I was a guest on California Gold #6, with guest host Matthew Sands. From the shownotes:
Stephan and Matt covered a wide variety of libertarian themes, including property rights, self-ownership, the Non-Aggression Principle, intellectual property, Hoppean Argumentation Ethics, Georgism, Objectivism, utilitarianism, deontology and much more. Stephan was hosted by Matthew Sands of the Nation of Sanity project (http://www.nationsofsanity.com/), which aims to promote the Non-Aggression Principle as a universal peace agreement, hosting for California Gold for the first time.
What do you think about this proposition: “It doesn’t matter how the law is made or who enforces it. What matters is simply that the law is reasonably and fairly enforced and it is compatible with a reasonable interpretation of our principle.” Isn’t this what we want?
Walter Block was cc’d and—as usual, sigh—he complained that the only problem with my remarks is that only a small group would see them. In other words, as usual, he’s exhorting me to “publish” more. So … in response, here’s my informal, quick reply (lightly edited):
❧
I’m not quite sure how to respond to these kinds of propositions. I think the law is the result of a process. Necessarily. Necessarily. Necessarily. This is important. I think it cannot be divorced from institutions. And normative analysis and theory plays its role in that process. My goal as a libertarian is primarily to understand liberty and in a political sphere, to understand what interpersonal norms should guide the development and evaluation of extant (positive) law. I think we can adjudge certain laws and state practices and policies as unjust to the extent they more or less obviously deviate from some incontrovertible norms, like the NAP or its propertarian concomitants, 1 but I don’t think this leads to the idea that we are fine with any institution that enforces “law” “so long as” it complies with the non-aggression principle (NAP). [continue reading…]
A nice young man, self-described as “generally an anarchist? But also a statist (monarchist? ie ‘the kingdom of heaven’) in the spiritual sense” had some questions for me since he doesn’t have a lot of people to bounce his ideas off of. I agreed to do it if we could record it, in case anything interesting came out of it. You be the judge.
A variety of topics came up, primarily his interest in the problem of “oaths” as the root evil in the modern world, and related/other issues like the nature of contracts, usury as evil, Pournelle’s “iron law of bureaucracy,” Jesus, and the evils of the Uniform Commercial Code (something to do with Babylon), and Galambos.
Transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT
Libertarian Answer Man: Oaths: With Kent Wellington
Stephan Kinsella & Kent Wellington
Oct. 17, 2021
00:00:03
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, hey, this is Stephan Kinsella, Kinsella on Liberty. This is another one of my episodes where someone asked to talk to me about something. And I said yes, if I can record it in case there’s anything of interest to listeners. So this is Kent Wellington who briefly informed me he’s not exactly a libertarian but just has some questions. I don’t really know what you want to talk about, but Kent, why don’t you introduce yourself, however you want to do it, and then we can start?
00:00:27
KENT WELLINGTON: Hey there. My name is Kent Wellington, and I just have been very anti-IP since I was a child really. And when I realized that Mr. Kinsella was the one who wrote one of my favorite books, Against IP, I was really taken aback. And then I was like, wow, I should reach out to him and just try to have a conversation with him because I’ve sort of been in the – what do you say – I’ve just been up in the towers on these topics for a long time, like my whole life.
00:01:14
And I’ve never – I never really get to talk about these topics with anybody one on one, and I just saw his – that he puts his email out there, so I was like, I’ll just email him, see if he’ll – he’s willing to talk to me for even a minute. So that’s what we’re doing right now, and I have some very different takes, I guess, what I think are some novel takes but maybe aren’t, and I’d love to be proven wrong, or I just wanted to throw some things at you regarding contracts, IP, anarchism, a few different things. Mainly, I guess my main hypothesis is – so I’m very into the quotes from Jesus on oaths, and I believe that, without – so I think that oaths are the key social mechanism of the state. Do you – what do you think about that? Are oaths not the key social mechanism of the state?
00:02:41
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oaths? O-A-T-H?
00:02:44
KENT WELLINGTON: Yes, oaths, yeah.
00:02:46
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’m not sure I know what that means. What do you mean?
00:02:51
KENT WELLINGTON: So oaths are – if you want to become a doctor in the US, at least a professionally recognized doctor, you have to take the Hippocratic Oath. Others are – so our whole professional society is filled with oaths, which are really these sort of mystical activities, and our secular world is filled with these oaths. To become a lawyer, you need to take the bar oath. To become a politician, you just swear in. You need to take an oath of office. There’s a bajillion oaths you need to take in modern society if you want to partake in modern society.
00:03:42
And so Jesus – and I’m not necessarily getting religious here. You can just say that in one of the most popular books in the world, which the Bible is, well, the biggest guy, the most important guy in the book, in the New Testament, Jesus, in his biggest speech, the Sermon on the Mount, he says take no oaths at all. Instead, just say yes or no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one. So my interpretation of that is that anything beyond you giving your word, like if I invite you to my birthday party, and I give you the – I say, hey, can you come to my birthday party, you can say yes or no, or you can say maybe too. But anything beyond that, if I say, hey, well, will you swear on it, or hey, will you sign this contract, or hey, will you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. To me, that’s opening the door. That’s exactly what Jesus was saying. It’s opening the door for bad things to happen.
00:04:49
And to me, it’s what is the root cause of – it’s the potential root cause of all the bad things that happen with the state because – so like Jesus says, anything beyond this, anything beyond a verbal yes or no, it basically invokes – as I mentioned to you in an email, I’m also – I – so have you heard of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy?
00:05:25
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Vaguely, but I don’t really remember.
00:05:28
KENT WELLINGTON: So he – so the law states that in any organization, over time, the bureaucracy will overtake the main organizational mission. So when you swear an oath or you have a contract or something, there’s always a third party that basically you’re acknowledging an elevated third party that is, at least on a long enough timespan, is going to corrupt things. And so to me, IP – so if – so IP is a form of a contract. I mean it’s a contract. If I have in my – I mean I just see that whole entire concept of IP as BS.
00:06:32
But let’s say I have my little idea, whether it’s a drawing. Let’s say it’s a drawing, and I just go to the government, and we have a contract. You could call it an oath where they’re going to protect my work. They’re going to monopolize my work. So to me, Jesus – I’m like – when I realized that Jesus said this because I had never heard that in a – I grew up in church. I’ve never heard that before, heard him say that. To me, that’s like – Jesus is the ultimate – he’s an anarchist in a sense, but he’s also, of course, a total statist, monarchist because he advocates for the kingdom of heaven and all these things, royal terms and things. But I was really blown away that he just prescribes so clearly this way to…
00:07:41
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, so I think we would need a definition of oath because you’re using it by examples, and you’re even including – I think it’s a stretch to include it – to call the IP grant an oath or even a contract with the government. It seems to me what you’re getting at is – and I imagine there’s lots of analysis of Jesus’ comments there, which I’m unfamiliar with. But I would assume he’s against oaths because oaths typically show allegiance to some kind of authority. And that gets close to having a false god. You should only worship God. You shouldn’t worship the state or the king. So I would imagine that the prohibition on oaths has something to do with that. I don’t know. It’s just a guess.
00:08:33
But I don’t really know the clear distinction between making an oath and just saying yes or no. I mean yes or no could be a contract. Contracts are different than oaths, I would think. But I mean the standard libertarian idea is that the state exists, is criminal, but the reason it exists is because it’s the rule of the majority by the minority. How does the minority get away with it? They get away with it because they basically have the majority convinced of their authority and their legitimacy, and they do this from a variety of ways. They bribe them. They brainwash them. They propagandize them.
00:09:11
And they get them to say the Pledge of Allegiance, which is like an oath, and lawyers have to take an oath, and everyone has to start treating the Constitution as this thing of – and then even the social contract idea is – a little bit sneaks this in because even if you’re not a congressman or a politician or a lawyer or a doctor, they say that you’ve taken an oath to the Constitution even though you never did because by living here you agreed to live under the Constitution. And they make you say the Pledge of Allegiance, so they sort of ingrain in everyone this idea that we all have this obligation or duty to the Constitution and thus to the state.
00:09:49
KENT WELLINGTON: Totally.
00:09:50
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So I think that’s one way they – that the government or the state maintains control and keeps the population docile and following their orders. I suppose you could bring in this idea of oaths as part of the description of what goes on there, and maybe Jesus had some wise things to say about the danger of oaths that you could build on in that analysis, but that’s all I know about that.
00:10:18
KENT WELLINGTON: Okay. I also want to point out that later on in the book of James, so James is talking about what Jesus had said, and he says remember, brothers, above all, swear no oaths. So this no-oaths commandment is so central. To me, it’s basically like the number-one commandment of Jesus besides the – sort of the key sacraments or something. At least the really concrete commandment of Jesus is to swear no oaths, and to me, that’s just so plain.
00:10:59
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I mean I suppose – I mean I think it seems at least compatible with the libertarian distrust of the state. I mean we don’t think that people should be allegiant to the state, and we don’t have any allegiance to the state, and we shouldn’t treat the state like God, which they want us to do. And maybe Jesus was giving something similar. I mean there are decent libertarian arguments, like you said earlier, that Jesus was an anarchist. There was a guy names James Redford who has an article, “Jesus is an Anarcho-Capitalist.”
00:11:28
And I think the fact that Jesus speaks in monarchist language and has a theological conception of this hierarchy of power in the spiritual realm doesn’t contradict the possibility that his secular thinking is compatible with private law and anarchy. I mean even the idea of render unto Caesar would not mean taking an oath. It just means hand your money over if it’s his money. That’s like a yes-or-no thing, so that’s – that would be – so you comply with the state if you have to, but you don’t have to recognize it as having any authority.
00:12:05
KENT WELLINGTON: I have a novel take on the render unto Caesar. I believe – like render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s basically means you weren’t supposed to have the money in the first place because it wasn’t yours, or it wasn’t – that’s just – it’s not really my only take, but this is just one take. Have you ever heard of this guy called Daniel Suelo?
00:12:29
STEPHAN KINSELLA: No.
00:12:30
KENT WELLINGTON: He’s sort of called the man who lived without money. There’s a book about him, but he still lives in Utah, and he lived most of his life without money. But he lived very, as you like to say, abundantly, and he actually got me rolling on a lot of these ideas. I’m sure you’re totally aware that – or I assume you’re aware that just from what I’ve been talking about that the vast majority of Christians do not—do not—interpret that passage the way I’m interpreting it.
00:13:10
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh sure, sure, but some libertarians interpret it similarly to what you’ve said from what I have heard. As for this guy that lived without money, look. Either he is living like a hermit, self-sufficient, which – in which – I mean money is only applicable in an advanced beyond-post-barter society. So I don’t see how you can live abundantly if you live a hand-to-mouth existence on your own. So my guess is he was doing what the Soviet Union did in the height of the Cold War where they were – they had fake prices, but they could copy the prices of the West to have some semblance of rational economic calculations.
00:13:50
So this guy probably was trading and bartering with people from the outside world, which had an abundance of goods to trade with him because of the money system. So it’s probably a little hypocritical to run around – it’s like these guys that did – I lived on Bitcoin only for a year. So all that means was they just converted dollars to Bitcoin every time they were going to make a purchase, so it’s not really…
00:14:15
KENT WELLINGTON: No, he – yeah, well, he actually never touched money for the time while he was living like that.
00:14:23
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, did he trade with anyone? Did he use…
00:14:26
KENT WELLINGTON: No, he also – he is also against all forms of barter. He says that.
00:14:32
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So it’s not about money. It’s just a hermit, like I said. He’s just living hand to mouth on his own reserve somewhere.
00:14:39
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah, he mostly lives in caves and stuff.
00:14:44
STEPHAN KINSELLA: You don’t live in – that’s not abundance, man. Come on.
00:14:46
KENT WELLINGTON: He calls it a spiritual abundance, so I mean.
00:14:51
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, you can call a horse a chicken, but you can’t…
00:14:57
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. Yeah.
00:14:58
STEPHAN KINSELLA: You can call things whatever you want, but if we’re speaking in a language that has meaning, abundance usually has a meaning. So it’s just – it’s a way of saying I don’t have material abundance, but I have spiritual abundance. Congratulations, but – then that’s equivocation because you’re trying to tell people they can have abundance, but you’re appealing to their common-sense understanding of it. And then you do a bait and switch on them and say, well, then – they’re poor and starving. You say, well, but you have material abundance. It’s like – I mean spiritual abundance. I don’t know. I don’t know the story. I’m just guessing.
00:15:28
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah, some interesting takes there but.
00:15:33
STEPHAN KINSELLA: If Jesus is really that smart, he wouldn’t be against money. Put it that way. I mean the idiots in Start Trek universe might say they don’t need money, but Jesus would know that we need money in a world of scarcity.
00:15:45
KENT WELLINGTON: I’m very anti-money. So Suelo – he has all these writings. He says that basically all the world religions agree on one thing, and it’s that they’re against usury. And to him, money is inherently usurious, and so, therefore, money is – because money is like math beyond what is in the natural world. And anything beyond the natural equation is usurious, any kind of interest.
00:16:24
STEPHAN KINSELLA: That could be, but there’s nothing wrong with usury. I mean the problem there is it’s just basically some kind of proto-Marxian confused economics. I mean this guy seems like he’s consistent. He’s not trading at all because if you’re against money, you should be against all social interaction whatsoever because you should be against all trade. You should be against barter as well as money. I mean money doesn’t get anything – money just makes trade more efficient.
00:16:52
KENT WELLINGTON: He advocates for what’s called gift economy, whereas you only gave away freely and receive freely. I don’t want to talk – I don’t want to get into him too much, but he inspired me on a lot of these topics, and I think he has a lot of good content if you ever want to look at it—Daniel Suelo. He’s like – he’s one of the links that schizo people like to link up on 4chan. He’s really out there, but I think a lot of it at its core is super good.
00:17:31
STEPHAN KINSELLA: But, I mean, how are you going to read this guy? Are you going to read a book he wrote, read his writing on the internet? All these things that came about because of the capitalist monetary system. So if he had his way, no one would read him, and no one would know what he’s talking about, so it’s hypocritical to…
00:17:46
KENT WELLINGTON: He only uses…
00:17:47
STEPHAN KINSELLA: … criticize the…
00:17:48
KENT WELLINGTON: He only uses freely given things, so he only uses computers at libraries, and I mean he really has his whole ideology worked out.
00:18:03
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Sounds like it will spread like wildfire among the youth.
00:18:07
KENT WELLINGTON: So I guess – so here’s my sort of main question to you is – so I – so you identify as a libertarian. I more so, at least on this Earth, consider myself an anarchist.
00:18:27
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I think consistent libertarians are anarchists, so I think that – and a consistent anarchist is libertarian, so I mean to me, libertarian just means the opposition to aggression. And if you take that consistently, then you have to recognize that all states are criminal, so you oppose all states.
00:18:48
KENT WELLINGTON: So okay, so to me…
00:18:49
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Libertarian means anarchist.
00:18:52
KENT WELLINGTON: Okay. Sorry. I wasn’t – I’m not totally familiar with all of your work, so you may have…
00:18:58
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, it’s not just me. This is – so libertarianism – libertarians include people that are for radically small government. We call those guys minarchists. They believe in the minimal state. And people that think there should be no state, like anarchists, and we – I’m an anarchist. And the anarchist libertarians think that the minarchist libertarians are inconsistent and not quite fully perfect libertarians, but they’re close enough that we include them in the label. And they would say the opposite. The minarchists would say that anarchists really don’t support liberty because their system of liberty would be destroyed. So they don’t count us as libertarians, so we’re kind of fighting with the term.
00:19:40
KENT WELLINGTON: So are you – so to me, what – I’m assuming – so you’re cool with contracts, right?
00:19:52
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Understood in the Rothbardian sense, yes, which is that contracts are not agreements or binding agreements. They are simply transfers of title of transfers of owned property from one person to another by his expressed consent.
00:20:09
KENT WELLINGTON: So…
00:20:11
STEPHAN KINSELLA: A contract is the transfer of ownership from – it’s basically a trade or the change of ownership from one thing to another. It’s not a binding promise or binding agreement, which is how the law classifies it. But the Rothbardian, the libertarian conception it, the Austrian-libertarian conception of it is as I just said. It’s a title-transfer theory.
00:20:32
KENT WELLINGTON: Okay, so…
00:20:35
STEPHAN KINSELLA: And it’s just – by the way, and that’s just the – that’s because libertarianism essentially is a property theory. It believes that there are private property rights. Every human being is the owner of certain things determined by the homesteading rule like who had it first, and contract, like who transferred it. Did you get it from a previous owner? So contract is just the exercise of ownership by an owner of a thing. It’s the decision to transfer it to someone else. So if you own something, you could let someone use it, or you can deny them the use of it, like your home or your car or your body.
00:21:12
KENT WELLINGTON: So within your conception of contracts or your ideal contract system, are there elevated third parties, or however you want to call them? Is there a state? Is there an enforcer?
00:21:30
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh. Well, you can’t have a libertarian system unless the libertarian norms are widely agreed upon in society and respected, which means property rules. So basically, to achieve the society, you have to have wide agreement on the just basis of ownership, and so of course, you could have institutional assistance in enforcing your property rights if you need it, which we do now.
00:22:01
I mean I think of today – the western societies as quasi-libertarian because the private law that exists and is enforced that evolved from the Roman law and the English common law, is roughly libertarian because it roughly recognizes property based upon those principles, like first use in contract. There’s lots of exceptions because the state has mangled it, and we’ve had bad economics informing judges. But roughly, they’re roughly libertarian. They’re just not perfectly consistent. But yeah, you can have people – like if you have a contract and the contract specifies that you own this thing as opposed to someone else, and then they refuse to hand over the money they owe you or the thing or whatever, and they refuse to cooperate, then you could have dispute resolution. That could be an arbitral tribunal or a court or an insurance company, something like that.
00:22:56
KENT WELLINGTON: So to me, your – since there’s any kind of elevation, you’re recreating the state, and then, according to Pournelle’s law, over a long enough timeline, basically that bureaucratic mechanism will overtake the entire society.
00:23:21
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I don’t think so, but even if that was true, the alternative would be to have just no law, and everyone always engage in self-help and then get rid of, obliterate the idea of ownership and property rules and norms. And everything just comes down to possession, and the strong win, and might makes right. And that’s a world of not – that’s not a world of humanity. That’s a world of how animals live. In fact, even animals have some norms. If one dog is eating at its bowl, he growls if you approach it. He knows it’s his bowl. So I think that – and I don’t think it is like the state because the state is specifically – that’s why definitions are important like this oath term. You can’t just throw it around there. You have to be precise and rigorous about it if you want to include in an analysis.
00:24:06
KENT WELLINGTON: Oath – like he says, oath is anything above binary yes or no.
00:24:12
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I don’t know what above means, and I don’t know what a yes or no means. Do you mean yes or no means consent? A prediction? An agreement? What does that even – that’s just not rigorous is all I’m saying. I mean maybe you could make it rigorous, but it doesn’t seem rigorous to me as you stated it. And the state is an institution or an agency that claims a monopoly on the provision of justice in a given region. That’s what the state is.
00:24:41
That’s where all its evils come from, from that characteristic of having this monopoly. How it gets the monopoly is an interesting and a different question. It gets it because it emerges over time, and people get to use to it, and then the state successfully uses some of its resources to propagandize people, nowadays by public schooling and manipulation or control of the airwaves through the FCC. But its nature is that it has a monopoly. Once it has a monopoly, it’s going to be inefficient, and it’s going to make decisions in its own favor. That’s just natural. That means it will become large and powerful and unjust and inefficient.
00:25:22
But that doesn’t – that logic doesn’t apply to a decentralized arbitral tribunal that we – two parties to a dispute voluntarily call upon. It would be like if I go to a doctor because I have a broken arm, it doesn’t mean that I’ve caused the state to emerge because I’ve given a doctor, a specialist, the role of helping me on a narrow area of my life. He’s a specialist. It’s a division of labor. And likewise, if two people have a dispute and they want to solve things peacefully and they can’t come to an agreement on their own, they would go to a mediator, a third party. Just like if a husband and wife have a problem, they might go to a marriage counselor. If a husband and wife go to a marriage counselor, I don’t see how that creates a state and sets the Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy in motion.
00:26:11
KENT WELLINGTON: Well, if he is an oath-based – in an oath-based position potentially.
00:26:18
STEPHAN KINSELLA: But again, that’s why it’s – I don’t know what it means that he’s in an oath-based position, but in any case, I don’t see how going to an arbitrator is an oath-based position. It’s simply we both agree to abide by the decision of a neutral third party, and when he makes his decision, then either we agree with it, or we don’t. And if we don’t, either there’s an enforcement mechanism to make us comply with it, or there’s not, and I think there might not be. It might just be a totally reputational thing. Someone who is known to disregard the edicts of a neutral third-party dispute resolution system will tend to find people won’t deal with him because they know that he’s not trustworthy.
00:27:04
So I tend to think ostracism and reputational effects and the inability to get insurance coverage will tend to drive out people that are recalcitrant and stubborn and not cooperative, and people that don’t have a tendency to seek – to compromise and try to find resolution of disputes. But this is the natural way of things, and of course, in a more – in a richer and a more advanced society, you could expect that to be done more and more efficiently. With a larger society, more wealth, more specialization like more lawyers, more dispute tribunals, more reputational agencies and systems, all this would get better and better.
00:27:47
KENT WELLINGTON: Okay. Well, we’re past the 30 minutes. Would you be willing to talk a little bit more?
00:27:57
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’ve got a little bit more time. Go ahead.
00:27:59
KENT WELLINGTON: Great. So I have a couple questions that I wrote, but they’re not necessarily – they don’t necessarily follow exactly with where we were. But – so would your ideal system necessarily be able to interface with Uniform Commercial Code?
00:28:23
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I detect something there, but let me guess at that. Do you have some kind of a – do you have some kind of idiosyncratic problem with the UCC?
00:28:37
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah.
00:28:39
STEPHAN KINSELLA: That’s what I thought. I’ve seen this before. First of all, I don’t have a – I’m an anarchist, so I don’t have an ideal system. Anarchists are not for – this is the problem statists. They’ll say like, well, I don’t think your system would work, like as if I’m proposing a system. I’m not proposing a system. I’m simply opposed to aggression in human affairs, and I recognize that the state that we have now and any state that could possibly exist because of its nature would commit aggression, and therefore, it’s unjust and it’s wrong. That’s all.
00:29:15
And I would be – I would prefer people not to engage in aggression, and if people didn’t engage in aggression, we would have a society where there was no aggression, or at least there was no institutionalized aggression. You still might have occasional, random, private acts of crime or aggression, and they would be dealt with in the predictable ways, by self-defense and by justice, sometimes vigilante justice, sometimes institutional.
00:29:43
But – so the society I – the system I’m in favor of is just a system where there’s no institutional aggression, and there’s no institutional aggression because most people recognize that it’s wrong. They don’t recognize that now because, although they oppose aggression more or less, they’re confused about the nature of the state. They bought into the myth that the state is necessary, and the state is good, and the state is essential, and although it’s imperfect, it’s better than the alternative, which is anarchy. That’s what they’ve been told, and they believe that, so they’re sort of confused.
00:30:15
So I think in that kind of system, private law would emerge naturally, and there would be a role for codes because, over time, people are going to want to know in this region what is the law. And so some lawyer or some company might publish a book. This is the private marriage law or family law or contract law or commercial law or property law or criminal law or evidence law or procedural law in this region. And people would buy the book because they want to know what the law is. And then, over time, different advances in the law would happen because of custom and tradition and practices and contracts, and law would finally keep developing.
00:31:06
And there would be need for treatises and codes. Now the Uniform Commercial Code is one of those types of hybrid codes that we have in society now. But it’s not exactly the type of code I’m talking about. The type of code I’m talking about would be a compilation of existing law. And hopefully that law would be mostly libertarian and just, so you just codify and compile it so people could understand it. That’s what legal scholars would do.
00:31:34
The UCC was really a draft at sort of summarizing the existing common law but then putting it in the form of a statute so the legislature could enact it as a statute. In my system, there’s no such thing as a statute or legislation for two reasons. Number one, there’s no state, so there’s no legislature, so it’s impossible to have statutes and legislation, which is a good thing because legislation is not a way to make law. Legislation is just a way to implement the will of the ruling authority by making it pass under the banner of law and pretend like it’s law.
00:32:11
Just like in the US, in the federal court system, all these guys that they call judges, the federal judges, the Supreme Court judges, they’re not really judges. 1 They’re just state agents whose job is to interpret the words written down on paper by other state agents. That’s it. Their job is not to do justice, which is what a real judge does. A real judge tries to resolve a dispute between two parties based upon principles of justness and fairness. These federal judges can’t do that because their job is to interpret the Constitution and federal law, which are just positive enactments written down on paper by a bunch of elected bureaucrats and members of the state. So I don’t think they’re actual judges. They’re not actually doing law. What they’re interpreting is not law. [See Another Problem with Legislation: James Carter v. the Field Codes]
00:32:58
And so the UCC is just another example of legislation, although it was based in part on codified commonwealth principles, so in substance it’s not completely horrible. It’s actually kind of beautiful. Now, tell me what your concern with the UCC is. A Roman Catholic Church conspiracy? Lizards or what?
00:33:19
KENT WELLINGTON: No. I just have sort of a basic – so from what I understand, it came from Babylon. So basically, I’m into this thing of – so the Jews. They went to Babylon. They were exiled, and then they got all these bad habits like essentially the commercial – the rules of the UCC, and basically, it’s like an oath-based…
00:33:56
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Again, with the oath-based thing. I don’t know what you – you need to – what do you mean by oath? What is an oath?
00:34:02
KENT WELLINGTON: So an oath…
00:34:03
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Is it like a solemn commitment, pledging allegiance to someone? What is an oath?
00:34:08
KENT WELLINGTON: So an oath is an elevation of your word beyond where it – I’m not that good at legalese but…
00:34:19
STEPHAN KINSELLA: It’s not legalese. This is just – it’s not legalese. This is – I think the problem you’re having is this is all metaphorical stuff, and it’s just not rigorous and crisp and – when you say it’s an elevation of a word beyond something, I think you’re thinking in mystical terms because you’re imaging words have power probably with a capital P, right?
00:34:42
KENT WELLINGTON: Sort of. I mean I’m trying to reconcile what I see here in the Bible, and apparently this big, important guy called Jesus said something that sounds super anarchic to me, whereas 99.9% of pastors and church people, they will not acknowledge – they’ll actually go the opposite on this verse. They’ll say, actually, it means take oaths and take them seriously. Literally everyone thinks that even though he says take no oaths at all.
00:35:17
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, because they do. I mean I think some people – look. Common sensically, I think what it is, is most people – there’s probably a mystical religious element to it. But most people, even religious people, believe that honesty is important, and your word is important just because of your reputation. So if the government asks you to swear to something, you shouldn’t lie. And so if it is a lie, you shouldn’t do it. And I believe, if I understand, in some courts – they don’t make you swear on the Bible like to be a witness. They give you an alternative. Like instead of a swear, you can affirm. You can affirm or something. So they do tend to make an exception because apparently some people have a problem with that.
00:36:01
But I always thought it was just because it’s against people’s religious idea where they hold God as their highest authority, to put something else above that, and I appreciate that. I think religion although I think is, in a sense, nonsense, is a useful institutional hedge against state power. I mean – but let’s take your – take a typical marriage between a man and a woman. I view that as a commitment, a committed relationship. Now, if you have a loose-goosey, vague concept of oath, you could call that an oath. I took an oath to my wife. But that’s because people just use the word as a synonym for promise.
00:36:46
KENT WELLINGTON: No. I love this – I love how weddings work into this because it’s not an oath, at least the traditional ceremony. The oath is when you go to the courthouse afterwards, but at the actual wedding ceremony, they ask you: Do you, blah-blah-blah take blah-blah-blah? And you just say yes or no. It’s within the binary [indiscernible_00:37:07].
00:37:08
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, but you’re saying – you’re making a promise. You’re making a commitment. You’re promising to be committed to this person until the end of your life. That’s what you’re promising. You’re making a commitment.
00:37:19
KENT WELLINGTON: I – it depends on the wording of the…
00:37:23
STEPHAN KINSELLA: But that’s what a marriage – I don’t care about the wording. It’s what a marriage is. A marriage is a committed relationship.
00:37:28
KENT WELLINGTON: No, because there’s a difference…
00:37:30
STEPHAN KINSELLA: A woman doesn’t want to have babies with a man that she thinks is going to run off. She needs to have someone who promises to stick with her, and she believes it.
00:37:37
KENT WELLINGTON: So like I consider myself a Christian, so in terms of Jesus’ words there, I do not want to make any promises because – and so anything beyond a binary is – you could call it a promise, but to me it’s not a promise, like if I say, yes, I’ll go to your…
00:37:57
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Even the word promise to me – promise is – so people use the word promise to mean a contract, and like I said, I don’t agree contracts should be viewed as binding promises. They might come from a promise. Like I might say I promise to deliver these goods to you tomorrow, and we take the underlying meaning of that to mean I’m transferring these goods to you tomorrow. But it’s not really a binding promise. It’s just the way we interpret language. Likewise, are you saying you have never told your significant other, look, I promise I’ll never do that again? You’ve never said the word promise before? Is the word promise now anathema?
00:38:35
KENT WELLINGTON: Right. Totally. Once I realized what these passages say I…
00:38:42
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So you view promising as an oath.
00:38:46
KENT WELLINGTON: Absolutely. Exactly.
00:38:47
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So if your wife says, do you promise not to do the following, and you say yes, that’s okay because you just said yes. I mean, you see, it’s a cheat because you’re saying yes to the question about a promise.
00:39:02
KENT WELLINGTON: No. I don’t promise, but I’ll give my word because see, word…
00:39:06
STEPHAN KINSELLA: What’s the difference between word and promise? It’s semantics.
00:39:08
KENT WELLINGTON: Word – I mean in the Bible it says in the beginning there was the word, and the word was God, and the word was with God.
00:39:15
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, that’s God. The word means the Holy Spirit. That means the logos of God. It means some supernatural spiritual thing. You’re not comparing your utterances to your wife to the holy divinity of God, are you?
00:39:29
KENT WELLINGTON: Well, our words are, in a sense, divine. So going beyond our word – it’s like…
00:39:35
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Beyond your promise, you mean. See, you mean your promise. Are you just saying be honest? Is that what you mean?
00:39:43
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. I mean absolutely be honest.
00:39:47
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay. So it means be honest about your intention. So if you say, honey, I have not cheated on you and I don’t intend to and I don’t think I ever will, and I give you my oath to never – I mean it’s like you’re trying to skirt around, by semantics, saying some magic bad words.
00:40:08
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. You just don’t elevate beyond your word, just yes or no. I mean just…
00:40:15
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So if your wife says, will you ever cheat on me, what would you say?
00:40:19
KENT WELLINGTON: Well, I mean it depends on if I’m going to say yes or no, I guess. But I’m just going to say yes or no. I mean – what do you mean?
00:40:28
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Let’s say you say no and then – say you say no, and then you cheat on her the next month. What does that mean? What does that mean? What have you violated?
00:40:35
KENT WELLINGTON: My word.
00:40:37
STEPHAN KINSELLA: But your word was just a prediction because you don’t want to make a promise. If it’s not a promise, then you didn’t violate it.
00:40:47
KENT WELLINGTON: It’s about congruence, which also I find is a very mystical concept. Like the alpha needs to be congruent.
00:41:00
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Have you ever seen – do you know much about math?
00:41:02
KENT WELLINGTON: No. I’m not a math guy.
00:41:05
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, what do you get if you divide 1 by 0 in your calculator? Have you ever tried that?
00:41:10
KENT WELLINGTON: It explodes.
00:41:11
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah. And do you know why?
00:41:13
KENT WELLINGTON: Why?
00:41:14
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Because it’s undefined, and do you know why? Because you can’t divide by 0.
00:41:19
KENT WELLINGTON: Right, right, right.
00:41:20
STEPHAN KINSELLA: And you have an equation with a bunch of X’s and Y’s. There might be – like if you have X + Y at the bottom, and if X and Y are the same, that’s 0, but you might not know it. You might not notice it, right? So you’re doing this equation. All of a sudden, you get these crazy results. And if you trace it back, you find out, oh, the reason I’m getting this crazy result is because I made a mistake, and the mistake was I did a divide by 0 on accident because at this point in the equation, the X and the Y were actually the same. That meant the denominator was 0 so – and I didn’t realize it, whatever.
00:41:51
Well, I see an analogy to that to speaking in vague, slippery, metaphorical, mystical language. Like if you don’t – if you’re not rigorous and careful and precise with your language and have clear definitions and make sure you’re not using things in multiple ways, which leads to equivocation, then you can prove anything. I mean you could say that, well, the word is this, and therefore – it’s just not – it’s not rational, rigorous analysis. You basically can use that kind of mumbo jumbo – now this is my…
00:42:26
KENT WELLINGTON: No.
00:42:27
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’m not being critical of you. I’m just – I’m giving you my kind of anti – my own prejudice against…
00:42:36
KENT WELLINGTON: Slippery language?
00:42:37
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Against language that is not clear and solid and rigorous, yes, because it just leads to…
00:42:44
KENT WELLINGTON: It’s the opposite. The legalese language is slippery, and there are so many ways you could look at it, whereas the word-based, just simple…
00:42:53
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I’m talking more philosophy and rigorous thought than legalese. I mean I’m not – I’m talking about just when you have rational discourse, you need to – especially when the terms matter a lot, like when you start talking about this oath, a lot of your theory hinges upon whether something is an oath or not. So it’s important to be clear about what you mean by it. And I guess my original assumption was right. You do mean a broad thing by it. So you mean promises too.
00:43:20
KENT WELLINGTON: Totally.
00:43:21
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So I don’t see how that makes you hate the UCC but except this has something to do with Babylon, but I mean the original code was the Code of Hammurabi. It’s one of the oldest ones that we know of. And then you had the 12 tables, and you had the decalogue, the Ten Commandments. You’ve had lots of codes. Then you had the Corpus Juris Civilis. You had the Institutes of Justinian, Roman law, Blackstone’s codes. I mean I think that my – I’ll put it this way. The Rothbard-Kinsella—whatever you want to call it—theory of contract is probably compatible with your hostility to oaths and promising because it doesn’t involve promising. It’s only a yes or a no. It’s like, do you transfer ownership of this thing that you own to someone else? Yes. That’s basically what contracts are in my view.
00:44:19
KENT WELLINGTON: I like it.
00:44:22
STEPHAN KINSELLA: But I don’t see what you would have against codes in general because it’s just a way of setting down, in an organized form, a body of principles.
00:44:34
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. I’m actually not – I mean I’m not against it itself. I’m against adhering to it in the form of – in the way that you must conform with it for other people to be able to conform to it with you. So if you want to do business with another country, like Nigeria, that conforms to UCC, you need to do all these – you need to sign all these things. I mean signing something, to me, is an oath. It’s a beyond a – it’s beyond a yes or a no. Actually, I’m not totally sure on – I’m not totally sure yet on simple signings, whether I consider that beyond.
00:45:11
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, yeah, because signing is just a way of documenting things and getting proof later. So it’s proof of people’s consent. Consent is not always an oath. Let’s say you’re going to have surgery, and the doctor is going to knock you out and cut you open. He doesn’t want you to wake up and sue him for assault and battery, right? But you could say, oh, you cut me open. You’re a butcher. And his defense would be, no, you consented to it. And you say, I didn’t consent. So how is he going to prove that you consented? He says, oh, well, you signed on a piece of paper right before I put you to sleep that says I consent, so I have evidence.
00:45:57
KENT WELLINGTON: So see, you’re – so I think it’s all – you shouldn’t have entered into the oath-based system at all. I mean you’re probably dealing with an oath-based doctor, a doctor who is taking an oath who’s submitting himself to this bureaucracy. And this bureaucracy changes like crazy. I mean…
00:46:17
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, but nothing in my hypothetical requires the doctor to be. This could be a private free-market doctor where there’s no such thing as the AMA, no such thing as medical licensing. I mean in an anarchist private society, you would still have doctors, and they don’t want to get sued.
00:46:31
KENT WELLINGTON: Ah, sued assumed that there’s a system that allows for such a thing.
00:46:43
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, it’s not – there would be. But even if there wasn’t, the doctor doesn’t want to get a reputation for running around butchering people and operating on them without their consent. He wants to have a good reputation, so he doesn’t want someone to be able to make an unsubstantiated claim that he performed a surgery without consent of the patient. So it would be natural for him to get them to sign on the dotted line giving him permission to do the operation. I mean surely God can’t be against using ink to put markings on paper.
00:47:14
KENT WELLINGTON: No.
00:47:18
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I mean the Bible itself is written down, wasn’t it?
00:47:20
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah.
00:47:23
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So you can put information on paper. That’s all…
00:47:26
KENT WELLINGTON: For sure.
00:47:27
STEPHAN KINSELLA: A signature is information. The information is that I read this, and I was aware of what it says, and here’s proof of that.
00:47:35
KENT WELLINGTON: I’m trying to figure out. I mean for the past, like, fucking – or like 5, 10 years, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what is an oath and what’s beyond the yes or the no. And it’s tricky, and I’m having a tough time, as you can understand.
00:47:55
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, you could be doing what I did when I tried to prove intellectual property or when I tried to prove that there was a god. I mean you could be butting your head against a wall because it’s just – I mean you chose a battle that’s just – basically, you think Jesus had some deep words about oaths in one of his brief statements. And you think you need to unpack it and apply it to life in general or something.
00:48:25
KENT WELLINGTON: Because I realized – because my life was not – is not – as a millennial, my life in many ways is not as good as it was portrayed to me that it was going to be. And I’m like holy shit. Every – holy shit. The book that they gave me, that they were like, okay, well, whatever you do, follow this guy and what he says. And I looked at what that guy said, and he said no oaths. And then I realized the whole world is totally replete with oaths. There’s oaths everywhere, every day.
00:48:56
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, but don’t you think – I mean if you really want to put so much importance on the word oath in the English version of some protestant translation of an ancient text that you would actually want to study what were the actual words in the original Aramaic or Greek or whatever it was in in that actual chapter. What was the – maybe it’s not even the word oath. Maybe it’s the word – I don’t know. Maybe it’s some other word. Maybe that’s just the way the translator translated it. Have you looked at other translations and they all use the word oath?
00:49:27
KENT WELLINGTON: Yes. Yes. I look at – I’ve read quite a lot on this subject. I mean not everything but quite a bit. And also, I mean getting more into crazy stuff, I realized that, wait. All my family members, or the male ones, they were all Free Masons, and that’s an oath-based system. It’s an oath-based system, right?
00:49:53
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah.
00:49:53
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. So why the heck – all these people who I feel [indiscernible_00:49:58], people – they’re all like oath nuts. They fucking love oaths. They’ll take any oath you give them—oath, oath, oath. And then I’m like, well, this guy says – Jesus says no oaths. And I’m like, okay. There’s something to this, and then I’ve like – my brain has been stuck on it for years now.
00:50:14
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So Oath Keepers drives you insane.
00:50:17
KENT WELLINGTON: In a sense, but I mean Stewart Rhodes apparently was an FBI informant, so I don’t know how real that organization even was. But they shouldn’t have taken the oath in the first place is my argument, right now at least.
00:50:36
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So one of your favorite songs would be that one, I beg your pardon/I never promised you a rose garden.
00:50:43
KENT WELLINGTON: I don’t know the song but…
00:50:47
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Really?
00:50:48
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah.
00:50:50
STEPHAN KINSELLA: [sings] I beg your pardon. A little country music there. So your whole thesis would be stop making promises.
00:51:03
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. Just stop making…
00:51:06
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Everyone, stop making promises.
00:51:07
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah, stop making these elevated – let’s just keep things simple on our word and – so I think the Amish interpret it this way, the way I do. They think that he literally says no oaths, but here’s the weird thing. They have – in their whole society – so they don’t – so from what I understand – okay, I’m not sure if they sign simple contracts for things like building someone a building or something. But I should know that. But the main problem with the Amish is they swear an oath to their church, which I think is like – it’s where they mess up there.
00:51:56
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So what do you think – you know some of these libertarian groups like I think the Libertarian Party and maybe – well, let’s take the Libertarian Party. I think that you have to agree to this nonaggression oath or principle, like you have to say something like, I hereby foreswear the use of aggression in human affairs or something like that to become a good member. And kind of like in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged before you enter the building where his magic electricity machine was housed, it had a special electronics or password system where you had to state this oath to get in. Like, I promise I will not live my life for someone else, or I expect – I guess you’re against all that too.
00:52:54
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah, yeah.
00:52:57
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, what if you wanted to join the Libertarian Party, and they say, well, we only accept libertarians. Are you a libertarian? If it’s a yes or no, is that okay?
00:53:08
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. I mean – yeah, yes, but I don’t think it would be because all these organizations – they all want you – they don’t like the simple language, the yes or the no. They all want things to be super official, and they all want things to conform with the UCC and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just want to live simple – live a simple life, almost like Daniel Suelo.
00:53:46
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I can tell. I mean so you’re for simplicity. I don’t see why simplicity is per se a good thing. By the way, we’re using Zoom right now. I assume you had to sign the terms and conditions to get this software.
00:53:55
KENT WELLINGTON: As you may assume, I pay extra careful attention to things like that, and no, I didn’t. I didn’t see it anywhere, but I’m sure it was tucked in somewhere, or it is tucked in somewhere.
00:54:12
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So I mean I understand being disillusioned with the world that the millennial generation is faced with in some ways. But I just don’t – I mean unless you link it in closely with the theory of the state, I don’t see how oaths themselves are the root source of the problem, although I can see how it is like a widespread phenomenon of people being basically coerced or induced or forced to give some kind of allegiance to different institutions that are all linked up with the state. I could agree with that to some extent.
00:54:52
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah.
00:54:55
STEPHAN KINSELLA: But I don’t think it’s really the root cause of it. I think that’s just – that’s the way that people’s – the way people are brainwashed to believe the state is good. That’s the way it manifests itself.
00:55:07
00:55:12
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah, and the oaths – they open the door for the bad things to happen. Without that opening, then so much – basically you need oaths for things to scale. You can’t – and the thing is, scaling naturally, I think, is fine. Like if you’re Amish or whatever, Mormon, and you make a big family naturally, then that’s cool. But what they want – what most people want to do is they want to commit usury in the sense that they want a – the curve. What’s it called? The curve that just goes straight up – hockey stick? They want a hockey stick, and the way – the only way you get hockey sticks is if you include oaths in things, at least sustainably.
00:55:58
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, you know, there’s a – you might like this article. It’s by Alfred Cuzan. It’s called “Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?” And his argument is that, even in today’s world, we still have anarchy of a type because even the state itself is internally in a type of anarchy because the leaders of that state, like the president, you don’t have direct control and coercive power over all your underlings. They just obey your orders because it’s part of the hierarchy and part of the order, and maybe oaths play a role in that because they’re expected to do it. It could be that you couldn’t get someone to go bomb innocent people in Cambodia on your orders if they didn’t have an oath that they felt they had to abide by. Maybe you wouldn’t have the I-was-just-following-order defense.
00:56:52
KENT WELLINGTON: Exactly, exactly. I think oaths are a powerful psychological mechanism that get people to do things that they otherwise wouldn’t.
00:57:01
STEPHAN KINSELLA: But this dislike of usury makes no sense to me, and it seems to be totally like it’s a society thing.
00:57:09
KENT WELLINGTON: Well, my…
00:57:09
STEPHAN KINSELLA: And the problem is that that’s used by states as an excuse to regulate commercial affairs, so it uses their authority to commit aggression. Or it’s used as an excuse – it’s used for hostility towards an advanced commercial capitalist society like, oh, we can’t have a contract and enforcement system because they might enforce loan contracts, which have usury. Let me guess. You’re against bigness and capitalism too.
00:57:37
KENT WELLINGTON: No. No, as long as it’s all – as long as it’s just word-based. I mean you just – I can go catch a fish, and then I can go sell it to someone, and as long as I’m not signing a contract or taking some [indiscernible_00:57:54]
00:57:55
STEPHAN KINSELLA: But I mean you’re not going to have your – you’re going to have your nice, simple, walled-in-style life in capitalism. You’re going to be a cog in the wheel and division of labor, and buy your trout from the supermarket.
00:58:05
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. I’m – what I’m figure out is…
00:58:08
STEPHAN KINSELLA: With money.
00:58:09
KENT WELLINGTON: What I’m figuring out is if I’m going to take this verse seriously and take the no-oath thing seriously, yeah, you basically are screwed in terms of having a comfy life, which is exactly what Jesus says is going to happen. He says it’s the hard way. It’s the narrow road, blah, blah, blah. And I’m not saying I’m even going to necessarily do it. I mean I still take oaths really. In some – in interpersonal relationships like family and friends, that’s an area where I really have tried to practice this.
00:58:43
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Maybe you’ve got it backwards. Maye the oaths you should try not to take are the ones with the state, but don’t be so uptight about oaths with your spouse or whatever or your family.
00:58:54
KENT WELLINGTON: Wait. I should be uptight with oaths about my family?
00:58:58
STEPHAN KINSELLA: No, the other way around, not be so uptight. Like nothing wrong with telling your mom I’ll be there for you when you get on your deathbed, or I’ll be there for Thanksgiving and your wife I won’t cheat on you.
00:59:08
KENT WELLINGTON: Those are not promises. Those are – to me, the way you phrase those is not above – I know we haven’t really worked on the definitions either.
00:59:18
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, sometimes people want promises. They want to say, will you be here for Christmas? Yes. Are you just making a prediction, or are you going to – you promise that you’ll be here for Christmas? I promise, okay. That’s what they want to hear.
00:59:33
KENT WELLINGTON: I guess when you elevate, you’re putting something on the line beyond just your…
00:59:40
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, that’s why people know they can count on you. That’s so people want to be able to count on others. There’s a utility. I mean what if you go to your lawyer and you tell him all your secrets, and – but you want him to have an oath – you want him to have a duty of confidentiality. You don’t want him to reveal your secrets to the world, right? That’s one good thing about going to a psychiatrist or your doctor or a lawyer.
01:00:11
KENT WELLINGTON: You just named all oath-based people, and I wouldn’t be…
01:00:16
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Or a priest. When you confess to a priest, you don’t want the priest to tell people what your sins were.
01:00:21
KENT WELLINGTON: So I think…
01:00:22
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So you want a society where no one can trust anyone, and you can’t – you’re just – if you have a problem, you have to deal with it all on your own, which, I guess…
01:00:29
KENT WELLINGTON: No, no, no. So yeah, you wouldn’t be able to trust necessarily people because the society wouldn’t scale. It just doesn’t…
01:00:39
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, so that’s why I said you’re against capitalism. You need scaling. Capitalism requires scaling.
01:00:44
KENT WELLINGTON: If you put it that way, then I guess yeah, in some sense, then I would be. But I don’t necessarily think that that’s the case in everything…
01:00:55
STEPHAN KINSELLA: You can’t just have handshake deals all the time going by reputation of your first cousin.
01:01:00
KENT WELLINGTON: Well, you’re going to have a simple…
01:01:01
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Like some small Afghani village. You need to have international transactions from remote parties who don’t know each other.
01:01:08
And they need to be able to count on each other’s commitments.
01:01:12
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah, this is – I think this is natural law. This is [indiscernible_01:01:17]. I mean I don’t even necessarily…
01:01:18
STEPHAN KINSELLA: That’s why I say. You’re against – you want things to be small and localized and…
01:01:22
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. I mean I don’t necessarily want them to be, but I just see why Jesus, as this figure, as this person who claims to be mystical, and he says this thing about oaths, and oaths are all around us, and he’s like…
01:01:40
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So you don’t think you should be able to go see a therapist and confide some personal things to help work out a problem and be sure that they have an obligation not to reveal your information. You don’t think you should be…
01:01:52
KENT WELLINGTON: Oh absolutely, right, right. I’m going to assume – like with you, I’m totally cool. I consented to talk with you. You can use this recording however you want. You can chop it up.
01:02:01
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I know, but I told you I was recording it, but if you had asked me not to and I had agreed not to…
01:02:06
KENT WELLINGTON: I would be fine with that too even if you recorded it and you told me – I mean if you told me you weren’t going to and then you did, then I would be like, okay, this guy is not congruent.
01:02:16
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Correct, correct. But that means that there are some things you’re going to be uncomfortable being able to get help with because some things you – look. If I talk to someone who I don’t completely trust, I know that even if they promise they’re going to keep something confidential, I’m going to still be careful about what I say because if they break the promise, I could still get hurt if the information got out there. So I’m careful about what I say. But sometimes you need to be able to say those things, and so you go to a very trusted person.
01:02:44
But you don’t always have a trusted person that’s like your brother or something. Sometimes you have to go to a professional outsider, and in that case, you want there to be a serious institutional and relational obligation arising from a commitment not to reveal your information. And I’m thinking a priest, counselors, medical doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers.
01:03:10
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah, all the…
01:03:11
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Your system would basically get rid of all those avenues people have.
01:03:18
KENT WELLINGTON: It’s like in an Amish society, nobody ever seeks out those people because it’s…
01:03:23
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I don’t know about that. I don’t – I can’t believe that. I can’t believe that some Amish people don’t, on occasion, use the services of a lawyer, for example or a doctor.
01:03:36
KENT WELLINGTON: Maybe they do. I…
01:03:40
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Of course they do, and they expect the doctor not to go blabbing their personal details. They’re…
01:03:46
KENT WELLINGTON: But if he does, they’re not going to sue. They don’t – I’m pretty sure they’re not litigious like that.
01:03:50
STEPHAN KINSELLA: It doesn’t matter. They’re using the doctor partly on the expectation and knowing – they’re taking advantage of the fact that these doctors do, or they’re embedded in a society where they have this obligation, and they’re not going to violate that obligation. I mean I think – see, to my mind, you’re turning something that’s natural and good into something that’s unnatural and bad, so that’s where I would disagree, although I can understand partly where you’re coming from.
01:04:18
I do think it’s always better if it’s natural or organic rather than forced, but I see nothing whatsoever wrong with someone making a promise to someone else. I think you’re taking the bad examples and generalizing it. So it is bad to have an oath to the state. I agree with you. It’s bad to require lawyers to have an oath to the state to become a lawyer. It’s bad for doctors to have – to take certain oaths, although the Hippocratic Oath is not the worst oath I’ve ever heard of: do no harm.
01:04:50
KENT WELLINGTON: It’s changed over time.
01:04:52
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Sure. But the fact that some oaths are bad doesn’t mean oath making in general is bad. And maybe Jesus didn’t mean that. I mean you studied it; I haven’t. I mean what he actually said is not clear because these records are not that reliable, and they’re not comprehensive. And they’ve been translated many times, and maybe he had some exceptions in mind. He was just talking about a certain case. I don’t know.
01:05:25
KENT WELLINGTON: Possible.
01:05:30
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I wonder if there’s been a book written about this, like Oath-Making as the Source of Evil in the Modern World or something. Maybe you could make an extended argument for it.
01:05:39
KENT WELLINGTON: Oh, I’m going to write the book. That’s part of my life work right there.
01:05:44
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Maybe start with an article, and then that would force you to kind of carefully define your terms and…
01:05:51
KENT WELLINGTON: Right, right, right.
01:05:52
STEPHAN KINSELLA: … see if you can have a flow, like a thesis, introduction, sustained argument, conclusion.
01:05:57
KENT WELLINGTON: It’s not that the oath is bad. It’s that it opens the door to bad. It’s just – it makes what was not necessarily before, possible.
01:06:08
STEPHAN KINSELLA: What could – if I make a commitment to my wife that I will be faithful to her for the rest of my life, what bad does that open the door to?
01:06:16
KENT WELLINGTON: Well, the way you phrased it is fine. You just give me your word.
01:06:19
STEPHAN KINSELLA: No, it’s a commitment. Yeah, but you – it’s a commitment. It’s a promise.
01:06:24
KENT WELLINGTON: No. Well, so no. To me, that’s not a promise. A promise is like – okay, if she, after that, said, Stephan, do you promise? Then, to me, you’re elevating. That’s like a second level. It’s like…
01:06:41
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I don’t know what you mean – but what does that mean, elevating? You’ve used that before too. That’s another thing I’m not clear what you mean. Elevating what to what?
01:06:46
KENT WELLINGTON: Beyond – you’re taking it, instead of – it’s just beyond the base level of what you’re saying. If – like if it’s math, it’s like, instead of 1, it’s 1.5 power, like oh, more. It’s heavier. It’s greater. It’s beyond.
01:07:09
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Look. We’ve already established that you’re not good at math, so let’s leave that to the side.
01:07:13
KENT WELLINGTON: Fair.
01:07:16
STEPHAN KINSELLA: You might divide by zero on accident.
01:07:19
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah, I might.
01:07:19
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Don’t do that. All right, I’ve got to go in a second. If you’ve got one more topic, I could do that. Otherwise, I’ve got to run.
01:07:27
KENT WELLINGTON: Well, I appreciate your work. I’d like to – do you – you said that you consider anarchists libertarians and libertarians anarchists or something like that? Do you have an article or anything where you talk more about that?
01:07:48
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah. Read my article “What Libertarianism Is.” It’s on my website.
01:07:53
KENT WELLINGTON: Okay.
01:07:55
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So libertarianism is just the consistent objection to aggression or the – it’s the consistent belief that aggression is unjust. And if you just open your eyes, then you will see that the state is also unjust because it commits aggression. So a natural application of that view opposing aggression is to oppose the state. I mean you can’t – if you oppose aggression, you oppose the state because it’s aggression writ large. It’s like saying if I’m against aggression, are you against murder? Well, yeah. That’s a type of aggression, and the state is a type of aggression. So not all libertarians see that. They think the state is necessary, so you need some state, and they see that it’s dangerous, so they want to put limits on it.
01:08:43
And a lot of libertarians are not anarchists – or I’m sorry. A lot of anarchists are not libertarians like left anarchists. I won’t say – anarcho-syndicalists, these types. I would say they’re not true anarchists because you have to be a libertarian, and you have to believe in private property rights because if you say you’re an anarchist, and you don’t support private property rights – excuse me – if you say you’re an anarchist and you’re not a libertarian, which means you don’t support private property rights, then that means that private property rights can be violated. And that’s what states do. States violate property rights. So you can’t – you have no grounds for opposing the state if you’re not against private property rights being violated. So that’s why I say all non-libertarian anarchists are incoherent, and all non-anarchist libertarians are inconsistent. That’s my view. But it’s a minority view. I mean that’s – but then we’re already a minority, so I’m a minority within minority within minorities.
01:09:45
KENT WELLINGTON: Well, that’s super interesting. I’m going to read that for sure.
01:09:50
STEPHAN KINSELLA: It sounds like you’re even more a minority.
01:09:52
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. I…
01:09:54
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’m like one out of a million. You’re – it sounds like you’re one out of three billion.
01:10:00
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah, it’s difficult.
01:10:03
STEPHAN KINSELLA: There might be two of you in the world.
01:10:05
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah, maybe, which is why I want to write more about what I’m thinking about. I have a tough time getting anything on paper because I feel – every six months I feel like my ideas are way better than they were six months ago. And why would I ever put anything on paper if it’s just going to be so much better later on?
01:10:24
STEPHAN KINSELLA: You should register the domain oathbreakers, oathbreakers.com.
01:10:32
KENT WELLINGTON: Well, I think registering a domain is a type of oath.
01:10:35
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, I know. You’d have to make an oath to get. I know. That’s the dilemma. That’s why I said your ideas are going to spread like wildfire.
01:10:40
KENT WELLINGTON: Well, I hope that at least my ideas were novel, and maybe you – because I feel like you – I really appreciate the way you engaged with them.
01:10:48
STEPHAN KINSELLA: No, it’s interesting. It’s interesting. I’m just being facetious because…
01:10:52
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah, totally, totally.
01:10:54
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Because I’m just saying that your ideas are going to make them hard to spread because you won’t be able to sign the contracts needed to publicize them. I mean so it’s sort of like there’s a joke in this great book by Jerome Tuccille called It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand where he – it’s sort of a parody type accounting, so based in fact of the rise of the libertarian movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And he tells the story of this guy named Galambos. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Galambos.
01:11:26
KENT WELLINGTON: No.
01:11:27
STEPHAN KINSELLA: He was an early crank libertarian who had this insane IP theory. So he believed everything came from intellectual property, and not only that, it was inalienable. So even if you – if you’re the owner of your ideas, you can’t even sell them to someone because they’re inalienable, which means that Galambos could tell all his followers his ideas, but they couldn’t go tell other people, and he couldn’t even give them permission to tell them. So that’s why – it’s like – so his ideas naturally – so some people are like, well, tell us about this Galambos that’s so great and said, I wish I could tell you, but if you could only hear it, you would understand how great his ideas were. It’s like, but you can’t tell me? No, I can’t tell you. So the joke, is expect those ideas to spread like wildfire, like it’s a self-defeating doctrine, like it intentionally hobbles itself from being spread.
01:12:20
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. I get it.
01:12:25
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So I see nothing wrong – if you want to write this up, I see nothing wrong with you writing a paper and putting it on the internet or self-publishing a book on Amazon even though if you have to click a couple of boxes.
01:12:33
KENT WELLINGTON: Yeah. Well, thanks a lot. I appreciate all your work, and I want to dig more into it. But I just had a lot of these ideas that have been in my head for a long time, and I’m not able to talk to anybody.
01:12:56
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I got it. Well, if you get your thoughts together if you want to have another chat some time, give me a ring.
01:13:01
KENT WELLINGTON: Thanks a lot, Mr. Kinsella, appreciate it.
Hello, Mr. Kinsella! I’m an economics student in Tennessee looking to get involved in the discourse around Austrian economics and libertarianism, particularly through culture change and academic organizations. Would it be possible to talk for a few minutes sometime this weekend or next week?
I’m currently working with Turning Point USA as a social media manager and event organizer for a local ambassador, and I am involved with the Libertarian Party in the area. I’ve been familiar with Austrian economics for years now, but I had the good fortune to get an Austrian economics professor this semester and he has influenced me to pursue connections within the Mises Institute. I came across the many Mises Institute lectures and articles, and realized this is something I could get behind.
I’ve recently spoken to Dr. Jonathan Newman, Mr. Jeff Deist, and Dr. Patrick Newman. I’m interested in understanding contract theory on a deeper level and found your lectures on intellectual property to be insightful.
Would it be possible to arrange a brief phone call this week? Thank you for your time.
We talked about college and what a libertarians goals should be, activism, careers, publishing, and economic and libertarian issues such as intellectual property.
there was already a union among the states, a loose confederation, based on a treaty, a compact–the Articles of Confederation. A convention was called to modify it. Instead the Convention staged a coup and produced a new central state in secret instead of simply amending the…
“the Articles were never abolished. So the United States of America under the Articles still exists; I suggest the 13 original states revive the original USA by having their legislatures appoint its delegation members to the Congress of the Confederation; each State delegation gets one vote in Congress. Then the Congress can permit applications from the other 37 newer states and expand the size of Congress to 50 delegations. Then the new Congress of the Confederation can seek to abolish and disband the USA and the illegal Constitution.”
This was originally published as: “Reply to Roderick Long on Argumentation Ethics” (September 17, 2021) by Alexander C., but it is now down and not archived. The original text, which he had emailed to me, is below:
❧
Long presents Hoppe’s argument as follows:
1. No position is rationally defensible unless it can be justified by argument.
2. No position can be justified by argument if it denies one or more of the preconditions of interpersonal argumentative exchange.
3. Interpersonal argumentative exchange requires that each participant in the exchange enjoy exclusive control over her own body.
4. To deny the right of self-ownership is to deny exclusive control over one’s own body.
5. Therefore, the denial of the right of self-ownership is rationally indefensible
There may be a problem with the representation of 1 and 3. For 1, a position cannot possibly exist if it cannot be argued for or against. This is impossible to prove otherwise because once somebody attempts to present an argument which cannot be argued, they are already arguing said position. So it’s not that a position cannot be defended unless through argument, but that no position exists which cannot be justified through argument. But this interpretation of what Long is representing could be a strawman, I repeat, COULD be, so I will review his full argument later. For 3, this can fall into word-play very quickly, as one could argue that 3 is simply a non-sequitur on its face, so for sake of argument I assume that Long is simply summarizing 3 to be as short as possible, while still implicitly putting forward the entire argument.
Putting the above, possibly meaningless, discussion aside, RoderickLong goes through each point after noting that the argument does, in fact, follow, and tests their validity.
Long writes:
Is premise (1) true? Not obviously so. It depends, I suppose, on what counts as an argument. (Does Aristotelean “negative demonstration” count? Does coherence among propositions count?) But if argument involves deriving a conclusion from premises, then (1) seems to say that no position is rationally defensible unless it can be derived from premises. But presumably the premises themselves must be rationally defensible too; deriving a conclusion from premises that are not rationally defensible is hardly going to confer rational defensibility on the conclusion. So those premises, too, must be justified by argument – and so on for the premises of that argument. Thus we are launched on an infinite regress, with the apparent upshot that no position can be rationally justified – a performatively contradictory assertion if there ever was one.
It should be noted here that all truth claims are made in argumentation, that being any proposition which a proponent or opponent tests the truth value- if it’s correct, undetermined, or incorrect etc- of. So if whatever possible concept can meet this criteria, for example the previously mentioned negative demonstration, then it counts as an argument. We must also not forget that some propositions are starting propositions, usually self-evident ones. So we don’t even need to justify those propositions or premises specifically. Argumentation ethics is built upon these first principles.
For premise 2 Long writes:
Consider the statement “I am the only person left alive.” One can certainly imagine circumstances in which one would be warranted in endorsing this statement on the basis of the available evidence. (The last astronaut left on the space station watches the Earth explode ….) Hence the statement could in principle be justified by argument. Yet it certainly denies one of the preconditions of interpersonal argumentative exchange – namely, the existence of other arguers.
First, the statement by itself is a truth claim, but the question of if it is an argument depends on the situation. If he is trying to justify this statement to another person, he would be acting in a contradiction. If he was justifying this to himself, as in the scenario of the exploded earth, then no problem is presented as it is not an argument, as argument, as Long pointed out, is an interpersonal exchange, so the proponent of this statement would be saying things for the sake of saying things instead of arguing. But regardless, the fact that the statement above can be justified by argument is all that matters.
It is also true that, if it were true that only one person was alive, then the problem of norms would not exist, and therefore argumentation ethics does not apply here.
For premise 3 Long writes:
Is premise (3) true? I don’t see why. Do you really have to have exclusive control over your entire body in order to engage in argument with me? Couldn’t I, say, have your body shackled yet leave your mouth free?
This critique is very commonly brought up, so fortunately it has already been refuted. Argumentation ethics does not argue that violations of self-ownership can happen during argument, but rather that they cannot be defended. For further refutation look to Frank van Dun and Marian Eabrasu, who have published papers on the topic.
Premise 4 Long spends the most time on:
Is premise (4) true? I find it ambiguous. What does it mean for me to deny your exclusive control over your body? I might be denying the fact of your control – or the legitimacy of your control – or your right to exercise such control. These are three different things. For example, suppose you aggress against me; then I can acknowledge the fact that you are exercising control over my body, without acknowledging the legitimacy of your doing so. In the same way, then, I can acknowledge the fact that you are exercising control over your own body without committing myself to the legitimacy of your doing so. Indeed, just as I can engage in activities (e.g., self-defense) that presuppose the fact, though not the legitimacy, of your aggression against me, so I can engage in activities (e.g., argumentative exchange) that presuppose the fact, but not the legitimacy, of your control over your own body. Thus acknowledging the fact need not involve acknowledging the legitimacy.
Likewise, acknowledging the legitimacy need not involve acknowledging the right. To say that your action is legitimate is to say that you violate no moral duty in performing the action; but it doesn’t imply – as a right would – that I am morally bound not to interfere with your performance of the action. Suppose a tiger attacks me. I don’t think the tiger is doing anything immoral, since I don’t regard tigers as responsible agents. Hence I grant that the tiger’s attack is legitimate, but I still regard myself as justified in using force to defend myself. Or suppose you and I are shooting hoops, and you try to block my shot. I acknowledge the legitimacy of what you are doing, but I don’t have to let you succeed. In the same way, even if I acknowledge the legitimacy of your exercising control over your own body, that is in principle compatible with my being justified in doing my best to interfere with that control.
Premise (4) is true if denying exclusive control over one’s own body means denying the right to such control – but not if it means merely denying either the fact or the legitimacy of such control. Hence we had better interpret premise (4) as talking about the right, not the legitimacy or the fact – since that is the only interpretation that makes (4) come out true. But then, if the argument is to remain valid, premise (3) must likewise be reinterpreted to mean “Interpersonal argumentative exchange requires that each participant in the exchange enjoy a right to exclusive control over her own body.” But why should we grant the truth of (3), under that interpretation? Whatever plausibility (3) had came from interpreting it as talking either about the fact or the legitimacy, not the right. When (3) is interpreted as talking about the right, it starts looking less like a premise and more like the intended conclusion.
It appears that Hoppe has seemingly answered these questions before, some in replies to other people:
“Arguing is an activity and requires a person’s exclusive control over scarce resources (one’s brain, vocal cords, etc.). More specifically, as long as there is argumentation, there is a mutual recognition of each other’s exclusive control over such resources. It is this which explains the unique feature of communication: that while one may disagree about what has been said, it is still possible to independently agree at least on the fact that there is disagreement. (Lomasky does not seem to dispute this. He claims, however, that it merely proves the fact of mutually exclusive domains of control, not the right of self- ownership. He errs. Whatever [the law of contradiction, for instance] must be presupposed insofar as one argues cannot be meaningfully disputed because it is the very precondition of meaningful doubt; hence, it must be regarded as indisputable or a priori valid. In the same vein, the fact of self-ownership is a praxeological precondition of argumentation. Anyone trying to prove or disprove anything must be a self-owner. It is a self-contradictory absurdity to ask for any further-reaching justification for this fact. Required, of necessity, by all meaningful argumentation, self-ownership is an absolutely and ultimately justified fact.)”
“To say that this principle [underlying capitalism] is just also does not preclude the possibility of people proposing or even enforcing rules that are incompatible with it. As a matter of fact, with respect to norms the situation is very similar to that in other disciplines of scientific inquiry. The fact, for instance, that certain empirical statements are justified or justifiable and others are not does not imply that everyone only defends objective, valid statements. Rather, people can be wrong, even intentionally. But the distinction between objective and subjective, between true and false, does not lose any of its significance because of this. Rather, people who are wrong would have to be classified as either uninformed or intentionally lying. The case is similar with respect ton orms. Of course there are many people who do not propagate or enforce norms which can be classified as valid according to the meaning of justification which I have given above. But the distinction between justifiable and nonjustifiable norms does not dissolve because of this, just as that between objective and subjective statements does not crumble because of the existence of uninformed or lying people. Rather, and accordingly, those people who would propagate and enforce such different, invalid norms would again have to be classified as uninformed or dishonest, insofar as one had explained to them and indeed made it clear that their alternative norm proposals or enforcements could not and never would be justifiable in argumentation.” 1
“The answer to the question what makes my body “mine” lies in the obvious fact that this is not merely an assertion but that, for everyone to see, this is indeed the case. Why do we say “this is my body”? For this a twofold requirement exists. On the one hand it must be the case that the body called “mine” must indeed (in an intersubjectively ascertainable way) express or “objectify” my will. Proof of this, as far as my body is concerned, is easy enough to demonstrate: When I announce that I will now lift my arm, turn my head, relax in my chair (or whatever else) and these announcements then become true (are fulfilled), then this shows that the body which does this has been indeed appropriated by my will. If, to the contrary, my announcements showed no systematic relation to my body’s actual behavior, then the proposition “this is my body” would have to be considered as an empty, objectively unfounded assertion; and likewise this proposition would be rejected as incorrect if following my announcement not my arm would rise but always that of Müller, Meier, or Schulze (in which case one would more likely be inclined to consider Müller’s, Meier’s, or Schulze’s body “mine”). On the other hand, apart from demonstrating that my will has been “objectified” in the body called “mine,” it must be demonstrated that my appropriation has priority as compared to the possible appropriation of the same body by another person.
“As far as bodies are concerned, it is also easy to prove this. We demonstrate it by showing that it is under my direct control, while every other person can objectify (express) itself in my body only indirectly, i.e., by means of their own bodies, and direct control must obviously have logical-temporal priority (precedence) as compared to any indirect control. The latter simply follows from the fact that any indirect control of a good by a person presupposes the direct control of this person regarding his own body; thus, in order for a scarce good to become justifiably appropriated, the appropriation of one’s directly controlled “own” body must already be presupposed as justified. It thus follows: If the justice of an appropriation by means of direct control must be presupposed by any further-reaching indirect appropriation, and if only I have direct control of my body, then no one except me can ever justifiably own my body (or, put differently, then property in/of my body cannot be transferred onto another person), and every attempt of an indirect control of my body by another person must, unless I have explicitly agreed to it, be regarded as unjust(ified).” 2
Long has a few further concerns:
I have two broader, Austro-Athenian worries about Hoppe’s argument. (They may actually just be two different ways of stating the same worry.) First: to defend the existence of libertarian rights is to defend a view about the content of justice – but as an Aristotelean, I’m inclined to doubt that the content of justice can be settled apart from the content of the other virtues, or of the good life generally. Second: Hoppe’s argument, if it worked, would commit us to recognising and respecting libertarian rights regardless of what our goals are – but as a praxeologist, I have trouble seeing how any practical requirement can be justified apart from a means-end structure.
Konrad Graf has an answer to this in his article Action-Based Jurisprudence where he says:
Deductive legal theory, when properly applied in a given context, objectively and descriptively defines the parameters of what justice is in relation to questions of property rights, contracts, torts, and other legal matters. This yields a deeper-than-expected foundation for the traditional libertarian insistence on not mixing law with morality and the corollary opposition to “legislating morality.” Legal theory is a discrete field that, like Mises’s conception of economic theory, can provide descriptive, categorical input for use in “ought” considerations, even as legal theory and ethics remain distinct in foundations, scope, and method.
Also, see the graph on page 66 of the above article.
I still believe Long’s representation of Argumentation Ethics is flawed, so I shall finish with the argument as Hoppe puts it. I hope the above puts Long’s criticism to rest for now.
“1. All truth-claims — all claims that a given proposition is true, false, indeterminate or un-decidable or that an argument is valid and complete or not — are raised, justified and decided upon in the course of an argumentation.
2. The truth of this proposition cannot be disputed without falling into contradiction, as any attempt to do so would itself have to come in the form of an argument. Hence, the“Apriori” of argumentation.
3. Argumentation is not free-floating sounds but a human action, i.e., a purposeful human activity employing physical means — a person’s body and various external things — in order to reach a specific end or goal: the attainment of agreement concerning the truth-value of a given proposition or argument.
4. While motivated by some initial disagreement, dispute or conflict concerning the validity of some truth-claim, every argumentation between a proponent and an opponent is itself a conflict-free — mutually agreed on, peaceful — form of interaction aimed at resolving the initial disagreement and reaching some mutually agreed-on answer as to the truth-value of a given proposition or argument.
5. The truth or validity of the norms or rules of action that make argumentation between a proponent and an opponent at all possible — the praxeological presuppositions of argumentation — cannot be argumentatively disputed without falling into a pragmatic or performative contradiction.
6. The praxeological presuppositions of argumentation, then, i.e., what makes argumentation as a specific form of truth-seeking activity possible, are twofold: a) each person must be entitled to exclusive control or ownership of his physical body (the very mean that he and only he can control directly, at will) so as to be able to act independently of one another and come to a conclusion on his own, i.e., autonomously; and b), for the same reason of mutually independent standing and autonomy, both proponent and opponent must be entitled to their respective prior possessions, i.e., the exclusive control of all other, external means of action appropriated indirectly by them prior to and independent of one another and prior to the on-set of their argumentation.
7. Any argument to the contrary: that either the proponent or the opponent is not entitled to the exclusive ownership of his body and all prior possessions cannot be defended without falling into a pragmatic or performative contradiction. For by engaging in argumentation, both proponent and opponent demonstrate that they seek a peaceful, conflict-free resolution to whatever disagreement gave rise to their arguments. Yet to deny one person the right to self-ownership and prior possessions is to deny his autonomy and his autonomous standing in a trial of arguments. It affirms instead dependency and conflict, i.e.,heteronomy, rather than conflict-free and autonomously reached agreement and is thus contrary to the very purpose of argumentation.”
Hans-Hermann Hoppe- Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, Eigentum, Anarchie, und Staat, On the Ethics of Argumentation
I was a guest recently on Peter Quiñones’ show Free Man Beyond The Wall, Episode 631 (Sept. 15, 2021). From his shownotes:
Pete and Stephan discuss the Constitutionality of Biden’s vaccine mandate and then get into discussions about Hoppe’s plan for local politics and how it can fight against overreach by the Feds.
I post this from Bodrum, Turkey, at the 2021 PFS meeting, watching Saif Ammous talk about bitcoin. The internet is wonderful.
Grok shownotes:
In this episode of the Free Man Beyond the Wall podcast, host Pete Quinones welcomes back patent attorney and author Stephan Kinsella to discuss pressing libertarian issues, starting with Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate announced in September 2021 (1:00-3:39). Kinsella critiques the mandate as unjust and potentially unconstitutional, predicting a 60% chance it survives legal challenges, though it may be struck down as illegal under current OSHA rules. The conversation explores the broader implications of federal overreach, contrasting it with state-level responses like Florida’s resistance under Governor DeSantis, which Kinsella views as strategically preferable despite its own libertarian shortcomings (5:02-9:20). They also touch on the cultural mania surrounding COVID policies, with Quinones expressing shock at public compliance and Kinsella noting the temporary nature of these measures compared to enduring state injustices like war and taxation (15:01-20:05).
The discussion shifts to deeper libertarian strategies, drawing heavily on Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s ideas of decentralization and covenant communities as a path to liberty (22:00-39:46). Kinsella advocates for nullification and secession as bold responses to federal mandates, emphasizing the importance of local politics and natural elites in fostering decentralized, voluntary societies (8:25-9:58, 44:42-47:37). They critique the left’s egalitarian chaos versus the right’s hierarchical order, aligning with Hoppe’s view of natural hierarchies as essential for a free society (41:15-44:37). The episode concludes with reflections on global COVID responses, particularly Australia’s authoritarian measures, and the potential for secession movements in the U.S. as federalism persists (30:58-36:04). Kinsella and Quinones also briefly address contentious libertarian topics like intellectual property, abortion, and borders, underscoring the need for anarchist solutions to resolve these intractable issues (49:19-50:38).
Transcript and grok analysis/summary below.
https://youtu.be/jFYMO6wzO8c
Bullet-Point Summary for Show Notes with Time Markers and Block Descriptions
0:00-5:00: Introduction and Initial Discussion on Biden’s Mandate
Description: The episode begins with a promotional segment for Richard Grove’s Autonomy course, followed by Quinones introducing Kinsella, a patent attorney and author of Against Intellectual Property. They dive into Biden’s vaccine mandate, announced in September 2021, discussing its constitutionality and potential legal outcomes.
Summary:
Promotion of Richard Grove’s Autonomy course, highlighting its value for navigating current challenges (0:00-0:49).
Quinones introduces Kinsella and outlines the episode’s focus on Biden’s mandate, its constitutionality, state nullification, and broader libertarian topics (1:00-1:44).
Kinsella shares his travel plans to Bodrum, Turkey, for a libertarian event, setting a casual tone (1:57-2:43).
Discussion on Biden’s mandate begins, with Kinsella calling it outrageous but noting OSHA’s history of overreach; he predicts a 60% chance it survives but may be struck down as illegal (2:48-3:39).
Quinones describes the mandate as part of a broader “insanity” over the past 18 months, citing public compliance and cultural shifts (3:47-4:49).
5:02-15:01: Federal vs. State Power and Cultural Mania
Description: The conversation deepens into the libertarian critique of federal and state interventions, comparing Biden’s mandate with DeSantis’ counter-policies in Florida. They explore the cultural mania surrounding COVID policies, with Quinones sharing personal experiences and Kinsella reflecting on vaccine skepticism and Twitter’s role in amplifying hysteria.
Summary:
Kinsella critiques both Biden’s mandate and DeSantis’ fines on businesses requiring vaccines as unlibertarian, but sees federal overreach as the greater threat (5:02-6:09).
Quinones laments the erosion of private property rights and shares horror stories from lockdown experiences, contrasting Georgia’s reopening with California’s prolonged restrictions (6:15-7:40).
Kinsella proposes nullification as a bold state strategy, citing Tom Woods, and criticizes praising governors for granting natural rights (7:48-9:20).
Discussion of culture wars, with businesses caught in political crossfire; Quinones references Hoppe’s insights on societal division (9:20-10:45).
Quinones recounts his severe COVID experience at Porkfest, expressing skepticism about vaccines but no regrets; Kinsella shares his milder case and vaccine choice (10:51-13:04).
They discuss vaccine skepticism, with Kinsella citing a doctor’s caution about mRNA technology; Quinones questions the rush to vaccinate without knowing COVID’s origins (13:13-14:54).
Twitter’s role in amplifying mania is debated, with Kinsella seeing it as a symptom of broader societal issues (14:54-15:01).
15:01-30:14: Long-Term Impacts, Economic Concerns, and Local Solutions
Description: The hosts analyze the long-term societal and economic impacts of COVID policies, including inflation and debt. They advocate for Hoppe’s localist solutions, discussing the plight of small businesses and the potential of Bitcoin to curb government spending.
Summary:
Kinsella views COVID policies as temporary compared to permanent state harms like war and IP; hopes for fatigue to end mandates, citing international variations (15:01-16:55).
Quinones notes public enthusiasm for mandates, suggesting empty lives find purpose in compliance; Kinsella sees mandates as punitive rather than protective (17:02-19:23).
They discuss authoritarian rhetoric from figures like Leana Wen, fueling conspiracy theories about vaccine motives; Kinsella predicts “herd immunity” may be erased from discourse (19:29-20:54).
Economic concerns arise, with Quinones highlighting inflation from excessive spending; Kinsella agrees, blaming the Federal Reserve (20:54-22:00).
Hoppe’s What Must Be Done is cited as a guide for local political action, advocating for decentralized “Liechtensteins” over immediate privatization (22:00-22:45).
Small businesses’ struggles under conflicting mandates are discussed; Kinsella critiques Massie’s contractor workaround as impractical (22:45-25:34).
Corporate restructuring to evade regulations (e.g., Obamacare) is noted, but Kinsella warns of bureaucratic adaptability (25:34-27:05).
Bitcoin’s potential to limit government spending is praised, forcing fiscal restraint and rational policy (27:05-28:57).
Promotion of the Nomad Network, a liberty-focused community for entrepreneurship and networking (29:03-30:14).
30:14-45:00: Global Perspectives, Secession, and Hoppean Principles
Description: The conversation turns to global COVID responses, particularly Australia’s authoritarianism, and the potential for U.S. secession. They delve into Hoppe’s vision of covenant communities, natural elites, and the left-right divide, emphasizing decentralized order over egalitarian chaos.
Summary:
Quinones questions the global coordination of COVID responses, dismissing Trump-centric conspiracies; Australia’s police brutality shocks them (30:14-31:25).
Kinsella contrasts U.S. constitutional limits with Commonwealth countries’ lack thereof, citing The Handmaid’s Tale to highlight state power (31:25-32:59).
Canada’s authoritarian potential is discussed, restrained by U.S. proximity and rural resistance (32:59-34:05).
Secession’s likelihood grows, with Quinones predicting a U.S. breakup in his lifetime; Kinsella sees federalism as a hopeful sign (34:05-36:15).
Critique of centralist libertarians (e.g., Objectivists) who oppose state sovereignty; Kinsella favors Hoppe’s decentralized enclaves (36:15-38:30).
Hoppe’s covenant communities are defended as inevitable under anarchy, ensuring law and order through private institutions (38:30-40:23).
Discussion of voluntary segregation and diverse enclaves as natural outcomes of freedom, citing U.S. ethnic neighborhoods (40:23-41:20).
Quinones aligns with Hoppe’s view of the right as order-driven (hierarchy) versus the left’s chaotic egalitarianism; Kinsella agrees, emphasizing natural hierarchies (41:20-44:37).
45:00-50:57: Natural Elites, Future Outlook, and Libertarian Divides
Description: The final segment focuses on Hoppe’s concept of natural elites as community leaders in a stateless society. They reflect on the future of COVID policies, predicting regional differences, and address divisive libertarian issues like IP, abortion, and borders.
Summary:
Hoppe’s What Must Be Done and natural elites are discussed; Kinsella defines them as trusted experts in various fields, essential for dispute resolution and social order (45:00-47:37).
Quinones predicts regional divergence, with blue states prolonging mandates; Kinsella remains cautiously optimistic, citing vaccine uptake and Delta’s impact (47:37-49:12).
Kinsella plugs his websites (stephankinsella.com, c4sif.org) and expresses interest in Quinones’ post-libertarianism, planning future discussion (49:12-49:34).
Divisive libertarian issues (IP, abortion, borders) are briefly addressed; Kinsella sees IP as clear-cut, abortion as intractable, and borders as unsolvable under a welfare state, advocating anarchy (49:34-50:38).
Episode concludes with thanks and a promise of future episodes (50:45-50:57).
My Grok prompt: For the following podcast episode https://stephankinsella.com/as_paf_podcast/kol357-free-man-beyond-wall-ep-631-quinones-bidens-mandate/ and accompanying youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFYMO6wzO8c, using also links provided in that episode and other commentary in that episode, using the transcript time markers, provide (1) a 2 paragraph summary of the conversation in the video, for use as shownotes, with time markers; (2) a summary of the conversation in the video, for use as shownotes, with bullet points and time markers and a description and summary for each 5 to 15 minute block of time in the video. Also consider https://x.com/PeterRQuinones/status/1918899681574158795 and https://x.com/NSKinsella/status/1918907574419624105 and https://x.com/NSKinsella/status/1918907269556638017 and https://x.com/NSKinsella/status/1918604845537214470.
Summary of the tweets from Chatgpt:
Here is a detailed breakdown of the disagreement between Stephan Kinsella and Peter R. Quinones based on their posts on X:
🔥 BACKGROUND CONTEXT
Stephan Kinsella, a leading libertarian theorist best known for his work on intellectual property and rights theory, takes a strong deontological and Rothbardian/Hoppian approach grounded in the non-aggression principle (NAP), self-ownership, and private property ethics.
Peter R. Quinones, associated with post-libertarian or dissident right movements, often criticizes what he sees as the impotence, inaction, or abstraction of traditional libertarianism. He has increasingly endorsed power-oriented strategies and right-authoritarian realpolitik to resist progressive/state overreach.
This exchange reveals a deeper philosophical divide between principled libertarianism and post-libertarian praxis.
📍 KINSELLA’S INITIAL POST
Tweet ID: 1918604845537214470
Kinsella criticizes certain ex-libertarians or “post-libertarians” as being hypocrites. His language is sharp:
“They just want to be the new thugs in charge. They reject the NAP, reject rights, but still pretend they’re moral or principled.”
He frames their position as one of shallow pragmatism—people who are no longer truly libertarian, yet still want to claim a kind of ethical superiority. He paints them as disgruntled libertarians who now want to “do unto others as was done unto them”, weaponizing state or community power under the guise of “fighting fire with fire.”
He labels them as:
“way-station libertarians”
“thuggocrats”
Advocates of a might-makes-right mentality
Embracers of state-like aggression from a different direction
Main idea: Using aggression to fight aggression is not libertarianism—it’s just shifting which gang is in charge. Even if state overreach is real, the moral response is not to mimic its methods.
Quinones claps back with disdain. Without naming Kinsella directly, he posts:
“The people who still use the term libertarian to describe themselves and use it as a cudgel against people who want to actually get something done are the biggest hypocrites in the world.”
He accuses these self-described libertarians of being ineffectual—people who:
Cling to ideology without real-world effect
Use their “purity” as a cover for fear, risk aversion, or inaction
Critique others for trying new strategies (even if imperfect or illiberal)
Underlying message: If “libertarianism” means standing by and moralizing while society crumbles or totalitarianism rises, then it’s not worth preserving. He seems to view attempts at principled consistency as hollow and counterproductive in the current environment.
“When I say some of the post-libertarian types are hypocrites, I mean they rail against woke-ism, covid authoritarianism, the state, big pharma, all kinds of tyranny… but then they turn around and advocate, praise, or wink at using state-like or aggressive force themselves.”
He argues that even if your enemies are using unjust means, you don’t get to fight back using the same immoral tools. Otherwise, you’re not resisting tyranny—you’re becoming a new version of it.
Second follow-up:
“There are ways to oppose the state, pharma, WEF, wokism, etc., that do not require becoming the monster you claim to fight. The right response is not to coerce better; it’s to withdraw consent, decentralize, use persuasion, nullification, and live outside the system.”
This invokes Hoppean ideas of decentralization and covenant communities—but consistent with libertarian ethics. He distinguishes between legitimate resistance (secession, disobedience, parallel institutions) versus domination or “based authoritarianism.”
🔍 DEEPER PHILOSOPHICAL DISAGREEMENT
Theme
Kinsella’s View
Quinones’s View
Use of Power
Any use of coercion outside of defensive property rights is immoral and self-defeating
Using coercion may be justified to fight worse coercion or reclaim control from enemies
Moral Consistency
Non-aggression is the bedrock of liberty—even when inconvenient
Moral purity is a luxury; bold action is needed in times of cultural/political decay
Effectiveness
Power achieved by betraying principles is illusory and dangerous
Without willingness to wield power, libertarians will remain irrelevant and mocked
Ideological Identity
Libertarianism = non-aggression, self-ownership, private law ethics
“Libertarianism” has failed; a new right-wing realism is needed
Seize or support power structures to push back against left-authoritarianism
🧩 CONCLUSION
Kinsella represents a principled, Rothbardian/Hoppian continuity: no compromise with aggression, ever. He believes libertarianism is a cohesive ethical theory, not just a policy toolkit.
Quinones represents a post-libertarian, anti-purity posture: moralism without power is impotence, and old libertarianism is unsuited to the existential struggle of our time.
The disagreement is not merely tactical—it’s foundational. One side sees ethical consistency as the precondition of liberty; the other sees ethical flexibility as necessary to protect civilization from collapse.
Transcript
0:00
people people people richard Grobe is starting season six of his autonomy
0:05
course and you really should be there i don’t think I could have gotten through the last 16 months of this world without
0:14
the skills that Richard Grove gave me so head on over to freemanbyondtheall.comutonomy
0:22
check it out there’s two links there one’s to an overview of the course another is to a 19 skills PDF download
0:29
go check out that video sign up for the course and get on Richard’s level thank
0:35
you [Music]
0:49
[Music]
1:00
hello everyone i want to welcome you to the Free Man Beyond the Wall podcast this is your host Pinz i invited Stefan
1:06
Consella to return to the show stefan is a patent attorney and he wrote the book
1:13
against intellectual property i asked Stefan to come on and answer some
1:19
questions about Joe Biden’s mandate how constitutional he thinks it is what he
1:25
thinks is going to happen with it does he think that states are going to nullify it and then we’re just going to
1:31
start talking about a host of subjects we’re going to get into some hapa we’re going to get into some local politics
1:38
and we just get into a conversation like we normally have when we’re talking by ourselves
1:44
so without any further delay here is Stefan Canella
1:49
canella my man how are you doing i’m doing well how you doing good man let’s just jump right in because you are I am
1:57
so jealous of where you are leaving to go tonight uh you want to tell everybody i’m heading tonight to uh Bodum Turkey
2:05
through Istanbul with uh several of my friends are going too greg Moran from
2:10
Atlanta and Juan Carpio from Ecuador u who you know I think you met some
2:15
Anthony Samuroff um is going too and lots of Sedina Moose is going um of
2:21
course Hans will be there ho will be there so uh yeah this may be my 10th time we started this in 2006 I believe i
2:30
missed a few because of kid issues but um we missed last year of course because of COVID so I think it’s a truncated
2:36
group this year because of COVID we’ll see when I get there it could be smaller more intimate but anyway I’m I’m looking forward to it cool making plans for next
2:43
year wish I was one of that group okay so let’s just jump right in what are you
2:48
making of this mandate last week that Biden came up with and what do you think
2:54
the courts are going to say about it i haven’t I I don’t know i mean my first
2:59
impulse is that it’s outrageous of course but then you know there’s lots of things the state has done the last 200
3:06
years which are outrageous and they just didn’t get reported as much because it was before the internet i mean I’m not
3:12
so sure that uh it’s beyond OSHA’s purview because everything else OSHA does is insane too um
3:20
the best theory I’ve heard is that it will be struck down as illegal but not unconstitutional so uh Congress will
3:27
have to revise the OSHA rules or something like that to let them do this but I wouldn’t bet on it i’d say there’s
3:32
a 60% chance it will it will it will survive um which which is crazy i think
3:39
it’s totally unjust and unlbertarian and um I would say unamerican but apparently it’s not what do you think
3:47
completely insane i mean we’ve gone off the rails in 18 months if you would have told me back in January of last year
3:57
half the things that have happened people people have embraced and talked about federalism
4:03
the governor of California re referred to California as its own nation and then
4:12
that people would just not only comply Yeah with what every
4:18
with everything but become warriors for it almost like you know hey you know my
4:23
grandfather fought in World War II and he did his part and this is me doing my part and you know all I need to do is
4:30
stay home or yeah wear a mask and scallop people who aren’t wearing masks
4:35
or get this vaccine that you know I mean just a a strange mania has overtaken the
4:42
nation i don’t understand why because we’ve had previous pandemics and we didn’t have this happen maybe it just
4:49
Jeff Tucker and others have tried to explain why i still don’t quite get it but um I’m not quite as I mean I’m not
4:56
as much of a vaccine skeptic I think as some other people so I mean I’m still as a libertarian I’m against all the policy
5:02
issues the same way as you uh you and I had a little maybe disagreement on the Florida thing uh and the interesting
5:09
that happened before this Biden thing so my first thought was I guess I spoke too soon opposing Dantis but the
5:16
more I thought about it I still think I I’m back to my original view so in both cases you have the the federal
5:23
government trying to tell businesses what to do they’re trying to tell them you have to insist that employees are
5:30
vaccinated and in Dantis’ case he’s telling them what to do he’s saying you cannot request that or you cannot uh
5:37
require your employees to be vaccinated so technically they’re both unlbertarian
5:42
right but of course you know I guess you’re looking at it from more strategic or overall forest for the trees point of
5:48
view which one is really worse we know which one’s the big enemy as always it’s the federal government and the central state and in this case you know it’s
5:56
worse to force people to inject the vaccine into their body than to uh suffer a fine for asking your employees
6:03
to you know prove that they’re vaccinated I guess so I guess that’s how I come down on it but I still think
6:09
they’re both unlbertarian I guess is my my my my perspective yeah I think it and
6:15
I agree i mean private property is not is just out the
6:20
window at this point i mean correct the idea of it and I just look at what what’s more
6:28
strategic at this point so when you have when you have 18 months of insanity
6:33
and you’ve seen people suffer and you’ve I mean I I know p personal horror
6:41
stories that I I don’t even I don’t even talk about because I don’t have permission to talk about them and
6:49
you just look and you’re like okay so you know I was in Georgia up until recently i left Georgia and moved to the
6:55
Midwest um a couple months ago and Georgia came out of it and last week in
7:02
April last year said businesses can reopen if they want to and a lot of businesses reopen and stayed open um
7:09
cities did mandates which you know is really not I’d rather cities do mandates
7:15
than states you know the smaller you can get with the mandates the better you know so decentralized yeah yeah yeah and
7:22
just watching what happened down there and then hearing stories from friends in
7:29
California who are like look I’ve been we’re still locked down you know it’s like 12 months later we’re still locked
7:34
down 13 months later we’re still locked down it’s just like well I
7:40
You’re gonna have to try to do something politically absolutely and it’s going to be unlbertarian you know it’s not maybe
7:48
i mean you had I think Thomas Massie recommending civil disobedience which I think may be one way to go um you know
7:55
one thing I was posting on Twitter with all these libertarians favoring Dantis and I understand that you’re grasping at
8:00
any straw but Dantis is no you know it’s kind of pathetic that we we we praise
8:06
these governors for letting us do things right that we have a natural right to do
8:11
in Texas and in Florida these guys are not really on our side uh they’re just not as bad as the federal government but
8:17
what I was thinking was you know if you really were ballsy and had a sincere radical approach and wanted a strategy
8:25
um you ought to favor Dantis pulling a Tom Woods nullification thing and saying “Listen we’re we’re not just going to
8:32
we’re not going to find employers employers for for asking this they can do whatever they want but we think a lot
8:38
of them are asking for vaccination because of pressure from the feds we’re going to protect them from that pressure by interposing right doing a
8:45
nullification thing saying we’re going to use our state sovereignty we’re going to step step up to the bat and we’re
8:50
going to protect you from any penalties from the federal government in other words try to be ballsy and do a little
8:58
quasi secession thing and say “Listen the federal rules are null and void here
9:03
you do not have to comply with the federal rules you don’t have to ask your employees to get a vaccine we’re going to protect you.” I don’t know how you do
9:10
that i don’t know if it’d be successful but at least it would be a a valiant attempt i would think that’d be way
9:15
better than punishing employers for asking for vaccines
9:20
yeah I mean I agree with you 100% i can’t I can’t argue with you you know I know my I know my property my private
9:26
property principles i think we’re I thought you were going to say you know your place no oh god damn just joking
9:33
getting a heavy weight on here i got to be careful um but you know I think Dancis is also well
9:41
aware that he’s in the middle of a culture war and that a lot of these businesses are against him just because
9:48
he’s a Republican right just because he’s against this and in the middle of a
9:53
culture war what happens is people tend to any chance that they can get to
9:59
punish their enemies are going to take it yeah and I think that’s that’s where we’re at you know and considering that
10:05
this culture war you know and I mean you’ve you’ve studied enough Hapa and
10:11
when you see a culture war happening especially like what’s happening now okay so everything that’s happening in
10:16
the culture is absolutely insane people can’t tell what’s up or down anymore a lot of people are just they’re just
10:22
existing at this point and you have a tendency to go one way or the other and
10:28
it’s real easy to take sides and be like “Okay the left is ab the left is in
10:33
charge they control everything they control the media they control the institutions they control academia they
10:38
control big tech then let’s punish I’m all for punishing them as much as
10:45
possible even on a personal level because and it’s kind of hard to argue
10:51
against that because it’s just a a human emotion that you know it’s like all
10:57
right these people would want to destroy me you I mean these people want to like I mean I got I was one of the ones at
11:04
Porkfest that got sick and I got it bad I got it I had it for like two and a half three weeks where I was down where
11:10
I was down and I went through it i came through it i feel very confident from
11:15
what I’ve seen out of Israel that any kind of future I’m pretty well protected
11:21
against any kind of future outbreak and and um let me ask you a question i don’t
11:27
want you to hold me down and put and put the you know these people want people to hold people down and stick needles in
11:34
their arms and that to me is the enemy do you have any personal regrets about not getting the vaccine beforehand in
11:40
other words do you think that being vaccinated would have made your experience um not as bad
11:47
it probably would have made my experience not as bad but I still don’t regret it i’m still glad that I went
11:53
through it because I went through it probably as bad as
11:58
anyone that I’ve heard and Oh no no have you talked to Justin justin Arand arman
12:04
oh no no no no i mean I’m I went through of people that I’ve talked to okay and
12:11
I’m glad to be able to tell the story i’m glad to be able to say “Yeah I’m I’m overweight i’m over 50 and I pulled
12:19
through this thing and I’m fine.” Yeah you know and I can go up and down i can do all the same things I used to do
12:25
before it without any suffer without any suffering and everything and I don’t know man i just think that
12:33
this f this vaccine is going to turn into a flu vaccine it’s going to be like a yearly thing or a seasonal thing and I
12:39
never had a flu vaccine in my life you know and it just I I don’t know it’s just I’m a hard-headed prick you know
12:46
well yeah i mean I got to say I’m kind of glad I got I got it too after Portf Fest but I was vaccinated but um but my
12:52
case was very mild but I’m glad I got it because um I do have antibodies i’ve
12:57
checked and uh I’m going to Turkey tonight so I think the risk of me getting it while I’m there which would result in some kind of bizarre
13:04
quarantine or lockdown is reduced so I’m glad I got it um but I’m also glad I was vaccinated first but um but I understand
13:13
like you don’t want to do it if people tell you to do it even if it’s a good idea like you want to spite them right u
13:21
But everyone’s got a different opinion on this and that’s what that’s the way the world should be right some people are antivaccine like you are some people
13:27
say “I’m not antivaccine i’m just anti this vaccine right or I’m anti this vaccine right now.” I’ve had a tetanus
13:34
shot i had a tetanus shot a few years ago i’m not completely antivaccine i’m
13:39
just looking at this thing and it’s like I’m just like they were calling for a vaccine from
13:45
this like right from the start you know and I’m just like well wait a minute can we find out what this is for we don’t
13:52
even know where this came from right now yeah and it’s like we don’t know the origin of it we don’t know if it’s lab
13:59
lab made if it was gain of function if it came from a bat or a pengalin or whatever and it’s like I’d like to know
14:05
these things first you know and then talking to Ken Wakowski who is a
14:11
mainline doctor worked for Hoover University for years and years and years
14:16
has every vaccine known to mankind in his body has taken it into his body and
14:22
then when he heard about this he’s like I like the he said mRNA technology is
14:28
going to be the future he goes I’m just not going to get this vaccine right now because I need to see more testing on it
14:33
yeah yeah yeah and that you know that was that’s that sounds way too reasonable yeah yeah yeah i know yeah
14:41
it’s like that you know I had dinner it’s not like I I know the guy over Skype i had dinner or Zoom i had dinner with the guy i think I looked in his
14:48
eyes you know but that contradicts some of the Twitter advice by Joy Reid on on on Twitter so it’s got to be
14:54
unreasonable what do you think of all this and how much of a how much of an influence do
15:01
you think that like the insanity that goes on on Twitter carries out into the
15:07
real world i mean I think Twitter is more of a symptom than a cause but I guess it it
15:13
goes both ways um we do have this weird mania now and I do think that we’re
15:19
having I thought a year or two ago we had peak peak SJW or peak panic uh what
15:25
do you peak cancel culture but it looks like it’s just getting worse it’s got to reach a peak at some point look my view
15:31
on the co thing is same similar to yours i think the lockdowns have been horrible the the the mask mandates have been
15:36
stupid and horrible um the social distancing is stupid and horrible all of it’s been horrible um but I got to
15:44
believe as bad as it is it’s temporary um because I think we’re going to have fatigue at some point because we’re I
15:51
just don’t think everyone’s going to live like this forever although in the beginning of this in 2020 I wouldn’t
15:57
have thought it’d be a year and a half later either so I don’t know um I guess
16:02
I just don’t think that you know the top what do you what do what do you say the top five or six things are that the
16:08
state does the type the worst thing that government’s always done to us war the drug war taxation central bank
16:15
government schools intellectual property i know not everyone thinks it should be up there but those things right the
16:20
permanent things um I just don’t think that CO is going to be up there forever the response but um
16:27
if it is I think we’re screwed you know uh luckily we have an international system right so everyone’s
16:34
treating it differently like even Denmark and some other countries I think are are some of these other countries
16:39
are ending their lockdowns now even the UK refused to do one the other day uh to escalate it so maybe that fact will keep
16:48
us from keeping it forever because it will just become too obvious that it’s ridiculous uh I’m just hoping a year
16:55
from now we’re you know 90% back to normal maybe I’m being polyiana i don’t know i had talked about vaccine mandates
17:02
in March of last year i had talked about uh passports in March of last year uh
17:08
but I had actually said that I thought the masks would be gone by July of last year so I was way off on that one um I
17:15
wish I wasn’t as right about a lot of this stuff as I was because um
17:21
people seem to really like this they are enjoying the mania there are a lot of
17:27
people who are re it’s get I hate to say it this way because you know you’re a
17:34
successful person i’m a successful person we look we enjoy these I mean we get so much out of doing what we do
17:42
there are people out there whose lives are so empty that this actually gave them purpose i I agree it’s it’s it’s an
17:48
excuse to pile on like for example I was thinking recently about all these mandates uh like I think Biden or
17:54
someone in his administration is proposing um that you have to be vaccinate i think Fouchy proposed that
17:59
you have to be vaccinated to travel uh which could be unconstitutional but who
18:04
knows but the point is you could almost empathize or understand why they would
18:12
want the vaccine mandate um in general if they think it will protect people
18:17
okay we don’t agree with the means but you understand it but if you don’t exempt people that have had that have
18:23
had COVID and have recovered then it’s not really about protecting people right and for the travel thing
18:31
it’s almost like they see an excuse to punish people like it’s a it’s it’s not a way to protect people it’s a way to
18:38
hit them when it hurts the most to force them to go along for their social program right so yeah if you really want
18:44
to travel this is the price you have to pay you have to get the vaccine first it’s not really about protecting them
18:50
right um and they’ve changed their tune of course in the beginning everyone was saying the vaccine was to prevent you
18:55
from getting sick maybe not 100% but most people would prevent you from getting sick now they’re saying “Oh no
19:00
it was never about preventing you from getting sick now it’s just about reducing the symptoms which I think is still an a huge accomplishment and I
19:06
think it does that.” But that wasn’t the story right so now they’re changing their tune and you have Biden even
19:11
saying we need to force people to get vaccinated to protect the vaccinated people from the unvaccinated so it’s
19:16
like what the hell is your message even you know um
19:23
so yeah I’m I guess I’m with you on all this um but I feel like in a way we’re
19:29
repeating the same refrain uh we we all know what’s wrong with this
19:34
but we’ve been in this for 18 months now yeah the well when you look at like
19:40
comments like Lyanna Woo this doctor who used I think she used to be with the CDC
19:46
I can’t remember and now she’s she I can’t remember who she’s working for now but she was on Wolf Blitzer and she said
19:52
this was a while back she said we really need to use vaccines as a stick and we
19:59
need to basically restrict people’s freedom until they take it and you’re hearing that a lot I mean I just heard
20:05
an audio from like some hospital administrators out in the out um out
20:11
west who were saying we need to make this sound worse than it actually is and it when
20:19
you Alex Jones becau you can get real Alex Jones when you hear people talking like that it’s like why do they want
20:25
this thing in me so much yeah yeah we’re we’re really at the point now that
20:33
I’m expecting to see the term herd immunity like removed like newspeak like
20:40
just taken out of any kind of medical text or any conversation and anyone
20:46
who’s talking about herd immunity may as well be talking about like a um a geocentric universe
20:54
or Yeah yeah I mean
21:00
it’s a strange time we’re in you know it’s a strange time and then on top of that this has led to like a complete
21:09
ignoring of fiscal sanity right so now we’ve just gone from people kind of
21:14
worried a little bit in the background about this huge national debt from three four years ago and now it’s like it’s
21:20
doubled and we’re spending like three four five six seven trillion dollars extra and it’s like and we’re finally
21:28
seeing it we’re finally seeing that inflation the price inflation that you
21:33
we’ve been talking about since 2008 when they started printing trillions yeah and all the Yeah and all these idiots are
21:39
saying “Oh it’s a temporary thing it’s because of supply chain uh disruption because of co but it’ll it’ll settle
21:46
down it’s like no it’s not settling down it’s it’s um it’s about to happen you know we’re we’re seeing it happen yeah i
21:53
mean I just don’t know other than at this point I’m saying that local if
22:00
you’re going to take a make a political solution I really think that looking at like hapa what must be done is the thing
22:07
you should be doing and not you know just jumping right in hey we need to privatize the schools and everything like that but if you’re in a red area
22:15
and local and the local politicians are
22:20
of the same mind as you know you know no one should be forced to wear a jab your
22:25
should your kid shouldn’t be forced to wear a mask something like that then we really should maybe start working at
22:31
local politics and start building up those 10,000 Likensteines that you know Papa talks about of course um but that’s
22:38
not going to be good enough for a lot of people who are more impatient and they want something we can do right now um I
22:45
mean think about a businessman an employer in Florida right now um they’re
22:50
caught between two masters right because they’re being told by Dantis that if they require vaccines they’re going to
22:56
be fined and they’re being told by Biden that they must ask for they must insist
23:02
on vaccines so they’re they’re screwed what what are they what are you supposed
23:07
to do just leave Florida yeah I I know uh fire fire your employees to get below
23:13
that 100 employee threshold which is another ridiculous thing about the mandate like why would you exempt small
23:20
businesses from if it’s really a pressing issue why wouldn’t it cover all businesses well and considering that
23:27
small businesses out outnumber Exactly large businesses i mean but that’s one
23:32
of those things is people it’s a very it’s something that libertarians you know like say “Oh well you know if you
23:38
can vote with your feet.” Well not everybody can vote with their feet especially business owners business
23:44
owners are kind of stuck and business no one has been taking a beating on this in
23:51
the last 18 months more than small business owners because No it’s No of course not especially like landlords
23:58
right landlords are totally screwed because they’re demonized even though they’re they have to pay the bank for their mortgages
24:04
uh for their loans right and service their their buildings and yet they can’t collect rent and they can’t keep keep
24:11
people out it’s so you know because the the the banks have political clout and
24:17
then the poor have political clout you know they’re going to get protected but the the landlords are stuck in between and
24:23
there’s lots of other businesses that that don’t have a high profile that are stuck in between um but you had I think
24:29
you had Thomas Massie on when he was suggest he suggested that uh to to to escape the u to evade the
24:37
the the Biden mandate that you you ask your employer to treat you like a
24:42
contractor which of course is high is just as impractical as saying move change states um but it’s also probably
24:50
illegal i mean if you could escape you got 1099 everyone yeah this is why it’s
24:57
it’s this is Uber saw this in California you can’t just to call your employees
25:02
contractors to escape employment regulations otherwise everyone would do that i mean there there if you fit the
25:08
definition of employee you are an employee whether you’re you’re called that or not and if you try to evade it
25:13
then you’re evading taxes and regulations and all that you don’t have the option to just say “Oh I’m I’m an I’m a contractor.” um because you’re not
25:22
if you’re under the supervision of your company and there are certain criteria by by which you’re an employee so that that won’t work either so that’s futile
25:29
i I understand people trying it but most employers are going to say “No screw you.” Or because they’re they’re going
25:34
along with the with the propaganda anyway most employers they’re not going to be sympathetic to an employee saying
25:39
“Please reclassify me as a contractor.” Well could a say a company has 200
25:46
employees or say they have 190 employees could they just split it in half under I
25:52
think I think you you you could if they wanted to i actually think something similar to that happened uh when
25:58
Obamacare was introduced there were these different man thresholds that um where a certain size of employment base
26:05
meant you were subject to the to the regulations of Obamacare so I think like here in Houston there’s a restaurant
26:11
chain called Hillstone it’s a national chain it’s not that big but it’s Hillstones it’s kind of an up upscale
26:16
and one of their subbrands is called Houston’s which is not related to my city but there’s one here so that
26:22
Houston’s restaurant location here next to my house which we’ve gone to for years changed their name two or three
26:29
times they they were Hillstone then they were back to Houston’s then they were Hillstone now they’re back to Houston’s again and my understanding is they were
26:35
doing that because the corporation was re reorganizing to keep different subsidiaries under these limits to to
26:42
evade Obamacare regulations so I suspect some companies will do that for uh any
26:48
Biden mandate and then of course the bureaucrats the OSHA will just modify the rules i mean they’ll just change the
26:54
threshold down to 50 you know so this is by the way this is
26:59
this is one thing I’ve pointed out in my writing and others have too um like hapa
27:05
that one of the problems with making law in society by legislation which
27:12
administrative law and regulations are a subset um is that it increases uncertainty in society because you never
27:18
know what the law is because the government can just change the rule from day to day um if it’s the common law
27:24
that evolves and and organically comes about even if it’s an unjust rule it’s kind of like permanent or like slowm
27:31
moving so you can predict what it is at least so you can adapt and respond to it and if you change your business model to
27:37
to respond to whatever the law is even if you don’t like it then it’s going to be that way and you can you can adapt
27:43
but if if they can just change the rules the next day then you never know what’s going on and that’s bad for the economy it’s bad bad for planning it reduces
27:50
overall wealth and efficiency and that’s That’s the world we live in now how much
27:55
do you think that Bitcoin can help us a lot i think Bitcoin can help a lot because a lot of this just like war is
28:02
driven by the ability of the government to spend money that they don’t have right and they can only do that because
28:08
um they’re not limited by taxation anymore because of the Federal Reserve and the printing press and I I I have
28:15
hope that Bitcoin is going to I think Bitcoin might fix this too right bitcoin fixes so many things in potentially and
28:23
if you cut off the government’s printing press I mean how could they have paid for all those people to have the
28:29
unemployment benefits and the PPP payments and all this if they didn’t have um um their printing press if you
28:35
take the printing press away they’ve got a tax they can’t run a deficit they can’t they they just cannot spend money
28:40
they don’t have so I think Bitcoin could put them on a huge budget when you put people on a budget they have to act more
28:46
rationally so perhaps they could have changed a lot of this you know if the the if the politicians knew they didn’t
28:52
have 1 trillion 2 trillion 5 trillion 7 trillion to throw around to to throw
28:57
around it would have affected their calculus it would have had to have had i’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that if
29:03
you’re someone who listens to this episode you care about liberty especially individual liberty there’s
29:09
also a good chance you’re tired of waiting around for political change tired of being duped by political
29:14
parties and filling you with hope and then never coming through if you’re ready to take matters into your own
29:20
hands then I want to tell you about a new community called the Nomad Network the Nomad Network is the number one
29:25
community for liberty-minded people like us who want to create freedom in our lifetimes by focusing on
29:31
entrepreneurship investment and income mobility i’ve been on there for about a week and a half it’s just one person
29:37
after another posting their W’s talking about what they have going on and it
29:43
just looks like the place to be at this point i’m going to be spending a lot of time on there whether you have an
29:48
existing business or you’re looking to start one or simply need to network with like-minded people I think the Nomad
29:54
Network is definitely the place for you the best part is it’s free to join just go to www.nomadnetwork.appete
30:03
appet see what everyone’s talking about that’s www.nomadnetwork.appete
30:14
and open your free account today last year a lot of people were saying that
30:20
this reaction to the Corona virus was mostly to make sure
30:28
that Trump didn’t get elected and I said “Sure that’s that could be a good
30:33
byproduct of it but it was worldwide and this was happening all over the
30:39
world.” How do you explain that how do you explain that there were so many that
30:44
there were so few countries and so few you know Commonwealths that just didn’t
30:51
buy into this and it just seemed to be like I mean let let’s go into conspiracy
30:58
theory land here it would look like an orchestrated global effort and then you look at what’s happening in I mean let’s
31:05
talk about this Australia have you been following what’s going on in Australia yeah loosely what do you think that I
31:12
mean it’s it’s in people are getting beaten in the streets by the police for
31:18
bringing their masks down the military are actually patrolling the streets there what the hell’s What is that i
31:25
don’t know i think it shows that um these so-called open societies that we always thought were like the West was
31:31
more of a liberal tolerant open society um I mean as much of a critic as I’ve
31:37
always been of the United States and the Constitution for our worship of it um
31:42
there’s something about having our written Constitution and our written bill of rights which which was at least somewhat inspired by some lip service
31:50
liberal ideas um has put down some kind of limits at least paper limits on what
31:56
the state does here whereas in in the in the other parts of the Commonwealth they never had that right so Australia
32:02
probably Canada the UK uh they’re really it shows that it shows the state has no
32:07
limits um even the ones that that that you think of as the kinder gentler states i mean I
32:16
I don’t know if you watched The Handmaid’s Tale on um I guess whatever
32:21
network it’s on but and they show you know the US has become a theocracy a fascist theocracy neo-Christian
32:27
theocracy and Canada is this kinder gentler place and when all the all the um all the people that the refugees from
32:34
the US go there they get welfare payments to set up their house and to pay their food and it’s so kind and
32:39
gentle but Jesus Christ it doesn’t look like that now does it the Commonwealth countries they’re not they’re not so kind in and gentle are they i mean the
32:46
the teeth of the state are shiny and sharp even if they hide it sometimes
32:51
yeah i just that blatant propaganda for Canada when you have Trudeau who’s just
32:59
basically he would have Canada turn into Australia overnight if I’m assuming if
33:07
it wasn’t for the fact that the United States is right here next to it that may
33:13
be one one thing that’s restraining it in some way um or the fact that that’s a
33:19
country full of insane rednecks i don’t think people realize that once you get outside of like the eastern parts of can
33:26
of Canada you’re you’re dealing with some serious rednecks that will um that
33:31
are pretty tough yeah i I you you kind of wonder if things like this might slowly increase
33:39
the odds of secession movements like in the US i mean you know you think of New York as like a as a um as a blue state
33:47
blue state right but lots of it is rural and very red um the same with even
33:53
California right and um and even Texas has red red blue parts outside of the uh
33:59
of the of of the red of the red areas well Dallas and Fort Worth are red and
34:05
blue right on top of each other yeah even even Houston where I live uh people think it’s conservative it’s not it’s
34:10
it’s um I the impression I get from living here is it’s a bunch of uh um
34:16
it’s a bunch of Democrats and a bunch of limousine neoliberal neo-Republican types so it’s it’s pretty it’s pretty
34:24
blue here too god I wish they wouldn’t have picked you know that was from the that was from the Gulf War wasn’t it when CNN uh picked those colors oh no
34:32
that was from the that was from the Gore Bush election in 2000 when they chose red and blue to represent Bush and Gore
34:40
and it’s always confusing to me because I always associate red with commies which would be the Democrats i’ve always
34:45
got to flip it in my mind to remember which one’s which yeah but going back to
34:51
secession now um yeah I when you talked about secession in January of 2020 it
34:58
was basically theoretical yeah texas talks about it all the time even
35:03
California brings it up and everything i’m pretty well convinced that we are
35:09
going to see it in my lifetime that there is going to be some there something is going to break off in my
35:15
lifetime and when one thing breaks off it is just going to it it’ll be dominoes falling well you know what’s heartened
35:23
me a little bit is that the federalism we have in the US has has not decayed in
35:29
the sense that there’s still a recognition by the feds that the states or the kind of the the fundamental units
35:35
here um I mean even Biden has been a little bit frustrated by the some of the
35:41
actions of some of the governors he doesn’t like but that’s a recognition on his part that he can’t really control
35:46
what they do so and he may like he may butt heads with Florida if his OSHA
35:52
mandate conflicts with the state law in Florida what’s going to happen i mean that’s to me it’s a good I mean I’m I
35:58
feel sorry for the businessman being caught in the middle but um it still is a is a display of of federalism so every
36:04
state maintains its identity and there are some states that have this like even Texas has this sort of this secession
36:10
idea built into its makeup um so I think it’s still possible here by the way this
36:15
is one reason I’ve always despised these centralist libertarians like the KO types uh like Tim Sander is a good
36:22
example that they’ve argued that oh the United States is one country and every
36:27
state’s not sovereign they want the federal government to be central supreme
36:33
power it’s just straight out of it’s objectivism yeah the objectivists at least they at least admit that they’re
36:39
rationalists and um and some of them if you if you ask them like well your opposition to anarchy wouldn’t that
36:46
imply that anarchy on the international plane is also bad and we shouldn’t have 200 states we should have one and most
36:52
of them if they’re honest they’ll say they’ll they’ll they’ll sort of reluctantly admit yes ideally we want
36:58
one world government but in today’s world that wouldn’t be practical it’s like yeah well it’s never practical
37:03
dumbass i mean I ran said the moral is the
37:09
practical so if you’re admitting something’s not practical maybe it’s immoral and in principle too dumb ass
37:16
well one of the places that myself and Scott Horton um diverge is I’m not a
37:22
libertarian universalist at all i mean I’m I’m a Hoppian covenant community guy
37:29
who just believes that that’s the only way that’s the only way that we’re going to achieve any kind of
37:37
libertarianish kind of society is to break it down to as small as possible
37:42
and exclude people from it and I mean it’s just and what better example than
37:49
the last 18 months i mean you do not want to share a polity with these people i mean it is just insane well not only
37:55
that if you imagine a world of 10,000 Likenstein then everyone’s got the power of exit right you can go anywhere you
38:02
can you can find your you can find your groove you know you can find your jam you can find your community that you like um it seems to be that would be the
38:10
least objectionable even to the left but they have this totalitarian control impulse you know they don’t want people
38:16
to be able to escape um their controls but the other reason I think that this hoppian enclave uh this private law
38:24
society idea uh makes sense is because it seems to be it’s inevitable
38:30
if you are the anarchist like we are which is you don’t believe in the state but you’re not for chaos so one common
38:37
criticism of us anarchists is that we don’t believe in law now that’s a false
38:42
unfair charge because it’s made by people who either honestly or disingenuously maintain that um law is
38:51
not possible without the state i mean they don’t think education or communication or roads or money is
38:57
possible without the state so they’re they’re dishonest or they’re stupid but but the point is they equate law with
39:03
the state so if we say we’re against the state they think we’re for chaos um um
39:09
and so when we anarchists say that there there can’t be law then
39:16
we’re kind of taking their side we’re agreeing with them that there can’t be law without the state but we we private
39:21
property anarchists believe there would be law but what that means is all the institutions that the state has monopolized
39:27
um they would have a private analog not all of them like the drug war would not
39:33
but um but education would and roads would right and uh money would so all
39:40
these things could and law there would be law and order it just would be done privately so
39:46
we libertarians have to believe that there would be private hierarchies and natural authority structures and figures
39:53
that would have to emerge to fill the role that the state has co-opted and monopolized we would do a better job of
39:59
it it would be more decentralized more focused more tailored more measured more tolerant more reasonable you know
40:04
everything about it would be better but it would exist and that would necessarily result in diverse
40:10
communities of different types it would necessarily result in that because you you everyone’s not the same and to
40:17
imagine a world of bland homogeneity is just absurd you’re going to have clusters of different types of things in
40:23
the world if you let people associate freely just like in in the US today with somewhat freedom we have segreg
40:30
voluntary segregation you have different you have Chinatown you know you have black neighborhoods you have Hispanic
40:36
areas it’s not 100% uniform but you do tend to have people likes tend to
40:42
associate with likes uh not just racially or ethnically but by different things class you know religion um
40:51
whatever so I think you’re going to have to expect some kind of coagulation some kind of lumpiness in the way things
40:57
spread out on the surface of the earth if you allow freedom so you would have
41:02
different enclaves and they would have their own rules and customs and traditions yeah i was on Tim P last week
41:08
and I had made the comment you know he introduced me as a libertarian podcaster so I was and you might not agree with
41:15
this but I was saying that you know when I think of the left I think of chaos when I think of the right I think of
41:20
order and I’m thinking of ho I’m thinking about hapa hapa talks
41:26
about the right being more about hierarchy and hierarchy brings about order and when you’re destroying
41:31
hierarchy is just freaking chaos and I what’s funny is I looked at the comments I had my phone and I’m looking at the
41:37
comments and someone said I I thought all libertarians wanted chaos right so that’s what they actually think people
41:43
who are non libertarians think that they’re all about chaos yeah and those people are they’re more sincere they just are confused they just don’t know
41:50
but uh yeah I actually don’t think I disagree with you on that i used so I used to think when I was younger I used
41:56
to think that um the simplistic like the first the first version was simplistic
42:02
the Nolan chart idea that uh oh the left believes in personal liberties and the right believes in economic liberties and
42:08
we just believe in both that’s not exactly right right um the way I then
42:13
the way I thought of it after that was well the left is worse on personal and
42:18
economic liberties and the right is bad on both but they’re not as bad as a left and we’re better on both okay and that’s
42:23
a better approximation but over time I started thinking well left just means
42:29
soft socialist and the right means nothing because conservativism is not
42:34
coherent it just means conser and if you think about the Republican party it’s this weird um elomeration of three
42:41
groups that have nothing in common you have the neocons and you have the moral majority Christians
42:48
and you have the chamber of commerce types which are the best ones i believe the kind of small business free market
42:53
types chamber of Commerce types the moral majority types are just kind of loose theocrats and I don’t know why
42:59
they’re free market at all and then you have the neocons who are basically wararmongers right and establishment um
43:07
crush the anti-fascist sorry so um but now I kind of agree with when Hapa put
43:13
it in one of his articles he said the essential definition or the essential characteristics of them is that the left
43:20
is inherently egalitarian which is anti-natural anti- nature
43:25
because it it’s anti- hierarchy and anti- authority and the right is realistic in other words they re they
43:31
recognize that in an in a private society you’re going to have natural hierarchies and natural differences
43:37
arise so to that extent I would agree with him and I would take the side of the right so if you define it that way
43:43
which I think is loosely analogous to your chaos and order perspective because
43:48
if you have egalitarianism you’re going to have chaos because you’re obliterating natural distinctions and
43:54
you’re trying to force people into a mold that is not natural you’re going to have chaos um and the right recognizes
44:01
order um so I think that the this this this conservative view of respecting
44:08
being realistic about the differences between people and allowing natural authority figures and hierarchies to
44:13
emerge that would replace and supplant what the state has co-opted is the only way to be and you have to temper that
44:20
with some kind of libertarian principles right to not have a theocracy or fascism
44:25
or something but um I guess that’s how I see the right and left now is as is um
44:31
as ealitarian which is unnatural and destructive versus being realistic about human
44:37
nature i’ve really been talking about hapa a lot lately and especially what must be
44:42
done we did a I did a live stream with a couple guys where we looked at the last
44:47
15 minutes of what must be done the speech that he did for the Mis Institute back in 96 and yes um he was talking
44:54
about one of the things that he talked about was on the local level you’re going to need leadership and that there
45:00
are natural elites and I think that that makes you and then he has that I guess booklet natural elites intellectuals in
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the state yeah and um that’s where you the the ancap the people who are living
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in an capistan in their head who can’t who wouldn’t even consider using the what must be done thing because oh it’s
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politics and I’m never going to get involved with politics and anyway and that’d be fine if they would just shut
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up but but a lot of them are also a lot of them
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are opposed to this idea of natural elites they have this sort of and you
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see this among the left libertarians right who hate the idea of employment you hate the idea of bossing people
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around and um you know they almost give some proof to the criticism that we’re
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for chaos because yeah if you oppose every private
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elite or authority figure or institution or hierarchy that would emerge in the
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vacuum of the state to fill the role that the state has been filling then you’re going to have chaos so there’s
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some there’s some um you know there’s some ground to the criticism of us being in favor of chaos if you listen to the
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way we’re depicted by the left libertarians who are opposed to this natural elites idea yeah i mean and when
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it comes down to how do you define it natural elites are the people in your community that instinctively if there
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was a problem people would go to and ask for their advice well well not only that
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you have natural elites in different dimensions of society i mean if you have a medical problem you go to someone
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who’s known to be a good healer a doctor you know if you have a legal problem you go to a lawyer if you have if you want
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to build a building you go to an architect and they have reputations within their communities but they have specialties that’s what the division of
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labor and the specialization of labor is about so you have different people that
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acquire a reputation and people go to them because they are more they have a higher quality rating basically and so
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for dispute resolution the same thing would happen i mean this is the idea of how kings emerged right the kings weren’t like the they weren’t dictators
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or desperates they were just the people that were the wise men in town that everyone respected their judgment
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authority and if you if you need if two people have a dispute and they don’t want to have to fight about it and have
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eternal warfare uh between their clans or between themselves you want to have some neutral third party settle your
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dispute so who would you pick someone who’s an idiot i mean a literal idiot or
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or a stranger or someone who’s trusted and known and wise and fair and has a reputation to guard i mean it’s just
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obvious how these things would emerge in society you were saying that you were hoping that a year down the line that
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things would start slowly going back to normal whatever that’s going to look like i mean we can’t get back to normal
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um we’re not going to get back to what it was in 2020 January of 2020 there’s going to be remnants of this that are
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left over and especially in areas I think you know the federalism that we’ve been talking about you’re New York’s
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going to try and keep this going California Illinois those places are going to try and keep this going um as
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long as possible do you see it getting getting worse before it gets better
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I I I don’t I think that it’s it’s uh it hasn’t improved as quickly as I hoped
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because of I think mainly because of Delta this Delta surge which has either happened or given them an excuse to
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extend their controls um but I think there’s a growing
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and the vaccine in a sense has helped because the more people that get it maybe they have an excuse not to be so
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paranoid anymore right i don’t know it’s probably not as much of a panacea as they think but at least it gives them um
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it gives them cover to to kind of stop being as as as paranoid as they were before uh so maybe they can stop wearing
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masks with they can they can save face a little bit you know by showing their face
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um so I don’t know i I guess I’m maybe optimistic but I am hopeful that it will get slowly better over the next uh over
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the next six months i’m going let you go man because I know you’re um getting prepared for a long long journey so um
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thank you thanks for coming on and um you want to What’s your website again where you steancella.com and my IP
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stuff’s at c4sif.org or and uh yeah I thought we were going to talk about your post libertarianism which I’ve been
49:25
hearing about which I haven’t heard elaborated yet so may maybe one day we can talk about that oh yeah yeah that’d be cool um also when it comes to
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subjects that make people absolutely insane especially libertarians abortion
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yep um borders and IP
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there’s Yeah i mean it’s just and I I’ve we’ve done we’ve done a couple episodes
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on IP we actually did an episode on China and IP and um yeah nothing makes
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nothing people as insane as that i mean of those three IP is the easiest because the answer is so clear once you see it
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abortion is always going to be an intractable issue and um although I
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think that there’s a pretty easy libertarian political approach to it and borders is also very difficult and it
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probably will be difficult until the state is radically minimized we have decentralization as long as we have a big democratic welfare state uh the
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immigration issue will always be a problem because if you have open borders you’ll have problems and if you don’t have open borders you have problems so
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there’s really no solution as long as you have the state which is why the anarchist approach is the only one
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really for the intractable problem intractable problems thanks a lot man safe travels thanks
50:45
Pete i want to thank you for tuning in to the Freeman Beyond the Wall podcast i
50:50
want to thank Stefon for coming on the show that’s it we’ll be back in a few days with another episode take care and
I just came across this draft article in my files. I believe it was written in 2005, as a followup to A Libertarian Defense of Kelo and Limited Federal Power, LewRockwell.com, June 27, 2005. I may not agree with everything in it, and can’t recall why I never published it. It is also not complete–I apparently meant to add some more links and research, and to stitch together a few sections. I may do this at some point. But here it is for now, in its draft form, for what it’s worth.
Judicial Activism and the Presumption of Unconstitutionality
by N. Stephan Kinsella
Draft, July 2005
A recent Reason article by Damon W. Root carries a refreshingly frank title: Unleash the Judges: The libertarian case for judicial activism. Root calls for “a principled form of libertarian judicial activism—that is, one that consistently upholds individual rights while strictly limiting state power,” in contrast to conservatives who “exalt[] the will of the majority over the liberties of unpopular minorities.” [continue reading…]
I was interviewed by Caleb Brown on the topic of IP–explained what it is, its origins, how it’s a type of crony capitalism, and how it emerged historically and acquired the name “intellectual property.” Recorded Sep. 4, 2021.
Do we have the right to abandon the things we own? Under the civil common law,6 property cannot be abandoned de jure, if that means that an owner may by his act alone destroy his title in a thing. An owner may only relinquish possession of a thing, whereupon any subsequent person’s possession may give him a good root of title. Although the legal view respecting title might suggest otherwise, it is submitted that we do have the right to abandon property.
6. Abandonment is recognized under the criminal law of theft-one cannot steal that which has been abandoned: Hudson 1984 [Hudson, A. H. (1984), ʻIs Divesting Abandonment Possible at Common Law?ʼ (1984) 100 Law Quarterly Review 110.].
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Homesteading, Abandonment, and Unowned Land in the Civil Law
We’ve corresponded before, and I believe you know my friend Greg Rome. I wanted to write you regarding some issues concerning the civil code and property, in case you might be interested in sharing any thoughts you have on this matter.
As you may recall, I’m a libertarian and intensely interested in various normative theories regarding property rights, including justifications thereof, Lockean-type homesteading theories, and Austrian economics as related thereto. I have found your own formulations in this regard (e.g. in sec. 1 of your Property treatise)–e.g., your discussion of the nature of property, including its scarcity–to be exquisite and to highlight the essential compatibility of the basic notions of civilian property with the Lockean-libertarian conception thereof, despite the legal positivism and deviations of the civilian system. [continue reading…]
As noted here, the academic ranking site Academic Influence has ranked Professor Hoppe the 36th most influential philosopher between 1990–2020. I did a similar search for Law, 1990–2020, and surprisingly I turned up #113, right after Eric Posner (Justice Scalia was #1). (As of Aug. 24, 2021: PDF; current profile; profile as of as of March 24, 2025)
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