to play Russian roulette
with the number of chambers in the gun and the number of bullets in the chambers
proportionate to how much I scare them.
Namely, the more I scare them of the sort that I just mentioned,
the more bullets in the few of the chambers,
or the higher the proportion of bullets to chambers.
That's libertarian punishment theory.
With it, we can prove that the death penalty is justified because what does murder consist of, if not stealing a life?
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.
One, put his life back into him and two, give him a second life of my own.
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,
but here I'm inspired by Robert Nozick who comes up with all sorts of machines,
and here's a machine that I invented but based on his path-breaking work in justice machines,
and here we have the murderer
and we put him smiling since he's still alive
and here is the dead victim who we put
frowning since he's now dead
and we then get the machine to working and the machine's got a lever here
and what the machine does is it takes the life out of him
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.
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.
If it was an accident, he only has to give one life back, not two.
Motive is important, but not all important.
If there's an accidental death, I'm cleaning my gun and all of a sudden I shoot Rosemary.
I'm innocent, there's no mens rea.
I'm sorry, I'm late.
Yeah, yeah.
Compensation.
The point is that I owe her a life.
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.
But I owe her something.
I just can't say, you know, sorry, or sorry to her heirs, I mean, that's nice, I should say that too.
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,
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.
Okay, so that's roughly what an overview of libertarian punishment theory.
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.
Okay, now let's get back to this case where I stole a pen from Matt. I've got his pen.
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?
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.
but we're both dead now and Dan has got the pen and Lisa would have got it
because Matt would have given it to her he gave everything else to her that he
had when because she's his dad and Lisa is the heir so it doesn't just as
consist of going over to Dan and saying Dan sorry you're not a criminal we're
not going to give you any two teeth for a tooth or anything but you've got a pen
And that you inherited it from Walter?
That you never in justice should have inherited from Walter
because he wasn't the rightful owner of it?
He stole it?
Wouldn't justice consist of taking the pen from Dan
and giving it to, well, Matt's gone so we can't give it to him,
and giving it to Lisa, who's his heir?
Seems to me that that would be just.
And that if Dan said, no, no, no, too bad, I'm not giving it up,
Then he's starting to take on the aspects of criminal,
because he's holding on to stolen property
when the forces of law and order are saying,
hey, you know, you're not the rightful owner of it,
give it to Lisa, because Lisa is the rightful owner of it.
Now, would it matter if it was one son,
or one generation, or two, or 10, or 20, or 50, or 100?
No, no statute of limitations on justice.
Justice is justice is justice.
It's timeless. It's just as bad for the caveman to hit someone as for the star man to hit someone.
Justice is timeless. It doesn't matter how many generations.
Of course, the burden of proof is always on the person who wants to overturn extant property rights.
Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Dan's got the pen. Give it back. Dan's got the pen.
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.
So there is no legal statute of limitations, but there's a natural statute of limitations.
What's the natural statute of limitations?
The natural statute of limitations is that the more generations that go by,
the harder it is to meet the proof, the burden of proof of possession.
The more generations that go between me and Matt to our great, great, great, great grandchildren,
the harder it is for them to know this or to prove it,
especially if in the old generation was before language,
like if you're talking about Indians or someone like that,
or black slaves that loved his language but much less,
much less writing ability, no computers.
Okay, so that I think is the, you know, who's got who's pens,
but I don't want to, I don't want anyone to knock out my teeth.
Okay, so that is an introduction
to libertarian punishment theory as it applies to reparations.
Reparations are just, justified if and only if
The person who wants to get the stuff
can meet the burden of proof.
What is the burden of proof?
That's a gray area.
That's a continuum problem.
I'm not getting into that.
But in clear cut cases, maybe not with pens,
but say with jewelry.
Let's say my picture is on the ring
or my initials are on the ring or something,
or a picture of me with the ring and the initials.
And now it's 50 generations later,
and you still can have proof.
Well, 50 generations you transplant the ring
from the heir of the thief to the heir of the victim.
Okay, now let's talk about the modern discussion
of reparations.
Most people, when they hear about black reparations
or reparations for slavery, they immediately assume
that this is anti-private property rights.
But as we've just seen, this is not only pro-private property rights, but is required by private property rights.
And indeed, if it's not upheld, private property rights are denigrated or abnegated or whatever.
Okay, so who are the ballplayers? There are three sets of ballplayers here.
the first is the liberal leftists who want to have reparations for blacks these
are people like Randall Robinson your man and my man Jesse Jackson who's all
over the place John Conyers a Democratic congressman from Michigan who's I think
the leader of the black caucus in in the Congress Henry Lewis Gates the black
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.
That's their view.
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,
The objections come from conservatives, who you think are sort of upholding private property rights.
People like David Horowitz, Mike Levin, Paul Craig Roberts and Fred Reed.
Some of these people are contributors to the rockwell.com, so they're not all bad.
But here I think they're mistaken because what they do is they throw out the baby with the bathwater.
They say, in effect, just because the leftist black case is wrong, therefore no reparations are justifiable.
And the third ball player, I guess, is me, because I'm criticizing both of those other two.
It's interesting, when Murray Rothbard was a student at Columbia, he wasn't sure which school of thought he would adhere to.
This is before he came in Austrian.
What he said was, he agrees with each schools of thought criticism of the other school of thought,
but he doesn't agree with anything positive that any of them said.
Well, similarly here, I agree with each of the two schools of thought,
the left liberal black and the right wing or conservative reaction.
I agree with each of them when they criticize the other,
but I don't agree with anything that either of them say in the positive case.
What are the specifics?
Well, the first objection, here's what Fred Reed says. Let me quote you, Fred Reed.
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.
It's because of slavery, see? This guy's a beautiful writer.
He is joined in this endeavor by a gaggle of other professional blacks. I guess he'll send me a bill, huh?
I feel like saying, let me get this straight, Hank. I'm slow. Be patient. You want free money because of slavery, right?
I don't blame you. I'd like some free money, too. Tell you what, I believe in justice.
I'll give you a million dollars for every slave I own and another million dollars for every year you were a slave.
Fair enough? But tell me, Hank, how many slaves do you suppose I have?
In round numbers, I mean, say to the nearest dozen.
And how long were you a slave?
Oh, in other words, I owe you reputations for something that I didn't do and didn't happen to you.
That makes sense, like lug nuts on a birthday cake.
Now this is a typical conservative reaction and it's funny and it's witty, but it's wrong.
That is just because Gates is wrong doesn't mean Rita's right, they're both wrong.
The libertarian theory comes riding to the rescue.
Here's what Levin says. Levin says, back pay for manumitted slaves is owed only by their former owners,
not by anyone now living because there are no slaveholders in the United States.
So in other words, what they're saying is, yes, I stole Matt's pen,
And if I were around, if we can go back in a time machine to the slave owners, we could get them.
But since I gave my pen to Dan, Lisa doesn't own the pen. That's just bloody wrong.
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.
says first of all blacks enslaved other blacks true right before they got on the
ships for the middle passage other blacks captured the first blacks or the
slave blacks and that's a reductio yes it's a good reductio against the Henry
Lewis Gates and and reynolds robinson's case where all whites are innocent all
blacks are all blacks are innocent all whites are guilty but it's got nothing
You don't know whether I or Matt are black or white or green or blue. It's rather thief and non-thief.
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,
we'd go to some blacks and we'd say you are the great-grandson of a thieving black
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.
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.
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.
Horowitz says, well, the whites didn't benefit and the blacks weren't harmed.
Let's take each one of these separately.
First of all, the whites didn't benefit.
Well, I disagree.
Some whites did benefit, but benefit is not the key.
Just because you benefit doesn't mean you're guilty of something.
You have to initiate violence to be a perpetrator.
For example, the orange grower in Florida benefits when there's a frost in California,
and half the grapefruit crop in California is unusable,
and the grapefruits in Florida rise in price because of less supply.
So they benefit. Does that mean they should go to jail? No.
Just because you benefit from something doesn't mean anything.
How about black incomes?
Isn't it true that black, the children of black slaves are better off here
than they would have been had they stayed in Africa?
If they had stayed in Africa, they might have been killed in some tribal war.
Here they're safer and they're richer.
Blacks in America are richer than blacks in Africa.
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,
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.
The slaves themselves, okay, fair enough, they were worsened, otherwise they would have volunteered to be slaves, I guess.
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.
Did the rape benefit her? Yeah, given that she'd rather be raped than killed.
But does that mean that the rapist is innocent? No.
So, you have to be careful about benefit or harm on the one hand, and on the other hand, invasion, violation of rights.
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,
Jewish reparations from Germany or Japanese-American reparations, they do justify those, but not blacks, not blacks and whites. Why?
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.
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.
So you're really arguing over one generation versus, say, three or four generations.
I don't see any principled issue here.
I mean, if it was the same people, then I can see a relevant difference.
It's the same person versus his heir.
But even there, I wouldn't accept it, because I think the heirs deserve what their parents would have given them,
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.
Another one is that there are lots of rich blacks.
For example, Oprah Winfrey is rich, and therefore to give her reparations is wrong.
But this comes from the conservative side, but this is a wrong argument, this is an unjustified argument,
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.
This is Marxist egalitarianism and it's coming from the conservatives.
Another point, if you give money from all whites to all blacks, there are some whites in this country,
who just came here, you know, a year ago, Maximilian, where are you from? Italy.
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
and somehow Maximilian, the Italian, owes the Nigerians money for stuff that occurred 150 years ago
when neither they nor their grandparents had anything to do with it.
This is a valid point that the conservatives make against the liberals.
Okay, another one is, well, we've already had a welfare system, or we have an ongoing welfare system,
and the blacks are overrepresented statistically as welfare recipients.
Therefore, we've already made reparations to blacks.
Well, there are problems here, and this is a Horowitz kind of an argument.
First of all, welfare is not the same as reparations.
Reparations is payment from the heirs of the thief to the heirs of the victim.
Welfare is taking money from everyone and giving it to poor people.
Now, it's possible that some of the money came from the heirs of the perpetrators and went to the heirs of the victim,
but it's not the same thing.
It wasn't from illegitimate owners to legitimate owners
and there were all sorts of strings attached.
So it wasn't really clear that it was reparations in any way.
Now, there are two kinds of welfare.
We talked about international welfare
and I gave you the Peter Bauer thing about the three Ms,
monuments, Mercedes and machine guns.
Let me talk a little bit about welfare now.
And here, I'm getting my stuff from Charles Murray, his book Losing Ground.
Now, I don't know if this is true, the biologist in the room will correct me if I'm wrong,
but my understanding is that if you put a frog in boiling water, it jumps out,
and doesn't do any real harm to the frog.
Whereas if you put a frog in cold water, and you boil it gradually,
Its metabolism is such that it really can't tell the difference between small degrees of temperature,
so it stays in there and it gets boiled alive.
Slavery is like boiling water.
Slavery did not ruin the black family.
The black family was as intact as the white family within a percentage or two points
in 1890, 1900, 1910, in 1870, in 1880, there were ads in the papers, Emily Lou looking for Joe,
I was on this plantation, where are you? And vice versa, the families were trying to get back together.
Slavery did not ruin the black family. The black family was a going concern up until about 1970,
when welfare got going, because welfare is like boiling the frog slowly, it's much more insidious.
Now the family is very important, an intact family is very important, most of the indices of disarray,
unemployment, drug use, illegitimacy, being in jail, are highly correlated with lack of a family.
One of the reasons that blacks are in such trouble now is there's no male adult in the family, or very, very few.
And as a result, the society resembles what a 17-year-old boy would like.
There was a movie that resembled what society would be like if the 10- and 12-year-old boys were ruling things.
What was that movie?
Lord of the Flies. Lord of the Flies depicted a society run by 12-year-old boys.
The black family or the black community almost looks like a family run by 18-year-old boys or 16-year-old boys.
Pretty gruesome in a slightly different way.
They're pretty gruesome no matter what.
Whereas when there are intact black families with a father present, the kids don't become unemployed,
they don't go to jail, they don't get into drugs, they don't get into prostitution,
Now, don't get into this, that or the other.
Welfare was very insidious.
It made the pregnant black girl an offer that the boy who impregnated her couldn't come within a million miles of matching.
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.
And what it did is it split up the black family.
So, to say that welfare was a form of reparations is a horror on several different dimensions.
It wasn't. It was a bad thing. If you want to ruin people, give them welfare.
Don't tell me that welfare is a reparation.
Okay, another one is, another reason why we don't have to give blacks any blacks reparation,
Even the children of blacks who were slaved and even from the children or the grandchildren of whites who were slave owners.
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.
Now, if this were true, there'd be some sort of coherence to it.
I mean, a lot of whites lost their lives on both sides.
So you could have some sort of case.
I wouldn't agree with it, but at least there'd be some case.
However, the research of Tom DiLorenzo and Tom Woods
shows that the war that started in 1861 was not over slavery.
Lincoln favored slavery.
He wanted to preserve the Union.
He said, if I can preserve the Union by keeping slavery,
I'll preserve the Union.
If I can preserve the Union by getting rid of slavery,
I'll do that. I don't care about slavery. I just want to preserve the Union.
So the fight was over preserving the Union.
And the main problem or the main dispute between the Northern and the Southern colonies
was not over slavery. They had all sorts of compromises worked out.
The big fight was, you know, should Kansas be slaved and the deal was to make sure
that the voting power was equal. The big fight was over the tariff.
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.
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,
the grandsons of the plantation owners, don't owe money. They still owe money.
Okay, talking about racism, Walter Williams tells the story of going into a room and seeing a tiger on a couch,
and he now has two courses of action.
One, he can be a racist or a tigerist and go by past experiences with tigers and get the hell out of there.
or he can be open and not be based on empirical evidence
and march up to the tiger and, you know, offer to shake hands and see if it's a friendly tiger
and what he says is, you know, this is lunacy
and what racism is, is just induction from past experiences
nothing wrong with that sort of racism
wrong to lynch people who are innocent but not wrong to
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.
Okay, here is Paul Craig Roberts, and here is a quote from him.
Consider how nonsensical is the reparations argument.
Whites, none of whom were slave owners, would be making transfer payments to blacks,
none of whom were slaves, very similar to the Fred Reed point.
Not even a sins of the fathers rationale justifies race reparations.
A majority of white Americans are descendants of people who immigrated to these shores after slavery had come to an end.
Similarly, many blacks are descendants of people who arrived in the United States in the post-slavery era.
This is that case of Italy and Nigeria.
Indeed, the millions of preferred minorities who have arrived in the last three decades
are legally privileged compared to native-born whites.
Well, that's true with affirmative action.
To find descendants of slave owners and descendants of slaves would require more extensive racial genealogies
and Nazi Germany and South Africa were able to assemble for their race-based policies.
And how would we classify people with ancestors in both camps?
Would they pay reparations themselves?
Would black descendants of black slave owners pay reparations? End quote.
So you get the same sort of, what I would regard as, how shall I say it and be nice,
superficially sensible criticisms but really don't match up to the libertarian insight?
Because we're not talking about all whites and all blacks, we're talking about me and Matt, whatever color we are is irrelevant,
and our two grandchildren, or granddaughter and grandson in this case, it's got nothing to do with race,
it's just got to do with return of stolen property.
I once got into a debate with Milton Friedman at some conference
And Milton Friedman, and I was giving him this idea, and he said,
Look, Block, putting me in my place. Land only counts about 10% of the GDP.
And I think at this time, we weren't talking about blacks and talking about Indians, but it doesn't matter.
They'd be much better off if they insisted that we get a free enterprise system.
They'd get much more out of free enterprise than they would out of reparations.
I said, you know, is it empirical statement? You're probably right.
The land is not that important. It's going to cost a lot of money to figure out who gets what.
If they just had free enterprise, they'd make out much better.
I agree. However, but isn't it just that they also get what is owed?
And he looked at me and he repeated the whole thing again, as if I didn't understand.
Because for him, the word justice doesn't mean anything.
There's only GDP.
And he just proved that GDP will be higher if they do this than that.
So what am I talking about this for?
But we who can see out of both eyes, out of an empirical eye and out of a just eye
or out of a normative and a positive eye can see that even though he's right, we're not wrong.
We're both right. He sort of thought that because he was right, I was wrong.
It doesn't follow. Yes, he was right.
The welfare of the, the true welfare of these people would be better if they just
forgot about the reparations and just worked for a free society.
If they had a free society, they'd do very well.
But, as a matter of justice, they are entitled to
land that was stolen from their grandparents because their grandparents
They just worked on the land, they homesteaded the land, in effect, and they weren't able to give it to their grandchildren.
Now, this sounds very radical, but it's not, in the case of black slavery.
Because you just don't go to any plantation in Alabama or South Carolina and say,
Hey you, get out. And you don't go to any guy in Harlem or Atlanta and say,
Okay, have we got a plantation for you.
There's a burden of proof.
And the more years that go by, the harder it is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
And I'm not going to get into what the proof would constitute,
because that's a question for lawyers and judges beyond my ability,
but I'm giving a principle.
If they can prove that there's stuff in the Bible and says,
yes, he was on that plantation,
and if there were 500 people on the plantation, he only gets one 500th of it.
doesn't get the whole thing, so we're not really, we're not really being very
radical in practice, not much would change and even less so for the Indians
because at least for the black slaves there was written language, the white
slave masters had some sort of records, these records might be found in some
courthouses or in some library somewhere, in the case of the Indians there was no
language, it's even further back, in the case of the Jews and the Palestinians
Plantations only God himself could sort it out, so we go back to the burden of proof
is on he who would overturn property rights and the accident owner is presumed to be the
rightful owner unless there's some change.
Let's take another complication.
Suppose what happened is that the plantation was sold to someone else.
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.
C is the innocent buyer, and now we, the forces of law and order and justice, come along and say,
the grandchild here, the grandkid, is the rightful owner, so you, innocent buyer or grandchildren of the innocent buyer,
have to give this property back to the grandchild
because we know that we now have proof.
We've matched the burden of proof.
Should we take it away from C?
Yes.
The property goes back to the rightful owner, the rightful or his heirs.
C was victimized by B.
C should go out and find B and get it out of him.
Two Teeth and All and Torture and Scaring and Whatever
And while I'm talking about that, you know, now
if I steal someone's TV and I get caught, what happens is I go to a comfortable jail
with air conditioning and a color TV
and a weight room and psychological counseling
and who pays for this? Among others, the victim that I stole from
Where's the justice there? Surely the libertarian punishment theory would be that what I'm going to do is work off my debt.
Debtors' prison. I am now owed a debt, two TVs or whatever it is, two cars or a million dollars or whatever I owe.
And I go to a place where I work 16 hours a day, think slavery, and I get whipped if I don't work.
And there's no air conditioning, no color TV and no psychological counseling.
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.
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.
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,
How about if I give you a million dollars and you let me out of it?
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.
Okay. I've now discussed libertarian punishment theory. I've applied it to reparations.
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?
Not so much in convincing people of reparations or abortion versus eviction or any of those tough ones.
And you can see why we have trouble with that. We're not even convinced here. Those are toughies.
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?
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?
Why is that? Why is it that people vote for minimum wage by two to one or three to one?
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?
Why is that? Well, there are probably many reasons, but one of them that I think is undercredited is a thing called sociobiology,
sometimes called evolutionary psychology.
And what sociobiology is, is a theory that says we are the way we are
now because of what it meant to survive
a million years ago. And what you do is you picture two tribes, one
with a certain characteristic, one with another characteristic,
and if the attribute of the characteristic
leads to survival, that's the way we are, because we are the children of survivors.
So for example, we are the species that, when a baby smiles, we're very happy.
When a baby cries, we rush to the aid of the baby.
Suppose there were two humanoid groups a million years ago.
One exactly alike in every other way, except one of them, our grandparents,
When a baby's small, we're happy. When it cries, we rush to their aid.
And the other didn't really give a rat...
Didn't really care about babies.
Well, which group is going to survive?
I mean, they had opposable thumbs, we had opposable thumbs.
Their brains were as big as our brains.
Every other way, their physical ability to fight tigers was the same.
But they had this one difference in characteristic.
It's easy to see that they would not long survive.
Because if you don't take care of babies,
We Plunish Yourselves and You Die Off. That's an easy one.
Take another one. The business of sexism and why is it?
I have a boy and a girl. They're now 27 and 25.
But when they were young, two and four, the little girl would play with dolls
and her and her friends, you'd hardly know what they were there
and they would switch, you know, dresses on the dolls or something
and the boys were racing around killing each other.
They were much more aggressive.
Sometimes we would try to reverse toys and give the boy a doll
and what he would do is take the doll and make into it a gun
and they would shoot the other boys with the doll
and you give a girl a truck and, you know, start decorating the truck.
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.
It's not culture. Even the children of the feminist women are like that.
Well, why? Why are boys much more aggressive than girls?
Well, it's got to do with sociobiology, or at least sociobiology offers one explanation as to why this could be true.
Take, again, let's go back a million years now, there were two societies just like ours,
equal ability, brains, brawn, opposable thumbs, whatever.
Only in one of them, they're the Amazon society.
They're the women or, you know, macho and they go out and fight the tigers and they go hunting
and the men stay in the back of the cave with the babies and they bury pick and they live more safe lives.
Now, let me clue you in on the economics of sex.
Why is it that the farmer keeps one bull and 50 cows, and not 50 bulls and one cow?
I'll tell you, since you ask.
The reason is bulls are superfluous.
One bull can do all the business that's necessary.
Maybe you need two for 50 cows, I'm a little weak on bull theory, but...
You don't need as many bulls as you need cows.
Females are the limitation on population.
Females are important.
Males are drones. Males are cannon fodder.
If you're a central planner, you send the men out to fight the tigers and go hunting, which is a very dangerous thing.
You don't send a precious woman out there, because every woman you send out is one less baby-maker.
And you need each and every one of them to survive. Remember what sociobiology is. The theory is who survives.
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.
At the end of the war, there were hardly any men from age, what, 18 to 50 who were all there.
And yet, the next generation of Germans and Russians, it's as if those guys were never missing.
Evidently, all the women that wanted to become impregnated could find someone, and men are willing to share their sperm.
And the two countries went on.
But suppose the war were fought between German women and Russian women.
And at the end of the war, there were no Russian women hardly, and no German women hardly.
There were plenty of men around.
If you think about the survival of these two countries, they'd be gone.
So, if there were ever a feminist or a society similar to us where the women were the Amazons
and they went out and fought, they'd be long gone.
They couldn't survive, they couldn't compete with us, even though in every other way they were equivalent to us.
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.
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.
And in a small group, if you live in an isolated small group for your whole life, you get to know everyone intimately.
They're your cousins, they're your uncles, they're your mother, your father, your children.
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.
Now let's talk about price gouging when the Florida hurricane hits,
And the market raises prices on things like milk and water and orange juice and flashlights, batteries and candles, and people are outraged.
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.
Because, sociobiologically, we're used to groups of 25, and in a group of 25, when Matt is having a rough time,
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.
So we're hardwired for thinking in terms of groups of 50 people.
And if we had a society of 50 people and there was a hurricane in Florida,
the people in Texas and North Carolina would bring stuff down there out of benevolence because they're their cousins.
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.
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.
So we have a hard slog, not just to convince people of the finer points of advanced libertarian theory,
but just the most basic things, property rights and prices and profits.
What? You're making a profit off of me? You dirty rat, yeah?
That's the way we're hard-wired.
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,
Forgetting about slavery until World War I, when we're a pretty free society.
The way I account for that, remember we're not talking praxeology here, we're talking an empirical theory.
The way I account for that is I ignore it. It's an aberration.
Looking over the past history for the last 10, 20,000 years of all the people on the earth,
there was just a little teeny bit of a couple of years in England and a couple of years in the United States
in the United States, where people acted in a market-oriented economic freedom way.
But for the rest of the time, in the rest of the world, this is just a little drop in the bucket.
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.
I've got some great jokes for you.
First of all, the one by Maximilian and Rosemaria.
They made me handsomer than I really am.
Here's a joke.
A little boy wanted $100 so badly that he prayed for two weeks.
He prayed and he prayed and he prayed, but nothing happened.
So he decided to write God a letter asking for the money.
When the postal authorities received the letter addressed to God, USA,
they decided to send it to President Bush.
George was so impressed, touched, and amused
that he instructed his secretary to send the boy a $5 bill.
The little boy was delighted with the $5
and sat down to write a thank you note to God,
which read, dear God,
thank you very much for sending me the money.
However, I noticed that for some reason
you sent it through Washington, D.C.
And as usual, those blankety blanks deducted $95.
I'm going to treasure this.
Okay, we now have time for questions and I'd be delighted, Prem.
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.
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.
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.
Scenario 2.
Okay, so B's kid comes and says to A's kid,
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.
Well, it seems to me that he owes it to him.
He had stuff that was improperly his, stolen property, and he just threw it away.
I think we should be gentle with him. We shouldn't say, okay, you're paying right now, otherwise you're going to jail.
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,
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.
You're totally innocent, but on the other hand, my money is gone thanks to you. Second case.
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.
An organ like a kidney? Not an organ that you're playing with.
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,
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.
There's only one heart, there are two kids that need it. One's got it, but he's the child of the thief.
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.
Must be catching. You're sitting next to Carrie Anne, I noticed. What's the third one?
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?
No, that would be visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons.
The son is totally innocent.
The only thing the son of the bad guy has to do
is give up property he was given improperly.
But he doesn't have to die.
He is innocent.
It's just that he's holding on to an organ
or to a pen that he shouldn't have gotten.
But his life, he never killed anyone.
So he's okay.
Thanks. Very good, thoughtful questions. Yeah?
Regarding sociobiology, what you specifically applied to, I think, is pretty much correct.
But the thing is, is that sociobiology really has one critical assumption that I think is obviously false.
It basically assumes that all traits were at one time adaptive.
,"
whereas you actually only have to be marginally more adaptive than the other thing that you
meet.
And so you know it doesn't actually, you don't have to be the most adaptive thing, you just
have to be a little bit more adaptive than the other guy.
And so I think a lot of times they make, they try to make everything have to be some sort
of adaptation when it's not.
Well I might be guilty of saying it loosely, I'm not a sociobiologist, I'm not a biologist,
I'm just borrowing this I might have said it not precisely I think your way of
saying is better than way I might have said it the tape will tell us I didn't
mean to say that the what do you call the feminists the Amazons were totally
non-adoptive and we were totally adopted just that we were more adoptive than
them
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.
There are now many people who can live and have children,
living alone is not good enough, you have to have children,
who couldn't before, so what's adaptive now is different than what's then.
But there are things that occurred many years ago,
that we're hardwired for, because through many generations we live that way,
and people who weren't compatible with that didn't leave as many heirs,
not no heirs, but as many heirs.
So I accept your qualification, and if I put it in all-or-none form,
I was wrong, I should have said more or less adaptive, so I accept that point.
Kevin.
I actually want to combine two examples you gave with the lead in my view and a pretty interesting question.
Suppose we have the case of slave reparations.
We've actually found that all of them have gone through.
And the question is, what has to be given back?
Now the difficulty is that some people, when they talk about reparations, say,
All the wealth you have came from this original land. You have benefited at our expense through time.
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.
And I think the way you get around that is the same way you talked about reputations and libel,
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.
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...
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.
You can't have much more for one person working it, or 100 acres or something. Well, you owe that 100 acres.
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.
The white grandson keeps 499 out of 500ths of it. So it's not very radical.
And if they sold the plantation and then they became investment bankers, they get nothing?
Oh, no, I think if they sold it, they got money for it.
But do you take the value then? Or do you have the value increased over time?
Well, these are tough questions that we need more research and more papers on.
But a first cut at this would be make believe you didn't sell it and go back.
And what's that 50 acres worth now on the market? And that's it.
That would be my first approximation.
Now, you had a question.
Why are there no black people in this audience?
Well, before that, why are there so few females?
There are only about five and there are about 30 people in the room, or give or take?
I don't know. I guess males are more interested.
Whenever I go to a libertarian meeting, it's almost as if it's a gay liberation.
guys if you're trying to pick up a girl don't come here girls if you want to
meet some nice guy there are zillions of them around why is this I don't know
it's an interesting question but now to get closer to your question in past years
and I've been coming to these meetings for 20 25 years I think ever since it's
When I first started, I might have missed a year or two, but I've been at virtually every one of them.
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.
But there have been some. Every year or so, there are one or two or three blacks.
Maybe not in this small group, but next week during the Mises University, there'll be 120, 130 people.
I'd be surprised if there weren't one or two or three blacks.
Look at how blacks vote.
Most of them don't vote for libertarians.
There are very few blacks in libertarian meetings.
Walter Williams was once offered the presidency of the libertarian party candidate.
He declined to take it, but they would have been very happy to have him.
So I don't think it's certainly not that if a black person applies, the Mises says,
what, a black? No, you can't come. That's silly.
It's very few black people apply for reasons of culture or biology.
I don't know.
I had this black kid, one of my very best students at Loyola.
One of my very, very best students, one of the best students I've ever had.
And I was dying to get him to become a austro-libertarian, if I can conflate normative and positive.
But Wall Street made him a big, big offer and he's off Wall Streeting it up
and I was trying to tell him that Walter Williams gets 20,000 a speech
and I think this kid was of the genre where he could be like that in 10-15 years
but my best efforts failed.
The way I see it, to have a black person here would be great
because there are so few and they can benefit so much from it
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.
So all I can say, I mean, I can't speak for the Mises Institute.
I'm just not an employee, but rather a part-time employee, one or two weeks a year or something like that.
But I think I speak for them when I say that they would be deliriously happy to have more black people
and more oriental people, you know, the more the merrier.
We wanna get the message out
and we're certainly not gonna say,
oh no, we're not gonna get the message out to you.
John?
As an aside, when our campaign for governor ran last time,
we had a couple of black candidates that were very good
and then they went out there and slugged it for liberty.
You know, the libertarians were the ones out there
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?
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.
Well, I promise you, that wasn't going to happen if it wasn't the libertarians that were championing it.
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.
Maybe we would be better off, you know, in a world where folks are camping liberty for everybody.
Let me just say that this is John Sophocles and he ran for governor on the Libertarian Party for Alabama the last time out.
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.
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.
So I hope that answers your question.
I have two questions on your theory of punishment. The first one is why don't you apply it also to accidents as well?
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.
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.
When without the life transfer machine, I owe something big.
Maybe I kill a young husband and his wife and three kids. I've got to support that wife and three kids.
It's a serious thing to shoot someone accidentally, but it's not a crime.
Second question. Given your opinion about alienability of self ownership, would you say that a
Could a martyr repay for his crime being given as a slave to the heirs of his victim?
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?
You don't even need my views on inalienability.
You see, the dispute I'm having with people like Rothbard and Kinsella
and other very good libertarians is over me selling myself as a slave.
But if I commit a crime, certainly Kinsella and all of us would say that
if it's a very serious crime, that I should be enslaved until I pay off the debt.
And if it's murder, it might be my whole life as a slave,
as a person in jail working hard
and not getting a color TV and an air conditioner
and stuff like that.
Carrie Ann.
I have a mother-baby question.
Sure.
I guess depending on how you answer the question,
I may have a follow-up question,
but we talked about the other day
about how you think it would be,
if you have a case where the baby's either gonna starve
to death and suffer, or you can kill it immediately,
it would be child abuse to let the baby starve
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.
not that I argued from authority but just that it's interesting that it has
some support from what might not be considered a libertarian source no I
don't think it's child abuse if no one wants the child there are no positive
obligations to bring up the child the only stipulation is that if you can't
hog the child you can't hide the child you can't force all others from taking
in the Child, but if you announce it, and no one in the whole world wants to take care of this baby,
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.
I think it would be rare, but if it happened, theoretically, that would be the way I would analyze it.
My follow-up question, I guess I could be missing some link somewhere, but it seems like then it's never child abuse,
and it's never not okay to relinquish your rights
to bring up the child at any...
Well, go ahead, I'm sorry.
I mean by that rationale, I mean, you know,
if you have a bomb that's ready to go off,
can you relinquish your ownership over the bomb
a second before it goes off
and you're not liable for the damages?
Just like you can relinquish your right to bring up the baby,
you know, right before it's gonna die
and now all of a sudden you're not guilty of child abuse.
Well, I think there's a disanalogy there.
If you relinquish your rights over a bomb that's about to explode, you're a murderer.
You can't relinquish your rights over something that's going to explode.
But with regard to the baby, now I think it's immoral to do this.
I think it's pretty nasty to give birth to a baby and then abandon it.
I mean, there's probably lower rungs in hell reserved for worse people than that,
but that's a pretty low rung in hell.
But we're not talking about rungs in hell and we're not talking about morality.
We're talking about libertarian law.
And the libertarian law confines itself to punishing people who initiate violence against another person or their property.
And by failing to rescue a drowning victim or a baby or another helpless person, you're not initiating violence.
So therefore, the law must leave you alone according to libertarian law.
But that doesn't make you a nice guy, similarly with libel and slander.
Just because I don't advocate putting you in jail or blackmail doesn't mean I think it's a great idea.
Similarly with prostitution or taking drugs.
Just because you shouldn't go to jail for these things doesn't mean that you're a great guy.
Yes.
I just wanted to concur with what this gentleman over here said.
I thought that your sociological and biological speculations were superb speculations, I enjoyed them.
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,
that it tends to videate the formalism of the Austrian or the logical kind of reasoning.
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.
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.
Not that both aren't good, so that's one concern I have about this sort of thing.
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.
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.
Certainly, I was not speaking as an Austrian praxeologist when I spoke about sociobiology.
That's an empirical claim about biology and Austrianism or praxeology is a very different universe of discourse.
True, I spoke about him in the same lecture, although, no, this lecture I didn't really talk about Austrianism.
Remember, the morning it's economics or Austrian economics, in the afternoon it's libertarianism.
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.
And I'm hoping that the emphasis that I placed on the distinction between normative and positive will carry through
and people will realize that Austrianism is a praxeological science, whereas everything else is an empirical science.
This is empirical stuff, so thanks for making it even more clear that there is that distinction.
Anyone else before we get to the second round? Yes, in the back.
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?
Well, remember, you can evict the baby for whatever reason you want, to save the mother's life or just out of a whim.
So, if the baby is, say, six months old and it stays one more day, it'll kill her.
She has the choice to die and maybe be a vegetable and keep the baby going.
And she might take that if she has cancer and is going to die a month later anyway.
But if she wants to evict the baby, she can evict the baby for any reason.
And certainly she can evict the baby to save her own life.
She can't kill it, but she can evict it, and if evicting means killing, well then that's the way it is.
But in a hundred years from now, if medical technology prediction increases, she will be able to evict it and it'll stay alive.
Ten years ago or now, at a certain time, four months old, the baby might not be able to live outside the womb.
The baby can be evicted, never murdered, not aborted, just evicted.
Kevin?
When you're talking about the 7th evolution of biology, you strike me, and Hayek talks a bit about this.
And he talks about how people confuse the sort of moral laws of the small and the moral laws of the large.
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.
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.
And to just say, you know, be willing to leave well enough alone on the outside.
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,
but that proximity made a huge amount of moral difference,
then I think they might be able to process that to some degree.
No, I agree with you entirely and I think I said, you know,
if the socialists want to have socialized medicine
and they want to do it on their own, God bless them.
Maybe I'll even join, who knows, maybe not,
but they have a right to do that.
If they want to have any group on their own
and they don't force other people into it,
God bless them as far as the law is concerned.
Now in terms of strategic things, as to how to promote liberty, justice, Austrian economics,
I've made a case for the academic life as opposed to using violence.
And I suppose I could talk a little bit about techniques that have been used, like the libertarian party,
which I'm a fan of, although the latest thing with Iraq I didn't really like,
and Lew Rockwell wrote this magnificent thing, attacking them for saying,
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
Maybe the Martians are taking over in the Libertarian Party. That was grotesque
but by and large I favor the Libertarian Party and
Then there's this group in New Hampshire where they're all trying to gather in New Hampshire
Free State Project. Well, you know, God bless them if that works. That's that's good, too
Institutes like the Mises Institute
People getting PhDs and going to teach in schools and then bringing their students here.
Lots of these techniques.
Then there's this other whole motif.
We tried this when I was in Vancouver, British Columbia.
There were a bunch of libertarians who were tenants.
And they started this group called Tenants Against Rent Control.
It's sort of like Man Bites Dog.
You know, Doctors Against Socialized Medicine, Farmers Against Farm Subsidies,
groups like that, some of these things might help as well. These are just
techniques of organizing and getting publicity and Lord knows we we could use
more publicity and I think we deserve it. Dan? I have another strategic question in
regards to you legitimize the death penalty through Nozick's murder machine
but kind of drawing on the value of a socio-biology kind of evolutionary
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
All I think I've shown with this machine based on the Nozickian inventiveness is that a death penalty could be justified.
Not that any specific death penalty could be justified.
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.
And they probably kill more people that are innocent than are guilty.
So I'm certainly not supporting governmental death penalties, although sometimes they probably get it right.
All I was doing is making a theoretical libertarian case that the death penalty
should not be ruled inconsistent with libertarianism. So you're quite right to
emphasize that I'm not favoring or ask if I am and I'm certainly not. Well we're
coming to the end of 10 lectures and I'm a little bit more tired than I was when
I started, but it's been just magnificent interacting with you, the
Question Periods, and I've had a great time, and I hope you have had too.