[KOL241: Dave Smith Part of the Problem Show] DAVE SMITH: All right, guys, today’s episode is brought to you by stamps.com, which is a wonderful service.

Everybody here at Gas Digital uses it, stamps.com. It provides you with basically all of the services of the post office.

You can print postage for any mail class, right from your own computer. The beauty of that is that, unlike the post office, it’s 24/7, and you don’t have to waste time traveling to and from the post office.

And everyone in business knows when you’re wasting time, you’re wasting money, and that’s how businesses go out of business. They burn up too much capital, so go to stamps.com. It’s a great service, makes life much more convenient.

Everyone’s got to ship stuff, and stamps.com brings all those great services right to you. So right now, if you go to stamps.com, they’re going to give you a pretty sweet deal.

Okay, it includes a four-week trial, plus postage and a digital scale. All you’ve got to do is go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in [email protected].

You click on the microphone and you type in problem, and you get that four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale. Guys, stamps.com has been sponsoring us for a while. They’re helping make this show possible.

Do us a favor. Go support the people who support us. Try the service out. Save yourself some time. Add some convenience to your life, and help out the show that you love: stamps.com.

M: You’re listening to Part of the Problem on the Gas Digital Network. DAVE SMITH: How can you be the freest country in the world when you lock more of your own people in cages than any other country in the world?

The lesson of 9/11 should have been to never fund another young rebel group in this part of the world again.

America’s saga is the smallest government in history, and it’s become the biggest government in the world to this day.

At the end of the day, it’s all about freedom. M: Here’s your host, Dave Smith. DAVE SMITH: Oh hello, hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.

I am, of course, Dave Smith. We got a great show planned for you guys today. I’m very excited about it. A couple quick announcements: first, I am headed out to Los Angeles first thing tomorrow morning.

The podcast and the stand-up comedy show at the Comedy Store have sold out. This is what happens when you don’t get your tickets when I first promote it and tell you to.

However, if you want to, I’m doing a meet-up with Jason Stapleton and Mark and Brian from the Lions of Liberty podcast.

It’s called Liberty Behind the Lines. That’s on Saturday, March 31 at 4 p.m. at the State Social House, so you can still come out to that if you want to.

And then when I return, just a couple more gigs to promote. When I get back, I will – next month, April 16, I’ll be opening things up at the Soho Forum…

… which features a debate on fractional reserve banking, a topic made for comedy, between the great Bob Murphy who’s been on the show several times, of course, and is just fantastic.

And he’ll be debating against George Selgin. I hope I’m saying that name right, but that should be a lot of fun.

I know that Tom Woods will also be in the building, and speaking of Bob Murphy and Tom Woods, I am happy to announce I will be going back on the Contra Cruise this year, which I’ve got to say is like the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life.

It’s incredible. It’s just a cruise fill of awesome, brilliant people, and you can go get information for that at contracruise.com.

And this year, it’s going to be October 21 through 28th. If you want to come on this then, and I’m telling you, if you’re a libertarian, this is like the best vacation to come on, move now because these things always sell out.

So, okay, announcements out of the way, I’m very excited to introduce our guest for today’s show. I think he’s one of the smartest, most interesting people out there, and I’ve learned a ton from him about advanced libertarian philosophy, Stephan Kinsella. Thank you so much for coming on the show. How are you sir?

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Hey, man, I’m good, glad to be here. Hey, is it okay if I take notes? DAVE SMITH: Of course, I insist.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, I might take notes. DAVE SMITH: Okay, yes. Believe me, I’m the one who’s needing to take notes if anyone does.

But for people who aren’t familiar… STEPHAN KINSELLA: Can we get permission? DAVE SMITH: If you’re not familiar with Stephan Kinsella, he’s a writer. He’s written several great books, wrote a ton of amazing articles.

He’s also a patent attorney, and for anyone who’s not familiar with you, tell us some more about what you do. STEPHAN KINSELLA: Like you mentioned, I’m an agent of the state as some libertarians call me for being a patent lawyer.

No, I’m just a lawyer here in Texas, and I have always loved libertarian thinking, and I write about it when I can.

I’ve got a book coming out in a couple of months, of collecting some of my essays on this stuff. So it’s kind of along the lines of rights theory and intellectual property and property theory and contract theory, the things that libertarians used to read when I was growing up but no one reads anymore.

DAVE SMITH: Well, you could just leave that statement at no one reads anymore and pretty much sum up our generation pretty well.

So I’m interested because you’re talking about how you always love libertarianism, and I’m always interested on how people kind of became libertarians.

I have a pretty generic hacky story, which is just that I saw the Ron Paul/Giuliani moment and I was like, that guy’s a badass.

And then I just got obsessed and went down this rabbit hole, but how did you become a libertarian?

And when did you realize that we were really all a bunch of secret Nazis? STEPHAN KINSELLA: So my view is now that I think that probably the three biggest feeders into libertarian movement would be Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman and now Ron Paul, but that’s a more recent thing.

And I came into it way before Ron Paul, so he’s – so it was through Ayn Rand. Like Tucille says in his book, it usually begins with Ayn Rand. I was in high school at a Catholic school in Louisiana.

And a librarian recommended that I read The Fountainhead, and so it started from there, just got interested in philosophy and economics, and then eventually Rothbard, and things like that.

So I was like a minarchist Randian for quite a while but finally became more of an anarchist.

But I’d say since 1982 or so, I’d say I was a hardcore libertarian, but before that, I was nothing.

I was just some kid in Louisiana with no opinions whatsoever. I mean I registered Democrat because my parents were Blue Dog Democrats, and I said what should we be?

It’s like my mom says hey, daddy. Who should I vote for? One of these kinds of things. DAVE SMITH: Well, that’s…

STEPHAN KINSELLA: So it was Rand I would say. DAVE SMITH: Okay, interesting. Certainly a lot of people – whatever one could say about Ayn Rand, she certainly reached a ton of people.

I’ve always thought like that’s kind of what I’m always interested in what the next person is going to be who reaches a ton of people like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman and later Ron Paul did.

I don’t know. Ayn Rand did it through novels. I have a suspicion that it’s not going to be a novelist who is the next great converter.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think that’s probably right, but I think – if I had to guess, I think she may still be the number one even now recruiting tool, but I don’t know who else it would be.

Maybe it’s more diffuse now, and Ron Paul’s influence is kind of fading right. Rand is not really another Ron it seems.

But yeah, I think you’re probably right, probably won’t be another novelist. DAVE SMITH: I’m still like – Rand Paul is like a – I feel about him like a girlfriend I was madly in love with who cheated on me or something because even now when you just say…

… Rand Paul it looks like isn’t going to be a Ron, I still sink a little bit in my chest, and I’m just like oh yeah, that’s right. He’s not.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I know, but even libertarians who felt like that and they say things like that, then six months later they’ll start looking at the landscape and say give them another chance because they’re like…

… Jesus Christ, he’s so much better than everyone else, even though he’s no Ron Paul. DAVE SMITH: It’s a weird position to be in because you’re like – the first thing I think of with Rand, and I can’t help it, is the disappointment and how we had this amazing opportunity to keep the Ron Paul movement going because now we got his younger son in there.

And it’s like all these things that I’m disappointed about him kind of come out first, and then after you take a breath you’re like, you know, he might be the greatest senator of all time.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, I know. And so – and then you’re thinking, yeah, but he’s – the better he is, the less influence he will have too, right?

So it’s frustrating if you’re into politics and that activism of that type, which I’m really not, so I’m never disappointed because I never expect too much, although I think the Trump victory has not failed to deliver on the entertainment value of his victory.

And even though he’s horrible in some ways and libertarians don’t like him, I just – I keep saying look. Just imagine if Hillary was in there.

So every day I have a smile on my face at what he does. There’s some news about Trump that’s always entertaining, and some of it’s not horrible even.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I mean I’ve – I agree with you on that, although I’ve been, as of late, kind of pretty horrified at his – some of his new appointments, particularly John Bolton and just the fact that basically there’s been a complete kind of neo-con takeover.

And I think the tariffs are terrible, and there’s lots of things that are disappointing, but I still hold on to a little bit of hope that at the very least Donald Trump has contributed to kind of degrading the system.

And just people – I mean once you see that a buffoon like Trump can get in there and that – I mean I like the idea at least that…

… there’s something with the 2016 election where Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump getting in there, and they just wanted to walk Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or whoever were the chosen people.

And people are at least seeing through the bullshit of the system a little bit, but I’m trying to be optimistic.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, I mean it seems like that right now, but we have this feeling of dread that when the Democrats come back in power, they’re going to forget their skepticism about government, right?

But I do this kind of calculus. I’m kind of simple-minded about this, like I boil it down to taxes and Supreme Court picks too.

I think he is better on that than Hillary would have been, so I say, okay, he saved me or the country this much in taxes, and everything he does bad, I take away a little bit.

I’m like, yeah, the tariffs are hurting us, but the net is still there, but it’s getting it’s getting smaller and smaller if you know what I mean.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, well, I mean we used to – me and Rob Bernstein, we’d joke about this all the time.

But it’s kind of like what really sums up to me what it is to be a libertarian in 2018 is we’d look at someone like Barack Obama, and you go, okay, he’s the biggest status in probably the history of the world.

I mean obviously there’s like guys like Stalin and Mao and people like that. But I mean he controls a far more powerful government, and he’s the worst thing you could imagine.

And then we’ll still go, oh, man, thank God, John McCain didn’t win because that would have been really bad. STEPHAN KINSELLA: I know, and libertarians keep changing. They keep adjusting their goal lines.

Like they say – they always correct themselves, too. It’s kind of annoying. They’ll say something like, you can’t just say I prefer Trump to Hillary.

You have to be really careful. You have to say I would be more upset if Hillary won than if Trump won.

You can’t just say something normal, like I have a preference. You have to say well, she’s more evil than he’s evil. You can’t just say it’s better if A wins than B wins. You have to do all these gyrations.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, you sure do. Libertarians are a difficult group to as a whole. So anyway, what do you think – because I know that you’re anarcho-capitalism in the kind of – in the Rothbardian/Hoppian tradition.

What do you think in terms of the long-term prospects? Because after a while we kind of all get to this point where at least we agree that a private-property-based society is the way to go, that the non-aggression principle is a good moral rule to follow.

But we also live under this – in this statist world where it seems like no matter who gets elected, things just get more and more socialized.

Ron Paul always said this crash is coming, and when that comes, maybe we’ll have a shot to regroup. But do you think there’s – more long term, is there a chance we get to an an-cap world in our lifetimes?

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, okay, so here’s my – here’s kind of my take on things. I admire people that know what they don’t know and they stick within their own lanes.

And so I do know a lot about certain things that I’ve studied and intellectual property and legal theory and things like that.

But maybe one reason I stick to theory is I don’t know if we can predict the future, and I don’t know – I really am always confused about the right strategy, although early on I was attracted to political activism and these things.

But I think I got disillusioned pretty quickly with political activism because it never works. And I just would imagine there were guys just like me 10 years, 15, 20, 30 years ago, and they’re having their all-night bowl sessions, and they were saying in five years we’re going to win, and they were all wrong.

They all died with a bigger state and more taxes than they were fighting against then. So why would I think I’m in any different period of history? And I’m very skeptical of the political process and political activism.

And I’m even skeptical in a sense of intellectual activism in the sense that you’re going to change everyone’s views and society or enough people’s views that you make everyone just adopt the system.

I kind of have the fear that the reason we have what we have is just for political holdout problems and just the free-rider problem and just Prisoner’s Dilemma type problems that are inherent to a large society.

So my only real hope is, number one, that people – as we get increasingly more technologically advanced and richer, people can basically buy their freedom by just becoming richer in their own lives and just figure out how to navigate around the state.

But also I – so I do actually have some optimism despite what I just said. I sort of think anarchy is coming. It might be a while, but I think it’s going to come out only because it’s just a natural thing to do because technology has made us so rich and powerful individually that the government just fades away almost in the communist sense.

But I don’t think it’s going to be because you persuade your neighbors or your uncles at Thanksgiving to read the latest Henry Hazlitt pamphlet or whatever.

I just don’t see that working. People don’t read these things by and large because they’re not like us. They’re not interested in being intellectuals, or they’re just spending their time on their families and getting – making money and having a career and their own hobbies.

They don’t – they’re not all – so we can’t count on everyone becoming libertarian. We have to – I think the only way it’s going to work is not if we nudge it or push it there but if it makes sense in a natural way.

And I think that we’re going to get there only because of technology, and I don’t mean we have to get in rockets and go land on Mars because the same thing would happen all over again as now.

But I just think over time people are going to get used to the idea of liberty because of the internet, because of just the antiquated way that all these old laws against homosexuality and religious regulations – they look so antiquated now.

The one thing that I turn to in my life is I always – I lived through 1990 when communism fell.

And I just can – it sort of seems to me that there’s a different level of understanding in general in the world now about communism and centralized planned economies.

People haven’t read Friedman and these kinds of books, but there’s a general understanding that we need free markets and that centralized planned economies just don’t work.

So that event in history was a big teaching moment, and so what I’m hoping is that over time, just the…

… as we get more and more used to capitalism and its radical excesses and individual freedom of the West, that we just start taking for granted the underpinnings that are going to lead to more and more freedom.

So that’s kind of my hope, but it means that we don’t really have much to do in our lives as activists except you can keep the torch alive.

You can keep the flame alive. You can seek for personal understanding and seek for personal wealth and for protection from the state.

So that’s kind of my approach to it is kind of a selfish and relatively disengaged point of view.

DAVE SMITH: Well, there’s – it’s that Randian in you comes right back out. Selfishness is a virtue. STEPHAN KINSELLA: I know. I know.

DAVE SMITH: There’s something interesting there, and I agree with you. I think – there’s a victory in the sense that when you’ll see people who are encouraged – people who love socialism, people on the left too.

And even when they talk about socialism now, they’ll kind of say, oh well, you know like Denmark or like Sweden or something like that.

And so there’s almost a victory inherently there that nobody’s actually arguing for what true socialism is or like the idea that the government should actually own the means of production and there should be no private property and no market.

So yeah, there’s certainly something there, although I mean I guess like in places like Venezuela and stuff like that you still have what could be considered true socialism.

But you know, it’s not working out so good for those people. STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think – Jess Tucker is a good buddy of mine. He mentioned to me one time something.

I don’t think I’d thought of it this way. But you know, originally the socialists claimed that they were going to defeat capitalism because they were more productive.

They would make everyone richer. That was the original, Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table. We will bury you. He didn’t mean nukes. He meant we were going to out-produce you.

So that was the original claim, and when that became hollow, they switched to social justice and egalitarianism.

So that’s their new goal, but no one really – I mean even China, which calls itself communist, is becoming some kind of capitalist.

They want to make money. They want to participate in the market. They want to trade. The people want to get rich. They’re on the internet now. They have their iPhones and those other phones that some libertarians use.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And there still is, though I guess a lot of ignorance about the history of socialism in the country.

And it’s really, I mean just – I would say disheartening isn’t even a strong enough word. 00:18:2 It’s just disgusting to see how many young people view socialism favorably.

I saw the other day at one of these marches. I forget what they called it the March Against Guns or March to Save Lives or whatever they were having the other day.

And one of these students, one of the Parkland survivors is on. She’s wearing like one of those communist green jackets with a Cuban flag on it.

And it’s like you guys – they’re like – these people who celebrate Che Guevara and stuff like that, and you’re like, you know he slaughtered gays, right?

I mean, there seems to just be nobody teaches anything it seems like to these young people about the horrors of socialism.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, it is disheartening, and I kind of do fear that over time people – it’s almost like the limousine liberal problem, right? These limousine liberals who, they’re very wealthy.

They live in the West, and they take for granted things like individual rights, and there’s no laws against miscegenation and things like that.

And they can fly on their airplanes around the world to conferences while decrying the use of fossil fuels.

They’re just totally clueless, and yeah, I’m a little afraid. But on the other hand, I don’t think freedom will ever be achieved unless it’s something that’s so natural in the background that most people don’t have to learn about it or even think about it.

They take it for granted, right? Like we take things for granted in the West to a certain degree, a certain amount of liberal – I think even Ayn Rand one time, she was asked what do you hope for in some future utopian society?

And she was like a society where no one has to worry about politics anymore because she was into politics or political theory.

But really in a free society, most people wouldn’t it just be the domain of the specialists. No one would even worry about it because there’s no threat to the free market. Everyone takes it for granted, and it’s so established and ingrained.

But yeah, I kind of fear that it will get – that people will – they’ll forget. Their memories will get short.

And they’ll start pining for socialism when they’re really standing on the shoulders of capitalism, right?

I mean, their education is paid for. Their parents made money with a job in the free market and things like that.

And they just don’t even connect these things up, so in a way it’s like an embarrassment of riches. It’s a first-world problem. It’s – I don’t know how you can avoid that.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right, and there’s something really interesting about just the irony of being a libertarian and something I’ve thought about a lot.

But it’s always like I’m obsessed with shit that I think shouldn’t exist to begin with, so it’s like you’ll be obsessed with the wars or the income tax or mass incarceration or any of these things.

And you’re like, ideally, none of this would exist, and then I do wonder what I would have left to obsess over. STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, and not only that, I think the other irony is libertarians are kind of altruistic because they spend so much time trying to change the laws that would benefit everyone else.

But they could just spend that time on bettering their careers and just make the money themselves and say screw off. I don’t care about you.

So in a way, libertarians are – and activists especially are very altruistic. They’re like don’t take that job. Come help us march on a Saturday. I’m like, dude, I want to take my kid to a soccer game.

So they want you to sacrifice for the whole. So it’s almost – that’s another reason I’m a little bit skeptical of political activism because it depends a little bit on – I mean it doesn’t depend on the profit motive exactly.

It’s like an altruistic thing. You’re not going to personally benefit so much. I mean I’ve benefited from Trump’s tax cuts, but I was a free rider. I didn’t contribute to his campaign.

So why would I? It’s a holdout or a free-rider problem. DAVE SMITH: Yeah, there definitely is something interesting about that, and that libertarians are in general, even though we’re…

… seen as greedy capitalists that there is something like – most libertarians I know are just concerned with kind of humanitarian goals and just want to help other people.

So I was transitioning, shifting topics. I was talking about a few episodes ago. I did a short episode where I was breaking down to the best of my ability.

But I was just kind of discussing argumentation ethics, which was a theory or a philosophy put forward by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who is, if not the, one of the greatest living libertarians in the world.

And I did – it was a shorter episode I did, and I just realized I’ve done over 300 of these things.

And I’ve still never discussed that, and I find it to be really, really interesting. I think he was really onto something with argumentation ethics, and I know we chatted on Facebook.

We messaged back and forth a little bit about it, and I’ve read a lot of your stuff on it. And I think you’re quite a bit better at breaking this down than I am. So I wanted to talk about that with you a little bit.

And I thought maybe you could give a little bit more of an expert outlook on it. So why don’t we just start from the beginning and just kind of explain what argumentation ethics is or your version of it.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: No, I actually thought you did a really good job, especially in a short space. I just was – I was kind of highlighting the scarcity issue, or the scarce means issue because that’s something, in recent years, I’ve come to –over time, your arguments and your way of putting things shifts.

And in the last few years, like with the intellectual property thing I’ve been obsessed with for 20 years now. DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I want to talk about that as well.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, so it all ties in together, but you asked earlier about how I became a libertarian, and I was libertarian already because of Friedman and Rand and Rothbard.

But like in law school, I was becoming an anarchist around that time around ‘88 or so.

And Hoppe’s work on argumentation ethics sort of came upon the scene around that time.

There was a big liberty – Liberty was a big magazine that was popular among libertarians back before the internet, like Reason was originally too.

Reason was a lot sort of more ramshackle and like a newsletter, but it was like all you had was Reason and Liberty magazine [see Liberty archives].

And Hoppe had this article, and then there was a symposium with about a dozen or so other libertarian thinkers criticizing it and commenting on it.

And most of them, by the way, were – I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but most of them were very hostile and negative to his theory.

Like Rothbard was basically the only one who adopted it wholesale, but the other guys are all varying levels of critics:

Tim Virkkala and I think David Friedman and the Dougs—Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, Tibor Machan, people like that.

But it fascinated me because the logic of it basically to me is that, well, first of all, he recognized the is-ought dichotomy, which, to my mind, makes sense.

That was a David Hume idea that when you’re talking about what people should do, what norms are, what laws should be, what people ought to do, you’re talking about a different category of statements than factual statements like that rock is there.

Humans have this biology, whatever, and that if you go from an is to an ought, there’s a logical gap.

You can’t assume something should be some way because of the way that it is. You have to insert an ought at some point, which makes sense to me.

But I see no problem with that because we do have values as humans.

We all value some things. That’s inherent in the structure of action, which is another reason the – and you mentioned praxeology and Mises’ view of the structure of human action…

… which, to me, is an extremely simple point, which may be one reason a lot of other kind of semi-Austrian economists don’t respect it that much because they think it’s too simple.

But to my mind it’s very powerful. It has a really powerful way of analyzing human action. It’s just very simple. Humans – we’re acting beings. We have intelligence. We have purpose, and you said I think something like you act to do this, and you’re right.

But what you’re really doing is you’re employing a means, so you take something you can control in the world that’s a means, a scarce means of action or a resource you could think of it or a tool.

And you use that to help manipulate the world to change the outcome of the way things otherwise would be in your mind. So you’re using means and using intelligence, which is in your head. So you’re combining those two things.

You’re using knowledge because you have to have knowledge to be intelligent to have goals and to have some idea of what will make an effect in the world.

Like what’s a causal effect in the world? How can I achieve this goal? Like if I want to catch fish, I’ve got to make a net that’s not too fine so that it doesn’t stop the water but not too big so the fish gets out.

You have to have some idea of things, but you have to have the resource to make the net, so you have to have both. And we can return to this in a minute, but this unlocks the whole key to intellectual property because you can understand why you need physical access and control of these things.

But you need knowledge too, but one of them is scarce in that you can have conflict over it, and one of them is not. That’s why you need property rights over scarce things, but it makes no sense to have property rights over knowledge because any number of other people in the world can use the same idea like getting a net to catch fish.

They could all do that same time. There’s no conflict. So property rights in that idea, make no sense, which is ultimately why patent and copyright make no sense.

But only I can use this piece of wood and this net at the same time, so there could be conflict over it.

So if we want to avoid conflict and get along cooperatively, we have property rights that emerge because of that. So it’s just – even the praxeological framework helps explain intellectual property.

But what Hans was saying was that when you have these – when people are trying to get along with each other in society…

… they want to avoid this conflict that comes about because of scarcity of things like that… … that we come up with rules, and we say, okay, we’re just going to have a rule that everyone respects that will say who owns this thing, and therefore, if everyone respects that rule, there doesn’t need to be conflict over it.

Then the owner can trade it. He can use it to make products that he can sell to other people, whatever.

And that’s where property rights come from, and so his insight was simply that what kind of property rights could you come up with that might satisfy this purpose?

And which ones could you justify in an argument about it? His point was if you step back and realize that all this discussion about which rights should we have…

…which property rules should we assign, it happens in the context of two human beings or more actually getting together in a physical context with their two bodies and having a dialogue with each other.

And when they do that, they’re already respecting certain things about each other. They’re already assuming the validity of certain norms, which would be like I’m trying to persuade you with reason, with force of my words, not with actual force.

I’m not going to kill you if you don’t agree with me. I’m not trying to coerce you into accepting my argument.

And you’re sitting there living, so you had to have some control of some resources to do that. And I have to think that you had the right to do that. Otherwise, we couldn’t be together having a discussion.

So there’s sort of these fundamental presuppositions that are normative, moral presuppositions that are part of any discussion whatsoever.

So Hans’ insight was that you could never advance successfully any kind of argument for any kind of norm that contradicted the very foundation of argument in the first place.

So also he argues that socialism and the various norms of socialism, which ultimately amount to, I can hit you, but you can’t hit me, that’s really what socialism amounts to is I basically am your slave owner, and you’re my slave to one degree or the other.

But that’s contrary to two people sitting down as independent, equal body owners having an argument.

So he’s just showing that all arguments for anything other than libertarianism collapse because they’re self contradictory.

So he’s saying it’s the ultimate proof, and in my opinion, the reason a lot of libertarian competitors in effect disagreed with him was they don’t want there to be a final argument.

They don’t like knockdown arguments. They like to play – they want to argue all night to the wee hours. They don’t want someone to get it right. And plus, they’re jealous, right? We’ve been fighting with utilitarian consequentialist things inching up to this, saying on the one hand this; on the other hand that, this kind of argument.

And then someone comes out and says, no, socialism is literally a contradiction, so it’s just flat out impossible, sort of like Mises’ argument against socialism in economic terms.

So I think they rejected it partly out of jealousy. Who is this upstart young guy because he was only in his mid 30s when he came to America.

Oh, you were wrong about that fact too, not to – you said in the ‘70s. He came to the US in ’85 or so, and he spent ten years with Rothbard, the last ten years of Rothbard’s life with Rothbard at UNLV and in New York.

So that’s kind of a nutshell of the argument, and it’s made – it sort of had a lasting impression.

It hasn’t gone away, hasn’t died away. There’s still a remnant of libertarians who interested in this. But it never sort of lit the libertarian world on fire in the sense that that’s what everyone believes, partly because so many libertarians are basically consequentialist or pragmatist.

And a lot of them are minarchist, and they don’t want something that’s going to say the state is inherently, by nature, criminal and just completely contrary to anything that could ever be justified.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah. STEPHAN KINSELLA: So that’s a summary, and it really impressed me, and it fascinated me because I think it’s one of the most devastating arguments for libertarianism…

…that gets around this is-ought problem I was saying earlier because he never makes – he says this isn’t the value you should hold because I’m giving you a factual argument for it.

He says this is the argument you already do hold. This the value that you already do hold and that everyone that ever participates in discussion does hold.

So if I’m talking to the government who’s trying to put me in jail for drugs or for not paying taxes, they’re not having a real argument.

They’re not trying to justify what they’re doing. They’re just using force. It’s might makes right. It’s brute force over reason, but they can’t justify their views is the point.

It’s not that they can’t do it, but they can’t justify it, which is why one of my favorite quotes was by Papinian, who was s a Roman jurist, and he says something like it’s easier to commit murder than to justify it, and I think that’s basically right.

So you can have a factual realm. You can do something wrong. You can violate people’s rights, but you can never justify it. You could never have an argument to justify it.

DAVE SMITH: Right. And Hoppe is such a fascinating guy. I don’t know of any other thinker who is more misrepresented both by his critics and by his supporters.

So he’s got a whole bunch of like the kind of Hoppian alt-right crowd that I’m convinced has never read Hoppe in their lives but think he’s all about throwing people out of helicopters or something like that.

And then his critics are all like, yeah, he’s this Nazi, throw-people-out-of-helicopters guy. And you’re like, guys, this was like a joke of a meme. It has nothing to do with the guy’s actual work.

But anyway, to what you were saying and I think that’s a great way to kind of explain it There’s something very – because it was always put in terms of there’s kind of like the – there’s the natural rights argument, and then there’s the utilitarian argument.

And to me, it always seemed like, although I had just this kind of gut understanding that libertarianism was the correct way to go, it seemed like there were flaws in both.

And to me, the consequentialist, utilitarian argument, it’s just – it’s kind of obvious that you could think of some areas where it wouldn’t be better for most people…

… to go into free – I mean if we just all rob one person and split that wealth up amongst the rest of us, you will, I guess you could say, have a greater result for a greater amount of people.

But we all probably would think there’s a moral problem with that. And with the natural rights argument, people just saying, well, you’re given these rights by God, or you’re given these rights by your humanity, always seemed like a little bit of a cop out to me.

I was always drawn to that, but what actual evidence is there that these things are given to us.

However, what Hoppe is able to do is just kind of show, by your own action of even engaging in an argument, you are kind of already indicating that you agree with the idea that we should have some type of norms.

We can convince people with arguments and that we can attempt to avoid conflict because that’s kind of the whole point. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be arguing to begin with.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, and so I think even Ayn Rand one time was asked, so then could you really ever say someone should not commit suicide?

And I think she or maybe one of her followers – they kind of grudgingly admitted you can’t really say that because every should in the Randian point of view is premised upon man valuing his life.

But if you don’t value your life, which is demonstrated in Misesian terms, demonstrated preference by the fact that you want to kill yourself…

… you can’t get under that and say that there’s – so she almost recognized the is-ought dichotomy there because saying that you can’t say man should value his life because what her argument was, was the fact that man does value his life.

Everything flows from that, and I think in a sense she’s right. But if you also think about Mises’ type of Austrian economics…

… which has this type of dualism he calls it, which is distinguishing between the causal realm and the teleological realm…

… the study of the way things work in a causal way in the world, natural sciences, the scientific method, and studying the implications of human action, which is purpose driven.

And it presupposes people have choice and that we have values and ends and that we choose them that way.

So that’s why economics praxeology studies the second, but we recognize a realm for the natural sciences.

But you see, there’s two ways of studying these things, and Hoppe sort of – because he’s such a Misesian and a Rothbardian, in his philosophy and his libertarianism, he almost did the same thing.

He took a type of dualism. Like you can say what people do do and what they should do and one is rights, and one is more like possession.

And in fact, Mises has something I didn’t discover until recently. I think Tucker pointed it out to me. It’s in his in his book Socialism in the chapter on property rights and ownership, which is not in Human Action, which is probably why did notice it because he didn’t…

… usually you think of Human Action as like the kind of sum of everything he ever did, like his final grand treatise.

He actually didn’t have some of the stuff in there he had in Socialism about property rights.

And also I think he improved upon Human Action in his last book or one of his last books, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, which he wrote like in his 80s.

It’s my favorite book by him. It’s just the best book by him. But in any case, it’s about dualism again.

In Socialism, he pointed out that you can think of two types of property rights or two types of ownership.

One he called catallactic, which means – or economic and one that was juristic or legal.

So even in his mind, he was distinguishing between basically what we would call possession, like the fact of being able to control something, some resource.

That’s part of human action. You have to have a resource and control it to act, and between the right to own something, which is what the law recognizes and what is socially recognized in a social setting.

So even Mises was recognizing this, so Hans is just distinguishing these things – Hans Hoppe – and treating them differently.

Anyway, you can see I’m getting a little geeked out here and maybe go too far, but this stuff has fascinated me ever since I came across his – a little anecdote.

I was in law school. I was in my first year class. Maybe it was ’88 I think, and I was in contracts class, and there’s this concept called estoppel, which I’ve written on myself.

I use that for some of my own theories about rights. And estoppel just means the court won’t let you say something that is inconsistent with your previous actions.

They say you’re stopped, which means you’re stopped or prevented. So if you lead someone to believe that you had a contract with them and they rely upon it, even though you didn’t satisfy all the criteria in the law and the regular law for a contract…

… like you’re missing consideration or something like that, the court – in equity, which means fairness, in an equity court, they would say, well, we’re still going to prevent you from suing this guy.

We’re going to stop you from saying there was no contract. Even though there was no contract under the regular law, the formal law, we’re going to stop you from saying that because it contradicts what you led this guy to believe.

So as soon as I read that, I was thinking this is very much like Hoppe’s argumentation ethics because – and it’s like libertarianism because libertarianism is all about the symmetry between an act of force.

That’s why our kind of initial intuitions I think that resonate with those of us who are sort of principled libertarians is this idea of the non-aggression principle, which is that you can only use force in response to force.

You can’t use force if you’re starting it because anything you’re starting, if you’re starting force, you’re using force in response to something that’s not force.

Like if you insult me or if you start a business that competes with me, you’re not using force against me.

So I don’t have the right to make a law about it. I don’t have the right to use force. You see the symmetry that’s inherent in that is that force is permissible, and it is permissible, unlike what pacifists would say.

Force is – we’re not against force or violence. We’re just against initiated, which is a shorthand for saying we believe in property rights assigned according to the rules I mentioned earlier of first use and contract, basically consent and the first guy that uses it.

So basically, I saw right away that there’s a kind of a kernel of intuitive understanding in this classic legal idea of estoppel, which courts use intuitively in equity cases, with the with the basis of libertarian reasoning as well.

I can use force against you but only to use force first, so there’s a symmetry there. So – and that’s what Hoppe’s argumentation ethics is getting at as well.

You cannot initiate force against someone else because the premise of any discussion is a peaceful dialogue between people who respect each other’s space basically.

DAVE SMITH: Right. It’s very interesting because I’ve always noticed, in general, with libertarians and obviously that 99.999% of them aren’t as smart as Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

But just in general, with people who are attracted to libertarianism, it seems to be people who are really interested in being consistent.

And one of the things that you see with just about every other political philosophy is people don’t really care about being inconsistent.

Like the Republicans and Democrats and right-wing/left-wing guys, you just see these inconsistencies all around.

They don’t even seem to care about it, and that’s, I think, part of what draws me so much to this kind of Hoppian argumentation ethics thing.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think – well, I was actually talking about something very similar with Jeff Tucker this morning. We talk a lot on the phone, and we were talking about – like libertarians, and I’m one, but we almost have an autistic almost or OCD obsession with consistency, which I admire, and I’m with it.

But I think most people, they have their day jobs, and they’re just not that interested in philosophy, and that’s why, if you talk to a conservative or something, and they’ll say, yes, I believe in liberty.

It’s an important value among many, and they say that so they’ll have an excuse to infringe on it later.

But basically they’re not that obsessed with consistency because if you point out, well, but you believe in the drug war, and they’ll say, well, because – and then they just have an excuse.

But right away they’re off of their liberty point, but we’re like, no, no, you have to hammer this thing out until the ultimate ends.

So yeah, I think consistency is really – that’s why I always think that to be a libertarian, you just have to be relatively smart.

You have to have a passion for consistency, and you have to know a little bit about economics.

So if you have a basic economic literacy, like on the level of Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, then you start realizing, well, the minimum wage might sound nice from a high-level sales pitch by Krugman or someone.

But when you think about economics, supply and demand, just the basic laws of economics and you know what this is going to do, and you care about liberty, and you think – like Bastiat said.

We just think that you can’t have the government do something the people can’t do, and most people will say you shouldn’t steal from each other.

You shouldn’t commit murder, but when the government does it, when they commit conscription or they commit war or they tax you, they say, oh, well, that’s an exception. That’s different.

I think yes, lack of consistency, is the big problem, and lack of economic literacy is another one. DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I agree. And I think that Hazlitt’s book Economics in One Lesson – it’s still to this day – it’s the best book to recommend as like a starter on economics if someone’s like coming from not really knowing that much and they’re interested in these ideas.

You don’t want to throw a man Economy and State. There might be books that are… STEPHAN KINSELLA: No. No, no, no. DAVE SMITH: There are books that are a little more detailed. I think Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics is a really great book, and there’s other ones that are great.

But there’s something about that one lesson that Hazlitt gives you that you can – it’s almost like a tool where now you can see through a lot of the bullshit that will be thrown at you.

I mean I’ve gotten into arguments with left-wing people who will – they’ll just say things like, oh, well, social security is a great idea because I remember after the 2008 recession.

Or people were like, man, if it wasn’t for social security, a lot of these old people would be below the poverty line, and now they’re not.

And if you’ve read Hazlitt, you can just go right, but where did we get that money from? We tax it from young people who are actually a poorer demographic than the old people.

So this can’t be correct. It’s just like one simple insight that allows you to smack down like 90% of the government propaganda on economics.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, I totally agree, and I there’s a couple others sort of my upbringing that I put almost on the same level but not quite.

I think that’s the main one. But The Law by Bastiat. DAVE SMITH: That’s great. STEPHAN KINSELLA: And Economic Sophisms. And also Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, which just to me was – it’s just basic economics.

And then also Ayn Rand’s I think Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal has a lot of basic economic stuff, which kind of opens your eyes to all these – the lies that the mainstream types tell.

But yeah, I agree, and there’s probably others, like you said, like Sowell, and there’s probably even nowadays there may be better ones out there that people have written in the meantime… 00:45:53.000,00:45:50.000 … maybe some of Bob Murphy’s stuff or other new primers or primers or however that word is said.

DAVE SMITH: So it’s interesting. There’s something because like – so Milton Friedman or somebody like that who – I know there’s a big division between the Austrian economics, like the Mises guys and the Chicago boys.

And I know there was a lot of bad blood between Rothbard and Friedman, and probably some of that stuff is silly, and some of it is legitimate.

But regardless of that, I mean I always – there’s – I mean Milton Friedman, if you’re talking about just like introductory things, I mean I recommend – go watch him on Donahue.

He’s just unbelievable. It’s like some of the best stuff you could ever watch in your life. And I think with Ayn Rand too I loved her Donahue appearances as well, and again, it is that thing that we were talking about before where it’s like if you’re drawn to consistency and you’re reasonably intelligent, you don’t have to be a genius.

But if you’re drawn to consistency and you want – there’s something about that that’s appealing, but I guess this is why I – once I found Rothbard and guys like that, I was just like, oh no, this is where it’s at…

… is because it does seem like where they diverge, where Friedman and Rothbard diverge, it’s like, oh yeah, Rothbard was just that much more obsessed with being consistent than even you are.

He would just take it to that final 5% or whatever, and just – he’d be like, no, no, no, we’re going all the way with this consistency thing…

… whereas even those guys would, it seems, when push comes to shove, would go like, okay, there’s this one exception to the entire thing that we’ve been building here.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, I think the consistency thing might explain the political difference more so than the economic. So for example, like Friedman’s son, David Friedman, kind of has the same mainstream economic positivist outlook on economics.

But he’s just more consistent in his politics, so he became an anarchist. So I think Rothbard’s anarchism is probably attributable to just being more consistent about politics.

But the main difference with Friedman, I think, would be economic, and I agree with almost all of those criticisms.

I think his positivism is logical positivism, this idea that you do economics by empirical testing, and I think it just – it collapses dualism.

This why am a Misesian. I think Mises is basically, to my mind, the great thinkers that you need plus a little basic economic literacy, which you can get from Friedman because that book and his Free to Choose – they’re great.

They’re great. But I think to me it’s Mises and Rothbard and Hoppe just with this hardcore emphasis on both praxeology and also on, especially for the latter two—Rothbard and Hoppe—on kind of a political realism about the nature of the state.

I mean Mises held onto this minarchist kind of view. You need a draft. You need some minimal state.

Sometimes you have to fight a war against the Nazis. You can understand his old-world mentality, but then Rothbard got more radical, and then even Hoppe got more radical than him.

Rothbard serves as a – I don’t say a middle-period libertarian because he was basically the foundation of modern libertarian thought I believe.

But even he, as Hoppe pointed out in this – I think it was in the introduction to the 1998 edition of Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty.

He pointed out that Mises and even Rothbard had this kind of nostalgic, pro-American and pro-democratic view…

… like this kind of assumption that democracy was an improvement when we went from monarchy to democracy, and that the original American founding was kind of quasi-libertarian.

I mean, really, you have to make a lot of excuses for the deviations to say that.

I mean, you could say, except for the slaves and except for the conscription of the war and except for the expropriation of the British subjects’ property.

And except for the women not having the property rights – except for all those things it was a quasi-libertarian paradise.

I mean it’s just untenable I think. And also the view that democracy was some unalloyed improvement from the previous world order, which is kind of these…

… parliamentary monarchies, which is why Hoppe got kind of famous after his earlier works for his democracy view and for his anti-democracy work, which, again, like you said, his critics and some of his fans mis-attribute what he says.

He actually never said that he was a monarchist, and he’s not a monarchist. He just was pointing out how monarchy was not inferior to democracy in some respects, which is a reasonable point to make.

DAVE SMITH: But this is why I made the point that I feel like those critics or even in some points, those proponents of him. I feel like they haven’t read the book.

The book Democracy: The God that Failed is unbelievable. I highly recommend it. I think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life. It’s like – it’s a masterpiece.

Every chapter stands alone, but it also still builds to this incredible argument. But there’s no way you could read it and think he was actually advocating for monarchy because he disclaims it dozens of times in the book. He keeps mentioning it.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Explicitly, explicitly. You’re right. DAVE SMITH: He keeps saying no, no, no. I’m not arguing in favor of monarchy. I am for a private property-based society.

However, if you want to compare monarchy to democracy, monarchy is preferable. And he addresses the fact that it’s basically just an accepted given in modern society, that that was an improvement, and was like, well, let’s actually look at this.

And it’s a fascinating argument, what he basically argues is that, because monarchs essentially owned their governments, they would act as property owners, whereas politicians in democracies are temporary decision-makers.

So they’re kind of incentivized to do things, like I don’t know, rack up $20 trillion in debt because they’re just passing out favors while they’re in there, and then they’re gone.

If you’re a monarch and you’re passing 20 trillion onto your kid, you might be like, actually, let’s not go that way.

And then in addition to what I think there is, and this is kind of like what Rothbard touches on, although he didn’t take it to where Hoppe did…

… the idea that in just Anatomy of the State, which is also one of the first things I recommend to people, it’s democracy has been able to convince people of this illusion that I don’t think monarchy was ever able to.

Monarchy – it’s just kind of like, yeah, this is this guy asserting that he rules all of us, whereas in democracy, people buy into this bullshit of like the government is us, and we are the government.

And they were chosen by the majority. Therefore, they must be great. STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, not only that – so I think that – and that’s Han’s emphasis.

I don’t think that – none of those – all of his original insights that he emphasizes this stuff repeatedly that – so democracy can get away with more plunder of the people because they’re under this delusion that we are the government.

We have the right to vote after all. You can’t complain. And there’s nothing you can do. You can’t kill the head of state. There is no head of state anymore.

It’s dispersed, whereas in a monarch at least, if you have an idiot or an evil monarch who’s born and inherits a crown…

… he could be – everyone, all his advisors and his uncle, they all sort of take care of things for him, and they keep him under control.

And if it gets bad enough, he can be killed, and people know that they’re not the government. They know that’s the monarch, and that’s us. So he can only get away with so much taxes, like wait a minute. I thought you were supposed to be giving us protection for these taxes.

And so there’s a limit. There’s like more natural limits to this. But – so that’s – I agree with you. That’s one of his great contributions.

By the way, I talk a lot about this just for viewers’ reference. I did a – Mises Academy is kind of – I guess it’s still going on, but they do these online courses.

And I did three or four a few years ago, and I did one on – I did a six-lecture course on Hoppe’s whole social theory.

So it’s all free on my website now. So if anyone wants to look into this stuff in more detail, I have six lectures going in detail about a lot of Hoppe’s views.

DAVE SMITH: Okay, highly recommend it. And, of course, Mises Institute is the greatest organization in the history of the world.

And I highly recommend everyone go check them out. I’m rocking one of their shirts right now. But there is – and this is just kind of, I think, too, to kind of back up Hoppe’s argument, which again, it’s just taken as a given that moving away from monarchy toward democracy was like – was an improvement in the human condition.

And, of course, things did – I mean the standards of living at this point are higher than they were under monarchy, but just to kind of…

… contribute to that argument and to also point out the problems that come along with regime change and going out and getting in wars to overthrow other governments, so which obviously we see a ton of right now in the Middle East.

Like nobody is really defending what a great guy Saddam Hussein was, but obviously Iraq is a lot worse now.

And it’s a lot worse in Libya without Qaddafi, and now we have slavery rising up in Libya, or not rising up. It’s risen up at this point.

But – and I remember Pat Buchanan made this point in his book. Pat Buchanan is guy who I don’t agree with on a lot of stuff. But I think he makes some very interesting points. But Woodrow Wilson, the original neocon if you want to think of it that way, the guy who said we’re going to make the world safe for democracy, and we went into World War I.

They had – basically Europe was ruled by monarchs, not to say that they’re great people or that this was the ideal system.

But after the monarchs fell, you had the rise of Lenin and Stalin. You had the rise of Hitler.

I mean things undeniably far, far worse than then the monarchies that came before them, and so it’s interesting that no one really looks at that.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, and I think we’ve had this sort of egalitarian revolution and this sort of human – people couple things together, and so they associate the modern Western system with the modern liberal traditions that we have now understandably.

So they think that if you want to go back to monarchy, you want to go back to the old ages and especially libertarians.

Like I’m not going to have a monarch. No one owns me. It’s like, yeah, but the democracy doesn’t own you either, but we’re putting up with that too, right?

I think it’s partly a case of mistaken causation versus correlation. It’s almost like the intellectual property system.

So we had the Industrial Revolution start around 1800, right around the time America came onto the scene and right around the time we instituted a patent system.

And the wealth just went up geometrically for the last 200-something years. And so when you say we should get rid of patents, they say are you crazy?

It was the cause of American success and innovation, which I think it’s just correlation, not causation.

And maybe the same thing is true with – democracy became – well, I guess, democracy didn’t really hit the scene until after World War I really so much.

But yeah, people correlate the modern Western systems. And I don’t know what to believe about this notion that – like R.J. Rummel I think, the guy from – the democide guy…

… the guy from Hawaii, the professor who’s collected all these statistics about what type of regimes kill which people and how many they killed in the 20th century and these things…

… which is just staggering: murders, clearly mostly by state systems, communism and fascism.

But so he concludes democracies are usually less prone to go to war against each other.

I’m not sure if that’s right. It could be that democracies tended to be the ones that are more Western and British and therefore capitalist and richer.

And therefore they could just exert their will and dominate the world as the US has done for the last 70-something years.

So it’s hard to sort these things out, but I suppose democracy, if every country in the world was a democracy, maybe they could get along.

But they would still be taxing the hell out of their citizens, so it still wouldn’t be totally fair.

DAVE SMITH: Right, absolutely. So anyway, you touched on patents again there, and I do – I want to talk about intellectual property with you because you are really the guy who kind of helps me understand this stuff.

And I – this was something that I used to struggle with when I first became a libertarian because there’s kind of – there’s this thing about intellectual property that didn’t quite make sense to me and didn’t fit into this kind of – the worldview of the non-aggression principle.

Like I could clearly see – the example I used to use is just that kind of like – I was like if you’re living in some kind of primitive society somewhere or say there is no government.

There’s no cops. There’s no laws or anything like that. But if somebody collected – some woman goes out and collects some seashells…

… and makes a necklace out of it and then someone comes over and bashes her over the head and takes that, it’s pretty easy to see that she was the rightful owner and that something immoral has been committed against her.

However, if someone goes out and collects some seashells and makes a necklace out of it and now says I’m the owner of seashell necklaces. I have the right to bash anyone else over the head who goes out and makes a necklace out of seashells.

Now, it kind of seems like she’s being the aggressor, and this isn’t really consistent with libertarianism.

And the other thing that always – I’m a stand-up comedian and intellectual property is something comedians kind of know about because we all feel a sense of ownership over our jokes.

But it always kind of seemed pretty obvious to me that it was like – I mean two people can come up with the same joke independently.

So who really stole something from someone there? And we have nonviolent ways of dealing with it, like if people know that you’re ripping off another comedian, people won’t have you work at their club and things like that.

But I always had an instinct that intellectual property was not consistent with libertarianism.

But it wasn’t until I read your stuff that I felt like I actually understand it, so also I love the connection you made at the beginning to praxeology and intellectual property.

So why don’t you just talk about that a little bit? What’s your stance on intellectual property? STEPHAN KINSELLA: And also comedians learn things from earlier comedians and other people in the culture, so they’re – everyone is always borrowing to some degree: scientists, engineers, inventors, artists.

They always are in the middle of some phase of human development. They’re using information before, and there’s just something wrong about being able to use this whole body of human knowledge that you’ve just locked onto because you were born in the 21st century instead of 200 A.D.

And then you want to take the ladder out and not let anyone use your stuff. So I do agree can be confusing.

And it took me a while to sort out the right way to explain it, and that’s why I’ve written about it over the years, and I’ve adapted and modified and learned new arguments.

And I think one is the human action paradigm, just understanding that in human action, there’s two things you need.

You need knowledge, and you need scarce resources, and then I’ve already explained why property rules make sense for one, not for the other.

But the other one, I think, is maybe a fundamental mistake, and I talk about this in a lecture about Locke, John Locke, whose idea was that – and a lot of libertarians hark back to john Locke because he’s sort of like a natural law theorist everyone kind of points that.

But the way he argued was – number one, was religious. So he’s taking God owning the world and giving it to Adam.

And God granted us the right to own ourselves. So he’s taking that for granted. But then he said if you own yourself, then you own your labor, and therefore you own things you mix with it that are unowned.

So this whole thing – he was trying to justify property rights against arbitrary interference by others.

But his argument basically introduced this labor theory of value or labor theory of property to the world, which I think spun off and eventually resulted in basically communism, the idea of the labor theory of value.

The idea that the reason things have a value is because people put time and effort into it. You’re sort of infusing it with your labor.

These things are like cousin ideas. It’s a metaphor that went wrong. You don’t own your labor.

Labor is just another word for a type of action and action is just what you do with your body. You own your body, but you don’t own what you do with it, and I think that that led to the – so the notion you had about, look, I’m a creator.

Someone got stolen from. That’s why it’s wrong. And so you tend to identify economic productivity with property because they often go together.

And so you think, well, the reason this woman is successful and prosperous is because she labored hard.

And she created something worth value, and therefore, it’s wrong for someone to steal it from her. And those things are as far as – they’re mostly correct, but they mix some things together that are not correct.

And the mistake made from that sort of first-level analysis is the assumption that we own what we create.

It’s the idea that one source of ownership is creation, and I think that’s a fundamental mistake that people make in political theory and just in common sense reasoning.

What they’re not – and one reason I brought up the Mises distinction between practical ownership or control of something, which we would call possession, and legal, which is a normative thing.

It’s a – there’s dualism in understanding property and wealth. Wealth is just the increase of value to us in a subjective sense, whereas property usually refers to resources that we can control in a possession sense.

And so if I take a natural resource that I own like, just a simple example would be like an iron ore or maybe a big slab of marble…

… and then I carve it into a statue or I make the iron ore into a horseshoe for a horse, I have increased the sum total of wealth in the world because I’ve made this thing more valuable.

So people naturally want to have property rights to protect that. But if you think closely about it, you haven’t created any new property. You’ve just rearranged things that you already had to own.

You had to own the marble to carpet into a statue. You had to own the iron ore in order to reshape it into a sword or to a horseshoe.

So there’s already property rights there, and the reason you own the resulting product is because you already owned the input ingredients.

And in fact, that’s the reason why Marxism is wrong when they say that the capitalist employer exploits the labor of the worker because they say, well, he produces all the horseshoes on the assembly line.

So he’s he doesn’t get the full value of that because he’s only getting paid a salary that’s a fraction of what it’s being sold for.

Then he’s being stolen from because the assumption is that, well, if he created the horseshoes, he should own them. You see, that’s wrong. He didn’t use his own resources to create the horseshoes. He was paid for his labor by the employer to use the materials supplied to him by the employer to make the horseshoes or whatever he’s making.

So you can see that creation is never a source of ownership. It’s only a source of wealth, and that is important.

But creation just means production, or it means transformation, or in a simple way, it means rearrangement.

I mean even Ayn Rand and Mises and Rothbard explicitly say this, but they never quite connected the dots.

But you own some resource, which you got either by contract from a previous owner, or you found it yourself.

That’s called homesteading. So there’s really only two sources of ownership, and that is homesteading. That means you find something unowned or by contract from previous owner.

They give it to you. They sell it to you. But production is a way of transforming these things that you already own and creating wealth for yourself or for the world, which is true.

But it doesn’t give rise to property rights, and if you don’t make this mistake, then you never make the mistake of thinking, well, if I create something like I make a new horseshoe, it’s wrong for someone to steal it from me.

That must mean you own whatever you create, and hey, I just created a novel or a joke or an invention, and that has value.

So it’s wrong for someone to steal that for me too, so you get confused by this original mistake I believe, or by this mistake that’s been woven into the dawning understanding we’ve worked out in the last 3-400 years in human political philosophy.

DAVE SMITH: Wow. That’s a really interesting connection. And yeah, okay, so I get that completely. So, in other words – so in a libertarian society or just the correct libertarian position to have is essentially that if you own a material and you improve it, then you own it

If you don’t, it’s whatever the agreement was when you when you worked to improve it. So in other words, if you – well, let’s say it this way. Here’s the challenge. So if you write a book, let’s just say for the sake of argument that you own the book, right?

And you – it’s blank, and then you write a book within that. What if somebody else comes along and writes the exact same book as you?

It was property that they own there now. Would you say – and I know I already agree with you, but I just want to set you up to explain this.

Would you say that you have no legal recourse to that person who’s now selling a book that was your thoughts that you put on this paper?

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, okay, yes. But one problem with the example is, as copyright advocates rightly point out, copyright usually covers things that – so patents cover inventions.

DAVE SMITH: Right. STEPHAN KINSELLA: They cover things that in almost every case are inevitable. In fact, there’s usually multiple inventors chasing the same idea because the technology is ripe for the next thing to come about, so the airplane or the light bulb, things like that.

Almost every – it’s hard to think of an invention that you would say would never have been invented if not for this guy.

If he had been hit by a bus, someone else would have come up with it. So it’s hard to think of independent invention. Maybe you come up with it earlier, but it’s going to come anyway.

It’s easier to argue for copyright that – like no one would have written, Great Expectations by Dickens.

No one would have written Atlas Shrugged. It’s just too unlikely, so it’s hard – or painted the same exact painting.

Now for jokes, it might be different because some of them are tropes, and they’re shorter, and they can be boarded in different ways with a general idea.

But I think the fundamental idea is that there’s – even if you copy exactly what someone else did, like you copy their novel, and even if you put your own name on it, there’s really nothing inherently wrong with that.

It might be a little seedy and shady, and it could be deceptive in some cases. And libertarians are way too quick to say, well, it’s fraud. Like if you lie about something, it’s fraud.

But even if it was, it would just be a fraud claim against whoever was deceived against the fraudulent seller or something like that.

It wouldn’t be a general right of property good against the world. Like I could copy the latest Harry Potter novel, and truthfully say J.K. Rowling wrote it. I’m just going to sell copies.

I’m not committing fraud. I’m not even lying. I’m not even saying I have permission. I’m just doing it. There’s no fraud, and I think fraud is a very specific libertarian offense that you have to understand contract theory and property theory and libertarian-consistent principles to even know what fraud is.

And I think fraud is a very narrow thing, and most times when libertarians even say, well, that’s just fraudulent, what they really mean is it was dishonest.

And you know what? They may be right to criticize someone for being dishonest. Like if you plagiarize a paper at your school, well, you’re not following the rules of your school.

Say I copy a chapter from Shakespeare and I just put it as my own. That’s plagiarism, and I don’t know if it’s exactly fraudulent.

Your teacher is not paying you for it. So there’s really no fraud claim there, and so there’s really no fraud claim there in the strict sense. So you just have to say it’s sort of like the comic thing you mentioned.

There’s norms, and you don’t want to hear a comic that’s borrowing stuff from other people. You want to hear fresh material.

You want to hear their voice. DAVE SMITH: Right, right because… STEPHAN KINSELLA: They’re going to get a bad reputation. DAVE SMITH: Right because like I was laying out with the idea of jokes. I mean there are things where there’s parallel thinking.

There are great comedians who have done basically the same joke. Brian Regan and Jerry Seinfeld had a joke that they both did.

It was about the man on the moon, but it’s a great joke by both of them. But it’s just something that they came up with that wasn’t the most complicated thing in the way, and they’re both really funny so they went to the funny place with that.

However, there are other examples where people are clearly ripping other people off, and they’re taking – their nuance and their timing and the exact words and this and that.

And I think the point that, what it comes down to when you’re saying intellectual property basically isn’t a property right, it’s that when we’re talking about property rights, we’re saying, as you laid out earlier.

It’s not that we’re against violence. We’re against initiating violence. So the question is really, are you allowed to act violently against somebody?

Like if they break into your home, you can shoot that person. So the question isn’t so much like is this seedy or this wrong?

It’s should we be throwing someone in a cage for this? And I think again, like we were saying with the comedian thing.

It’s like, yeah, you can have libertarian solutions to this, which is that if you do blatantly rip somebody off, the clubs kind of stop working you.

People out you as being this person, so if someone was doing that, like stealing somebody else’s book or something like that…

… I think the appropriate responses for publishers to not want to work with this guy, people to kind of out them…

… but it wouldn’t be a legal claim where you can actually go steal money – like where you can say, oh, this guy owes you money, or this guy needs to be locked up or something like that.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, and people need to realize that we have a large public domain right now.

Everything published before a certain date is public domain: Shakespeare, the Bible. There’s no barrier, no legal barrier to you republishing Shakespeare’s works or Plato or Aristotle or Francis Bacon, all this stuff.

You could publish it right now on Amazon or anywhere on the web and put your name on it if you want to, and there’s just no claim.

And yet people don’t do this. So everyone’s freaking out about a problem that just never happens. Why aren’t there a million people claiming they wrote the Bible or Shakespeare?

It’s just not going to happen because everyone knows who wrote it, and you’re just going to look like an idiot. And we talked earlier about the symmetry that libertarians obsess about in the non-aggression principle and the consistency and the idea that you can only use force in response to force, initiating force in particular.

Well, we libertarians recognize that all law is ultimately the use of physical real force.

And it’s always against some real thing in the world, and if you just say why can’t you have a law – like there’s this notion among IP advocates, even libertarians, that it’s just another right.

It’s in addition to our other rights. But what they don’t understand is that all rights are legal rights, which are enforced by physical force, and they have to be directed at some physical resource.

That’s just what force is used against. So actually my argument is not that intellectual property is unjustified.

Instead it’s impossible. It’s legally impossible for there to be a right in a pattern of information.

What that is, is it’s just a disguised way of transferring existing ownership of existing things.

So, for example, if I have a copyright, I can stop you from – or I can sue you for damages for copying my novel.

I’m just going to get physical force of a government court to take your money away from you. So it’s really the contest is about the money, or if I have a patent and I’m going to – I’m Apple and I’m going to keep you from making a rectangular-ish touchscreen phone with rounded corners because of my design patent…

… I’m just trying to get physical force from the government against your factory, which means they’re claiming partial ownership of this competitor’s factory, which is another physical thing.

So all these things are always about who controls physical resources, and if you already have two rules that specify who owns these things, which is who got it first…

… who got it by contract from a previous owner, then you have to have a third rule, which is undercutting the first two.

It’s very similar to what I pointed out before, the same reason that libertarians oppose monetary inflation by the government and we oppose what’s called positive rights.

Liberals and mainstream people think, well, we believe in the rights to security and etc., but we also believe in the right to welfare and education and housing.

We libertarians would say, no, it’s a positive right. It’s got to be provided by someone, and it’s got to come at the expense of negative rights that we have.

We know that. And if you have money and the government just prints more, hey, what’s wrong with the government just giving free money to people?

Because it dilutes the purchasing power of the existing money and makes us all poor. It’s stealing our purchasing power.

And exactly in the same way is when the government creates other rights, like intellectual property, it’s taking away and eating at the existing allocation of property rights in physical things.

You can never have physical property rights and intellectual property.

The intellectual property is just a way of shifting these other ownership rights, and it’s basically stealing it under the guise of calling it property, which is just obscene.

You call it intellectual property so that the act of theft there is masked or distorted.

DAVE SMITH: Right. That’s actually I think, the best way to think about it because it really is just another positive right, which almost didn’t – in theory, if you didn’t have to violate all of the negative rights in order to provide it, it would be like, yeah, sure.

I mean I guess that sounds great. Like if printing money did create wealth, you could just spread it around. It sounds like a nice idea. The problem is you have to rob from the prior in order to provide the latter. So I’d say…

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Let me… DAVE SMITH: Go ahead. STEPHAN KINSELLA: Another way to think about it is if you – all these – property rights like your right to your house or your car – no one in – what state do you live in?

DAVE SMITH: I’m in New York. STEPHAN KINSELLA: It doesn’t matter but – where? DAVE SMITH: In New York City. STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, so New York law prohibits theft of your car and trespass against your house.

But even someone in Texas or in Russia can’t – they can’t actually violate your house or your car, right?

They have to travel there and do it. But patent and copyright law are inherently territorial.

So I might have a patent on my invention in America but not in China, if I didn’t apply for it.

And if you even think broader, like let’s say there was a colony on the moon or on another – let’s say there’s another planet out there, and there’s an identical copy of one of Rand’s novels, or someone’s doing the same invention.

It’s not even conceivable that they’re infringing my property rights here, but you can’t conceive of someone infringing my property rights in my car or in my house on another planet without me noticing.

It just makes no sense. The entire paradigm makes no sense to try to analogize. And what I see some pro-IP guys do, some libertarians like Richard Epstein and others, they’ll say something like, well – and Adam Mossoff, the objectivist guy who’s all about trying to finally put IP on its own footing after Rand failed to…

… and he’s never going to either because I tried already and I actually know patent law. I’m a patent lawyer.

Anyway, I forgot where I was going with this.

DAVE SMITH: Oh, well, you were saying… STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh. Oh no, so what they –like Richard Epstein, what they say is well, we admit that intangible property rights like – which is what IP is called, is not the same as property.

But here’s how you could view it as the same. For example, you can sell it, and it’s got an economic value, and you can license it just like you – and I’m like, yeah, well, slave owners in the 1700s could sell frickin’ slaves too.

The legal system can treat things as property that they shouldn’t, and that doesn’t mean that you should, just because you can make an analogy and say, oh, you can treat humans as property too, so I guess that’s okay.

That’s the kind of argument they’re making in defense of IP, and it drives me bonkers. DAVE SMITH: Yeah, that’s – the one that I think I hear as the most common argument, and I used to kind of – I’m almost embarrassed to say, but I used to kind of think maybe there was something to this until I read you just destroy it.

But I think the most common argument I hear is something about either R&D or something about the idea that patents incentivize people to invent things.

But again, I know – so I’ll just give you a chance to knock that one down because it’s kind of a similar thing.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: What’s interesting about that argument is – well, here’s what I’ve noticed over the years of thinking about these issues and talking to people.

I mean as a basic point, which sounds condescending, but you have to realize that a question is not a fricking argument.

Like if I give you – I explain for 30 minutes to you, here’s why the patent system is wrong, and then someone says, but how would I make profit by doing this?

It’s like, well, okay, so that’s not really a counterargument. It’s just a question. DAVE SMITH: Right. STEPHAN KINSELLA: And some questions are wrongheaded. I mean I could say why slavery is illegal, and someone could say, okay, I hear all your points, but who’s going to pick the cotton?

It’s like, well, I mean, dude, I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t have to prove to you what the world’s going to look like in 50 years after slavery is abolished and we don’t have African slaves to pick the cotton anymore.

It really doesn’t matter. I mean I can guess, but my argument doesn’t depend upon that. So – and other thing is that there’s this assumption when people ask these questions, and when they make some of their arguments…

… that the purpose of law is to fine-tune basically market failures I guess and in slightly increased market efficiency by remedying defects that they imagine would happen without the government coming in and doing this.

So there’s an assumption that we don’t have enough innovation. We have this much innovation, but we need this much.

And if the government will come in and fix these free-rider holdout problems with a system of patent and copyright law, we’ll have slightly more innovation.

But besides that being totally false, the purpose of law is not to increase innovation.

The purpose of law is to do justice and protect people’s rights, which just means property rights, which means we have to identify what our property rights are and have the law respect and defend them.

But it’s not to increase innovation, so to me that’s the biggest problem. And then the idea that the government can even get this right ever is crazy.

I mean no one even knows what the right term should be. In fact, the funny thing is – so copyrights last over 100 years now, roughly 120 let’s say.

Patents last about 17 years. If you ask an advocate of patent or copyright, why should patents less 17? Why not 12? Why not 11? Why not 100? Why not 0? They have no answer.

In fact, Ayn Rand was asked this question. That was one of her most embarrassing mistakes in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, that article on patent and copyright.

And she said, well, we don’t know exactly what the right term should be, but it doesn’t matter. As long as we have some finite term that’s than zero I guess is her argument.

You know, the libertarian argument to patent and copyright and the optimal term because I’ve heard – I’ve said the optimal term is zero.

And I’ll hear libertarians say, well, you said that 17 is an arbitrary number, but zero is an arbitrary number too. Well, I know. That’s because I know it’s evil. That’s like saying the average – the optimum prison sentence for drug use is not 10 years or 15 or five.

It’s frickin’ zero because the drug war is immoral and wrong. I know zero is the right answer. Yes, I do know, and you can’t tell me what the right sentence for someone smoking marijuana is.

It’s not five or 10, or two or three months’ probation or whatever. All those things are too much. It’s like taxes. Every tax is too much.

DAVE SMITH: It is almost like – and I’ve never been a big Randian. I got brought into the movement by Ron Paul.

I came along later, and so I was brought in by Ron Paul. And then I found the Mises guys and Rothbard and all those guys. So by the time I started reading Ayn Rand, I like her novels and stuff, but it just didn’t – I never felt like this allegiance to her or anything like that.

But it still even kind of hurts. Like it hurts when those people who I do look at as heroes… … even if they’re flawed heroes, it’s like it’s so – whenever they try to argue against a voluntarist society or something, it’s just – it’s almost painful because it’s like you’ve been so on the market for 95% of your work.

And then in this other 5% – I saw this thing – it’s like a video – it was less than a year ago.

I forget exactly where it was, but Walter Williams was giving a speech, and then he took questions afterward.

And now we live in this post Ron Paul internet world where there’s – at any event like that, there’s going to be a bunch of an-caps out there who are asking these questions.

And Walter Williams, who I do look at as like a hero, and he’s making all these great arguments, and, and he doesn’t even say taxation is theft.

His argument is that taxation is slavery, and I’ve heard him break this down a lot of different times. And he’s like, well, what is slavery other than one person forcibly taking the labor of another person and this whole beautiful argument?

STEPHAN KINSELLA: You see – wait. You see that labor. But you see, that’s a good metaphor, but you see, it’s not quite precise because you see he’s making a little bit of a labor – the Lockian labor theory of ownership.

DAVE SMITH: Yes, yes, you’re right. STEPHAN KINSELLA: But anyway, I kind of agree with him here in the application, but go ahead. DAVE SMITH: Yeah, you’re absolutely right about that. But anyway, so this is his argument, and he gives this whole speech.

And then this guy – it’s like the first question, and this young kid who’s a bright kid and he gets up there and he asks.

And he goes, well, if taxation is a violation and it’s theft or it’s slavery or whatever, what justification is there to tax for a military or for courts or for any of this other stuff?

And Walter Williams goes, well, it’s in the Constitution. I remember just being like oh. It hurts inside. I don’t know.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, or the Randians will say it’s necessary. So they just can’t imagine how you could have these competing defense agencies, so they think it’s necessary.

It’s not a very good argument. I respect they’re anarchists – their anti-anarchist argument a little bit more than I respect their pro-IP argument.

I can see how you couldn’t wrap your head around having no final legal authority.

I could understand and especially for the earlier thinkers. I kind of give them a break on that a little bit.

They’re wrong, but this IP thing, man, honestly there is – I have never come across a good argument for it at all.

And I’ve heard – I think I must have heard every one. I was going to ask you, what about this joke, the man on the moon?

You’re going to leave your listeners hanging? They’re going to be all wondering what is this man on the moon joke? You’re not going to tell it? DAVE SMITH: The man on the moon is – the joke – it’s a really funny joke. I’m probably going to butcher it.

This is why I try not to tell other comedians’ jokes, but it’s more or less he’s just – he goes we put a – when they say we put a man on the moon, it’s always used to like, oh, well, I’m sure we can do this.

I mean we put a man on the moon. Or it’s like that they go like, they put a man on the moon, but they can’t get my phone service right?

It’s always that. And he’s like, well, I wonder if we had never put a man on the moon. People would just never be upset about things we couldn’t do. So it’s like – the idea of just of like, oh man, my phone service is terrible.

He says, well, they never even put a man on the moon, but it’s really funny the way they do it, and it’s just – but they have – it’s like identical, the two jokes they have.

Hey, so we’re running close to the end of time here, but I did want to just ask you to expand a little bit on the point you made there because I would be remiss if I had you and didn’t…

… talk a little bit about law in an anarcho-libertarian-voluntarist world because, as you said, that is the thing that people can’t wrap their head around.

And you gave them a little bit of a pass but did say that they were wrong. This is something that I get a lot. When people first hear about the idea of anarcho-capitalism, they think, well, so you’re against laws because the state and law are completely associated with each other.

That is not actually true. We are in favor of laws, not most of the ones that we have currently. But how would you say, just in a quick few-minute kind of sum-up, which I know this could be a whole podcast on its own.

But how would law work? How would law be enforced in courts and stuff like that in a voluntarist world? STEPHAN KINSELLA: I mean, this is actually a topic I haven’t – actually I haven’t written a lot about this because so much has been done on it already.

I sort of view – a lot of libertarian thinking is arguing and thinking about what laws make sense and which are justified, and that’s kind of what I do.

The system that would rise up and implement it is also interesting. It’s a different question, and I basically share the views of the main writers on this topic.

And there’s a lot of impressive ones. There’s Rothbard. There’s Tannehills, the Market for Liberty in ’74 I think.

Bob Murphy has written something recently about it, and also his Chaos Theory. Gerard Casey – he’s a brilliant Irish philosopher, an anarcho-capitalist/Rothbardian, has this great book out discussing this stuff, Randy Barnet and Bruce Benson.

So the stuff by these – David Friedman too – these guys’ stuff is what I basically agree with.

So there’s no way we can summarize it. But yeah, I think you would – if we all agree what law makes sense because we can have justifications for it…

… and that’s what we libertarians do, then the assumption is that that’s what would be accepted in society too if you’re basically a libertarian society.

So – and even Hoppe has written on this stuff too. So what I think is more along Hoppe’s lines that you’re not going to have a free society unless people, for some reason, have adopted these basic norms.

And the ones that make sense are the ones that we believe in. That’s why we believe in them. They make sense. So they would have to emerge. They would emerge by custom, by contract. They would be enforced ultimately I think by people doing self-help but also institutionally by the arms of insurance companies.

So people would have – they would tend to have insurance to be able to make their way into given regions and areas and to join polite society.

And the insurance companies would have all these incentives to work with each other, establish meta rules and arbitration rules.

My personal guess is, even though I’ve written a lot on the theoretical right of a victim of aggression to use…

… proportional retaliatory force like in theory, if someone commits murder, they could be killed or even tortured to death depending – theoretically you could justify this.

I think in a practical, real-world sitting, I am personally drawn towards arguments that say we would have a mostly voluntary system and it wouldn’t be enforced with lethal force after the fact most of the time.

It would be a restitution-based system and voluntary in the sense that, if you don’t want to show up in court, we can’t make you.

But then your reputation – you’re going to be an outlaw basically. Your life is going to be hell, and we can easily ostracize you and force you out of society.

So people have strong incentives as long as they’re part of a growing free society to comply with these rules and to be a reasonable civilized person.

And if they’re hauled into court for some proceeding, they would show up and they would make their case. And usually the remedy would be restitution or some kind of – something that if it was a violent crime or something really bad, would give them a way to integrate themselves back into society, something – I think that’s how it would work.

And Randy Barnett and others have written a lot on this. I’ve written a little bit in blog posts why I think that would happen.

So I think that even though technically there’s a right for an eye-for-an-eye-type punishment or retaliation, I don’t see that being done institutionally, that is, by the private agencies that would arise because it’s just too expensive.

It doesn’t accomplish much, and it’s too risky because you could make a mistake. If you execute an innocent guy, then what do you do? And who does it really help? Who’s going to pay for that?

So I think restitution would be way more accepted in a free society, and plus I think crime would be lower anyway, so it wouldn’t be as much of a problem.

And when we all have super nanobot robot swarms around us that protect us from any possible harm, we won’t – maybe no one can hurt each other in the far future.

We’ll all have invincible little robot armies around us. DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Okay I… STEPHAN KINSELLA: To be a little techno optimistic.

DAVE SMITH: Yeah, I like that. Let’s end with some optimism. I do – I really agree with everything you said there. And I think it’s interesting – and I get it. I get it because I think there’s this natural tendency for people to accept whatever system they’re in as the norm and be worried about changing it.

But it’s like – it’s amazing to me how much people get caught up on this thing, and it’s like, oh my God, I mean we wouldn’t have a state, and then we can’t force people to show up for court.

We have to just make them outlaws or outcasts, and it’s like, yeah, I know it’s a little bit scary. But when you have a state, you end up having world wars, a military draft.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Exactly. DAVE SMITH: Robbing from your entire population, throwing people in a cage for pot, so maybe it’s better to go with the risk of too much freedom or whatever.

Anyway, listen, man. We’ve got to wrap because we’re over time, and we have other people coming into the studio after us. But dude, this was great. Thanks so much for coming on, Stephan Kinsella. Please let people know where they can find more of your work and what your next projects are.

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’d say the clearinghouse is just Stephan Kinsella with an A, not an E. That’s Stephen. And I just want to tell you I was debating with my family whether you’re the smartest funny guy or the funniest smart guy, and I think we have to go with probably the smartest funny guy because otherwise Bob Murphy would be upset.

DAVE SMITH: Well, thank you. I appreciate that very much, and I really enjoyed this episode. We’ll have to do it again soon. All right, everybody, thanks so much for listening.

I will be – like I said, I’m going to Los Angeles, so my next episode will be on the road, but it’ll be out at normal time Friday at 6 p.m. All right, thanks guys. Peace.