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Aug. 21, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:51:13

2199 Freedom Fest Panel 2012

A panel from the 2012 Freedom Fest including Bob Murphy, Jeffrey Tucker and more!

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	The first speaker is an adjunct scholar at the Mises Institute.
	He wears a number of hats beyond that.
	He's a research fellow with the Independent Institute, senior economist with the Energy Institute, although he has pointed out that he's the only economist for that group, so I guess he would be senior.
	He has a blog.
	It's called Free Advice.
	And by the way, that's the only thing free you will get from him.
	But he is the author of a couple of books.
	Well, he's the author of a number of books, but we have a couple of them here.
	And one is the Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, which is a wonderful primer to talk about capitalism with people.
	Also, a great book that he produced.
	For those of you who have high school students, junior high students, I want to teach them sound economics.
	He has written a wonderful book called Lessons for the Young Economist.
	We have a couple of copies down on the table.
	You really should take a look at this book.
	It's a wonderful, wonderful primer for the student that you want to teach about free market economics.
	So, without further ado, he's going to talk about alternative education institutions.
	His name is Dr.
	Bob Murphy.
	Thanks everybody for showing up.
	I know many of you are probably fighting hangovers, so we appreciate that.
	It's always good to be here at Freedom Fest.
	A lot of us go to many libertarian and sort of academic conferences, and so the thing at Freedom Fest is why it's so interesting for us, I think, is that it's I'm not kidding, he really said that so.
	Because at first I was like, "Hey, that's a good one." Right, right.
	So afterwards, this is why after we give our talk, Stefan and I are going to leave the room.
	Because he's bald and so...
	The last panel said that you should try to be real simple and explain things, so I want to make sure my humor goes over with you guys.
	So what I'm going to talk about, as Doug mentioned, I know some of you were trickling in here.
	We actually have a big panel, as you can see, so we're supposed to keep our individual remarks pretty short.
	I'm supposed to just be talking about education and ways to sort of get around The state's grip on that, so I'll just offer you some thoughts.
	A lot of what I have to say, I think most of us would have already thought these things, but let me just try to give it maybe a different perspective.
	So first of all, this might seem obvious, but why is education a big deal?
	Is that really an important thing?
	Focus more on the money or health care or energy, things like that.
	And those are all different areas where the state has made inroads and they're always coming up with different pretexts for why they need to regulate there.
	And it's funny, you know, think about it.
	Like with climate change issues, you know, they're going to get control of the energy sector.
	And the stuff with fighting terrorism, you know, what do they do under that pretext?
	It's, oh, we've got to be able to monitor bank transactions and be able to check people when they're coming and going from the country.
	It's not like they ever say, and this is why we have to be able to regulate, you know, Slurpees and things like that.
	They go for things that are really important and integral to controlling society.
	And so it just makes some of us suspicious when they do that.
	And with education, again, on the one hand it seems real obvious to us, but just to think through, for me, For me, one of the most compelling pieces of evidence to show that education really is crucial and that we should be very suspicious when even in a relatively limited setting, government settings, that they go for education and try to take it over and set curriculum standards and things is that you look at totalitarian societies that they go for education and try to take it over and set curriculum standards and
	No one's gonna argue with you about that and no one's gonna say, well, they really mean well over there and they just, or a bit misguided.
	I mean, just about everybody You talk to is going to agree, okay, in totalitarian societies, that's too much government.
	The people running the show there do not have the best interests of their people at heart, and it's all about them maintaining power.
	In those societies, they have the utmost control over education in the media.
	So, you know, clearly there is that pattern there, and so clearly the government's I think one of the biggest aspects of it is just to remember a point that many thinkers pointed out is that,
	going back to David Hume and others, that government rests on the consent of the government, that ultimately all government rests on public opinion.
	And there's different ways of interpreting what he means by that, and in some settings that might seem more contrived than others.
	But again, even it's in the dictatorships and those totalitarian societies where you might think, what do they care about, education or the media, because they have all the guns and they can just kill people, like their system allows that and nobody thinks that that's odd.
	And everyone kind of knows that if you step out of line the government kills you in those kind of societies.
	So you might think, if you didn't know just from a direct experience, you might think that in those societies they actually don't care so much about controlling education or the media because they don't need to.
	It doesn't matter whether the people agree with them or not.
	But again, it's the exact opposite.
	It's precisely in those places where it seems like It's all about who has guns when controlling how people think is taken to the utmost extreme.
	And I think the explanation, again, is that it's not like it's the three guys, the villains in Superman 2, you know, the people in black that came.
	And they could take over because, well, they're from Krypton, and, you know, Superman just left his thing with Lois Lane get out of hand, and then he gave away his powers foolishly.
	So, yeah, there's three guys from Krypton.
	You can't stop them.
	They can take over the world.
	But...
	In real life, that's not why, you know, Stalin wasn't in charge because he could physically beat up anybody who challenged him, right?
	And certainly George Bush wasn't in charge for that reason.
	So you see how the point there, that the reason they're in power is because their subordinates obey them.
	If they say, this person is not listening to me shoot him, there are people who...
	I don't want to say voluntarily do that, but it's more refined there.
	So it's more subtle than that.
	And this is where the point about controlling the framing of the narrative or how people think is so important.
	Because in the extreme, you could imagine there could be a society where there's one guy in charge and everybody else despises him and secretly thinks, I wish somebody would just kill this guy.
	And yet, if everyone believed that everyone else wasn't thinking that, and that if you stepped on a line and he anticipated it, anticipated your plot before you could kill him, and then would tell other people, shoot him, that they would obey, everybody could be policing everybody else, even though everyone secretly despises that guy.
	So how could he maintain that system is he has to make darn sure that people don't realize how much everyone hates him.
	He's got to keep this false image up of how he's the great leader and so on.
	So that's an extreme exaggeration, obviously, but I think that hypothetical position or scenario does shed light on actual totalitarian societies.
	For example, I saw a presentation at NYU one time, and the guy there was pointing out that in societies like that, like in the Soviet Union and then in North Korea, graffiti would be taken care of immediately.
	Whereas you drive around places in the United States where we think, oh, Big Brother's watching us, but if somebody puts up F the police or something, nobody's just going to take care of that.
	Whereas in these places, if somebody wrote something against the regime, that gets immediately scrubbed.
	And again, why is that?
	Because they don't want other people seeing that somebody had the courage to do that because they must really hate what this guy's been doing.
	And so that might give people hope and make them be willing to step up.
	Because ultimately, if enough of us step up, then the regime topples.
	And so they've got to make sure they don't let that get out of hand.
	Because ultimately, even if you have the army on your side, if the whole 98% of the rest of the population decides to withdraw its consent and not report on each other, you just can't run a prison society like that.
	So that's why education is so important and control of it, because you've got to frame the way people think.
	To give you an example, I was reading...
	An account, an interview with his dissident who left North Korea for South Korea, and they're asking him, you know, what made you take the plunge and do that?
	Because they actually risked his life, and then his family would be in trouble back home.
	You know, that's one of the ways they control people, is they say, even if you manage to escape and get past the border, like you bribe the guards or figure out a way to get around it, we'll kill your family.
	And so that keeps people there.
	And so this guy, I don't remember why, I think he was young and maybe he didn't like his parents.
	He was like, no.
	It should have been nice when you were growing up.
	But the thing he said was interesting.
	The thing he said, what pushed him over the edge was actually pro-communist propaganda that backfired.
	I think he'd been a member of the party, too.
	They were passing around photos of a South Korean labor union protest that there were workers who were agitating for better working conditions or something better paying, who knows what, in South Korea.
	And so the North Korean party officials were saying, you see how bad they have it down there?
	Whereas here, we love the workers and everyone's a big happy family, that kind of stuff.
	And he said, what he noticed in the picture were a few things that made him realize, I have to get out of this place.
	He said, first of all, in the background, he could see lots of normal people driving cars.
	He said that would be unheard of here, that only the officials get the car.
	If you have a bike, you're lucky.
	And he said the other thing was, they were allowed to protest, and that just blew his mind.
	Like, how come these people aren't just all dead?
	That the police are just hemming them in and stuff, but they're not just mowing them down.
	And then he said, and the third thing, he said, and then I saw it and the guy's breast pocket was a ballpoint pen.
	And I was just, oh my gosh, these people are so fantastically wealthy that they're walking around with, you know, and so stuff like wouldn't even occur.
	So even, so the party officials who made that propaganda were themselves, like they forgot how out of touch, you know, they kept their population and they didn't even realize that they were letting stuff slip through thinking, oh, this will help them, you know, reassure them as to why we have the better system.
	That's how ignorant they can manage to keep those people.
	So that's part of it, that you really control the education and the media and filter that stuff.
	People have no frame of reference because obviously people thousands of years ago didn't have our standard of living or even the standard of living of people in the Soviet Union.
	So in the absolute sense, you wouldn't know whether the regime is delivering good things to you or not.
	The way you can tell is to say, okay, right now people in a freer society are living a lot better than we are.
	And so that's I think ultimately that's why I like projects like seasteading and things like that to try to or having someone succeed and try to just I think we need to be able to point to things that work and say you see that they're doing it better there and that would because you know just a theoretical argument since we don't really know and it's hard to convince you but you point to something tangible so that's why controlling education is so important because it frames The way people think and then also with the history just an example
	of framing how people think about subjects the words and the vocabulary they use I encounter this a lot I do work as Doug mentioned I'm the senior economist for the Institute for Energy Research and also the junior mid-level economist too and there it's so as you can imagine I'm against the government coming in and regulating carbon dioxide emissions and all that kind of stuff and The opponent,
	like the economists who are for the think tanks on the other side, the people that I've battled with all the time on the blog and stuff, The terms they use, they are for what they call clean energy.
	Like that's actually, with a straight face, that's how they refer to their position, a word for clean energy.
	So, you know, we on the defense, and they can have such a monopoly on, you know, the discussion that us just to jump in and to, you know, I end up having to say, oh, well, there's problems with clean energy.
	You know, and I put it in quotation marks or whatever.
	You know what I mean?
	Or green energy and things like that.
	You know what I mean?
	So they get to...
	And for a while, we toyed with, well, what can we do to combat that?
	And I was like, well, maybe we can call what they're for as inefficient energy.
	Let's say we're for efficient energy.
	But that was too wishy-washy.
	That just doesn't come naturally.
	I want to say, no, we're talking about solar or wind or nuclear power or fossil fuel.
	You know what I mean?
	To try to honestly communicate to people, it seems unfair to load the deck and say, oh, we're for efficient energy.
	You see what I mean?
	But the people on the other side had no qualms about saying that we're for dirty energy and they're for clean energy.
	So that's just an example of controlling the debate.
	So as far as how can we break out of this, and one last thing in terms of history, I've noticed this as an economist, I can have all the arguments I want that are theoretically compelling.
	I can say all sorts of cute reductio ad absurdum arguments about government intervention, but if people have been taught in their history class when they were in sixth grade that America had laissez-faire.
	Then there was a 29 stock market crash.
	Herbert Hoover sat back and did nothing.
	And then we had the Great Depression.
	FDR came in, big government, and it saved the day.
	That trumps anything I can possibly say to them.
	Or people, oh, George Bush deregulated the financial sector and look what happened.
	We've tried your ideas, Murphy.
	If people think that that's what history said, then all of my, you know, they get real suspicious.
	And yeah, you're kind of clever with your theoretical art, but we know what happened.
	So, it's really important to control the teaching of history or to make sure they don't get to define it.
	So, how is...
	Okay.
	So, what can we do?
	Well, fortunately, I think the time is with us that, for example, I teach a lot of classes online at the Mises Academy, and it's not accredited.
	People have always been saying it always is accredited, but we still get hundreds of people who go through those courses because they actually want to learn.
	And so that's significant for a few reasons.
	So one is, I used to tell people, when they would say, gee, young people would come up to me and say, I'm interested in Austrian economics, should I go get a PhD?
	And the way I would explain to them, they'd say, well, back in the 1970s, if you got a PhD and you specialized in Austrian economics, that was this career suicide.
	And I said, now it's like chopping off your left arm.
	You know?
	So it's gotten better.
	And...
	See, I had to explain the joke.
	So it's gotten better, but now it's not even like that.
	And specifically with these co-courses, I make, as Doug says, I've done many things for free.
	This is my blog post.
	I get paid for that stuff, and I make more teaching in a given year, teaching those online classes for people who aren't getting official credit anywhere.
	than I did when I was a college professor at Hillsdale College.
	Now, that's a little bit of a misleading thing because Hillsdale College didn't pay me very well.
	I was cutting lawns on the side.
	But still, I'm not exaggerating when I say I make more doing these online things than I did when I was formerly a college professor for my job.
	And so why that's amazing is because that means now people coming up through the ranks, if they want to go and do a dissertation on some obscure topic, whether it's libertarian philosophy or whatever, Austrian capital theory, they know they could possibly pay their bills doing that because now they know they could possibly pay their bills doing that because now we have the whole world as a potential market because of these So then Doug's going to cut me off in a second.
	But the last point I want to make is simply that what will finally make just the floodgates open, I think, is when the employers realize that I need to stop vetting people and having a filter as to are they a college grad that they need.
	That more and more employers are realizing that is hardly the signal of who's a good employee is going to be.
	And so I think once that becomes more widespread and they start trusting alternative institutions and people can say, oh, I went through the Mises Academy class or I went through the laissez-faire program or whatever and here's what the report is on me.
	Once more employers start doing that, then the floodgates will just Open up and we'll be able to get around the sort of vice grip that the state has on education.
	Thanks.
	I know you will have questions for Bob.
	And again, at the end of this, we're going to have 20 minutes for Q&A.
	And so, you know, keep your questions in mind for Mr. Merck.
	Murphy.
	Our next speaker I'm a research fellow at the Independent Institute.
	She wrote a wonderful book many years ago called The Reasonable Woman.
	I'm familiar with this book because I used to buy Buy a few of them and pass them out to my stripper friends here in Vegas.
	And they very much appreciated it because these girls are all working on their law degrees or whatever.
	So it was a very interesting book for them.
	We do not have it downstairs, I don't believe, but what we do have is her brand new book.
	And this is a book that you really, really, really should buy.
	The Art of Being Free.
	I think that's what we all strive to accomplish in our lives, and she's written a wonderful book about that.
	She's talking today about the two attitudes toward the state.
	She is the First Lady of Freedom.
	Please help me welcome Wendy McElroy.
	Good afternoon.
	I want to thank Laissez-faire Books.
	I want to thank Laissez-faire Books, and I most especially want to thank Jeff Tucker for bringing me here.
	There are very few people in the world that would get me off my farm in rural Canada to come down to Las Vegas.
	Jeff's one of them.
	Thanks, Jeff.
	I'm an optimist about freedom.
	And it's not just the abstract concept that I'm optimistic about, but the idea of living freedom.
	Quite frankly, I'm pretty tired of dealing with abstractions when it comes to freedom, when it comes to living my life.
	I want to do it.
	I don't want to talk about it.
	I'm an optimist not because I'm mentally deficient, not because I haven't been paying attention.
	Every morning of my life I wake up and I go through about 20 newspaper or media sites in order to feed two news feeds, daily news feeds, that I manage.
	So I have no illusions about the condition of the world.
	It's dismal.
	I have no illusions about the future immediately.
	I think it's pretty dismal.
	I think that the worst of hard times will hit in 2013 and maybe will hit this fall.
	And we're all going to go through a hard time.
	And I expect the hard times will last for several years.
	And yet I'm an optimist.
	As bizarre as it sounds, my current attitude arose as a result of turning around the whole experience of 9-11 in my mind over and over again.
	I gave a lot of thought to the idea of what is my relationship to the state.
	Nothing on the face of this earth has profoundly shocked me as much as the 9-11 experience.
	And when I say that, I'm not referring primarily to terrorist acts on one day.
	I'm talking about America's reaction, when I say experience, to 9-11.
	The entire nation seemed to give up on freedom at one moment.
	The entire nation seemed to surrender everything it was built upon, everything that made it great.
	I'm a Canadian.
	I've written more about American politics than Canadian politics because I'm in love with the American ideal.
	The American ideal is the human ideal of freedom.
	And the police tank came so fast.
	It just happened so fast.
	To me, the symbol of 9-11 is the airport I went through to get down here, where people ceased to be customers and became criminals.
	Where people lined up to have their bodies frisked, have the bodies of their children frisked, have their possessions pawed through by these uniformed thugs And the people who dared to mention civil liberties while they were standing in line were the people that were turned upon by the fellow people standing before and behind them.
	I've been involved in libertarianism and objectivism.
	I became an objectivist when I was 15 years old.
	And I've been involved in libertarianism actively for decades.
	And when I saw the rapidity, the speed with which a police state was established, I wondered if I'd wasted my life.
	Was freedom something that was not inherent in human nature?
	And the title of my presentation this morning, This afternoon is two attitudes toward the state, and I want to explain the two attitudes between which I've swung for many years and which I've been swinging since 9-11.
	And they're still present within me today.
	Before moving on to them, however, I should be clear that I'm talking about attitudes and not the evaluation of the state.
	The state is a thug.
	Basically, it relies upon two things To elicit cooperation for people from you, to surrender your rights and your wealth.
	The first is the myth of legitimacy.
	This is the notion that an electoral process or a hereditary line of secession or fill in the blank, whatever process is there, establishes an elite category of people Known as politicians or people with political pull who have better rights than you have.
	Somehow they have the right to tell other individuals what to do with their bodies, what to say with their minds, how they can spend their wealth.
	They live by a double standard.
	Theft is wrong except if done by them in the form of taxation.
	Killing innocent people is wrong, except if done by them, by bombing foreign countries.
	Today, the myth of legitimacy is crumbling.
	It's going away.
	Very few people look at the government with its bailouts, with its corruptions, with its scandals, and say, these are legitimate human beings.
	And without that myth, government now relies on the second thing That establishes its cooperation from you.
	And that's force or the threat of force.
	Increasingly, you are being subjected to a police state.
	And it is a sure sign that the elites have lost legitimacy and they know it.
	That they are willing to flex their muscle on the streets, Over the emails, over the internet, they are willing to use raw force because legitimacy no longer works for them.
	And so I have no illusions about the conditions of the world and my evaluation of the state has not changed.
	But I want right now to return to attitudes.
	The first attitude toward the state that I want to examine was best expressed in a talk by David Friedman years ago In which he assured the audience that there was an Italian saying that when translated into English meant, it is raining again.
	Pick up a government!
	I remember wincing in my seat when he said that because I had a sudden vision of myself standing in an open street with my fist raised in fury at the political injustice of the drizzle hitting my face.
	The meaning of the saying, of course, is that many people blame everything on the government.
	Every single thing in their life.
	And this hit pretty close to home for me.
	I was spending so much time railing against the state that I was running the risk of defining myself by the things I opposed.
	I was taking the state inside myself and using it as a filter To determine many of my emotional reactions and much of how I spend my time.
	And to some degree I think that process is inevitable.
	The state is everywhere.
	As long as you care about injustice, as long as you care about freedom, then of course you're going to react.
	And this is a sign of the decency within you.
	And even if that reaction doesn't always feel good, even if it doesn't always Lead me in positive directions.
	I prefer it to the alternative, not caring.
	Having said that, I also want a life in which I'm not constantly reacting to injustice, constantly crying out against the state.
	I've seen too many good people in this movement burn out.
	I've seen that the debris is just incredible.
	And so after 9-11, I tried to find a balance in how I consume the state, if you want to use an economic term, or in how I filter the state, if you want to use a psychological term.
	And an invaluable resource in that quest as being someone I go back to over and over again, Henry David Thoreau and his essay on civil disobedience.
	Specifically, I turned over and over in my mind The story of his famous one night stay in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax.
	And at this point, I'll let Thoreau speak for himself, because who does it better?
	Quote, "It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the jail window, my neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked my neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I'd returned from a long journey.
	I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemakers when I was let out.
	The next morning I proceeded to finish my errand, and having put on my mended shoe, I joined a huckleberry party." End quote.
	Thoreau journeyed off with a swarm of children who moved joyfully through fields and forests in search of this juicy treasure.
	At one point, Thoreau paused and noted to himself, quote,"...in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off and then, the state was nowhere to be seen." End quote.
	Upon his release from jail, Thoreau felt no rage toward his neighbors, no bitterness.
	He did not brood or rail against the injustice that had been done to him.
	He shed everything but the insights that he took from this.
	And then he went about what he called the business of living.
	And that is a wonderful phrase.
	That is a wonderful phrase.
	The business of living.
	When a tax collector knocked on his door and confronted him with the demand to pay up, Thoreau probably asked himself the same question that I've been asking myself for years now.
	What is my relationship to the state?
	In answering, it's important to understand that Thoreau, in refusing to pay the tax, was not being a determined dissident.
	This was not a pattern.
	You hear of this one incident, and you hear of this one incident because it's isolated.
	It wasn't a pattern of resistance against the state by Thoreau.
	He refused to pay the tax because it supported the Mexican-American War, which he thought was immoral.
	He refused to pay the tax because when the taxman knocked on his door, he was saying, cooperate with me in an act of evil.
	And he said, no.
	But unless until the state literally knocked on his door, Thoreau was happy to go about his business, the business of living.
	His insight while standing on a high hill is simple but profound.
	And then the state was nowhere to be seen.
	The essay on civil disobedience is often mistitled.
	It's often titled, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.
	And Thoreau thought there was no such duty.
	Anyone who stands up against injustice when it doesn't knock on their door but knocks on the door of other people is to be applauded.
	But they should not do so at the expense of their own primary duty, their own primary duty in life, which is to live.
	To live as deeply and as honestly as possible.
	It is far more difficult today to stand on a high hill and say, here there is no state than it wasn't Thoreau's day.
	The state is everywhere and always, it seems.
	But I think this means that it is only more important to try.
	It is only more important to do whatever you can.
	These are the two attitudes for the state that define my relationship to it.
	On the one hand, I still shake my hand at government and say, pig of a government, it's raining.
	And I probably always will.
	I don't think I'm going to go against my own nature.
	I'm old enough to know that this is my reaction.
	On the other hand, I want to live freedom.
	I want to live my life.
	I want to increase and expand the areas of life where I can say, here there is no state.
	These areas are home, family, work, writing.
	And in a sense, and it's a simplistic sense, what these two opposing attitudes express is a distinction that's key to the entire structure of libertarianism.
	The distinction between state and society, which is most often expressed in economic terms.
	The standard expression comes from Franz Oppenheimer, his book, the state in which he contrasts what he calls the political means with the economic means.
	The political means is force.
	And that's the state.
	The economic means is cooperation.
	And that's everything else.
	It's family.
	It's trade.
	It's your neighbors.
	It's life.
	Instead of making an economic distinction, however, I'm making a psychological one.
	The attitude of the pig of a government is who I am in relationship to the state.
	That's my reaction when the state knocks on my door like it knocked on Thoreau's and on the door of others.
	That reaction remains within me and I'll be expressing it for as long as there is a state.
	But, The attitude of here, there is no state.
	In here, within me, there is no state.
	That's my reaction to society.
	And it involves a commitment.
	As much as possible, as much as it is possible within my life, and I'm not talking about people making huge sacrifices and ruining their lives to implement this principle, as much as it is feasible within your life, don't deal with the government.
	Don't use the services or so-called benefits the government offers, but seek private means instead.
	I explore alternative currencies, I'm very active right now doing that, and means of exchange like barter, like cooperatives that are being set up.
	I join networks of individuals who cooperate together for mutual benefit.
	In short, I'm taking back my life from the state.
	I am privatizing my life.
	My life is not a state property, it's private property, and I'm taking it back.
	And oddly enough, the attitude of ignoring the state, or obviating the state, if you will, again, as much as possible, I'm not trying to create martyrs anywhere, may well be the most effective strategy for countering it.
	That's not my purpose.
	My purpose is to be true to Thoreau and go about the business of living.
	But by privatizing your own life, You make the state increasingly irrelevant, and that is what they cannot stand.
	The state wants to be an intimate partner in your life.
	They want to educate your children.
	They want to tell you what you can eat, the size of what cups you can drink soda from.
	They want to regulate your work.
	They want to read your e-messages.
	They want to listen in on your phone calls.
	They want to dictate your medical decisions.
	They want to be the intimate partner in your life.
	Telling them you're irrelevant is like Doug going like this to me.
	I will make one last statement.
	My new book, The Art of Being Free, has just been published, again thanks to Jeff.
	I will be behind the laissez-faire book table, stop by, I'm a slave to the clock.
	I apologize.
	Anyway, our next speaker, for 25 years, made the world go around at the Mises Institute.
	Now he makes the world go around at Laissez-faire Books.
	He is the author of a very provocative book with a provocative title, Bourbon for Breakfast.
	Hopefully you had yours.
	We'll make this speech all the better.
	He's also the author of It's a Jetson's World.
	He has an upcoming book that's going to be released through the club.
	Again, if you sign up with the club, you'll get this in a free download.
	And it's going to be called No More Gatekeepers.
	It's talking about defying the plan through your own digital civilization.
	Please help me welcome Jeffrey Tucker.
	It's wonderful to have Doug French as a business partner now.
	Can you imagine how exciting it is?
	You know, every day we're in this cool office and plotting all sorts of revolutions and things.
	He's a dear friend and a wonderful colleague, so thank you, Doug.
	And thank you, Wendy, for that very beautiful speech.
	Very touching and interesting.
	The last, the epilogue to her book, you know, when she sent it to me in email at some of these rare times, I don't know if this has happened to you, on this rare occasion you've read something that just kind of like...
	Really had a super powerful impact on a physical feeling you've had, like your heart was racing or stopping or something or something was catching your throat and maybe a tear was coming to your eye.
	I mean, I felt that way when I read the epilogue to this book.
	I know you're going to pick up the book and go read the epilogue right away, right?
	Don't do that.
	Read the whole thing and then get to the epilogue.
	She's working, I think, on something very important, very profound after a lifetime of serious scholarship And I think you got a foretaste of it here in her speech.
	Part of the goal of putting together this panel was to begin to think some new thoughts about the idea of liberty.
	We need new thoughts.
	We need new things.
	And everybody in this panel, we chose these people because they're all kind of doing new things, what I would consider to be very progressive thinkers.
	New ways of working out the problem of liberty in an age of statism.
	I think we desperately need creativity above all else in our intellectual world.
	I'm attempting to contribute to that a little bit with my upcoming book.
	None of the thoughts you will hear today are final.
	They're all subject to change.
	We're all kind of toying with new strategies and new ways of going about things in our world.
	Faced, I think, with a growing sense of what we've done in the past isn't working as well as we might have hoped.
	So I'd like to open this little talk today with a reflection on one of my favorite movies.
	It's called Reds.
	How many of you have seen it?
	Oh, I'm carrying it.
	I love it.
	Oh, yeah.
	I have to close the vote.
	Okay.
	So it is a very inspiring.
	Do you cheer when they sing the Internationale during the Bolshevik Revolution?
	Do you cheer at that part?
	It's hard not to, right?
	I mean, it's really exciting.
	So it's a story about Jack Reed and the American idealist who was witness to the Bolshevik Revolution and his role in building the communist movement in America.
	And then his role in celebrating and covering up the crimes of communism after it became a reality in Russia.
	So it's a wonderful film and very inspiring.
	What's neat, what's interesting about the movie is how it begins with the most beautiful ideals you can possibly ever imagine.
	I mean, Jack Reed stands up and gives an anti-war speech at like a chamber of Congress meeting and you can't just have to love him.
	I mean, he's exposing the reality of World War I. He's got these amazing ideals and he's a visionary.
	And what does he care about more than anything else in the world?
	Same thing that all of us care about or do care about at some point in our lives and perhaps now.
	We want to liberate humanity from oppression.
	It's a broad-minded concern.
	That's the definition of idealism, isn't it?
	To care about something larger and bigger than yourself.
	To care about the future and to have dreams and to have an insight.
	That you think you can bring to the world that will make it a better place.
	So I very much identified with Jack Reed in those opening scenes.
	Wow!
	And then, you know, he stays up all night talking politics with his friends and, you know, he develops a kind of a salon culture, you know, where the ideas are pouring out all the time.
	It's like, you know, the early days of Rothbard's living room or something like that.
	Fabulous and exciting.
	Everything's fresh, everything's new, the optimism, the hope is there.
	It's a very long movie, but he contrasts to the very end.
	At the very end of the movie, he's completely alone, isolated, losing his health, on the verge of death.
	All of his ideals have been Shattered completely.
	He has nothing left other than just his capacity to sort of breathe and hang on for dear life and that's it.
	So, a tremendous flop in some ways.
	So it's a terrifying movie for a libertarian to see because we can't all but just help but see ourselves in the person of Jack Reed.
	Is that our fate?
	I mean, what a horrible prospect and surely we'll avoid whatever errors he made if we can figure out what they were.
	Not a very romantic ending.
	But what's interesting from the viewer's point of view, and what intrigues us at every step in the whole progress events, is the growing absurdity of the contrast between his ideals Maybe as they once exist, and the reality of the movement he headed.
	So this is an ideal that he was going to work with others to inspire a global revolution of the workers.
	They're going to stand up against power and dismantle capitalism, the capitalist state, and replace it with a kind of a global system of cooperative communism or whatever the thing was.
	And yet, very quickly after the movie begins, Jack Reed confronts the problem with there are people in his world there that are not holding the purest of the pure doctrine that he holds.
	He's some sort of Trotsky.
	I don't know actually what Jack Reed ever believed, but whatever he believed, it wasn't precisely the same as what his friends believed.
	So of course he had to purge them and they purged him.
	The movement divided in half, and then half again, and half again, and half again, until it's just a handful of people battling out for control of the workers' movement of the world.
	And it's absurd.
	I mean, it's laughable and hilarious.
	Anthony, what's his partner's name?
	I don't remember.
	Yeah, okay, she wrote, yeah.
	Louise?
	What is it?
	Louise, yeah.
	Everybody's forgotten her, right?
	Terrible.
	But at some point she says, look at you, you pathetic person.
	It's just you and one sort of Russian immigrate battling it out for, you know, the control of the workers, the hearts and minds of the workers of the world, and you alone are going to lead this international revolution.
	Can't you see how pathetic you are and how you're just completely living this lie?
	And the viewer sympathizes with their comment because You're thinking, yeah, what kind of communist society would you be able to set up when you can't even manage your little movement without tolerating the slightest bit of deviant thought, you know, without leading into human conflict?
	I mean, you can't get along with your closest friends, much less set up a kind of a world global system, you know, of your own dream.
	Well, I think as libertarians we do have to wonder sometimes what people would say about us when they look at our movement.
	Are we able to manage ourselves as a community?
	And does our management of ourselves as a community of thinkers in any sense inspire anybody to expand this system more broadly to society?
	Or are we so contentious and so warlike with each other that it makes people wonder what is wrong with these libertarians?
	All they do is fight with each other.
	And yet they expect that somehow we're going to follow them into the revolution, you know, into the light of freedom, and yet they can't manage their own lives and can't manage their own movements.
	It's a very interesting problem, and we all feel a little bit defensive when I'm saying this.
	That's a little extreme, but I wonder.
	I really wonder.
	Russell Kirk once referred to the Libertarians as completely irrelevant because all they are really is certain sectaries.
	They just have sex.
	They're increasingly small sex, but the sex, it's not S-C-X, that's it.
	S-C-T, you're right.
	Little sectors, you know, increasingly small and irrelevant to the larger course of events.
	I read that essay when I was in college and I thought, that can't be right.
	Okay, that was a long time ago and I'm wondering maybe he wasn't entirely wrong about this.
	And it's none of our fault, really.
	I really stand here with seeking to find an explanation for why this tends to happen, why a philosophy that revolves around the idea of diversity, human cooperation, and the magical capacity of free association to produce beautiful things in the world.
	So often devolves into nothing but insults and war and factionalism and calumny and detraction and smears and backbiting and all the rest of it.
	That has so vexed our movement for so long.
	And I think I have something like a theory as to why this is true.
	And I think it has something to do with our goal, our single-minded goal, so often set up as the need to somehow reduce or smash the state.
	I'm not a monarchist.
	I think the idea that somehow we can reduce the state in a controlled way and eliminate the functions of the state that we don't like and preserve those that we do like is a preposterously utopian idea.
	Anarchism strikes me as far more practical.
	Just get rid of any of it, any time, and all of it, ideally.
	That's the idea.
	The problem is the state is, well, a little bit impervious.
	We write our blog posts, we write our articles.
	Nothing seems to happen.
	For some reason, the state is not reducing itself on our command.
	Isn't it strange?
	So, um, so you can...
	Hmm.
	So, here's the problem.
	And Wendy mentioned this.
	She said she sees burnout.
	And it was a little bit of an emotional statement.
	She said she sees burnout in our movement.
	People fight and they fight and they fight and nothing happens and then they burn out.
	I think we can sum up this attitude in one word.
	Despair.
	Despair.
	That's what happens to libertarians.
	They begin to despair.
	At first they're idealists, they're jack-reed.
	At some point they begin to despair.
	Imagine, imagine libertarians as being a kind of a tribe and we're all standing together united in ideals determined in front of this gigantic mountain and we're screaming at the mountain Move.
	Fall.
	Disappear.
	And we're doing this day after day after day.
	And it's all we know to do.
	And we keep saying this again and again.
	At some point, A number of people began to realize that it's not working, and after some years, they began to despair.
	I looked up the word despair, and my favorite thinker, Thomas Aquinas, who seems to have answers for a lot of issues, and he said that despair is this.
	Despair comes about when you no longer see the good.
	When the light is no longer in front of you, when goodness is no longer in view and you've turned away from it and you no longer see it, you no longer see hope, then you turn to despair.
	And typical in his scholastic way, he enumerates a number of consequences of despair.
	The number one thing he says is that you turn to, because you no longer have hope, you no longer see the good, you turn to evil.
	And then you go to hell.
	I mean, he was religious.
	You can take a big breath.
	That last part.
	Anyways, it happens to us, doesn't it?
	We no longer see the good.
	We no longer see the hope.
	The question is, why is it that libertarians, faced with this mountain, turned despairing, why there's so few people who have thought about maybe other ways of dealing with the problem of the mountain?
	Why are there so few people who have thought about things like Going around the mountain.
	Digging under it.
	Using new tools to scale it, for example.
	Creative thoughts.
	The kind of stuff that commerce inspires.
	Creativity.
	Entrepreneurship.
	New solutions to old problems.
	Where are they in our world?
	There are very few of them.
	Some years ago I began to write essays about the beauty of commerce.
	The beauty of entrepreneurship.
	The loveliness, the sheer loveliness of the creativity of the market economy, and the wonderful things it does for us.
	Some people found my articles to be silly, but I would like to write a hymn to Taco Bell.
	But other people said, you know, that's a very interesting thing, what you're doing, because you know what?
	I'm seeing, for the first time, good things.
	I'm seeing hopeful things.
	And it's making me happy and inspired.
	And I realized that the more I would write about the beauty of commerce and the beauty of entrepreneurship and the wonderful things it does for our world, how it's reduced global poverty by half in the last ten years, The technologies we've been given in our age, the wonders of the digital age, and what it's done for our personal lives, and our quality of life, and the capacity for liberating ourselves.
	The more I wrote about these things, the more inspired I felt, and the more people would write me and say, you know, that's inspiring me too.
	So I think it provides some insight into what Thomas Aquinas was talking about.
	Despair comes when we turn away from the good.
	Hope comes when we look at the good.
	And then it inspires within us a certain creativity.
	How am I doing on time?
	Okay.
	What is my message to you?
	Okay.
	Is that we should, as intellectuals, as thinkers, Don't despair, and don't despair by finding beautiful things to look at, examine, and hopefully, this is what I would really urge you to do, participate in them.
	And this is why I moved to laissez-faire, because it is a commercial venture, and it presented to me something spectacular, a real and serious challenge.
	Thank you.
	And I've learned since being at Agora that free enterprise is a very interesting system.
	It inspires within us a certain humility.
	We don't know all things.
	An entrepreneur who thinks he knows all things will fail.
	An entrepreneur is above all else an extractor of information, a desperate and wild and insanely mad learner of information.
	He wants to be tough.
	By the world around him, and the desire to learn, it begins with the awareness that there's something inside of you that there's a hole, there's an emptiness within you, and it's a hole that's just ignorant.
	You're uncertain about something, and you begin to live with this feeling of uncertainty.
	There's no possibility that tomorrow you will discover that thing that you don't know today.
	It's a strange experience.
	I urge all of you to try it.
	Commerce is a beautiful thing.
	You go to bed ignorant.
	You wake up with a new idea.
	It's a creative idea.
	It fills that hole, and a new hole emerges, a new uncertainty.
	You plan for the future, but your plans, they're always changing all the time.
	Why?
	Because the world is always changing.
	We must adapt.
	And you know what's fabulous about commerce?
	There is a sign and a seal of your success.
	And it's available to you.
	Success or failure.
	And it's available to you every single day.
	And it's called the balance.
	Isn't such a thing?
	It's like this machine.
	It's always working.
	You succeeded today.
	Today wasn't so good.
	You failed completely.
	You must change.
	It's our character.
	It makes us better people to be aware of our ignorance and to have that craving for new information, to have that hunger to learn and extract information, turn it over in our heads and learn new things.
	When I went to work for Laissez-Faire, the company was bleeding red.
	It was a catastrophe, and it had been for 15 years.
	And it was terrifying.
	Every month, we were losing $50,000.
	And I knew this every day.
	That was very scary.
	Agora took a risk on me and on this institution.
	And we thought, and we thought, and we thought.
	And every day, everybody would contribute a new idea.
	And every day, there was a new revelation.
	Some of them were thrown out.
	Others were accepted and embraced.
	And ultimately, you have to go with your intuition.
	You know, what's going to work, what's not.
	I don't know.
	And eventually we called together a fabulous little business plan.
	It took us three months.
	So something that didn't exist suddenly began to exist.
	I would love to give a separate speech about how all this happened.
	Anyway, what I'm telling you is technology makes entrepreneurship ever more exciting The existence of commerce, it's the thing that has made the world beautiful.
	It is the source of our lives.
	It is the greatest thing this world has to offer.
	I'm very thrilled to be part of it.
	It's changing me.
	It's changing the world.
	Commerce will liberate humanity.
	I think that commerce is the way we will get around that mountain, or dig under it, or scale it.
	More importantly, it's through commerce that we will avoid our great enemy, despair, and embrace that great hope of humanity, liberty itself.
	thank you all right our next speaker well our next speaker is going to cede his time to the next two speakers since we're running a little bit over Our next speaker is a constitutional lawyer in Chicago.
	He's a law professor.
	He's a writer.
	He's written a wonderful book called Libertarian Today, adjunct scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
	Please help me welcome Jacob Hubert.
	My talk today is on private forms of security and dispute management.
	I'm a radical libertarian, so of course, I don't think we need government for dispute management or security at all.
	Not the police, not the courts, not anything.
	But in this short time I have here, I can't make the full case for getting rid of government in these areas, and I'm not going to speculate much about what the world might look like in the future if we did get rid of the state.
	Instead, I'd like to talk about a couple of ways that the private sector is providing security and dispute resolution right now that many people might not fully appreciate.
	We can maybe think of these as sort of beautiful things to look at, as Jeff suggested, and have them help us think about how the market might deal with problems that most people don't think it can deal with.
	The first example I want to talk about involves something that you probably have on your person right now.
	And that's your credit card.
	Credit cards are of course a tool for buying things on credit.
	That's why they exist.
	That's how credit card companies make a lot of their money.
	But your credit card also includes many other services besides credit that you can take advantage of for free.
	And one of these is access to an efficient, effective system of consumer dispute resolution.
	I'll give you an example of how this works from my own experience.
	Last year I was traveling to Mexico, and I got taken in by a bait-and-switch scam, or a restaurant.
	You advertise something at a seemingly really good price, and you come in and you think you just ordered that thing, but then after you've eaten, they tell you, no, no, you actually ordered a much more expensive thing, and here's the bill that you have to pay.
	So, you know, I put up a bit of protest about that, but before long I found that my table was surrounded by a number of gentlemen who apparently worked for the restaurant and insisted that I pay the full amount.
	And so it seemed like the best thing to do to just give in and pay.
	And so I did, but I was able to use my credit card.
	And so when I got home from my trip, I went on to my credit card issuer's website and I filled out a little form explaining what had happened and why I was disputing the charge, the overcharge.
	And a few days later, I got a call from the card company and they told me that the overcharge would be credited back to my account.
	And that was it.
	Justice was done, swiftly and completely, across national borders, free of charge.
	Now what would have happened if I had paid with cash and had to rely on the state to get redress for my problem?
	Well, I guess I could have tried going to the cops, but that would have taken a lot of time, and the cops definitely aren't going to care anyway about my little problem, and if anything, the Mexican cops might have shaken me down for even more money.
	And even if this happened to me in the U.S., what could I do if I didn't pay with my credit card?
	I guess I could call my state attorney general's consumer fraud hotline and let them know, and maybe eventually they'd get around to looking into that and maybe do something about it.
	How would that give me my money back?
	You know, maybe I could go to small claims court, but then I have to go to a courthouse, prepare and file paperwork, go back for a hearing, and then, if I win, try to collect a judgment.
	There's no way that would be worth the time of trouble.
	Now, the credit card networks, on the other hand, are able to quickly and easily right wrongs because each of them has a network set up, a chargeback system set up to handle consumer disputes.
	If I dispute a charge on my Visa card, My credit card issuer will temporarily undo that charge.
	Then these consumer dispute resolution people will ask the seller and me for evidence about what has gone on here.
	And they'll consider it.
	And if they decide that the charge was improper, they'll take the money out of the seller's account and give it back to me.
	Or if they decide that actually the charge is okay, then they'll let the merchant keep the money.
	This system, which works so quickly and so well, is completely voluntary.
	It doesn't rely on the existence of government at all.
	It holds together without anyone threatening force against anybody else.
	Everyone who participates in one of the credit card networks, the cardholders, the merchants, the banks, agrees by contract to submit to this.
	And this system creates really strong incentives for everyone involved in it to behave morally.
	As a cardholder, I have an incentive not to file frivolous complaints against sellers, because if I do that very many times, eventually I'll have my card cancelled, because of course Visa doesn't want the expense dealing with my frivolous claims.
	A merchant has an incentive not to cheat its customers, because if they get too many chargebacks, one, then Visa will have to We have the expense of dealing with that, and it'll be bad for Visa's reputation.
	They don't want their logo on the door of a business that's ripping people off.
	Visa also has an incentive to decide cases fairly, because they want to keep both cardholders and merchants as happy as possible, so they'll keep wanting to participate in the Visa network.
	All this arises out of nothing more than people's desire to do business with one another.
	Now, it's true that the chargeback system I'm talking about doesn't have a lot of things that we associate with our state court system.
	For example, there are no rules of evidence.
	You can't cross-examine witnesses.
	The car companies don't issue written explanations of their decisions, so there's no case law that you can go look at.
	But that's good, because those things are expensive.
	Those things are some of the reasons why it's not economical to go to court for a lot of disputes that have relatively low dollar amounts.
	The courts can indulge in that expensive stuff, though, because, one, they don't care if you can get justice.
	It doesn't really matter to them.
	They have no incentive to actually provide you with the use of product.
	And to the extent that they do provide it, and it's really unnecessarily expensive, they can just pass it all on to taxpayers anyway.
	They have none of the good incentives that we see in this private system that I described.
	A credit card company, on the other hand, they have an incentive to economize, to spend the least resources possible, to make as many people as possible as happy as possible.
	And they do, and it works all around the world.
	Unless, of course, a country decides to put laws in the way to stop it from functioning, which some have.
	In France, for example, they don't allow chargebacks because they favor merchants and guests.
	And this reminds me, you may have heard that Congress passed legislation supposedly reforming credit cards and their practices to protect consumers.
	Well, what this has done, it's made credit cards much harder for people to get.
	It's placed barriers in the way of getting that, and as a result, it's depriving consumers of one of the most powerful consumer protection tools that there is.
	It shouldn't be too surprising, I guess, because no one needs competition, more than the government.
	Now I want to talk about another great tool of free market security and justice, which you probably also have on your person at this time, and that's your smartphone.
	Smartphones improve our lives and make us safer in countless ways.
	One way they make us safer, obviously, is just by being phoned now anywhere at any time you can call for help.
	Or if you're in a dangerous area, you just pull up a map and it tells you how to get to the closest safe area.
	And they have video cameras, which surely deter crime because a would-be criminal never knows for sure who might be recording it.
	And on and on.
	But I want to focus now on one particular smartphone app, which is tremendous in this respect, but which I suspect is underappreciated.
	And that's Yelp.
	As you may know, Yelp is a website that you can access through a smartphone, which people do typically access on their phones, where people write reviews of businesses of all kinds, restaurants, stores, doctors, lawyers, anything.
	Yelp is life-changing and it's world-changing.
	It used to be, if you were going to, if you wanted to go to a business before you had the internet and Yelp at your fingertips 24 hours a day, it could be really difficult to find out whether a business was any good before you actually went there and tried it.
	I mean, maybe if it was a restaurant, you might have read a review in your local paper, or maybe you would know someone who had been to the business, Or maybe you could check with a better business bureau, but who has time for that?
	And if you're visiting an unfamiliar city or another country, forget it.
	It's a total guessing game as to what restaurant is going to be good, what shop is going to be good.
	And as a result, if you were traveling, the only thing you could really do to ensure that you had any quality would be to maybe go to a chain restaurant or a chain store where you have a guaranteed minimal level of quality, but you couldn't be adventuresome because it was very risky to do so.
	Well, Yelp has forever destroyed this problem.
	If you have Yelp on your phone, you can instantly see what businesses are near you, and you can see what people who have been to them have to say about them.
	If a business provides shoddy service, if it isn't clean, if people have gotten sick eating there, if people feel they've been ripped off there, you will know about it, and you won't waste your time going there.
	You'll go to a good place instead.
	The market has always been good at weeding out bad actors, of course, but in the past, information could travel slowly, and people could get away with bad stuff for a while.
	It may be a long while if you're the type of place that doesn't have to worry about repeat business, like the tourist restaurant in Mexico that ripped me off.
	There's always a new turnover of people, so word doesn't get out, and they can keep pouring this thing off.
	But not anymore, and never again.
	Yelp not only gives me helpful information on a case-by-case basis, of course, it also pushes businesses, all businesses, to become better, of course, to avoid negative reviews.
	And you might expect some businesses to try to game the system by posting phony positive reviews, and some do try that.
	But Yelp has developed algorithms to weed those out.
	And even if Yelp can't catch all the fakes, genuine reviewers will tend to drown them out anyway.
	According to the latest figures that I've seen, there's some 27 million reviews on Yelp, with thousands and thousands more being added constantly.
	So it would be impossible for a fake reviewer to keep up with real reviewers.
	And anyway, if you want to talk about gaming the system, think about how relatively easy it is to game the government consumer protection system.
	I mean, suppose you're a shady restaurant owner and you want to get around consumer protections related to health and safety and so on.
	Well, you might well be able to do that by simply bribing or fooling one person, the government official who's in charge of overseeing this, the health inspector, say.
	But the shady restaurant owner has no way to bribe a world full of Yelp reviewers, and he can't bribe Yelp's owners either, because if Yelp were to take bribes, it wouldn't be reliable, and people would start going to Urban Spoon or TripAdvisor or whatever other services, because there are others.
	Here again, we see self-interest driving people to moral behavior with no need for anyone to use force.
	And the service is free to its users.
	Nobody even has to pay for this.
	They just take it for granted that they should have it now.
	One of the leading arguments that we hear about the need for government is to protect people from businesses that would take advantage of us.
	But that was always a bad argument.
	But now in the age when we have Yelp and Google and TripAdvisor and Angie's List and Wikipedia and so many other sources of information instantly at hand at all times, it's just plainly ridiculous.
	It would be easy to overlook the role of Yelp and smartphones and keeping us safe, because on the surface they just seem like nice little things to help us go to better restaurants or whatever.
	And people are fooled into thinking, though, that we need police and other government authorities to prevent crime or protect consumers, because a police officer, as a bureaucrat, is someone who supposedly exists to keep them safe, and it's someone they can see.
	And so when the government stops something bad from happening, and of course it makes the news, the government officials get in front of the cameras, and they take credit for keeping the public safe.
	And they tell you, see?
	This is why you need us.
	When the market stops bad things from happening through a service like Yelp, nobody notices.
	It doesn't make the news, and nobody even takes credit.
	And in fact, I suspect that the people at Yelp don't even realize how much good they're doing for humanity.
	You might say that's nice, but it hardly proves that we don't need, say, government police.
	Preventing consumer ripoffs is one thing, and stopping violent crime like rape and murder is another.
	And that's true, but I think Yelp gives us reasons to be confident that the market could address the problem of crime more generally.
	After all, what's more important to you?
	Finding out whether the restaurant you're thinking of eating at is good, or finding out whether the person you're thinking of hiring to babysit your children is a child molester?
	Well, I suspect that most of us would say that the latter piece of information is relatively more valuable.
	And if it is so much more valuable, why don't you think someone would take advantage of that and try to provide it to you?
	I don't know if a yelp for writing reviews of our fellow human beings is quite the answer.
	Wow, I'm out of time already.
	That's amazing.
	Well, I hope this prompts you, though, to think about this and to recognize that the market is doing things for us, that the state claims it can do, even when the market doesn't even purport to be doing this.
	And I hope it challenges you to think about the fact that the state Doesn't succeed at this.
	Actors within the state don't have the right incentives at all.
	The best we can hope for from them is that they happen to be good people and just decide to do the right thing, even though there's no real reason why they should.
	So if you're interested in exploring this topic further, I'll recommend first and foremost, if you haven't gotten into this subject before, a book that's going to be released for free to members of the Laissez-Faire Club next month.
	called Conscience of an Anarchist by Gary Chartier, and he gets into the tough cases.
	It's short, but he still makes compelling arguments about the tough cases, about police, about courts, about national defense, and all that sort of thing.
	And he does it in such a way that this radical idea of doing without the state just starts to seem like common sense.
	so you consider that I thank you for listening and I look forward to discussing all right our last speaker hosts the largest philosophy website in the world he's the host of freedom radio author of practical anarchy which I guess that's what we're talking about today
	His newest book that has created somewhat of a bit of a back and forth on the blogosphere, universally preferable behavior.
	He's talking about redefining communities of peace and learning.
	His name is Stephon Melanot.
	Thanks, everybody.
	I appreciate your patience.
	Everyone's glad I'm able to make it through.
	I'll try and be quick and brief.
	I invite you to join me in a Tarantino movie.
	We will be speaking very fast and have lots of guns.
	But I want to make a case for what we're trying to do as a community.
	Now, of course, nobody can be the voice of the community, but I'd like to make a case as to what we're doing and how it can help liberate us in our personal lives, which is really the only place where liberty can occur.
	One of the great temptations of being part of a big movement, and libertarianism is the biggest movement because it's talking about the most fundamental moral issues and the greatest changes that society has ever seen.
	One of the great temptations is for us to spend our precious energy, our blood and treasure, the blood and treasure of our souls on things we can't change.
	And the Fed!
	Right?
	So this is Jeff, you know, talking about a mountain.
	You know, the mountain, with all due respect, not quite the right metaphor, because mountains stay the same size, right?
	But the mountain tends to get bigger, and its foot sometimes seems to come down very fast.
	But maybe it's a dancing mountain.
	A dancing mountain, there's not a good dancer.
	You don't know where the foot's going to go.
	But we have to make sure when we define things like the non-aggression principle, like a respect for property rights, that we put the rubber on the road.
	We want our ethics to work where we live so that we don't rail against the clouds and don't set out for the rainwater.
	I've really tried to focus on practical philosophy, on practical ethics, things that we can do in our own life.
	So, to go back to the Tarantino film.
	So, imagine you've got A kind of seedy brother.
	Anyone in the audience does, in fact, have a seedy brother?
	Let's imagine you have a seedy brother who, you know, he's kind of skimmed around the up and down side of the law and all that.
	And he calls you up one morning and he's like, hey man, I need to go to the bank.
	Do you mind driving me?
	I don't know why he sounds like a bad mother, but he does.
	He drinks and smokes a lot.
	His voice is the godfather of crime or whatever.
	Anyway, so you say, okay, he's my brother.
	He's been trying to come clean and do the right things.
	I'm going to get my car and drive him right now.
	Anyway, so you go and you pick him up and he's got a couple of friends and they have, well in Canada we call them hockey bags.
	I don't know what they call them here, duffel bags.
	They got some duffel bags.
	And you're like, huh, I guess he's got some friends who want to go to the bank too.
	Didn't mention that.
	Because you don't know which film you're in.
	I told you you're in a Tarantino film, so you know what's going to happen.
	But in real life, nobody tells you the film you're in.
	Maybe you're going to go and hunt cartoon gear in the woods.
	I don't know.
	But in this case, it's a Tarantino film, so you know what's going to happen.
	So then you drive him to the bank, and he's like, listen, I'm just going to be, according to the plan, six to seven and a half minutes.
	It's very specific, and he's not known for his specificity, so this is another clue as to what is going to happen.
	And then, you know, he goes out, and even though it's Vegas, let's make this, you know, a Tarantino film has got to happen in Vegas in this instance.
	So it's Vegas, and it's of course, I think, if we convert from imperial to metric, it's about 450,000 degrees, if I get that right.
	And so what he does is they pull on their balaclavas because they're chilly.
	Maybe the air conditioning turned up too high.
	Maybe they're expecting the air conditioning in the bank to be kind of cranked up.
	So they put on their balaclavas and they go running in.
	And you sit in your car and, you know, it begins to dawn on you, maybe, that this is not going to be an ATM friendly withdrawal from the bank.
	Anyway, so then after the approximate six to seven and a half minutes, he comes screaming at the bank and he jumps into your car and clearly, obviously, somebody got, you know, maybe there was an ailment in the bank, there's lots of sirens and so on.
	And they've got big bags of money, and they've got shotguns in their duffel bags, and he jumps into the car, and he's like, drive, man, drive!
	See, he doesn't sound like Marlon Brando anymore, because he's panicking.
	Maybe that's how Marlon Brando sounds when he's panicking, but I'm off topic.
	So, in this moment, it's very clear that you are now...
	Participating in a crime.
	There's no court who would say, even after all of these clues, at this point, you know he just robbed the bank.
	And interestingly enough, if you do drive off, then you are now an accomplice, and a significant accomplice in an egregious crime theft.
	Now, I would argue that in libertarianism, we're trying to wake people up to the movie they're in, right?
	Because, you know, lots of people think they're into, you know, Mr.
	Smith goes to Washington, or Dave, or, you know, I don't know, whatever, patriotic films are around, The Longest Day, or whatever.
	But they're not.
	They're really not.
	They're somewhere between a Tarantino film and The Matrix, something like that.
	And we're trying to wake them up.
	So a metaphor I've sometimes used is, you know, they've got these movies where the guys go and steal some of the cat burglars and, you know, the guys are all in suits and the women are all in spandex.
	And what they do is they get these water sprayers, you know, spray the water and see the lasers.
	You don't see the lasers, right?
	You don't see the lasers, then, you know, you're going to get caught and all that kind of stuff.
	So I think that what we're trying to do is to reveal to people That they're participating in crimes.
	I think this is what Wendy was talking about.
	But that's a real challenge.
	It's a real challenge for people.
	I was talking with Wendy beforehand, and she was saying, how do you get through customs and all without being downtrodden or whatever?
	But, you know, they're in the matrix.
	If some guy in the 1950s in Russia turns out to be a communist, Well, of course, that's the whole point of propaganda.
	But you can't say he chose communism.
	People don't choose statism.
	They don't choose patriotism.
	This is what is inflicted upon them repeatedly, aggressively, emotionally, manipulatively, and it goes on your whole life.
	And it's really hard for people to unplug from that constant repetition of, you need your government, your government is good.
	Without your government, well, there would be lawlessness.
	As if there are any laws now.
	Remember that Obamacare thing?
	Nine people study for decades the Constitution, which is, what, 50 odd pages?
	And they can't even remotely come to a consensus.
	I mean, we're bound by it, you see, as citizens, but they can't even come to a consensus.
	There's not a lot of discussion among biologists about evolution.
	Most of them would, you know, but when it comes to law, it's all just made up nonsense.
	And so, what I try to do, and I sort of suggest this approach to you in terms of how to bring freedom to your life, how to bring freedom to your life, is to recognize that I think the state, right, the state is not The guy's at the top.
	I would argue.
	The men and the women are at the top.
	It's not the cops.
	It's not the soldiers.
	It's not the prison guards.
	It's not the propagandists.
	The state is horizontal.
	The effect of the state is vertical.
	But the state, so I think of a pyramid.
	A pyramid has got stuff at the top, but it's all dependent upon what's on at the base.
	What is the base?
	So I would argue that the state is like this sword that's kept aloft by people's belief that it's good, that it's necessary, that it's virtuous.
	So how many people here have gone to jail for libertarianism?
	One.
	Yes, you have chickens.
	I'm a chicken too.
	Two!
	Okay, good.
	Alright, so, but how many people have experienced negative social repercussions for speaking the truth about the situation of the world?
	Right, excellent.
	The person who hasn't, you can see me after.
	I may have some help here.
	But this is the reality, that the negative social repercussions that we experience for speaking the truth are significant.
	And you know, scientifically, it's very interesting.
	Do you know that when we experience social ostracism, it activates exactly the same brain centers as physical pain?
	Exactly that it is to our minds, deep down in our bodies, it's indistinguishable from physical pain.
	This is why ostracism is so powerful.
	And this is why we don't need to say it, but anyway.
	So, when we are looking at the state, we're looking at the effects, and we want to make sure we look at the cause.
	The cause is people's belief that the state is virtuous and necessary.
	And why do they believe that?
	Because that's what they've been told their whole lives.
	I don't believe that they're morally responsible for that.
	I mean, if it turns out that the world is flat and I've been lied to my whole life, you know, I can't cross every conceivable fact in the known universe.
	I have to accept some things on faith.
	I don't believe the moon is made of green cheese.
	But if it turns out that it is, A. I'm now hungry.
	And B. I'm just not responsible for having been lied to by everyone my whole life.
	And so my argument is that what we're trying to do is we're trying to remind people or to bring people to the awareness that the state, by initiating force, is a criminal organization.
	That's really hard for people to process.
	Because, you know, we're all Stockholm Syndrome with the state, you know.
	Ah, the flag, ah, the politicians, ah, you know, the heroes, and so on, right?
	And so it's really, really hard for people to do that, but I think it's really essential to do that.
	And I'll give you sort of one little tool that I've used over the years to help people to understand this.
	So, just to give an example from my show, I do a call-in show every Sunday.
	One person called in, and they were really for the surge.
	Remember, this is back in the day, a couple of years ago.
	The surge in Iraq, remember, because it was going to It's going to solve all the problems.
	I can't even say that stuff with a straight face.
	It's going to solve all the problems.
	I used to be able to say that stuff with a straight face.
	I can't anymore.
	And this woman was calling in.
	She was really for the search.
	Now, my old temptation would have been imperialism and blah, blah, blah.
	But I said, okay, well, if you're for the search, that's fine.
	That's your belief.
	You should send them some money or volunteer or whatever it is that you feel is going to support that particular course.
	I respect your right to support the search.
	And she said, well, that's nice.
	And I said, will you return to me the same respect for me not to support the surge?
	Let's pretend I'm American for a moment.
	I got this tour of the colonies accident, but let's pretend that the colony I'm touring is one that has, you know, gone able.
	And we used to want you back.
	Not the death.
	We did the Empire thing.
	That's old news for us.
	But, what was I?
	Oh, yeah, so do you, do you give me She said, yeah, I give you the same respect.
	Because she thought she was just talking my opinion against the surge.
	I said, okay, well, if you respect my right to not support the surge, then you must respect my right not to be forced to fund it.
	There's no point having an opinion, having a conscience, that you are forced to act in opposition.
	That's not freedom.
	It's like, oh, you're free to trade, but you have to go to jail if you do.
	Well, then you're not.
	This is the weird thing you get into status, right?
	It's a social contract.
	It's voluntary.
	Great, then we don't need to enforce it.
	Well, no, we have to enforce it.
	Oh, then it's not a social contract.
	No, it's a social contract.
	It's voluntary, but we have to enforce it.
	No, we don't want to enforce it.
	It's like you're stuck in these revolving doors.
	Hey, I think I've seen this before.
	I think I've seen this before.
	I think I've seen this before.
	So, it was hard for her to process.
	Because, remember, it's very, very important.
	And let's, you know, to Dominicus friends in the room, you know, 12 to 16 months, no problem.
	We'll wait.
	We'll take your time.
	It's a big desert.
	Tough to cross, but get lost.
	Just, you know, follow the golden eagle.
	And it's hard for people to understand that if you're against the drug war, right?
	And someone says, I'm for the drug war.
	I think that cocaine users should be, you know, arrested or whatever, right?
	Punished.
	So, well, you recognize that you are supporting the initiation of force against me as an individual.
	Because the drug was very abstract in the welfare state, the imperialist, it's all very abstract stuff.
	But this is guns to flesh that people are talking about when they're talking about state force.
	It's guns to flesh.
	It's nice to next.
	Right?
	So I said to the woman, will you allow me to not be kidnapped and caged if I don't agree with you?
	Because that's really all it comes down to.
	If I don't believe that the welfare state helps the poor, if I believe it traps them in an underworld perpetual poverty, ignorance and declining prospects, am I allowed to disagree with you about the welfare state without you supporting cats in blue coming through my window dragging me off to a cage?
	I will let you have your beliefs without wanting force used against you.
	Will you return to me the same respect as a civilized and equal human being?
	That is a very powerful argument to make, because people talk about law and order and, you know, courts.
	They don't get that what they're advocating is the initiation of force.
	I'm not talking about self-defense.
	Self-defense, of course, is perfectly valid, but relatively unimportant.
	How many times do people run it, you put chainsaws?
	Not often.
	Oh, wait, unless we're in a Tarantino movie.
	It's a stream of them.
	But we are talking about the initiation of force.
	And it is very real.
	The state is something, people use it to abstract all the time, to abstract things all the time.
	Obamacare.
	Can I disagree with your health care plan without Somebody pointing a gun at me.
	Will you grant me that respect as a civilized, fellow human being?
	Even if you disagree with me.
	Perhaps especially if you disagree with me.
	Because I will allow you to disagree with me and not subject you to force.
	Will you allow me to disagree with you and not subject me to force?
	In other words, will you drop your support of violence against me for my conscience, for my convictions?
	Will you put down the gun?
	So that we can talk.
	Will you get out of the getaway car?
	Will you recognize that you are participating in a crime?
	That you are supporting a crime?
	You see, the important thing is that the bank robbery can't happen without the getaway driver.
	No getaway driver.
	No bank robbery.
	No support of institutional violence.
	No institutional violence.
	But we can never talk people out of that which they call virtue.
	We can never talk somebody out of that which they call virtue.
	You can force them to act against it, but you can't talk them out of it.
	And this is why I write a book on ethics.
	This is why I talk about what I call the argument for morality.
	Oh, sorry, free domain radio.
	Freedom radio would have been a great idea.
	But I'm too branded now.
	I got the tattoo, so I can't change it.
	But it is essential that we keep hammering the argument for morality.
	People always want to talk about consequences.
	Well, the consequence of Obamacare is some people will get health care who otherwise wouldn't.
	That's exactly true.
	The consequence of slavery is people get cheaper shirts.
	They'll make it right.
	Well, if we get rid of slavery, we won't have any cotton.
	No.
	We'll just have different things.
	Giant machines will drink dinosaur juice and go across the plains and pick all the cotton in their own universe.
	I mean, you don't know what happens after freedom.
	But people always want to talk about consequences.
	And that means nothing.
	Consequences is no way to judge an ethical theory.
	I mean, the consequence for a marker is he's richer.
	So he's all for it.
	I mean, look, I have a watch and a wallet.
	These consequences rock!
	And the consequence for political power is idiots get to tell everyone else what to do, and idiots believe that they can't.
	Intelligent people don't try to run out of other people's lives.
	So consequentialism and utilitarianism and pragmatism is all nonsense.
	It's the fundamental, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal.
	That we need to keep focusing on and to recognize with two people that, to wake them up to the fact that they are, I agree unknowingly and unwittingly and with all great sympathy that they are participating in crimes.
	If they praise the state, I'm not saying everyone's got to go to jail.
	Of course not.
	But if you praise the state, if you don't recognize That the state is violent.
	That the state is coercion.
	That the state is brutal and uncivilized.
	And the state is a 10,000-year-old system.
	Good God!
	If you want to cure statism, I think you just passed a law.
	If you want to cure statism, just passed a law that says that you can't use any technology newer than the oldest one you love.
	Oh, you love the state?
	That's about 10,000-year-olds.
	Sorry, you don't get antibiotics.
	We've got some bucket of leeches here for you.
	Witch doctor, you know, but sorry, we just can't give you any new technology because you love your old school.
	You love that old stuff where a small minority of people have all the guns in the world telling them what to do.
	That's tribalism.
	That's way old.
	Airplane?
	Sorry.
	No, no, no.
	You fangled nonsense.
	You can walk.
	But that's about it.
	And the horses weren't domesticated, you know, until way after the state was invented.
	But I think waking people up to the fact that they are unknowingly and unwittingly participating in a crime creates a moral choice for them.
	I believe when you're in the state of propaganda, when you're in the matrix, you don't have a moral choice.
	Choice is knowledge.
	Morality is a kind of technology.
	You can't describe antibiotics as a doctor before they're invented, and you can't make the choice to oppose immorality if you mistakenly believe that that which is evil is good.
	And I'll leave you just one final thought.
	I mean, I think the fundamental mission statement of libertarianism is fight evil.
	Fight evil!
	You know, I mean, I swear to God, if we all looked fantastic in capes and tights, that would be the official I guess, costume.
	I think it's costume.
	Our mascot.
	I mean, we're superheroes.
	We're trying to fight evil.
	And it's early days, right?
	And it's really early days in this fight.
	You know, it's not my point being an abolitionist now.
	Kind of dealt with the slavery thing, at least the overt kind.
	It's really great to be in the ground floor of the modern revolution.
	That's where the real metals are.
	That's where the real heroism is.
	But we fight evil, and there's no way to fight evil.
	That's what's so annoying about it.
	It's so slippery.
	Because it always redefines itself as the good.
	It's a social contract.
	It's vulnerable.
	Patriotism, don't you care about the poor?
	What do you want to take healthcare away from the sick and old people?
	What kind of monster are you?
	Don't you want to bomb some democracy into people?
	It's a crater of freedom.
	Their atoms will thank you as they float among the stratascy.
	Because it almost redefines itself as good.
	Once people see evil, they reject evil.
	Which is why evil is the chameleon.
	It camouflages itself all the time.
	It is the wind that moves, it changes, it redefines itself all the time.
	And that's why you go back to basic principles, you know, spray that good old moral vapor, show the lasers, show the violets, reveal that this is not an ATM friendly withdrawal.
	This is not a man taken out of bank, something he put into the bank.
	This is a man taken by force out of the bank, something he did not put into the bank.
	That's evil, that's immoral.
	That gives people a choice about the moral direction that they're going to take.
	And I believe That is the illumination of that choice that is the fundamental crossroads of the future.
	If we don't see that choice, evil will only escalate and multiply.
	If we see that choice, when people clearly see what evil is, we recoil from it.
	We reject it.
	and that's what we need I think to save the future thank you all right now it's time for the panel and I'm just pull your chair here Gary?
	Gary.
	Gary Gibson.
	Gary!
	Gary Gibson's here.
	Any fans of whiskey and gunpowder?
	I'm not sure if he's whiskey or whether he's gunpowder, but he is Gary Gibson, and he is here to answer questions.
	This is, of course, the Q&A, and so you provide the questions, we make up the answers, as the case may be.
	There's a microphone there, but I don't think we need it, so...
	Question from Max.
	Doc, you have to use the microphone, otherwise it's not going to be in quality.
	Oh, okay.
	Stickler for details.
	Line up the microphone, if you will.
	Yeah, I'm sorry.
	So I guess my question is for the panel.
	What's your guys' doomsday scenarios?
	Every libertarian likes to have a doomsday scenario, and then what's your guys' utopian scenario, or how things turn out well?
	What's your answer to that stuff?
	Oh, sorry, I was hoping to get a long and in-depth question.
	I'll try and stretch this one out as something meaningful.
	Well, I mean, I think that the nightmare scenario is that people, you know, there are increased catastrophes from the use of violence.
	I mean, violence is addictive.
	Violence is a drug.
	It follows the same pattern as all addictions, which is escalation to collapse, unless people sort of wake up and change their behavior.
	And so, as continual interventions in the market, as continual escalations of aggression, violence, and control occur, the economy gets worse and worse, and people's knee-jerk reaction, emphasis on the last syllable, is to say, well, we've got problems, and therefore we need more government.
	The fact that the government created those problems, but this is a typical addictive behavior, you know, like, I really have problems with cocaine, so I better make those problems go away by having more cocaine.
	And so, my nightmare scenario is that people You know, the continual problems of the state, of which 9-11, which Wendy was talking about, was one example.
	Problems that result from violence result in increased call for violence, and you just keep going and going and going until you're a smoking third world crater of perpetual dystopian Orwellian nightmare.
	So that's one possibility.
	On the other side, you know, if we flick the other turn indicator, it's that people wake up to the fact that violence always and forever creates Short-term gains and long-term catastrophes.
	And people correctly diagnose that it is the escalation of violence that is causing problems in society.
	Once you diagnose things correctly, you can cure them.
	And then they say, okay, well, what we need to do is stop using guns to solve complex social problems, like healthcare provision, like charity for the poor, like roads, you know.
	Right, so, you know, once we get that violence is not solving our problems and violence is making them worse, the solution is very clear.
	But if we don't diagnose correctly, you know, things will just keep getting worse.
	Wendy would like to weigh in on this as well.
	Yeah, because I believe that, as I've touched on in my talk, I think the wheels are coming off the world right now.
	And I think that it's impossible to cure.
	I think that it just has to play out when the wheels are coming off the world.
	Samuel E. Conkin III, who was a good friend of mine, many years ago used to say, he used to applaud when the world got worse because he says it has to collapse.
	And I used to be horrified by that vision.
	I think maybe the world will not collapse.
	I'm not a survivalist.
	I don't think that people will stop trading or growing tomatoes or things like that.
	But there's going to be significant collapse.
	Doug Casey shocked me.
	He's an old friend, too, recently by telling all his friends, make sure you have money in the house because there will be bank failures in the coming months.
	And make sure you have enough to cover a few months of your...
	So having said that, that's what I think is in store for the world.
	It's not like the worst case scenario.
	It's just what I think is going to happen.
	I also live in a community that's rural.
	And when the collapse comes, it will affect everyone.
	But what we have is a very strong community of grassroots activism, where people will help each other.
	Where people, as opposed to the state, they're a society.
	And I think we will see this arising more and more.
	I said I was very active in alternative currencies and many other ways to just get past the state.
	Bitcoins, all these things are going to arise.
	A lot of them will fail.
	That's the way of the world.
	But I think there will be a lot more voluntary networks and cooperation between people, and that will be the salvation.
	Just real quickly, the thing that I think would be a huge difference that is entirely plausible is that they decriminalize or legalize drug offenses, and that could happen, I would think, fairly soon.
	The thing that worries me is that once they clear out the prisons, they say, okay, now we can have room for the Libertarians.
	And that was an applause line.
	It's okay, Brian.
	Yes, sir?
	I had a question for Stefan Molyneux.
	I'm a fan of yours.
	You obviously prefer principle over pragmatism, and usually when people ask you questions or debate, you always use deontological arguments rather than consequentialist arguments.
	Being a narco-capitalist myself, The biggest thing for me is people ask, well, if they have this image, and you know, I live in Vermont, there's a lot of big government liberals, they have this image of anarchy as being a synonym for chaos.
	If we had anarchy, then you're talking about violence.
	There would just be so much more violence.
	And I try to explain to them, well, you can't aggress, from the de-intellectual standpoint, you can't aggress innocent people because they may commit a crime sometime.
	But they don't seem to buy that argument.
	And I find myself Consequentialist arguments that it would work, that courts would be provided, just that shoes are provided on the free market, but how do you avoid going to the consequentialist arguments when people have this image that anarchy is chaos?
	Yeah, I mean, technically, of course, they're one letter wrong, right?
	So anarchy means without rulers, and they just take one letter away, and they say, well, anarchy means without rules.
	And, you know, I really want to get that extra R back in, because I think that's a misconception.
	Look, Whoever's doing the most harm to evil people is probably doing some good, right?
	So the fact that the existing society paints anarchy as the worst possible thing, you know, if the imperialist really hates something, it's probably because it's not good for the imperialist, right?
	So that's one thing to recognize, right?
	So the fact that if you define an institution as evil, look for whoever paints the worst, and that's probably where the most good is occurring.
	I mean, that's a tough argument to make, but that would be one.
	I mean, the government doesn't tell you who to marry.
	The government doesn't tell you what career you can have.
	The government doesn't tell you whether or not you can take this degree or that degree.
	I mean, would society be better if we were forced to marry people that the government chose and people would go, oh my god, that's terrible!
	But I mean, how is that different from trading, fundamentally?
	I mean, trading is an act of exchanging value, marriage is an act of exchanging value, and the occasional body fluids.
	I mean, it's really important.
	I guess some trading can involve body fluids here in Vegas, if I understand correctly.
	But the reality is that, fluid or not, I'm distracting myself.
	Is there any questions that require a short answer?
	Yeah, so that would just recognize that they live in a voluntary situation in most of their lives and would just say and go a little bit further and expecting the exact opposite to happen if voluntarism is introduced into areas other than what they're used to when they love the voluntarism in the areas they like.
	Yeah, just that would work with that argument.
	I've actually been given the five-minute mark.
	So anyway, yeah, if we can go to the next question.
	I'm going to take 30 seconds, and my favorite words are, that government is best, that government is not at all.
	It's in that same essay, I believe.
	Yes, it is.
	It's the beginning of the essay.
	Just a quick statement.
	This is about my seventh or eighth Freedom Summit, and this is by far the best panel We're continuing.
	You have to swear.
	You know, it occurs to me.
	I think this is an enormously creative and brilliant panel.
	But I especially like the new way of thinking here.
	And it occurred to me during Jacob's talk, what we really need is to collect these essays in a book and solicit others and call it something like Liberty 2.0 or something like that.
	You know, practical approaches to living a life of liberty in an age of statism.
	Doesn't that seem like a real book on this topic?
	Doesn't that seem right?
	Yeah.
	I propose that.
	I welcome any inputs from anybody here.
	Maybe we'll go on the forums at LFB and discuss it.
	But this could be an important new chapter in the history of the libertarian idea.
	And this book could really make a real difference here.
	So I just want to say thank you for coming, and especially all these wonderful, creative, progressive, interesting, out-of-the-box thinkers.
	Yeah, and you can do that in the community area of Laws Affair today.
	Yes, sir.
	Hi, I'm Judd Weiss, and I have to agree with what that guy just said.
	This is an amazing panel.
	I was really inspired by Jeff Tucker's new approach.
	And Stephan Molyneux's radio show has been a huge influence on me.
	I come from an objectivist perspective, and he's the first person to get me to consider anarchy and anarchism and voluntarism.
	But there's a couple things that are just sitting with me that are very uncomfortable, and I just want to ask a question.
	I completely concede that limited government has a bad track record, and I completely concede that if we had a police, judicial system, and military, that there's going to be mass inefficiencies and injustice with that.
	But what I have a problem with is We all believe that inequality is okay and that if you do well and you make more money you can live a better life or everybody is different and they have different priorities but we don't believe in the difference in inequality of our rights.
	We all believe in equal rights and that we all should have the same rights.
	I'm wondering how in an anarchist society people could Perhaps do better, raise their income, and start being able to violate rights, maybe house sex slaves no longer have to concern themselves.
	And I don't know how private police and private security would be able to reprimand its own customers and succeed.
	So these are a couple of questions.
	I know that's a big topic, but I just wondered if you had a few insights on that.
	I think that Robert has the most experience with sex slaves questions, so I'm just going to...
	Yeah.
	Make sure there's no evidence.
	Every single time he's in the room.
	Yeah, we're on the clock here.
	But just to think of the NBA or something, I mean, yeah, certain key players, like Jordan, maybe could carry the ball a little more.
	But it's not like the teams that had the most money could systematically violate the rules of the sport in smaller clubs couldn't cheat as much.
	You know what I mean?
	Because they're...
	The referees know if the games are completely rigged, and it's obvious to the spectators, we're out of business.
	And so I think it's the same thing, that a judge's reputation, if it's all voluntary, I mean, people have to know that if he threw the case, obviously, and then it was discovered because he took a bribe from some rich defendant, that would be the end of his career.
	You know what I mean?
	So I think that that's the answer, and that the whole community, the standards would arise that no one person would be rich enough to buy off all the judges, that that just wouldn't happen in a free system.
	Alright, one more question.
	This is for Jeffrey.
	I enjoyed your talk.
	This is a very mild critique.
	The state as a mountain, the metaphor, I find that unsatisfying because the problem is the state is an active object.
	It knocks on Thoreau's door and throws him in jail because he didn't pay on the poll tax.
	If the state was a passive object, we could just ignore it, we could go around it, we could Dig under it, as you suggest, and it really wouldn't be a problem.
	I think the reason we're all here is because the state is actively pursuing us and making us do these things.
	It's not going on.
	Yeah, and every metaphor falls apart, of course.
	But the point is that the state presents a problem to us that cries out for our creative answers.
	And I find that in the libertarian world that's sort of stagnating in the university and non-profit world is not a creative world.
	It's like...
	Well, there's certain sectors of society where there's no new answers to anything.
	And a good example of that, for example, is the prison system.
	It's the same damn thing for hundreds of years.
	There's no creativity in how to deal with crime in that world.
	So it's a stagnant and stupid system.
	And I don't want libertarianism to become like that.
	It's the same thing over and over and over again.
	There are, in our midst, many tools that have been given to us that have liberated mass swaths of humanity.
	This was never more clear than during the Arab Spring when people were twittering back and forth and dealing with each other in ways that would have been inconceivable five years earlier.
	I mean, technology is liberating humanity right now.
	These are creative solutions.
	These are amazing things.
	Entrepreneurs are coming up with new stuff every day that's making us freer despite the existence of despotism.
	What would we do without this level of creativity?
	And it's embarrassing to me that libertarians have played such a small role in reinventing human liberty in our times.
	I mean, this is starting to change.
	Out of the Ron Paul movement, many young people are starting to go into business.
	My friend David Vexler, for example, has invented a new cryptography service that provides instant messaging that's entirely encrypted.
	Now, this is a marginal contribution.
	It's not going to change the world overnight.
	It's a small contribution, but it's exactly the kind of step we need towards greater freedom.
	Others are developing platforms for video sharing.
	They can go up to ten, fifty thousand users, hundred thousand users.
	These kinds of technologies are great.
	They're connecting us more broadly with people around the world and helping us understand more about our lives and helping us to live better and freer lives.
	These are the kinds of steps I'm really talking about.
	So I grant you the metaphor of the mountain, stupid, but a lot of times Libertarians, imagine their task is just to scream again.
	And that's it.
	I'm just saying there's probably other things for us to do.
	And we all need to get to work discovering what those are.
	I don't know what they are.
	That's good.
	That's good.
	Because life should be a process of discovering new and wonderful things.
	Maybe they'll come tomorrow, the next day.
	We can crowdsource this project, really.
	We can crowdsource it.
	Listen, we want to thank you.
	This is a little out of the way room, but we really appreciate you.

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