KOL464 | Law, Rights and Hoppe | Tyrants’ Den Ep 4

um hello welcome to another episode The Tyrants Den uh today we have a very

special guest um I’d say he’s probably top five libertarian thinkers you know

to ever exist uh and and I’m quite excited for this uh so um Stefan Conell

welcome good day yeah good day um so

uh yeah so you’re a you’re a patent attorney uh so I’m just curious like

what’s it like being an anti-IP patent attorney like like do you do you file

patents or like and do that stuff uh well I I

did so I’m an attorney well I’m kind of retired attorney i’m not doing that much work anymore i’m basically retired um

here in Houston Texas um I was a practicing patent attorney for a good 30 years um starting around

1992 when I started practicing law um and yeah so most of my career I did

patent law or patent law as you guys call it um and I did the in the US you

can either do if you’re a patent specialist as opposed to other types of IP like trademarks or copyrights um the

patent law specialists tend to have technical degrees like me engineering backgrounds and we you either tend to do

litigation uh or you do what we call patent prosecution which means you you you you

prepare patent applications for clients and you file them with the patent office and that’s mostly what I did i um I with

for my clients I would interview their their engineers their inventors and understand their invention and file it

as a patent so I did uh the work of filing US and international patents uh

for corporate clients um usually in electro electronics or laser technology

opto electronics that kinds of thing so I did that for for most of my career and at the same time um around the time that

I passed the patent bar in 1994 I was I was already a libertarian

but I I was I had never thought much about intellectual property until I started specializing in it as an

attorney and I decided as a libertarian writer to turn my attention to the IP

issue myself um and I looked into it for a long time and tried to come up with

good arguments for IP what we call IP or intellectual property because all the arguments I had heard were not good um

so I thought I would I would come up with my own since I knew something about the the area and I concluded around the

time I passed the patent bar that the entire system should be abolished so the entire time I was practicing IP law I

believe that the system should be abolished um um just like if I was a drug attorney or as a defense attorney

representing clients um accused of drug crimes by the state as a libertarian I

would want those laws to be abolished but I in the meantime I would still think my services were necessary to help

people being you know attacked by the state um and so likewise as an attorney

we have a patent system and so companies need to have patents to defend themselves or to use them aggressively

uh which I don’t support and I tried not to do that in my career i tried not to defend people using their patents um

aggressively but because I wasn’t really an a litigator anyway i didn’t really file lawsuits i I helped defend lawsuit

i helped uh in lawsuit support but usually or almost always actually always

in my case it was on the defendant side defending them against a patent uh lawsuit so uh luckily I was able to

maneuver my career so that I never did anything um that distasteful ethically for me um I I only obtained patents for

companies and how they use them is up to them if they use them to sue someone um I didn’t help them do that um but I

viewed my job as more like a providing guns to people and they could use them

for good purposes like for defending themselves or they can use them for evil purposes and how they used it was um not

up to me now I will say that over time I I grew to dis to not like as much the

patent law practice partly because of that um but I did it anyway because it

was a good living yeah yeah well from watching your videos

you do seem like you live in a nice home so um so yeah so what what initially got

you interested in law i was an I was an engineer because I

like technology but um it wasn’t enough for me personally uh because I was interested in economics and political

thinking and all that so I went to law school um to sort of get that other side

of my brain activated you know verbal reasoning and and analytical thinking other than mathematical stuff which is

what engineers do and also I had the feeling like I would be good at it and um I could make more money at it uh than

as an engineer and also um I just thought I would be happier doing it and I I think I was right i I I I enjoyed

being a lawyer and um I like the legal and it it’s helped and so the whole time I was doing law I also had this side

hobby of libertarian theorizing so I would be writing legal stuff for my job

but also publishing because that’s part of what you do as an attorney to get um to get business and to get your name out

there so I wrote legal things um I I intellectual property law or international law or oil and gas law

which I did at first but I also was writing um legal philosophy and these things which no one in my legal life

knew much about my clients didn’t know about it they didn’t care um I I did think that when I started publishing on

IP as a libertarian like writing writing against it I was a little bit more concerned that my my partners at my law

firm or my clients would find out and they would be upset with me so I I kind of toned it down a little bit like I I

published articles saying “Are we really sure that patents are a good idea?” Um but over time I realized that no one

cares no one cares what your personal political views are and in fact the few clients that found out about it and

lawyers they were kind of impressed by it because they assumed that I must know something about IP law if I’m um able to

write about it from like in a legal theory and political philosophy way they didn’t really care what my conclusions were it just sort of it made them

believe that I was competent um so it it wasn’t a problem in fact I got some clients a few times in my career i would

go to the Mises Institute in Auburn and give speeches on IP law or I mean on intellectual property theory or on other

topics and libertarian topics and on occasion someone would say “Hey you seem like you’re a good patent attorney i

know you’re against the system but would you help me get a patent?” You know they weren’t upset by the fact that I was

against it they knew I would do a good job helping them get a patent so I sort of had these both careers at at the same

time in the last 10 10 or 15 years I I reduced my legal practice down to zero essentially and at the same time I was

able to spend more time writing on purely libertarian topics which is pretty much what I do now full-time

right and so watching and from reading your stuff right it’s really g me like a

much deeper insight of law right it’s like taught me stuff about like common law Roman law and then natural law and

then like I I I really like I really had no idea what like common law was like

prior to you right and so like it’s just so do you mind explaining that yeah and

this another area I was fortunate so I think I was in a ways fortunate um because of my intellectual and writing

and libertarian interests i was a little bit fortunate that I had the engineering background but then the legal background

but I also went to law school in Louisiana um um which is the only state

in the US which is a which is a civil law state not a common law state all the other 49 states are common law which

Australia is to and all the other Commonwealth countries and England as well um and um because and so the two

major systems in the world today would be um well if you ignore Islamic law things like that but the two major

western private law systems would be the common law which is the Anglo-American

law England and its commonwealths and then the US um and then the civil law countries or we call them sometimes the

continental law countries because most of the most of the European countries in the on the continent also Latin America

um and and uh Latin America and uh some other countries to have have what’s

called civil law and the civil law is sort of a mostly cottified version of law which is a

combination of the ancient Roman law and the European customary law that grew up in the in the in the centuries since the

Roman law so the Roman law was about a thousand-year period of law before the common law and the common law was about

a thousand-y year period of law after the Roman law uh and they’re both similar in that they’re decentralized

legal systems decentralized in the sense that a common law system the law is formed by incrementally by the decision

of judges hearing a dispute between real people and trying to come up with a fair

a fair fair uh settlement to the dispute based upon precedent or case law that

went before that so that way the law grows gradually and over time legal principles develop um and the law

develops like that and something similar happened in the Roman law um you had you had courts and judges and they would

decide disputes when people came before them and and the law grew that way too the Roman law was largely lost after the

fall of the Roman Empire but then it was rediscovered centuries later and made a comeback later and it did and when it

came back it did have some influence on the common law too so there’s some there’s some co cross-pollination

between the two and so the common law and the uh and the ro and the Roman law are the two big

decentralized systems and in today’s world the the civil law of the continental law is the codified version

of the ancient Roman law so those are the two major systems the other would be international law which is the law

between nations and then uh say canon law or church law of the Catholic Church

and law merchant was the customary law between the merchants in the 14 15 1600s

which also influence the uh the legal systems the private legal systems of the common law so anyway it’s interesting to

understand all that and I happen to know a lot about common law and civil law because I went to the only civil law law

school in the US um well the only only the only solely civil law law school that’s Louisiana State University and

also then I got my masters in international law in London so I learned about that which also those also turned

out to be very relevant not only in my career but also in my my libertarian career of writing so it it helped me um

I think it helped me in my uh development and extension of existing libertarian uh theories

yeah no I think it’s interesting uh that Louisiana’s the only state with um civil

law because that that’s like like the French settlers right and so it was it

was a combination of the Spanish and the French law um because the the Spanish and the French Spain and France traded

Louisiana back and forth a few times in so the law is actually a hybrid of of Spanish and French law the form is the

is the civil law of France the the code Napoleon but the substance is arguably both Spanish and French um in in Canada

most of the country is common law but Quebec is civil law for the same reason because of its French influence and even

in the UK uh Scotland is a civil law country although it’s not codified it’s not a civil code country but it is I

believe but it’s it’s it’s somewhat of a civil law country so Wales and um and

Ireland and uh England are all common law but Scotland is also an an outlier in that in that regard

yeah it’s it’s quite interesting and then and then um talking about Ireland

uh prior to um them being colonized they had their own law system right Brennan law I’m pretty sure it’s called uh I

believe so Brhan law or something like that I don’t know a lot about it but I think so and of course there have been

some studies by Rothbart and David Freriedman and I think Gerard Casey who’s an Irish uh libertarian

philosopher um who’s brilliant um in his book u libertarian anarchy and then

Rothbard’s I think for a new liberty And then also in David Freriedman’s the machinery freedom they both talk about

anc so I think two mainly two ancient systems of law I think one is ancient

Ireland and one is ancient um Iceland and how they were roughly anarchistic in

a lot of ways um but I think those are pretty far a field from um the modern

private law we have now which are largely largely drawn from as I said European customary law and the Roman law

and then the English common law right and then um as libertarians

um like we we tend to focus on like natural law as like um Rothbard put it

right so uh so how does it um how does that intertwine with

everything else yeah that’s interesting so um and that’s why I mentioned um um

um canon law of the Catholic Church um because that had a lot of influence from

um hold on a second

um from natural law thinkers like Thomas Aquinus um and and also um international

law international law is interesting because in a way a lot of libertarians don’t like it because the United Nations

and all this um and there was a fear for several decades by the John Burchers and

the conservatives and some libertarians of of a one world state that the UN

would turn into i think that fear is has gone down it seems pretty clear that the nation states are not going to give up

their power especially the US um if anything the US uses the UN as its um

implement to control other countries uh but international law itself

is it’s largely kind of more libertarian than than the than the law in in in most

nation states today because the law of most na most nation states um um has

been tainted by legislation so the common law and the civil law which is based upon the Roman law are all pretty

good legal systems their their private law is roughly compatible in most ways with what we would say is or libertarian

property rights principles you know murders outlawed um prohibited theft is prohibited property rights are secured

um there’s due process uh things like that um international law is is more

general and it applies to nation states so the citizens in a sense or the subjects of international law are the

200 states in the world 93 states or 96 wherever there are

right now um but the principles are general and vague and because the United Nations has very little power to

legislate there they’re the the customary and traditional international

law that has developed by uh over the centuries has not been tainted as much by legislation whereas in in in America

and in England and in Australia and other countries the bulk of the law now is special interest special statutes and

legislation so to the extent the common law still applies it’s largely pretty

good but you have all these special statutes that come in and override it quite often the international law is based upon the idea that every country

is sovereign and states can trade with each other and they can make contracts or treaties with each other there’s a

Latin term called pactas cervonda agreements are to be respected and so I think international law and so

international law some of the most famous early philosophers like um Pufandorf and uh gcious heavily

influenced by natural law thinking so natural law uh thinking um and and the

natural law type of reasoning has influenced of course the ideas of justice that were referred to by judges

in this in the Roman law and in the um especially in the common law so that’s

how they all tie together um yeah the um yeah the international

law stuff’s interesting because when they were um uh prosecuting the Nazis

and all of that stuff like the um the the lawyers representing the the Nazis were pretty much saying “Hey it wasn’t

against the law in Germany right to do this stuff right?” And so um the people

prosecuting the Nazis were like “Oh well we’re we’re um uh we’re referring to

something like a higher law correct that has been broken.” Yeah the the Nuremberg trials um I mean there are some aspects

of it that you could criticize as a libertarian um for example you know you could say that yeah but it wasn’t a cr

Yeah it wasn’t a crime um under the positive law of Germany at the time you

know just like you know if if if if if one country goes to war against another it’s not technically a violation of of

their law it’s just an act of aggression between two countries and unless there’s a treaty between them it’s not clear

it’s not clear that that’s prohibited i mean you can you can go to but there there’s always been a law of war and

that’s so there are war crimes there are things you’re not supposed to do and those those were limits on the the war

making power of states developed by natural law thinkers trying to limit the damage done to civilians and things like

that um in war but the one good outcome in my view of the Nurburgg trials was it

yeah it did recognize that there’s a higher law principle which even if they

didn’t have a a sound libertarian basis for it it’s like they at least intuitively recognized

um now again they they bent the they bent the international law to get the results they wanted okay but no one can

deny that most of these guys were were abhorrent people which committed crimes that would be actions that would be

crimes under libertarian law right they committed mass murder and genocide and torture um so it’s not like an injustice

to go after them so the one good thing about the Nurburgg trials is it

established the principle that there’s a higher law above the municip the municipal law we call it the the

national law of a state um and that reasoning is sort of implicit like in the US when when you have attorneys go

to uh argue before the Supreme Court and they argue they argue in terms of my

client should win because the constitution says this and the other side says the opposite but quite often

they appeal to intuitive principles of fairness and justice so they’re trying to appeal to the natural sense of

justice of the of the judges to get them to try to interpret the constitution their way to get the result that they

that they’re implicitly claiming comp is is uh is compatible with a higher sense

of justice so everyone sort of implicitly recognizes that there’s really a a concept and a standard of

justice outside of the state which is a good thing so it means that you can criticize the law for being unjust and

you can’t have a legal positivist or a statist say well you can’t say that the law is unjust because it is the law and

the law is the only way we have to know what is just and unjust once you have

this this idea that some laws are so immoral and in fact that law is that

principle is present and you know the idea that um uh of war crimes like there’s some things you shouldn’t do

even if your commander tells you to do it like you can’t just say I was just obeying orders if it’s so heinous that

and abhorentt that you should have known and that’s the other thing too you know the the laws all these all these

countries have this idea of ignorance is no excuse of the law which of course is is not is is not a good doctrine because

it means that the government can have a virtually infinite number of of laws

which no one knows what they are because there’s so many laws because they’re made up by the legislature and and you can be held

liable for violating one even though you didn’t know it and even though it’s not naturally wrong to do it it’s just what

we called um malum prohibitum which means it’s just wrong because the government makes it wrong as opposed to

malum in say um and so um uh if you had

a a libertarian order which was based only on what you might some might call natural law or things that are

intuitively wrong or obviously wrong like theft and murder um then there’s

nothing wrong with having a rule that says um you’re guilty even though you claim you didn’t know it was wrong

because what we say is knowledge of this is engraved on the human heart and that’s because it’s just common sense

every functioning non-csychopathic adult knows that you shouldn’t take other

people’s things and you shouldn’t kill other people everyone knows that you don’t have to be on notice of that to to

to for it to be fair to subject you to punishment the nature of your actions means it’s fair to subject you to

punishment but when you have laws that are artificially created by legislators then I think it should be a

defense like you’re you’re trying to punish me for committing this crime but you don’t even have to show that I had a

guilty conscience or citor um um because uh which which you should have to prove

because I think innocence or or sorry u um lack of knowledge or of the law

should be a defense in in those cases but it’s not but the point is when you

recognize that there’s a higher law it sort of it sort of supports the idea that there is a sense there are some

things that you just know in your heart are wrong to do so it makes a distinction between malum prohibitum and

malum insay laws and I think this might go nicely um into like

your theory of rights uh the estoppel principle uh do you mind explaining that

yeah I mean when I uh uh there I’d say there are two major

strands of ways people libertarians um and some classical liberals think about rights

uh and just laws uh some are more natural law type thinkers and some are more utilitarian or consequentialist

um the the the Einrand or objectivist or Randian influence types like me um don’t

necessarily think that there’s um an incompatibility or a

contradiction between those two um and I don’t think it’s just a happy coincidence i think that Rand was right

that the the moral is the practical and so if you have a justified moral principle

uh it’s also going to be practically the best one i mean property rights all as Rothbart says all rights are property

right all human rights are property rights well all rights are individual rights and they’re individual rights of

humans and all these human rights they’re property rights that’s just what rights are their property rights they’re rights to control a scarce resource

including the resource of your body because that’s what it means to say that aggression is is not permitted

um because aggression means using someone else’s resource their property

without their permission that’s what aggression just means so um so property rights are um um sorry I

just got a text that that that distracted me um

um what was I saying uh property rights and um uh I asked about a stoppple and

oh right uh yeah so um so the two main types of uh thinking so the utilitarian or consequentialist says that we should

have the type the laws that lead to good consequences or results um and then the the sort of deonttological or natural

rights guy says that well by man’s nature we can deduce how we ought to live and how to act and therefore uh by

man’s nature we can come to conclusions about what’s right and wrong what’s naturally right and wrong and what

natural laws are well therefore what natural rights are um and that was always sort of the thinking of of judges

for 200 years it just wasn’t that systematic and it wasn’t always that consistent i I view libertarianism and

libertarians as just people that are much more consistent about applying all this and then looking for the common

principles and boiling it down and simplifying it getting rid of uh errors and getting rid of inconsistencies um so

I was attracted to the natural law thinking of Ein Ran because she basically said that you know it’s just

common not common sense but it’s intuitively obvious that um the only way you can violate someone’s rights is by

using force against them um and so therefore the only way the only time you

have the right to use force without someone’s permission is in self-defense it’s there’s a reciprocity there but you

should you never have the right to initiate force um now her argument was a

little bit um natural law oriented in the sense of she thought our nature determines what our rights are but the

problem with that according to uh some like David Hume and people who follow him is that you have a logical gap there

going from an is statement about the way things are the facts the facts of the matter to an ought statement which is a

prescription about what you should or should not do and when I was in law school I was I always like uh I don’t

think it’s a major problem by the way i think that common sense decent values the common values most people have tend

to be pro peace and pro um pro um um prosperity and you know um empathetic

towards each other so people go ahead well according to some people online um

common sense values are um having having a welfare state and universal healthare

and all of that stuff yeah well they’re inconsistent but I mean most people would admit that it’s wrong to hit

people they just also favor hitting people when you need to take their money so they’re they’re inconsistent but the

point is most people intuitively recognize that we should have laws against murder and theft um but

um when I read so Hans Herman Hoa who became ho Rothbart’s sort of a um

partner and student and protege from 1985 to 1995 when Rothbart died he he

moved to the US and lived with with Ro with Roth um not lived with but taught with and and partnered with Rothbart um

he developed he was a upand cominging libertarian thinker and Austrian

Austrian economist and philosopher and he came up with the argumentation ethics

idea which is the idea that um the way to sidestep this ishaw is gap and to

come up with a different form of natural rights thinking is to say that um um

basically any form of socialism which by which he meant um um an ethic a

political ical ethic or a set of laws that is based upon the idea that you can you know you don’t respect people’s

property rights um is um the way to defend that is to recognize that the

only type of system that could be justified is by an argumentation but argumentation has certain normative

presuppositions because it’s not just a factual matter you have to respect each other’s body rights when you’re arguing

with someone or discussing things with someone so there’s like an implicit recognition of the importance of these

values so you could never argue during such a discussion for a system that obliterates those values so it was sort

of a way of showing by contradiction that you you would have a practical contradiction um if you argued for socialism in effect

and when I read that it it it it um it it I thought it was great but I also at

the same time was in contracts law class in law school and I just learned about

the common law concept of a stoppple which is a legal doctrine which is a way

of getting around some uh some um formalities in in contract law which

would prevent someone from from collecting on a contract like suing for

breach of contract if there had not been some formalities like you forgot to pay consideration or there was no offer for

an acceptance so the judges would say “Well there would be an injustice done if we

let this guy get off the hook here so we’re going to come up with um an equitable remedy here.” And they called

it a stoppple which says that if you acted in a way previously that contradicts your claims now you can be

prevented or stopped from from making that argument um in in the in the interest of justice that was sort of

just a legal doctrine which was used also in the Roman law to a certain degree and I recognized that that the

insight behind that doctrine or the the um the intuition behind it was similar

to the the logic of libertarian rights because libertarian rights says that you

can only use force against someone in response to force so there’s a symmetry there so I recognize that the same thing

would apply the the reason why you’re entitled to use force against an

aggressor but he’s not entitled to use force against you is that you can you can object to his using force against

you because you haven’t done anything to him but if you use force in response to retaliate against him or to use force to

defend yourself against him he can’t object to it because he would be stopped from from

from complaining about it effectively by the by the by the uh by the u the fact

of his previous actions so I turned that idea and I I I I used it I integrated it

with Hapa’s idea and I came up with my own theory of rights and that was one of the first things I wrote in 1992 in

recent papers T-board Macccan’s journal um so that was originally my one of my

my interest always was rights theory but then how it applied like in for contracts and causation and then

intellectual property later most people know me from IP because that was the most people have heard about that um but

my interest was never IP only it was always it was it was a host of other issues that are related to it

yeah so a a story that I find somewhat amusing and somewhat

horrifying is that I think it’s Melbourne right and this guy broke into

this other guy’s house right uh but then the victim overpowered the person and

just kept him as like a sex slave for a couple days right and and and I’m and

I’m just thinking because you’ve said like before that like the uh that it

pretty much um so this person can’t argue for their rights in in to some

extent but I I feel like that that’s way too far right and so the way I work mine

and the way Hopper works his and the way the legal system works is there’s a proportionality requirement and the reason is because so in my in my

argument for rights um proportionality enters into it because you’re only as stopped to the

extent of what you did okay so if you commit a very minor thing then you can’t

you can’t really make the argument that I don’t believe in aggression at all because you committed aggression but you

could tailor your claim to the facts of the case you could say “Well I slapped you on the in the face so I kind of

admitted that slapping someone in the face without their permission is something that people have the right to do so I can’t really complain about

being slapped back in the face.” Something like that it could be maybe maybe more but something on the same

type or level uh but if it’s beyond that if you if you if if if the victim wants

to murder me or to execute me for it I could say “No that would be killing me without my permission.” and I have the

right to complain about that i’m I’m not a stopped because I only did so much so

a proportionality would enter into it now in the case you mentioned I don’t know that the particulars

um so there’s two problems with what the guy did number one he might have

um overpunished i don’t know i mean you could imagine a case where he didn’t overpunish where the guy came broke in

he raped the guy’s daughters and this kind of stuff or murdered his kids and then you could say that you know keeping

him as a sex slave for a year like literally was proportional punishment you could say that i’m assuming this was

disproportionate punishment so that’s one problem with it the other problem was even if it’s proportionate punishment the the other problem is

taking the law into your own hands is always um um a potentially problematic

thing this is why the common law systems and I I assume the civil law systems I’m not too sure but I know the common law

systems like in the US and England and the common Commonwealth countries um

there’s always a right to defend yourself you don’t like if someone breaks into your house you can defend yourself you don’t have to wait for the

c the police to show up so in those cases you can take law into your own hands because there’s just no choice so

in those cases you can be judge jury and executioner right but you’re you’re still supposed to act reasonably right

so once you subdue the guy for example let’s say you capture the guy and you got him tied up then you need to

call the police and let the police come because you have no excuse anymore to take the law into your own hands and the

danger of taking the law into your own hands is you might be making a mistake you might overpunish because you’re not

you’re not unbiased you’re not you’re not impartial you’re partial and your and your neighbors they might they would

be willing to turn a bl they would be willing to condone your use of self-defense in an emergency

but if you run around taking the law into your hand law law into your own hands and you run around acting like a

vigilante and not turning the matter over to a neutral third party when you

have the chance then you sort of become a danger to everyone because you’re kind of an outlaw you’re acting in a reckless

manner and I think that’s going to tend to ostracize people um and and be

expensive because they might lose their insurance coverage you know their neighbors might not want to live near them um or they might even get punished

by the family of the um uh of the aggressor if they overpunished them you

know so um there’s lots of reasons not to take the law into your own hands when you don’t have to yeah well where where

I’m from if you are like uh defend yourself and you in like a

home invasion and you hurt the uh the burglar uh you you could be in some

spicy waters right uh but yeah no so and that’s probably

that’s probably because of modern legislation in Australia which is encroached upon the traditional defend

your castle or the castle doctrine you know you can defend your own home in the

US that’s still pretty strong like in Texas and other states everyone sort of knows if someone if someone is at your

front door threatening you you’re better to shoot them and drag them inside your house and pretend like you killed them

inside like and then no one’s going to question it you know it’s that kind of common system that goes around but the idea is everyone sort of intuitively

knows and and and some laws some states have extended that to carjackings they’ll say that if you’re in your car

and someone um tries to carjack you you can actually kill them if you have to and I think that’s reasonable um and

then there’s also things called stand your ground laws like if you’re just minding your own business and someone wants to punch you or assault you some

jurisdictions might say you have an obligation to try to run away to minimize things but some places say no

you can stand your ground even if that causes the situation to escalate to the point where you have to use lethal force

to kill the guy um because he’s the one asking for it he’s the one causing it so it that it depends um

yeah it’s it’s always interesting and I hope I’m never in that scenario where

well I hope no one’s in the scenario where they’re victimized but I know especially where I’m from it’s just you

know it’s just hard for you know just to like a lot of situations i mean luckily

you have a you’re common law so you still have a I assume you still have a jury system for criminal trials so I

guess you could hope that your neighbors would vote uh not guilty but who knows

the Australians are probably so statist and minded they they would they would do whatever the prosecutor says it’s

against the law he broke the law uh and I my guess is you’re not able to uh tell

the tell the jurors of their right to to vote on the on the justice of the law

itself which um in the US that’s called the fully informed jury movement which

which is a movement to try to get states to make it legal for the defense to tell

the jury that they have the right to acquit based upon their view of the law but um they the courts still don’t allow

that here either right yeah no I I remember this one guy uh in the city I’m

in and he had a home invader and um I know he decapitated him mhm uh with a

samurai sword mhm and he was like and this is like years and years of legal troubles but he but he eventually got

off mhm right so you know it’s it’s it’s also the fear of just being you know

stuck with the bill at all yeah and there’s other things like um some people

um let’s say you have a your vacation home or cabin in the woods you’re not

there all the time or even your home and some people rig them with these traps like they’ll put a shotgun by the sink

pointing out the window with a with a like with a string on it where if anyone breaks in the shotgun will blow off go

off and blow blow you know it’ll kill the person trying to break into your house those things are generally illegal

because they they could be disproportionate you follow me because there’s no human there to monitor

whether you need to do it so you have to be careful about how how you rig

something to defend yourself as well unfortunately I think those things should generally be presumptively legal

um and then there’s also cases of negligence i’m I’m sure in in other countries too uh where yeah someone

breaks into your house like a criminal breaks into your your business when no one’s there and he trips and he injures

himself and then he sues for negligence um and sometimes he wins because you know there was a negligent hazard on the

floor that he slipped and tripped on whereas I think in the old days people would say uh no this guy doesn’t get he

doesn’t get to sue the company he was victimizing yeah yeah okay so I kind of want to like

move on so last last time I was talking to Liquid Zulu uh you’ve you’ve spoken

to him before have you i think so yeah yeah and um

so when I brought up Hopper and um his like can’t influence uh he described it

as like kind of like cope right it’s just like oh like the the school that he

came from the Kian school was like more realist school and it’s he just and he

they view K as like this great Arisatilian right and he just said that’s full of cope on yeah like um

coping yeah and so you come from the um the

objectivist school as well so I’m just curious on what are your thoughts on

like Kant and his influences i’m not a deep K I’m not a K scholar at all um and

I don’t read German i’ve I’ve read I’ve read Kant and and and and secondhand

descriptions of Kant in English but um um you know and I agree with Rand on her

on her realism and on her uh objection to in her criticism of idealism and

skepticism i agree with all that um when she described Kant I agreed with

her criticism of Kant but I’m not sure that Kant is who she she was i don’t

know if if the person she was referring to was actually Kant himself um my understanding is Kant was somewhat of a

confusing and brilliant but murky writer and that’s why there’s so many schools of thought and interpretations of Kant

and from Hapa and others I kind of got the impression that um in the American in

the American in America there grew up a a skeptical a skeptical interpretation

of Kant which is what Ran was sort of referring to whereas in in in Europe um

there the continent there was more of a realistic interpretation of Kant in any case it appears to me that that’s what

influenced Mises and Hapa and they were not deep deeply influenced by Kant either only in their

terminology and in their basic understanding of um describing the

difference between uh contingent statements uh like uh

statements that could be false and things you have to find out from experiment

uh and induction like uh and and the causal method scientific method you know

causal laws and then things we can know appidictically as Miso say true or or

they might say a priori laws um um like the action axiom and then even things

ran talks about like um fundamental axioms she called it like you can know that consciousness exists and things

have an identity and um um there’s such a thing as consciousness that that kind

of stuff um so everything I think Mises argues the action axiom and the structure of

human action is just sort of common sense but with a Pontian terminology i

I’ve asked Hans himself personally a few times hans Hans views

Papa views his um his work on rights theory and and his his influence from

Mises um as Kante only in the sense that he takes ideas where they make sense and he

fits them into like this wall he’s building right so there might be a brick here from there a brick here from

Spinosa a brick here from Hume a brick here from Kant but he he attaches them

together with reason to make them make sense and he doesn’t care about their pedigree so much and I think that’s the

right way to look at it so um I’m not trying to defend Kant i don’t really know what the real Kant actually meant

but I think that to the extent his his concepts are interpreted in a realistic

way as Mises and see Hapa actually built on Mises’s praxiology in his book

economic science and the Austrian method primarily to to extend it a little bit

by showing that the action axiom of mises is is is the reason we can

actually be sure that our our our operi concepts are realistically true because

it’s action that gives is the bridge between the mind and the the external world it’s a different way of looking at

looking at it that from the wayin ran looked at it but it’s a similar approach

they both they both recognize that um there’s an external real world and that

we’re aware of it uh and they both believe that we can know some things for sure ran called them axioms uh mises and

especially hapa and even Rothbart to some extent even the Rothbar is more of a roatilian um also had this view so I

think they’re all compatible with each other it just means there’s two types of knowledge there things we can know for sure that we don’t have to test because

they can never be disproven like you can never disprove the law of non-contradiction you can never disprove

the fact that there’s a universe you can never disprove the fact that there’s consciousness

you can never disprove the fact that people act and you can ever disprove um things that are implied by the fact of

action like that people have goals and purposes and they employ means to achieve ends and that that implies um

choice and uh opportunity cost and profit and loss and all these

categories of action um so I don’t know if it’s copium or not but um I think

it’s a sensible way of making sense out of the world and as long as it’s compatible with realism um I don’t see a

problem all right uh cool and so yeah going back

to K being a murky writer um I’m currently reading like this um this

primer right now and then I’m going to go into Critique of Pure Reason and it

it said that um he wrote Critique of Pure Reason in like 6 months

so you know I think it’s like understandable the the murkiness and this reputation that he has right you

know because of that time period one one that I’ve read that I thought was pretty good was by Roger if I recall by

Roger Scrutin roger Scrutin it’s like a 120 page uh book in the what what used

to be called the past masters series but I think they renamed it it’s called something else now but just look up

Roger Scruton and Kant um there’s about a hundred or two or 300 or 400 books in

that series a lot of them are really good they’re all written by an expert on that particular character um all right

cool thank you if you like philosophy another really good book that’s one of my favorites is um one that I never hear

mentioned anymore because it’s hard to find it’s by Tezy Lavine it’s called From Socrates to Sart the philosophic

quest it’s a really good overview of philosophy for like the non-speist okay cool thank

you um I mean for the for the Yeah for the nonspecialist yeah yeah

yeah okay um yeah and so going Okay so going back

to um like action and all of that stuff I what I thought was really interesting

that you were on um Adam Haymon show recently and you were talking about how

um the Tesla Model Y is more likely to gain consciousness than a chat

GBT or something or something along those lines oh I don’t remember saying that exactly i think we were talking

about um u Adam and I both were talking about how we both believe that um for

there to be some kind of new form of consciousness technology you know artificial artificial intelligence um

you have to have a body and that has actually implicit implied by the theories of Peter Janick Yannik a German

philosopher that is not in English very much but Hapa has talked about him a lot

um um he’s got something called Uklids something uh anyway I I can I can um I

I’ve got a couple posts about that maybe in my Adam Haymon um show notes I have

some references there okay Peter Janning but anyway the idea is that uh for a consciousness to develop even if we

overcome the technological problems you have enough neurons and it’s uh it’s rich enough

to potentially have an actual intelligence you only develop intelligence by having you know a desire

to live and to function in the world you have goals and you have to do that you have to have interaction with the world

you have to be able to manipulate it you have to get inputs but also outputs you have to control things you have to have a body basically so I don’t remember

talking about the car we were talking about robots I thought but um um but just a just a a pure brain inside of a

computer I think could never develop consciousness i mean what do I know but that’s my that’s my sort of Omni magazine space

cadet grad school thinking um I I just think you need a body to actually

develop consciousness and sapiens um so I think a robot with with a very

powerful brain or maybe a car you know could could theoretically develop consciousness although I’m still

skeptical that um given current technology as long as the brains are digital and and they’re not and they’re

not analog um I think it it’s going to be longer a longer time like if it if it

was just a an electronic analog brain that you could train it it might it

might somehow develop and then you wouldn’t be able to control it as much uh if it’s digital I think it’s a longer like I think my understanding is a lot

of these so-called neural networks are not actually real neural networks they’re just a computer processor programmed to

simulate a neural network and even a real neural network wouldn’t be analog it would be digital um but I think we

need to actually develop literally neural networks that are have a vast number of neuronal

connections on the order of the human brain or maybe even larger if they’re if they’re digital if they’re not analog

yeah yeah i don’t know i recently got into like these YouTube videos and they

just it’s like evolution uh like generators right and like they

set up like a certain neural network and then um then you add in like a chance of

mutation and then you add your um I don’t know condition to kill off like how many pe how many odd people or

things and it’s quite interesting how they they evolve um yeah all right so going to to

a libertarian issue that I don’t know I I have some

issue I don’t know thinking about because there’s just there’s just so

many you know different things to consider it’s the open verse closed

borders mhm and I don’t know at at some time like I

don’t know I used to be quite a firm uh closed borders libertarian but then I

don’t know I’ve just gotten more doubt uh into with that position so what what are

your what are your exact thoughts on it um I mean ideally I’m an anarcho capitalist or an anarchist um so I’m I

think the state should be abolished and in such a world um the concept of citizenship and even immigration would

would just evaporate um there would just be private property and rules related to that um in today’s I think Hapa’s

analysis is roughly right what Hapa identified is that in especially in

today’s world where there’s no monarchy anymore and there’s mostly democracies and large large powerful democracies at

that which have led to welfare states and to all kinds of egalitarian rules

like um anti-discrimination law and welfare and voting rights and all this

kind of stuff um in such a world um

um whatever the state’s immigration policy is and it will have a

policy like to the extent the state exists it will have a policy one way or the other um someone will be harmed by

this which is one reason we’re against the state because the state results in a situation where against in a sense we’re

all losers and we’re all there’s a war of all against all we’re all sharing for our piece of the pie since the

government forces us to fight for it because they take from us and they only let us get back what we can fight back for all this kind of stuff so Hapa’s

kind of paradigm is what he calls forced integration and forced exclusion which means that um if you have a mass

immigration into a modern democratic welfare state um then this violates the

rights of homegrown citizens because the immigrants have the right to vote they

have the right to get welfare they have the right to use the public roads to move in next to you they have the right

to work in your factories because you can’t exclude them because of anti-discrimination law um all these

kinds of things so it’s called forced integration on the other hand if you were to ex if you were to um not if you

were to not have open borders you’re preventing some people from entering and at least in a large number of those

cases it’s someone that would be invited by a local resident who wants someone to come work for them or to live on their

property and they’re not per permitted to do that so that’s called first forced exclusion so that’s um that’s the

problem there so both of these problems exist

now if the if let’s let’s take the United States if the United States

um had open borders tomorrow I’m afraid it would result in hundreds of millions

of people if not billions just moving here and you would lose the character of

being American and maybe you’d maybe lose the country at a certain point so you’d lose liberty um just like if we

had a one world government and um and we had egalitarian policies then you know

you know the top rich the top 10 rich countries would all become impoverished because you’d have to they would go from

you know a GDP per person of um or an income per person of you know 50 $70,000

per year to like 10 so um that’s why decentralization is always optimal and

centralization is always bad um which is effectively what immigration is doing it would it would basically extending the

scope of this state to more people by having a billion people move here now they’re covered you know it’d be like

making the world one one state in a sense um on the other hand as as a libertarian I simply detest and despise

the federal government of course in the US the central state and I just can’t

side with the INS either stopping people from coming so I have like a dilemma

right um now my personal view is like in the US and probably many other countries

an obvious not solution but an obvious improvement would be if the US were to

simply say anyone can come if they’re invited by an employer or by a property

owner as long as you have a a legitimate invitation you can come that would result in now it’d be better if that

could come with with limitations like and you can’t get welfare and all that but let’s say whoever invites you has to

be kind of responsible for you for some period of time that would limit it would

basically it would increase the number of immigration because I think you could at least get 10 20 million people a year in the US if they were invited but

that’s way way more than we allow now so it would expand the number of immigrants and therefore it would reduce the amount

of forced exclusion that we’re doing right But it would also reduce the amount of forced integration because the people

that would come would be more productive they would be less less of them would be on welfare um so that would be a second

best improvement I think would be to move to an invitation system um that’s the only thing I can think of that would

that would be an improvement in liberty for immigrants citizens and libertarians that that live

in the country yeah so uh in Australia we have an

election coming up and uh our um Libertarian Party has kind of put out

like a similar uh hoppy like invitey uh Oh really i

didn’t thing yeah it’s it’s not it’s not completely um hoppy there’s like it’s

like an in between from like the current state to Hopper i I forget the exact details but it’s quite interesting um I

mean there are some countries that you need immigration and you can see them doing better i mean the US is pretty good at assimilating people um probably

Australia and some other countries they need immigration and they’re good at assimilating it now there are some other

countries you can imagine Likenstein or Switzerland or or Japan now they might although Japan might need

immigration because of their plummeting birth rates but but if you just open the doors in Japan

or Switzerland or Likenstein um you might the countries might be lo

like you you might no longer have Japan you know it wouldn’t be Japanese anymore after a certain point in time and I

don’t think those costs are are negligible um um it’s is everything’s a

difficult problem when you have collectivism and tribalism and statism all mixed in together

yeah yeah it is um

yeah um well I think it’s good time to call it uh for a podcast uh thank you uh

Stephan Canella for joining um this this episode four of the Tyrants Dan uh any

anything else you want to say no I I appreciate it and good luck with your podcast um I look forward to adding it

to my queue and hearing your other your other episodes and um anyone who’s

interested in these ideas um I wrote a book uh two years ago which is a compilation and a heavily u updated and

and integrated compilation of my my articles over the last 30 years 20 29

years on libertarian all this stuff uh intellectual property causation rights

theory um legal theory like legislation and common law so that’s called legal foundations for a

free society it’s free online on my website too but you can buy a copy if you like to from Amazon um so that’s

stefan stefancella.com yeah I’ll I’ll have that uh in the

description and um your other social medias so yeah thanks for watching all

right thanks a lot all right