KOL394 | The Nature of Property, Ep. 2 (WiM216) with Robert Breedlove, of the “What is Money” Show

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Stefan consella welcome back to the what is money show thank you glad to be here glad to have

you again we’re gonna continue going through pape’s excellent book a theory of

socialism and capitalism and I’ll get us a rolling here uh reading an excerpt on page 19.

in the pdf version of this book copyrights to develop the concept of

property it is necessary for goods to be scarce so that conflicts over the use of

these Goods can possibly arise it is the function of property rights to

avoid such possible clashes over the use of scarce Resources by assigning rights

of exclusive ownership property is thus a normative concept

a concept designed to make a conflict-free interaction possible by

stipulating mutually binding rules of conduct Norms regarding scarce resources

so you know this is one of those Concepts that I visit a lot

on this show and have a really hard time because people have these preconceived

notions of property right the property is just the asset but it’s really this as as Hopi is

describing here this normative way of dealing with the reality of scarcity right there’s

there are limited things in the world and there are more wants than there are

for certain things those things are scarce we have to resolve conflict over those

scarce resources either by contract or you know the other

approach is like actual conflict physical conflict right something something more coercive

well notice his first sentence is to develop the concept of property there

there need to be scarce Goods so what he’s saying there and the Randy and say when we we talk like this because they

they think we’re focusing on the negative or something like that or it’s like it’s like the economic or political

equivalent of saying that rights are based upon the ability to feel pain or something which

um but it’s not like that what Hans is saying is that we have to recognize why property rules emerge they emerge

because we are actors and we are actors that which means to act means to use

scarce resources or means to achieve ends uh and when we achieve ends we’re trying

to change the future from something that we think it will be to something that we prefer to be which means that the world

is not perfect in other words means we’re unsatisfied or dissatisfied

um or uneasy as mises calls it and this all implies that we live in a world of scarcity okay we live in a world where

all of our means all of our wants can’t be satisfied just at whim we have to do something to try to get it and then

they’re not always possible to be solved because there’s limited resources and there’s competition for these Resources

with other people there’s competition for them which means the possibility of a clash or a conflict because the

resources are scarce which means they have a property which is uh they can only be used by one person at a time so

if someone sees a coconut and someone else sees the coconut they both want the coconut they can’t both have it at the

same time only one can consume the coconut um so that means there’s a possibility

of conflict so it’s the possibility of conflict that gives rise to the the problem of conflict which we need to try

to solve somehow you could try to solve it by I don’t know becoming Immortal and omnipotent

and God I guess but that’s not really feasible so the other way we try to solve it is we recognize that we live in

society among a bunch of similarly placed actors or agents human beings that have similar capacities uh similar

desires similar wants they all need to use scarce resources but we tend to prefer

um to use these things without violently battling each other for them all the time because that gets us nowhere it’s a

it’s a lose-lose game right um and because it costs resources and effort to just fight with each other and

you still don’t increase the sum total of resources so we would prefer to have Cooperative use of these resources which

implies the need to to have a set of rules that assign owners to the every

given resource there needs to be a rule that says who is the actor that has the better claim to it so that’s what

property rights are and we say Norms because a norm is um is a normative rule that you can consult to tell you how you

should act in a given situation or who should win so that’s what property rights are property rights are rules

that emerge in society out of the desire for people to be able to use resources peacefully and cooperatively and without

conflict so these rules assign owners and so then the question is what are the

contents of the particular rules and that’s where libertarianism comes in and the lock key in natural rights

perspective and that’s where it differs from all other competing theories which we would all call variations of a type

of socialism whether it’s autocratic or Democratic or authoritarian or communist or or democrat socialist or whatever

um uh all those rules differ in how they

specify who has the right to control a resource but anyway so the point is once you think of once you understand the

purpose of property rights is to help us solve the problem of the possibility of

conflict which emerges because of the nature of scarcity in the real world

um then you understand that property rules are just those rules and so then you start to see when people refer to like a you know a piece of land or a car

as a pro as your property it’s a slight misuse of the word or at least it can lead to confusion because

technically speaking if we want to be precise the word property is the relationship between

human beings with respect to these scarce resources so my property right in a car

basically means I have a connection to that car that is distinct and Superior

to everyone else’s that other people can see and respect if they want to avoid conflict

yeah brilliantly sad um you know one one thing that really jumps out for me there is just the

nature of the two different approaches for resolving conflicts over scarce

resources you know as you said we can have some normative Arrangement like property

or you can just have the the fighting right the fighting over the stuff itself and those two different modes of

relating to scarce resources have significant impact on how much

we’re able to conquer scarcity right to increase productivity and capital accumulation and all these things the

fighting would be a zero-sum game right it’s not creating any more pie the pie is not getting

bigger whereas if you have private property enabled free trade we can actually grow the pie and so that’s

kind of the magic of capitalism in a way yeah not only that I think the fighting is a negative some game because you have

to expend resources to engage in battle even if you win the battle um and you’re the winner you had to

expend resources to to get there um yeah it’s sort of it goes along economically with the idea that uh

capitalism and Society progresses um by having what we call lower time

preference which corresponds to a longer time Horizon which corresponds to longer

term projects okay and so in capitalism you can have more

profit in a sense or more output more productivity if you have a longer time

Horizon so you can you know you plan a crop and you if you you know if it’s trees or something you can’t use it for

a few years you have to wait um as opposed to going into the woods and just chopping the first tree down

that you see and if you keep doing that soon you’ll have no trees left um so or you might can plant something

that would last that would you could reap in a month but if you could plant if you could start a factory then you don’t see the profits for 20 years

that’s a longer time Horizon but the only way to engage in these long-term projects is to have stability of

property rights because you’re not going to invest your resources in something that can be taken away in a month or a

year or 10 years so security of property rights that is a normative approach to

solving conflict um permits us to engage in longer term planning and that produce more

Prosperity so this is why if you have if you think of competition among societies on the world societies that happen to

settle upon more or more locky and type private property rules

are going to be more prosperous than other areas or regions which don’t because they’re going to be living hand

to mouth let me think of Africa versus Europe you know Africa is poor and Europe is is prosperous in the west is

prosperous and that’s primarily because of the differences in the way property rights are institutionally respected so

you can engage in longer term projects if you can’t count on the future that is if you live in a might makes right

society which basically means there’s no right there’s only might right um so the normative view means that we

have have a a built-in society-wide ethos where people tend to respect these

Norms even though they’re not self-enforcing we voluntarily abide by them now the few people that don’t are

regarded as Outlaws or criminals and are dealt with as as what Hoppa calls mere technical obstacles

um or mere technical problems but um that’s basically the way you look at it

yeah it seems to be um you know the law of sewing and reaping

comes to mind that this just lets us engage in more sewing and therefore more

future reaping and you know the West has really proven that economic law this the

economic success of the West I think has proven that property works right strong property rights allow

the society to become more wealthy than it could without them yeah and I think that I think that a

priori reasoning demonstrates that too we have to be a little bit careful we have to think of the west as an

illustration of that Opera reasoning that kind of deductive reasoning because

we have to be careful not to engage in the causation and correlation fallacy which is what some people do with intellectual property so they’ll say

that that um well the West has been prosperous and say America has been very

prosperous since 1800 roughly um and we had patent laws and and

copyright law since then so therefore they’re the cause of our prosperity um so we have to isolate these things I

think we can make a good case that our strong property rights have been a cause or at least a necessary component of our

prosperity but there are other things we’ve had continuously for the the life

of the country uh we’ve had uh we’ve had uh inflation we’ve had you know Central

inflation of the money we’ve had tariffs we’ve had Wars we’ve had taxation we had slavery for a long time

um we had discriminatory laws we we’ve had intellectual property we’ve had regulations all those things also

accompanied our growth but they’re not the cause of our growth I would say that our growth happened despite these things and would have been greater without

those things that’s a great point so I should say that the West’s illustrious

of yeah it illustrates uh it illustrates a rational Insight yeah not necessarily

approved but a good illustration that’s a good qualification there and so this

normative concept of property I think it really begins it or it’s the

human being relationship with nature in a lot of way right it’s like how how much

rather than how much when we go into the world and make productive use of these

scarce resources we establish this relationship called property and it begins really with our own

biology right and that’s where where Hopi goes next is into this kind of lockian view as property as an extension

of individual self-ownership um and I’ll read this a quick excerpt on that

copyrights as a matter of fact even if we were to assume that we lived in the Garden of Eden where there was a super

abundance of everything needed not only to sustain one’s one’s life but to indulge in every possible Comfort by

simply stretching out one’s hand the concept of property would necessarily have to evolve

for even under these quote unquote ideal circumstances every person’s physical body would still be a scarce resource

and thus the need for the establishment of property rules I.E rules regarding

people’s bodies would exist one is not used to thinking of One’s Own body in terms of a scarce good

but in Imagining the most ideal situation one could ever hope for the Garden of Eden it becomes possible to

realize that one’s body is indeed the Prototype of a scarce good

for the use of which property rights I.E rights of exclusive ownership somehow

have to be established in order to avoid clashes now this is one of those areas that I it

just seems so abundantly obvious to me the the reality of individual

self-ownership but when I’ve tried to use that as a justification for property it was like the foundational

the foundation of property as a normative concept I’ve had a lot of people argue with me they’re like no

you’re right you’re not individually cell phone right you’re this positive other influences and personalities and

how do you how do you deal with that is it do you take the lock-in view

um or well I take the hopian view which is which is a um based upon some of

Locke’s insights um this is an example of what Hopper is such a precise clear powerful writer but

in this one paragraph there’s a lot of things compressed and a lot of assumptions um

um so this this first of all this paragraph illustrates sort of the the problem or

the or the uh the problematic nature of some of these hypotheticals like for example in economics I think rothbard

and mises used this idea of the evenly rotating economy now that is actually an impossible situation but they’re trying

to mentally isolate aspects of reality to help us focus on certain phenomena right like

interest or time preference or uncertainty or the or the the role of money like you wouldn’t need money in an

evenly rotated economy because you would know everything so that kind of right although the the examples always break

down if you take them seriously because they’re they’re literally impossible so it’s just like if you have a math

equation and you you accidentally introduce a zero in the denominator like

there’s x minus y and they happen to be the same it’s a zero you can get any result possible and you might you might

get weird results because you don’t realize you made that mistake and the same thing is true um if with these exam samples now the

same thing is true here Hapa takes it halfway see says imagine the Garden of Eden where the super abundance of

external resources now super abundance basically means we’re basically like little mini gods or

something but he he says we still have physical bodies so he’s imagining we still have physical bodies because if you took the example all the way to this

ghostly realm of like Where Angels or Spirits like ghosts that kind of flow through each other we can’t so we don’t

have any needs we’re actually each omnipotent we I have we have all the needs and it wants fulfilled and we

literally can’t interfere with each other because we’re like ghostly bodies then we’re not even talking about the real universe so he keeps one aspect of

it he keeps the fact that we have bodies just to show that even if you ignore the

problem of scarcity in the world of of external resources and needs if if we

still like identify ourselves as having human bodies you can still have fights over that and you would still need property rules there so what he’s trying

to do is trying to show that number one your body is a type of property or a resource that you need property rights

for and number one is the Prototype because you you really can’t imagine a way the physical physicality of your

body and still have a realistic example you could imagine away everything else but not your body so this is why number

one you have to have property rights in your body which some people call self-ownership and you and this is the

Prototype which means that the same reason that you need property rights in your body is why when you relax these

constraints and say okay but the real world does have scarce resources out there that we need to use then then you

also need property rules in those things too so first we establish self ownership and then we establish ownership

of the self-owning agents in external resources so in that loose way of

putting it or that General way putting it there’s a parallel to what lock says Locke says we’re self-owners

and therefore we can own things that we appropriate his argument is a little bit flawed and let me say one other thing

one criticism some Libertarians make of the self-ownership idea I don’t know which one you’re referring to that

you’ve heard but one criticism is that they’re leery of a type of dualism or

mysticism that they believe is inherent in the idea of self-ownership like they think that if you if you’re a self-owner

then yourself must be something different than your body like a soul or a spirit like so they’re imagining this

metaphysical dualism so they think that self-ownership implies a religious perspective but it doesn’t at all as

Roderick long points out as I pointed out um the the precise way to put it is body

ownership as Hapa emphasizes here so your body is a scarce resource now

legally and juristically uh we and economically we have a concept

of the person or the agent or the actor we call like you are you but you have a

body which means that um your body is one concept referring to your corporeal body but you as your

personality now uh atheists think that that this is buying into some religious

mysticism to point this out but it’s not simply conceptual distinction it’s like saying that conceptually there’s a

distinction between your mind and your body and your brain it doesn’t mean there’s no connection it

doesn’t mean that there’s a spiritual mind it just means that the concept of mind is different than the brain and that’s easy to see because

you know if there’s a dead person on the ground they that body has a brain but it doesn’t have a mind anymore right so

these are just different concepts you can change your mind but you can’t change your brain you know what I mean your brain has a weight but your mind

doesn’t have a weight for example they’re just simply different concepts um and they’re related

um and likewise your personality what some people call your soul but what we don’t have to we could just say your

person your agency uh your identity as a person or as an actor is distinct from

your body although they’re definitely related because you can’t be an actor without a body because your body is how

you interact with the world um so these are just different concepts um so one objection to self-ownership is

that it’s religious that Leland Yeager made this objection to me and I’m an atheist too so he doesn’t know what he’s talking about I mean when I say

self-ownership I simply mean body ownership and all I mean by that is you have a scarce resource in your body and

someone has a better claim to it than someone else and either that’s me or it’s someone else so the choice is

really between lawlessness and chaos and and and and and the the war of all

against all or slavery or self-ownership and Libertarians simply prefer

self-ownership that means I am the one that has the right to decide who gets to use my body if you have a woman for

example Sharon and she has a body then the question arises who gets to decide who

can have sex with that body and our answer is Libertarians is Sharon we don’t have to decide metaphysical

questions about our religious questions about whether Sharon is a soul or not it doesn’t matter we can identify her as a

person and Sharon is the person in control of her body and she’s the one who has the right to decide who can have

sex with it right any other answer is either slavery or lawlessness

no brilliantly brilliantly put [Music] um yeah the the imaginary constructions you

know they’re very useful but it seems to be something that critics of libertarianism try to zero in on and

attack right that we’re living in some type of theoretical World versus

as you said the evenly rotating economy could never exist it’s a world of essentially no uncertainty right so the

need for money goes away you can always match your your inflows and outflows so you never need liquidity basically right

and um the so then what property it’s

interesting because you get this okay so there’s this very fundamental pre-legalistic property right which is

just your the relationship of your agency to your body and then

essentially the property that relationships we establish in the world with scarce resources are almost like an

extension of that right you’re just extending your self-ownership into nature like you know because the

appropriating or trading with others to acquire and yeah this is why I think the

word property tended to get the uh the connotations that it has now where people use the word property to refer to

the thing that you have a property right in wherein if you want to be precise in a legalistic or juristic sense

um if there’s a scarce resource out there let’s call it X you know um

a microphone I’m looking at a microphone now so there’s a microphone here right okay so here’s a microphone and

um people say I I own that so can Stephon and seller owns this microphone so they say it’s my property well the

technically correct way to say is I have a property right in the microphone so the microphone is a scarce resource in

which I own or have a property right in but because we human beings have naked

bodies when we’re born into the world and we are literally it’s impossible to act without interfering uh interfacing

with the world because we’re not like floating in our space like you know the Hulk or something just floating for

years we’re touching the ground we’re breathing the air we have electromagnetic radiation coming off of

us and gravitational waves and you know we’re all connected in fact that’s what I think it means

what I think the word exists I think to exist means to have an effect on other things so not to be mystical but

everything in the in the universe is connected to everything else right so when people posit these theories about what if there’s a parallel universe or

what if there’s um another realm that doesn’t affect us well then I think it literally does not

exist because if it can’t affect you then it doesn’t exist because that’s what it means to exist

um but um in any case when we act we always act in accordance with the laws

of cause and effect because we’re trying to intervene in the course of Affairs to causally manipulate things to change the

course of events and we use our bodies by directly controlling it like our hands and our feet and our mouths and

our heads um and we grapple with things that matter in the universe to get these

things done you know we stand on certain ground we pick up a piece of wood we pick up a fruit and eat it you know we

do things like this um so this use of these things is

unavoidably part of what action is so over time we accumulate what you can

call tools or means like like clothing or a spear and they become extensions of ourselves

because we have to that’s how we extend our influence into the worlds so it becomes a property of ourselves like as

part of our characteristic or part of our feature like like I identify that guy as you know for for the guy with the

hat with the horns on it like so that hat is an external resource that’s part of his identity or nature or features or

characteristics or part of his properties so over time we we slip from saying I

have a propriety in that resource or a property right in that resource by the way proprietor is an owner right so to

have a proprietary interest means you have a better claim to something than someone else so you see it’s always a

relational thing about who owns it now you did say something earlier that slightly uh no uh not to criticize you

but slightly imprecise like it’s not merely acting in the world um and using things that gives rise to

property because that’s only in society so Crusoe alone on this island

um only if this is only true if you think of the word property in the two senses that some economists do property in the

sense of um um an actual fact or ability to control and property in the sense of property

rights now mises distinguishes this and and so in socialism and in some other writings by saying that there’s

sociological ownership I think you call it a sociological ownership and catalactic or economic ownership

um but uh and then in another later writer he calls sociological ownership he calls uh I think he calls it juristic

no I I’m sorry I’m getting confused in an earlier writing he distinguished sociological versus juristic ownership

that is legal that’s the right to own something versus possession of it which he calls sociological and in later works

he used the word catalactic which means economic instead of Sociology because I think he realized I think maybe he

wanted to use the word sociology for economics but it was already taken so uh something like that but the point is

if we were going to be precise we should say possession or the fact of dominion or control as the factual matter and

ownership should be reserved to the juristic or the normative concept so Crusoe on its island has factual control

of things he can you know make a fishing net he can eat the coconuts and things like that but he doesn’t own them in the

juristic sense because there’s no other people around that he could have a conflict with we don’t need a norm I mean who’s the normal one to apply to

that’s not to say that he doesn’t have certain morals or rules he follows himself to try to better his own life

um you you know you could argue that um some Libertarians get so afraid of

exporting their their their their their strict view that not everything that’s

immoral should be illegal okay which I agree with that they’re afraid to say anything is a

moral uh that’s not illegal like objectively which means that if Crusoe

is alone on an island there is nothing there’s no illegality there’s no crime so there could be nothing that’s immoral

now that’s not the iron Rand do it’s not my view I think it is immoral to be too lazy and to let you you know let your

life Decay on this island uh because it’s bad for your life as a human being but that’s my own personal ethical view

but saying something is immoral doesn’t mean that it’s illegal right so it’s okay to say that but anyway the point is

property emerges with the combination of the fact of scarcity when people are in society which is

pretty much always the case so that’s why property rights emerged yeah it makes a lot of sense and then

you know even to exist at all right we exist within space within time

and to exist within time is the same thing as saying you’re finite right there’s nothing

or there’s no one at least that’s in time wait wait unpack that because I I

well I’m just thinking that time itself sort of implies scarcity and this segues

into one of his next quotes is um you know our bodies and our lifetimes are scarce right there’s

or they’re inherently fine I I guess maybe it’s an assumption or presumption to say they’re scarce because I would

assume people wanted I think I think it’s actually I think there’s some commonality between the fact that we

have finite a finite a limited amount of time on the earth um there’s some analogy to that and

scarcity but I don’t think it’s really the same thing this is why in some of my writing I’ve tried to like replace the concept of scarcity uh with what I call

conflictability now the reason is because uh which is almost the same as the economic concept of rival

rivallessness the reason is because the word scarcity can is ambiguous and which

is implied by hapa’s use of the word super abundance super abundance is distinct from abundance abundance means

there’s a like there’s a lot of bananas out there there’s so many bananas that they’re a penny a piece let’s say right

but a super abundance means there’s so many that there’s like literally it’s impossible to take it again it’s an

impossible construct to imagine but that actually is is the case for ideas and information information is super

abundant because you can’t diminish the supply of someone’s uh possession of of

knowledge by you having a duplicate copy of it so that is an example of super abundance but um

um but but I don’t I mean here’s my here’s

my way of looking at Hop is written on this by the way in other places on something called protophysics you know the idea that we can use a priori and

deductive reasoning to talk about basic concepts of even physics that are the

foundation of physics not to be proved by experiments okay and so I would say that it’s like Opera true that we have

to conceive of ourselves as operating in three-dimensional space you know um and when physicists and Space Cadets

as Rock Bar might call them and mathematicians say old times the other dimension and there’s there’s like 11 other dimensions curled up into I think

it’s all nonsense in a physical sense I don’t think time is a dimension time is a concept that we have that has arisen

because we observe what we observe observing implies that things change things change so time is

just the concept that comes along with our recognition of the fact that things change in fact action implies this

because action means we we’re in a present moment and we see something is coming that means the current state of

affairs is going to change and so change happens and it it it it it it it it it our priority happens because

of whatever the laws of cause causality are in the universe uh we don’t know what they are exactly

we have some guests and we developed that over time with the scientific method and with the experience an observation right but the point is

um so time is just the fact of things changing so but we have good reason as a

factual con uh contingent empirical matter to believe that uh our lives our

lifespan is finite right you could say it’s scarce because oh there’s a certain number of minutes and you need time to

do things so you have a certain bucket of minutes in your life to get things done so that’s scarce and that affects how you plan and how you live your life

that’s all true but it’s not scarcity in the sense of conflictability because you can’t have a conflict over time now

people overuse metaphors and they’ll say something well if you enslave someone or if you tax them you’re stealing their

time okay that’s not literally true you’re not literally stealing their time

um because that’s just a metaphor right it’s just a way to express the outrage and the consequences of aggression in

certain cases uh like if you enslave someone for 10 years then there’s 10 years that they ten years they had to

spend in prison instead of getting something productive done with their life but it doesn’t mean you stole their time and in the sense of like there’s a

substance that you took it from them and now you have it you can spend it you know so I think we need to be careful with these terms so anyway we’ll go

ahead so let me double click on that actually when when someone uh is the victim of

Taxation or inflation let’s say or just keep it in the realm of Taxation I guess

they’re the fruits of their labor are being stolen right their property rights

are being violated so would you say that it is proper to say the fruits of their labor are being

stolen but not their labor is being stolen well so I would say it’s a metaphor upon

metaphor so the fruits of your labor is a metaphorical way to describe okay so economically this fruits of your labor

idea is the idea that if you work hard and to transform a resource that you

have a a claim over like ownership of then if you have luck and you have good

planning and then you might make a profit right so you know if you plant a field they plant

a garden and you reap then you you uh you you get

the uh the crops a year later and it works out as you planned then

your your labor was was used by you to to produce a

profit right so and you know if it’s a tree or or a plant that produces fruits

we call that fruits that means so like even the law there’s something called civil fruit so like if you if you loan

someone money and you get interest we call that civil fruits or if the cow if you own a cow and it has a calf we call

that a fruit so it’s just the result of your actions now this leads to the concept if you’re not careful this can

lead to the marxian labor concept that if you if you do any effort at all you’re entitled to a prophet right of

course you’re not this idea behind an intellectual property like well I I worked on this idea I should get a profit I mean just like in physics work

is moving a force through a distance if you push on a wall you expend effort but

you don’t get anything done you’re not you’re not working you’re not producing any work right you have to actually accomplish something and the same thing

in the market you know if you can work hard on idea your business Google bankrupt you don’t make any profit so working hard doesn’t guarantee it it’s

just that sometimes there is a fruit of your labor right that’s why you labor trying to make a profit so

I would say uh when when people say like uh inflation is

theft it’s it’s not literally theft but it’s not literally theft because

um uh taxation is theft because the government coerces you into turning over some of your own resources like the

government says you just got 10 pieces of silver for that trade you must give us one of

those or we’re going to put you in prison so they that’s a way of extorting or coercing you to hand over one of your

pieces of silver which you own so that’s theft okay theft by coercion there can always also be theft by

stealth theft by other men but it’s a type of theft now inflation is similar because when the government prints money

they reduce the purchasing power of your existing money

but the reason it’s analogous is because there is still an act of coercion or aggression in the government

monopolizing the monetary system in the first place right so they wouldn’t be able to do this unless they have

monopolized the money and that required coercion as well like they had to pass a law saying uh the dollar is legal tender

and it’s illegal to own gold and uh or gold is taxed but our legal tender is

not taxed so they do these things that are all rights violations and the way any system any any theory of Justice

works is um when we identify an active aggression then at that point you can take the

consequences into account in assessing damages right this is called consequential damages in the law this is

why people say that um they try to justify intellectual property by saying well Stefan if you

have a stack of paper in your house and someone breaks into your house and

steals the paper and is blank paper but if someone breaks into your house and steals a stack of paper that has

your unpublished novel written on it right then the damages would be

different which implies intellectual property because they’re stealing something like they must have stolen something you

owned right but it’s like no it’s not that way at all it’s just that the fact of the act of trespass you the damage is

owed is is the consequences of the action so for example in the law there’s always been What’s called the eggshell

skull Doctrine which is if you walk up to some innocent victim on the street and you you slap them on the head

okay a normal person would get annoyed and they might sue you and they might get a thousand dollars damages for this

assault and battery on your skull but it wouldn’t be the death penalty because they just slapped you on the

head but if you slap someone on the head who has a rare condition of an eggshell skull we call it someone who has got a

like like a soft head and you actually kill them then you’re you’re guilty of murder in both cases the physicalist or

behaviorist description of the action is the same you just kind of slap them on the head but in one case you kill them

in one case you didn’t so it’s not the victim’s fault for having a thin skull so it’s the aggressor’s fault for doing

what they did and if what they did happened to cause worse consequences in a given case then they’re liable for

more damages so in one case they might be liable for a thousand dollars in another case for three million dollars okay

the same thing if I steal your blank blank stack of paper I might owe you a thousand dollars damages for trespassing

invading your home but if I take your novel and publish it and I I reduce your

opportunity to make a million dollars by first releasing your book then I’m guilty I might I might owe you a million

dollars because the consequences of my Act of aggression are different so just because there’s a difference in the

paper that I stole doesn’t mean that there’s intellectual property now I’d like to tell you about a great new

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where you can find the promo code for 99 a month for six months that’s funny inflation is not theft I

often say inflation is theft for that very reason you gave that but so the inflation example so the theft is or the

aggression is so theft is just a type of aggression the aggression with inflation is the government monopolizes the

central bank system that lets them create an effect that’s similar to

um um similar to actual theft I mean like it’s just from the government’s point of

view they’re a criminal they don’t care where they commit their aggression if there’s physical hard money like gold

and silver then when the king forces you to turn some of it in that’s actually theft or if they clip the coins that’s

theft right if they switch to a digital Fiat system like we have now

then they can just print it and do the same thing economically to you but the

the aggression is not in the printing the aggression is in the laws that prevent you from escaping that system

the monopolization the monopolization yeah so but but but just as in the IP

case there can be greater damages from stealing a valuable piece of matter as opposed to a a blank sheet of paper

um when the government commits that type of aggression it’s just like if the government monopolized the money system

they have a sound money system there’s almost no damages like if they didn’t inflate at all but if they inflate now

they’re causing damages to the people which you could and I so there’s no problem with calling it theft because as

long as you keep in mind that the theft is back in the chain of causation a little bit earlier right or it’s really

a different type of aggression but it’s still the same effect as theft and so you could measure it the same way

yeah no that’s a great point and then when I do Define it because obviously

inflation is a nebulous term too so always Define inflation as the arbitrary expansion of a fiat currency Supply

under the protection of illegal Monopoly right so that whole it’s not just I mean it’s not just arbitrary I mean if you

want to be technical inflation is inflation of the money supply it’s not arbitrary it’s just any expansion of the

money supply is inflationary which means that even in a private Society where there’s gold and gold is

bind my personal view is when gold is mine that’s inflationary okay but the difference is there’s costs

to mining the gold there’s not cost to well that’s one difference the other difference is there’s no coercion like there’s no one’s forcing people to

accept this gold standard they’re doing it because it’s the best thing available right until Bitcoin came along right right right right so I I think I my

personal view is uh uh you know when people say Bitcoin um unlike gold Bitcoin doesn’t have any

intrinsic value and there’s nothing backing up your money it’s like well first of all there’s nothing backing up any money because even if gold is money

it’s got a monetary premium probably 10 times the the the non-monetary value of

the gold so if if whatever you’re using is money stops being used as money you’re gonna lose nine you know 90 of

your savings anyway right so there it’s it’s literally impossible to have a

money that is backed by anything because whatever’s money is always going to have monetary premium and that monetary premium could evaporate if it stops

being used as money um but anything that does have a non-monetary use is imperfect is money

because I mean still might be better than having no money like right having gold even though it’s imperfect is better than

having a barn of society obviously but it’d be the ideal money would be one that has no non-monetary use because

when you have gold then you’re wasting resources getting gold just for monetary use you’re

diverting the the ornamental and the uh industrial uses of gold into money

um right and uh also it causes I think when there’s when the new new gold is

mined it leads to a redistribution of wealth and it leads to inflation

price inflation yeah relative price inflation um no that’s a small cost small price is

worth paying to have to avoid a barter system but if we can have one that doesn’t have that which is what Bitcoin

is and that’s why it’s even better in my in my view yeah I agreed I’ve often called Bitcoin

the first pure money all right everything else has been impure to the extent that it’s used for industrial or

ornamental purposes yeah it’s a 100 monetary premium instead of 90 monetary premium exactly so to continue here on

Hobby’s Garden of Eden analogy he writes even in the Garden of Eden Eden I could

not simultaneously eat an apple smoke a cigarette have a drink climb up a tree read a book build a house play with my

cat drive a car Etc I would have to make choices and could do things only sequentially

and this would be so because there is only one body that I can use to do these things and enjoy the satisfaction

derived from doing them I do not have a super abundance of bodies which would allow me to enjoy all

possible satisfaction simultaneously in one single Bliss and I would be restrained by scarcity in

another respect as well as long as this scarce resource the body is not

indestructible and is not equipped with eternal health and energy but rather as an organism with only a

limited lifespan time is scarce too the time used up in pursuing goal a reduces

the time left to pursue other goals and the longer it takes to reach a desired result the higher the costs involved in

Waiting will be and the higher the expected satisfaction must be in order to justify the cost

so there’s I mean there’s just no way out of

again I don’t know if scarcity is the right term maybe that’s a little bit muddy but maybe uh what’s the one you

said conflictability there’s an inherent conflictability I guess just by existing

as a human being right you we live in time pursuing golay diverts

from pursuing goal B you’ve got to prioritize and that’s that prioritization is action in a way right

whatever you’re doing in a moment you’re doing at the exclusion of all other things you could be doing right you’re incurring those opportunity costs yeah

and I think he’s also kind of explaining time preference here which is almost uh

um um implied by the fact of action because you can only act in the present so

whatever you do you’re always preferring something now as opposed to the Future so it’s it’s implied by the fact of

action but notice that so like when he makes this kind of a Fantastical uh Assumption of a Garden of Eden he’s

assuming away all scarcity except for your body because if he assumes that away then we’re we’re not even humans

anymore we’re just some kind of weird mini Gods living in our own you know solipsistic realm or something like it

just doesn’t have any relevance to us at all but the the fact that he retains scarcity of your body in his in his

Fantastical example is a way of highlighting one thing that some Libertarians Miss which is

they believe that um just because your human body is a

prototype of ownership of scarce resources that that means that we own ourselves because of homesteading as

well in other words the reason you own an unknown resource in the world because it was unknown and

you appropriated or you first used it or you you homesteaded it as lock says and they think that well then you you own if

you own yourself it’s because you homesteaded yourself but that doesn’t make any sense the concept of homesteading requires her to be an actor

like so there has to be an actor or an agent in the world who’s roving around the world finding unknown things and

then taking them to himself and becoming the owner of those things but the First Act of appropriation can’t be owning

your body because there wouldn’t be an actor to do that which is exactly why Hapa here doesn’t imagine a way the

scarcity of your body like to keep the concept of ourselves as actors we have to assume a human body with physical

features but if you own that it can’t be because you homesteaded it because there’s no there’s no actor before that

to Homestead it unless you go mystical and you assume that you know there’s a God up in heaven with souls and he

he puts a soul into a body in soulment or whatever but you know that’s not

libertarianism that’s that’s that’s religion and metaphysics um we have to we have to have a

different grounding for that now lock this where I would differ for lock okay and I think we’re hopping differs from

luck so hapa’s View and he spells us out by the way not in this book but in an earlier writing which was in German

which he translated for me when I was talking to him about it and I put it in my article how we come to own ourselves

it’s implicit in what he wrote here but he didn’t spell it out but basically um he does speak of homesteading of

external resources things that were unowned but he never says you own your body because you Homestead it it’s but

it’s it’s rather because you have direct control of your body so if you go back a

level of description the basis of of libertarian property

rights is that we identify a scarce resource and then we identify which

human agent or actor has the better claim to it so that’s the ultimate thing

who has the better link or the better claim to a thing now in the cases of external objects that were previously

unowned the better link has to be the first user the reason is because purse

use has to be possible otherwise we wouldn’t be alive so first use has to be possible and unless a second guy can

come along and take it from you in which case you don’t have any property rules because property means the current owner

owns it until he gives it away right so it’s like a mises money regression theorem idea with property if you

believe that people have to be able to use unknown things in the first case and in property rights then obviously first

use is a core property principle for things that were previously unowned that is the best Link in that case but

in the case of your body the best link is not your first use of your body because you didn’t exist without your

body you’re part of your body your the best link is your direct control over your body the fact that you can directly

control it um now in a sense when you wake up as a baby or a child and you start asserting

your will over your body you could say that’s the first use of your body but it’s still not like you’re you’re home

studying an unowned body because before you owned your body it was a piece of matter that someone else owned like your

mother or your dad right so whenever you believe rights start happening whether it’s in the fetus stage or the baby

stage or whatever before that it’s it’s owned by the mother for the family and after that it’s owned

by the person who directly controls it yeah that makes a lot of sense

um I wonder if that is perhaps another useful way to conceptualize property as as control

over an asset or because that’s what it’s ultimately about is the connection between the individual agency and the

actual scarce resource there isn’t there is an element of control so in in the case of your body

it’s your direct control so that gives you that gives you an unavoidable an undeniable link to it which so in the

whisper hapa’s argumentation I think comes into play he says that like when we justify rights you have to imagine say two or more people engaged in a

dialogue or a discourse about okay what rules should we have and if the first rule that comes up is okay who owns our

bodies well each person making the argument for ownership of our bodies is already presupposing well he’s already

controlling his own body right and he’s definitely claimed right to his own body because he doesn’t want he might he

might say he owns you but he also says he owns himself but for whatever grounds he gets for owning his own body he’s got

a grant that you have the same basis because you’re similarly situated so whatever it is about him and so what it

is about him is he has a direct control of his body so he’s basically by claiming a right in him in his own self

he’s conceding that other actors also have right to their own bodies because they are their bodies and they control

their bodies so it’s all interlinked together right so that’s the core of it now

as a matter of pure economics and crucial on his Island we need to control other things in the world right so

controls and that’s what we call I would distinguish that I would call that possession right just uh the fact of

control uh over a thing but again when there’s other people around this fact of

control and this need to control gives rise to the possibility of conflict because of the nature of these things

they could be they could be thought over by more than one person at a time so then we seek Norms that say okay there’s

a thing that could be used by many people Well it can’t be used by many people once but many people could seek to use it but that’s going to be

wasteful and violent so we’re going to assign it to one person so obviously

it’s got to be the person that has the best link to it and that’s the first person who controlled it you could say

which is one appropriation or homesteading is the person who controlled it and then that person has

the right by consent by contractual consent to consensually transfer it to another person that that’s how someone

can come to own something so you basically can come to own things only two ways

um you’re the first person to start using an unknown thing or you get the own thing from from the existing owner

that’s that’s very simple right through consensual exchange to contract that’s

what contractor contract yes and so does this then highlight the relationship of

defensibility and property because if you I think if you get really darwinian about it it’s ultimately it’s only yours

to the extent that you can defend it and I think that’s yeah I think the statements like that that’s that’s a

mixture of practicality and economics on the one hand and and Norms on the other so if you’re not careful so it’s true I

think basically but if you’re not careful with that then you start thinking it might makes right right and you start thinking well

there’s lots of property that’s owned now that has a tarnish on its title from 700 years ago so basically it’s all my

makes right or something like that that’s a confusion which we can clear up with property Theory but um

I think I think with what the what the core of the inside is is that

um well first of all rights are not self-enforcing so just because you have a normatively

justifiable property right and something doesn’t mean that it’s impossible literally possible for someone to to

violate that right and the rights can be violated they’re normative they’re not laws of they’re not physical causal laws

like you can’t violate the law of gravity you can’t violate the law Second Law affirmative Dynamics or whatever

right but even if you disagree with it it’s going to operate no matter what but

God’s not out there making everyone live up by the Golden Rule right people can violate rights

um and this is one thing that that kind of simple-minded legal positivist and

Skeptics point to as I say haha what good your rights do I can just shoot you it’s like yeah okay you can violate my

rights but I never claim my rights are self-enforcing anyway so saying that rights are property is only

so good as you can protect it it’s true in a practical sense because they’re not self-enforcing so sometimes you have to

engage in reasonable measures like you know put a lock on your door or or or or or you know higher hire a protection

company or or live in a society where everyone respects this and there’s a police force or you know a private

police force or whatever um or or have you know have some guns on

yourself you know protect protect yourself so uh that’s that’s one that’s

one um uh aspect of what that kind of expression means

the other one is recognizing the fact that it’s possible to lose your rights over time

um and also the fact that you don’t have to trace title back to a pristine source to

have a legitimate property right what that means is you don’t have to trace your title back to Adam the hypothetical

atom um so some people say well kinsella obviously you don’t believe in your property responsible is because uh

there’s where I said that the only two things you need is first ownership and contractual title transfer

the the problem is they take that to go they say that implies that if you go

backwards you can only have good property if you can trace it all the way back to that original active

homesteading and there was no Act of crime in between that’s actually just not true these rules establish a

presumption right and they help us settle because any property dispute in

the real world is always between two existing present living actors who claim

a given existing resource so as between them the question is always which one of

you has the better claim so what they typically do instead of going through the trouble of going all the way back to

Adam whatever that is you know the state of Louisiana being founded or America being founded or the Magna Carta or what

where whatever you want to do or back to at literal Guardian Adam and Eve whatever um what you as a matter of economy what

we do is we in the law we trace it back to what’s called a common author which means a common owner so so if a and b

both want a piece of property now but they both admit that it was owned by

C say 300 years ago they both admit that c owned it it doesn’t matter that whether C himself was a thief it doesn’t

matter whether C got it from D and D got it from e and e was a thief it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter if there’s like

a long lost F out there who was dispossessed and his errors are all gone it doesn’t matter all that matters is a

and b have the two best claims to this property and they both agree that c owned it so then so then you only have

to trace title back from C so then you see well who did C die and live it to who did and if if C left it to this air

but then C had a contract five years later giving it to to someone else that that b claims it from well then the law

has a set of rules that say okay well no well then your claim is bad and yours is good this is the way it works

um and so because they both have Clean Hands we call it but they’re both innocent they’re not thieves with

respect to anyone else um and so a has a better claim against B and A and B together have a better claim

against the rest of the world because they create you back to C and no one else can come forward that says a better claim so for all practical

purposes no one else can defeat their claim so they are the owners because ownership means having the right to use

a resource having the right means no one else has a better claim and if there’s no one else there’s just no one else

now what this does imply in my view some Libertarians would disagree with this

if someone can come forward today in 2022 America or the world and they can

show that they have a better claim to an existing resource like let’s say for example I live on a plantation in

Louisiana which I inherited from my from my father he got it from his father and ultimately it was a slave owner that

owned that Plantation and let’s say there was one family of slaves that were kept enslaved by my great

great grandfather and they’re still alive and they could have a clear chain

of title back to what their ancestors were owed in restitution for the crime

of slaver of being enslaved I would say in those cases if they can make out the claim they should be able

to take the plantation away from me right but in that case we’re still there’s

still principles the same we’re not tracing it back to Adam we’re tracing it back to my great great grandfather we’re

saying my great-grandfather lost title of it because he committed a tort against these these innocent black

people right so he owes them these slaves right um no some people think that that kind

of rule was I mean maybe we have to give Manhattan back to the Indians or maybe uh uh you know uh whatever well

if we had a just Society where we were actually honoring these kinds of claims on occasion which would be really rare

by the way because the older Acclaim gets the harder it is to prove it because the evidence is lost

Witnesses are all dead so the problems of vanishingly small problem which is the reason why things like the statute

of limitations arose just practically recognizing the fact that after a certain amount of time it’s just unfair

to um subject someone to a lawsuit that someone should have brought earlier

because if you wait too long it makes it unfair for the guy being sued because he can’t defend himself anymore because all

the witnesses are dead no in the case of slavery it’s not their fault that they didn’t ring the suit they weren’t allowed to so sometimes we told the

statute of limitations or we told what’s called latches so things like this come into play and they’re all reasonable but

in my view if this was a common Occurrence at all then you would have just title insurance that would cover it

you know like if I buy a Rolex from a Rolex store in the in in the shopping

mall there’s zero chance that it’s stolen because it’s an authorized Rolex dealer

but if I buy a Rolex for five thousand dollars when it’s normally 20 000 used on eBay there is a slight chance that

I’m buying stolen goods okay so what if the owner of the Rolex comes forward and he says hey you have

my grandfather’s Rolex which is stolen from him you’ve got to turn it over to me okay well then I would be out to five thousand dollars and the Rolex so if I’m

really worried about that I would just take out property title insurance and then if I took up property title insurance

like I’m buying the Rolex for five thousand I paid another 300 for property title insurance the insurer is going to

do a title check first to make sure they’re not going to pay out so they’re going to investigate right so these things would not be a real problem but

as as a as a I think as a technical matter um you you take these property rules and

you take them to wherever they lead you but my point is it doesn’t mean that that the fact of original sin you could

call it in most people’s real property titles today means that they don’t own it because remember when you have these

socialists say things like oh well you own this this Factory but it really came from I don’t know people that were

stolen from 700 years ago or something like that what what are they saying they’re saying

you don’t have a property in this Factory but we do so they’re claiming it for

themselves but what gives them a better claim to it than you who’ve been using it for Generations productively and

peacefully and you never commit an act of crime yourself so as between those two people who has a better claim you

can’t just get a better claimer with someone’s property by criticizing something wrong with their title chain

from Generations in the past that doesn’t give you a better claim to the property than they have

and you see I’m using the word property wrongly here the resource it’s hard it’s hard

well it’s yeah so we’re trying to I guess superimpose this normative

structure but if the further you go back in history obviously the muddier Things

become especially I mean human history is just a disaster in a lot of ways right

there’s been crime the the history of humanity is like kind of the history of crime they’re kind of

one in the same obviously not everything we do is Criminal but man it’s it’s pretty bleak

um and you mentioned here these Norms that were superimposing on our

relationships with ourselves and one another they’re not self-enforcing

is that the Genesis of the state then is to be the enforcer of these Norms is that

that’s that’s a good Insight it’s a good question I think in a sense it is because they’re not self-enforcing and because

what we call self-help I mean like being your own little kingdom I mean that’s possible to an extent for some people

you know you can have a big family on a farm and everyone’s got their guns and so people know to stay away but

um you know for for a large invading Force you can’t fight them all so people tend to band together and have Collective

defense so like yeah the king I think the small K King in a little Community a

little tribe a little region would tend to be the a guy people would turn to that was

wise preserve the traditions and the customs and would resolve disputes you know do civil things like conduct

marriages and but resolve disputes but also you know lead the tribe and they

would have Collective defense and so yeah you’re gonna give a little tribute to the guy which is like a proto-form of taxes and so of course over time that

gets corrupted so I do think that uh that may be part of the Genesis of of um

of proto-states and then which emerges in the states which really got to be problematic with democracy right in in

the early part of the the 20th century um you know even in a large monarchy

it’s going to have corruption inefficiencies and actual taxation not just tribute voluntarily paid

um but there’s as Hopper writes in his democracy book there’s lots of natural limits on what the Monarch can get away

with and lots of good things they do compared to the way democracies Now operate so once you have democracy then

the the state has metastasized into the modern State and um and it’s just all

bets are off then uh and there’s like almost no connection anymore between what the state does and what natural

Justice is where at least there’s some remnant connection when there’s a or there can be when there’s a monarch like

it’s possible to have a good Monarch right but it’s not possible to have a good Democratic state right and again

this is sort of back to property I think uh again drawing on Hoppe’s book

democracy The God That Failed the the Monarch has more skin in the game or has more of a capital interest in the tax

base versus a a democratically elected you know four or eight year guy right

because because in the monarchical and feudalistic systems um there’s like a hierarchy of ownership so the the the

king the state is the overlord they they’re the base owner of the entire country in a sense and then that

property is distributed to their Lords and their fiefdoms and you know and and the tenants down the road

um it’s very decentralized distributed uh mutually reinforcing uh but and the

king the king is there for life and then he can give it to his his heirs so uh so

he has a um an interest in preserving the value of so-called his kingdom or at least the

base ownership of his his kingdom um so you know he tends to think of long-term consequences when he enacts

policies whereas you know in the Democratic State the leaders the rulers

are in for four years or something like that so they’re trying to get as much as they can they they don’t care about the cost they impose to get it

yeah it’s a great point so I mean would it then be another way I describe the

importance of private property is that it’s foundational to civilization or perhaps more narrowly just social

organization um and as we’ll get into later in this book you know socialism is sort of

premised on obviating or or even eliminating private property so would

you agree with that that it’s as we’re describing it’s the monarchs property interest in the tax base it sort of

makes that work the state it seems like the Genesis of the state is related to the enforcement

of the Norms of property so I’m I’m drawing on iron Rand here where she says and I think Misa says this too right

private property is foundational to civilization you can’t really have one without the other I certainly I I mean I

think Society itself um presupposes a certain amount of voluntary respect for each other’s

rights and that’s because we’re a socialist PCS which means most normal people

um the way I crudely put it even mises talks about this is we have empathy for others which which simply means that

part of our value system is the well-being of other people I mean we’re all self-interested but because we’re

social social species it matters to most of us that are not sociopaths

um that other people the other people’s well-being matters to us too much baked

into that right because otherwise because there are social species and

because we we enjoy having our families and our living in the community with

others and we enjoy the division of labor and social intercourse with other people it’s all part of selfish it’s all

mixed together but it’s just part of who we are so most normal people that are not sociopaths

um have some empathy for others and that means that we have a certain amount of voluntary respect for other people’s

rights according to these natural natural property norms and if we didn’t have that we just wouldn’t exist as a

civilized species we would just be like animals basically you know with living hand to mouth all the time but we’re not

so apparently apparently we have a different nature than that um and if we’re if we’re lucky we have

enough of us to fight off the deviance Among Us you know the the five percent one percent

ten percent whatever it is the people who will cheat um look even if everyone was born an

angel if you had a perfectly docile pacifist Society where everyone respected everyone’s rights the

Temptation for that one worse Guy the one least good guy on the edge to cheat would be so immense because he could

just walk into everyone’s houses and steal their gold you know because they wouldn’t even have locks on their doors no one would know what locks were so I

think just economically there’s always going to tend to be some deviance some

outliers some Outlaws and so the the 90 remainder people always have to

recognize this possibility and they always need to be on the ready to stop it or to be so wealthy that they don’t

care which is what I suspect the future will be if we don’t kill ourselves I think we’ll have some kind of some kind

of near super abundant Society not super abundant but a post-scarcity society not even post scarcity but like hyper

abundance Super Rich yeah yeah Super Rich so that you know I mean no one has a need to steal and even if someone is

so poor even in a world where it’s easy to become rich people would just give them some stuff for free who cares you

know yeah have some bananas yeah that’s my that’s my kind of utopian dream for the future uh that that crime

will diminish because it won’t matter people won’t need to commit crime and no one will care

they all have so much stuff they I don’t know that’s my hope for the future yeah well it all comes down to the incentives

like you just said if everyone’s in this super docile Society the incentives to

be the one wolf in that exact pack of humans is really huge because you can

just reap a lot of gains but um I guess the other piece of that is like

again something like Bitcoin right it makes at least that form of property money itself really hard to steal really

unprofitable to to correct and not only that I think there’s been some really good essays I think keto Holzman has

written on this and there’s a guy named um uh Paul Cantor I think he recently died actually he was a music scholar

he’s got a great article on Paul Mann and hyperinflation about how our current

Fiat inflationary order has totally corrupted

um um Society everyone’s view about the future

their view about savings their view about um time preference their time preference

and if we were to have a sound money I think it would have dramatic uh implication and consequences for just

our character as a species it will reduce time preference it would make us have a completely different perspective

on spending and consumption leisure you know I mean I think you know I can

imagine a future where you know you get out of you get out of high school or college and get some productive job and you just

rent for eight years and then you saved up enough to just buy a house for cash like I can

imagine lending the whole concept of lending just disappearing yeah um and people just saving ahead of time and

using their savings for Investments or for purchases um I could see the whole concept of

loans just disappearing in a sound money world yeah it makes a lot of sense and exactly

what you just said Hoppe gets into later but I want to be respectful of your time today um so we’ll wrap it up here and and jump

back in soon so stop we can do a part three sure thank you so much appreciate

it Robert [Music]