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Feb. 13, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:14
2327 Aaron Swartz and the Soul Eating Machinery of "Justice"

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses the Aaron Swartz case with Jeffrey Tucker, head of Laissez-Faire Books. Also, Ron Paul is using a form of eminent domain to seize URLs?

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Hi, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I am here with head ninja master of Lasse Faire Books, a.k.a.
Jeffrey Tucker.
And thanks for taking the time, Jeff.
We're going to talk about Aaron Swartz today.
Of course, quite a sad story.
But before we dip into that, not that Vegas needs a lot of selling, but I thought it might be worth mentioning our Vegas trip.
That's great.
You know, it's astonishing that this interview has started just as the train is going by.
Do you hear that?
It's the train of progress.
It's the train of the future.
Oh wait, that would be teleportation.
I have this constant train problem.
But the good thing is that the train comes and it goes.
Unless it hits somebody.
Then it comes and stops.
Either way, the sound will go away.
way it'll be gone one second here okay okay what is it honking its horn at does It must be required to do that at crossings or something.
There.
That's it.
That's it.
It's a fun track.
Anyway, yeah, let's talk about Vegas.
We've got the beginnings of a plan, don't we?
I mean, for this Vegas trip.
We've got, of course, we're going to have a whole day this year.
Last year we just had, what, an hour or two?
This year we've got a whole day.
And A lot of exciting stars and things.
We're expecting 3,000 people.
John Stossel is doing his show there.
You're going to be doing a lot of shows for Laissez-Faire.
We're going to be recording a lot of things.
We've got a long list of the most excellent, most exciting progressive thinkers in the world of liberty and anarchism coming.
I'm hoping that we can talk about all the edgiest possible topics.
Well, I'm going to be completely thrilled to meet John Stossel because I really want to pitch to him being the star in my Freddie Mercury biopic, which I feel he would be an excellent choice for.
Either him or Borat, who we're still working on who would be best.
But that may be something we won't talk about too much in this show because that's sort of a pet project of mine.
So, who's coming down and what are the topics going to be?
Well, I have a list of like 20 people and probably only 10 will make it through, so I shouldn't say for sure.
But the topics I want to cover are Things are a little different.
We want to talk about crime and punishment and the jail problem and libertarian solutions to criminal justice and those kinds of issues, which is an important subject that is not explored nearly enough and we've got some experts out there on that.
Of course I want to raise the topic of intellectual property and kind of get into some of the nitty-gritty of that subject because it's like ever more relevant.
It seems like every day.
I feel like with that topic, it's like in Godfather 3, I keep trying to take myself out, but they keep pulling me back in.
Right.
No, it is a challenging topic for sure.
And because there are so many knowledge workers in the libertarian movement, it is the great temptation.
Everyone has their weak spot when it comes to true freedom.
For me, it's unschooling.
For some people, it's intellectual property.
For you, it's the absence of a bow tie.
Everybody has their challenges when it comes to how we can most be free.
And intellectual property is one of them.
I don't know if you heard recently, but apparently...
I only know the sketchiest outlines.
You may know more.
Ron Paul has applied to the ICANN, I guess, aspect of the United Nations to have ronpaul.com and ronpaul.org transfer to him, I guess, forcibly without paying compensation to the existing domain holders who've been running the site as a fan site for many years and they claim have put 10,000 hours in and raised millions of dollars for him and so on.
They've made an offer to sell it to him for You took my line.
I was going to say it gives new meaning to the word eminent domain.
Yeah, so that's exactly it.
I mean, I can't help but think that whoever's behind this doesn't understand something about the internet.
You know, we're not...
This is real property.
It's...
It's a little more significant than going in and taking somebody's home because it's a home with a global reach.
It's gigantically significant and I can't help but think that it was some lawyers following conventional routes.
There's so many expedients in this world of business.
People can do very nasty things to other people.
And lawyers don't have any reservations about using whatever kind of clubs they have.
That's sort of their job, in a way.
It's, of course, very disturbing.
Yeah, I think one of his son's name was on the legal documents, so it's not something that he probably doesn't know about.
It does seem like a pretty not great way to get property from someone.
They're not domain squatters, right?
Domain squatters.
It's another one of these words like price gouging, domain squatters, or what it sounds like.
It just makes it sound really bad.
But domain squatter is somebody who just buys the name and then just basically, quote, extorts you.
But, I mean, I don't see how that's a problem.
I mean, they're first.
They've homesteaded the name.
Yeah.
They can then pay you for stuff.
And I remember chatting with a guy on a plane once back in my business days who'd bought, I think, buychemicals.com or something like that and sat on it for a while and then made a good deal of money reselling it.
And I don't see what I mean, there's the whole point of mining, which I know a little bit about having been a gold panner and prospector for about a year and a half in my youth.
You go and you stake a whole bunch of land that you think might have some value.
In our particular case, we were looking for glaciers that may have dragged gold deposits down.
So we're following back wherever we found gold anomalies.
We're following back the glacier paths to see if we could find the source.
But of course, it's a pretty wide net to cast.
You just cast your net wide, then you do more exploring.
And so...
Is that land squatting?
No, that's just establishing some mineral rights over land.
But that's not the case with the Ron Paul sites.
I mean, they are fan sites.
They've got rich, deep content and all that.
You know, the fact that they offered to sell and he didn't want to.
They offered, I think, RonPaul.org for free as a goodwill gesture now that's being used against him in the legal documents.
And it's just not a great thing.
Like, if someone doesn't want to sell, I don't think you get to go to the state to get them to compel the transfer of the problem.
Yeah, the demand squatting issue alone is kind of interesting.
But you're right.
This is not a case of demand squatting.
But I agree with you that demand squatters have rights, too.
You know...
The pope died this morning, so I was just curious.
I looked up Pope Benedict XVI.com.
It turns out it's an advertising site that tries to run ads and that sort of thing, sort of Google bait.
I would even defend that because it's homesteading in a way.
It shows that somebody had better foresight than somebody around the Pope if the domain is valuable.
There is a regular market for domains.
I don't think people entirely understand this, but it works just like real estate.
This is a scarce good.
And, you know, about 10 years ago, it was the equivalent of, you know, buying up domains was the equivalent of, you know, the Western land speculators, you know?
And you have to keep them renewed.
I mean, it's not like you can just buy it one time and hold on to it forever.
You have to kind of...
And sometimes they expire, and you can sweep in.
If you've got your eye on a domain, you can see when its expiration comes, and then, like, jump in, you know, when the opportunity's there.
But it's...
In other words, this is just normal economics.
I mean, in a peaceful society, in a free society, if you want something that somebody else has, you've got to figure out a way to trade with them to get it.
Well, and the interesting thing is that if the claims of the Ron Paul site owners are true or valid, that they have raised millions of dollars, then it seems like a bit churlish to not give them some of that money back.
The other thing, too, is that if you look at the hidden upside, which is I always look at the sort of long-term hidden upside, especially when I was in business – Imagine if Ron Paul paid a quarter million dollars to a fan site.
Imagine how many more fan sites he would get from people who would be hoping to make that kind of windfall.
I mean, it would really spread his reach around the internet.
And that's something that would probably be worth a lot more in terms of raising revenue for, I think he's got a TV project or something.
It would be a lot more valuable in raising revenue than what he would spend to get the domain.
Just getting other people thinking like, wow, maybe I could cash in too.
That's not a bad thing to have floating around the world.
Many software applications are developed in hopes that a larger company will buy them.
This is the internet economy and this is one aspect of the internet economy.
I buy a domain, I develop a very nice thing solely.
I try to make it popular, try to get a lot of traffic, get a high search engine ranking and when it becomes valuable enough and it seems like something that another company wants, either looks at as a potential competitor Or genuinely desires the product, they sweep in and purchase it.
It's a global bazaar for domains.
For me, I've used it in my writings as an example of how Peace results from trade.
But something like Icahn's rules on this stuff actually interferes with that because it introduces a moral hazard and encourages people to use violent takings rather than peaceful trade to get their way.
And this would be an example of that.
I didn't realize what you said earlier.
Sometimes lawyers do things that people are not aware of.
I don't know to what extent Ron's actually aware of the implications of this.
Actually, I find it a little bit alarming that some people come out in defense of this because on trademark grounds or whatever, as if you can own your name as property and prevent anybody else from using it, I would say that's not really a libertarian solution at all.
Well, in the precedent, I mean, he's, according to the website owners, he's written letters of thanks to them for all of their help in supporting him for many years.
So, it wasn't that he was unaware of this.
It's just that when he wants a new project and wants the name, then suddenly the power of the state starts to look mighty appealing, which I can understand.
But I think...
It's not so much an argument against Ron Paul as an argument against the ring of power.
I mean, if even Frodo could be corrupted, then we've got to put the ring into the mountain, right?
That's the basic idea.
I mean, if even Ron Paul is tempted to save some money by going to the power of the state, with all of his principles and all of his knowledge, this just shows that nobody is immune to the temptations of this kind of power, which means it's an argument for the full-on stateless society rather than let's get to a sort of constitutionally limited republic or something.
Yeah, but you know, it's funny because it's true that people regard the state as an expedient, but it really isn't over the long term, you know, because I don't think that you really want...
To host a business on a domain that was stolen from somebody else.
It's just not a good business model, really.
I always feel like trade and peace is not just a good thing, not just a moral thing, but in the long run, it's the most workable thing of all.
Yes.
Yeah, and certainly I think reputation damage by an avowed libertarian using the power of the state to forcibly transfer property, if that is indeed what's happening, is going to cost him more in the long run than he could possibly have saved by paying the market value.
And yes, it's a government industry.
It's a government setup.
The domain name thing is under government.
But still, there is some elements of trade involved.
Listen, because we never did end up talking about when Freedom Fest is because we're good at chatting and bad at marketing.
One of the things that I really want this day to – because there's a lot of competitive things that go on at Freedom Fest and a lot of alternatives.
So I want us to really stand out as doing something really spectacular and interesting and different.
So one of the things I really want to cover is practical ways to live out libertarian principles.
To me, that's really the cutting edge of thinking at this point, because I think we know that politics has failed us.
Academia is a wonderful solution for a tiny minority, but what about for the larger numbers of people that come around to this view that peace and trade is better than violence?
I think we need better ways to engage people in a productive building of liberty going forward.
We've been working here at Les Faires for several months and coming up with a guide to these ways, whether it's Personal finance or just the conduct of your private life, how to avoid the traps that the state has set up for you, you know, of which there are many.
The state nudges us in all these kind of different directions and to become aware of those nudges and avoid them is a way towards living a freer, more prosperous life.
And so those are some of the topics I want to talk about.
I want to talk about family, family law, And just lots of different kinds of unusual topics because as important as I think economic theory is, I spent a good part of my life on that subject, it's not the only topic.
And when we're talking about The idea of liberty, we're really addressing something gigantic and it has to do with the whole social order, the whole way the world is structured and it penetrates even to our individual lives and what we decide to do and how we decide to conduct our lives privately.
So this is a giant subject and I would like to explore more of those further reaches of libertarianism.
The dates, I don't actually have them...
Is it July 12th through 14th?
Or maybe you can look it up real quick.
Let me check.
It's going to be a great event.
I'm excited about it.
I think it's just Freedom Fest.
It'll come right up.
Alright, so...
So, Freedom Fest.
Ah, look at that.
You know that they are appealing to not the youngest crowd when they include Roman numerals in the date.
So, yeah, Steve Forbes is going to be the Art Laffer, Jim Rogers, Steve Moore.
I guess I'll be there.
You'll be there, some other great people.
It's July 10th to 13th at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.
Yeah, and the theme is, are we Rome?
And I think the answer to that is probably yes.
I don't know who we is because increasingly, I'm probably like many people, I'm more and more thinking myself as a citizen of Rome.
I mean, it sounds like a cliche, but as citizens of the world, I don't like to think of we as being like Americans anymore.
You know what I mean?
To me, that's almost a dated idea.
I mean, certainly in a digital sense, I have as many friends abroad as I have, you know, in this country.
So, but anyway.
Well, the other thing I think would be worth exploring as well is when it comes to lifestyle, That's a tough word because I've heard it said and probably it's quite true that people who use the word lifestyle have neither life nor style.
But I think we would like to inculcate – I'd like to make the claim that we should try to inculcate a lifestyle that people can envy.
Envy is a very underrated virtue because envy can, of course, is part of aspiration.
It's part of wanting something better.
And different, you know, the fat person may envy the thin person, the smoker may envy the person who can run a marathon, and it can really impel us to, I mean, most of advertising is based on envy, some of it good, some of it not so good.
But we generally, I would think as a community, do not necessarily focus on having lives that people can envy.
I think that a lot of times libertarians and political activists have lives that look like A kind of Dantian circle of hell to a lot of people on the outside.
Like, come join us in our doom porn and our, you know, we are the ministers of doom and gloom from the kingdom of woe is me, that everything's going to hell in a handbasket.
There's not much we can do about it.
We're going to stockpile food in the basement, buy gold, and shake it under our blankets.
And people look at that and say, well, that doesn't look like a lot of freedom to me.
It doesn't look like something that I'd really want to get involved in.
And so I think having...
But focusing on personal freedom and personal virtues creates a life, I think, that's really abundant with happiness and with intimacy and with love.
And I think that's something that people can envy.
But if we keep focusing on, you know, politics and the sort of Yeah.
It would be great if we could convince everyone in the Socratic form of wisdom and virtue.
But the thing is that people make a lot of shallow decisions at the moment.
We can't change that.
That is the way of the world.
But we can appeal to it by creating lives of more envy.
And I think that people can envy more or people can look up to us and say, I want me some of that.
Whatever you've got, I want me some of that.
And I think that really can only result from the enactment of personal projects.
And we need to talk more openly about these subjects.
I mean, there's all kinds of issues like education.
I mean, we really do have choices in the way we go about education.
And the digital age has allowed us to have more choices than we used to have.
So what are the alternatives out there?
And how can they be viably put into effect to great personal profit?
Personal finance, I already mentioned.
But another one is, how do you deal with tangling with the law?
I mean, these are practical areas.
I mean, how should a libertarian...
Deal with, you know, the criminal justice system.
I mean, because all of us at one point or another in our lives will, you know, at any moment could get tangled up in it.
You know, how do we...
Is it best to fight?
Or is it best just to...
To go along and pay and get out as soon as possible.
What are the best ways to use technology?
Should we fear the technology and its invasions on our privacy or should we use it for our personal benefit in a way of shoring up our personal capital?
So these and many other topics, no one of which is going to make you free, you know, of course, but if you put them all together and at least start thinking seriously about these ideas, you can find yourself living a freer life than you otherwise might.
And I think that's the right way to look at it.
So, I guess this is a fairly decent segue into this Aaron Swartz.
I wonder if you could just summarize, for those who may be watching this a little bit later, when it has receded from the two-minute attention span of the modern population, the story of what happened to this poor young man.
Well, you know, I have to say, Stephan, that I'm actually pleased to see that the story...
That his legacy continues to actually, I would say, even grow after his death.
Because my fear was that it was all for naught, that it would all just go away.
But now I've just read a huge article this morning on Slate.
It was a wonderful biographical account of his life.
There's a new foundation, Schwartz Foundation, named in his honor.
There's new prizes coming out named on him.
I mean, essentially, this kid...
He was somehow blessed with an astonishing insight into what the age of the internet would mean for himself and for the world as a whole.
Of course, he was a brilliant coder from a very early age.
I think even from the age of 10 or 11 or something like that, he was writing complex computer code.
He wrote the first program for the RSS feeds.
He was founding All sorts of new ventures.
We began to work with all the top people at MIT in the industry to Innovate with Creative Commons.
He had a long involvement with Reddit.
One of the things that really annoyed him is that open source federal court records, you have to pay to get them online.
He was a real activist.
He was an early hacker in a way, in the best possible sense, to download all his files and make them available for free.
He was all about information liberation.
And his downloading of these court documents, I think that you had to pay 10 cents a page, and he was arguing that they're not copyrighted.
They are paid for by taxpayers' dollars in their creation, right?
Everyone gets paid in the involvement of creation of them, therefore it should be open to the public.
He downloaded them.
It was not illegal, but the FBI began to keep a file on him.
They surveilled his house, his parents, and they really began to To take quote notice of him, which probably when it came to the subsequent offense made him in the eyes of the law a repeat offender.
And this probably did not, of course, help his case at all.
No, that's right.
And so when it came down to, and I think the reason I've written this in several articles, the reason they really went after him was that he was innovating new models of political activism.
That's not quite the right word.
What he was trying to do was use digital tools to create a more democratic environment so that the oligarchs that are running the state can't just have freedom to do whatever they want to do.
It was really very brilliant.
And so practically alone, he stopped SOPA from going through, which was a kind of egregious piece of legislation that would have led to vastly more censorship.
And he stopped it.
I mean, it was really one of the most amazing political events in my lifetime.
I'm not used to seeing anything really good happen.
The only thing that I think would be analogous was Phyllis Schlafly's opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.
She almost single-handedly prevented the enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment.
I think that was in the 70s and 80s.
But it is remarkable for one person to be associated with stopping a drug.
It is literally like that Chinese guy with the tank or like one person stopping the Patriot Act or something.
It really is quite astounding.
And the government does not like to be thwarted in this kind of way.
I'm getting a train.
Why don't you talk for a few seconds?
Let me turn the sound off.
Oh, you know me.
Don't like to chat out of turn.
Yeah, I mean, so whenever you thwart the government, and particularly the government keeps its prisoners, the prisoners of secrecy, keeps all of its secrets locked up and doesn't like people poking in and getting access.
It really likes to control the flow of information, despite, of course, Obama's claims to run an open and legitimate kind of administration.
He's clamped down on all kinds of releases of information.
The government is very frightened Like cops are if you're filming them, the government is very frightened of information getting out against their wishes.
He understood the power of this stuff.
What shocked me about that SOPA case in particular, I think this Equal Rights Amendment battle that he referred to, which I completely forgot about, but that dragged on for years.
The SOPA thing...
It happened in almost like a matter of days.
The whole thing just collapsed with his tools.
I was riveted by that thing.
I wrote several articles at the time saying, oh my god, did this actually happen?
SOPA was one of those pieces of legislation like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA or bailout of the banks after 2008.
One of those things that both parties agreed on that was just going to happen no matter what.
Aaron just single-handedly stopped it.
Oh, the other interesting thing, I only found this out this morning.
He was working on an open-source software package for non-profit activism, so that you would just download the program and it would allow you to generate national campaigns in any country in every language.
On a particular topic, sending emails, automating emails to congressmen, you know, just like moveon.org uses this to great effect, but their program they're using is proprietary.
So he was writing, and he was almost completed with it, an open source version of this so that any politically active organization could download it and do their thing.
That was his goal.
I mean, he believed that We needed new structures of relationship between the citizen and government in the digital age.
It didn't make any sense that the way government is run nowadays is entirely analog age stuff.
It's like where these citizens have no power whatsoever.
We have to vote for representatives and then they go and in their wisdom do what somehow represents us.
He thought this whole system was ridiculous and didn't have any role.
We really needed true democratic methods.
Now, Aaron's politics are not like politics I think you and I would say, okay, we agree with him completely.
The books he read were more of the far left, like Chomsky and some of the far left-wing things like that.
But, you know, I've listened to many of his talks online.
And wow, this guy had extraordinary insight.
I mean, one of the things he always pointed out was that the internet is nothing but a giant copy machine.
I mean, I love listening to his interviews because he's extremely insightful.
And thank goodness they're all on YouTube.
And I'd urge anybody to just spend an afternoon You know, watching the speeches, you just learned so much.
He had such insight.
He was a real radical in the same sense that you and I are.
So, I mean, most everything he says, I find myself just nodding my head in agreement.
Anyway, we should move on to his tragic death.
Sorry, just before we do that, there's something that I read that he spoke, you know, the truth to power.
He spoke this as an early teen in his school.
He said, every day millions of innocent children are unwillingly part of a terrible dictatorship.
The government takes them away from their families and brings them to cramped, crowded buildings where they are treated as slaves in terrible conditions for seven hours a day.
They are indoctrinated to love their current conditions and support their government and society.
As if this was not enough, they are often held for another two hours to exert themselves almost to the point of physical exhaustion and sometimes injury.
Then, when at home during the few short hours which they are permitted to see their families, they are forced to do additional mind-numbing work which they finish in return the following day.
This isn't a repressive government in some far-off country.
It's happening right here.
We call it school.
How fantastic.
And yes, he had a problem with advertisements.
He wanted the web to be free of advertisements and so on because he had this sort of platonic idea of the purity of mind exchange with no concept of profit.
And I mean, okay, so he got all that lefty crap, but that's okay.
How on earth would he be exposed to anything different for the most part?
I mean, he hung around with professors for God's sakes.
They're not a big fan of… I mean, he grew up in a time...
Where the internet was always there.
And so therefore, as being unusually gifted, he had particular insights that people for whom the internet was new in their adult lives or something just didn't have.
He was really a child of the digital generation.
And as a programmer, he saw the potential, and it infuriated him when he saw people resisting.
He didn't understand what the problem was.
Why aren't court records available for free?
And this JSTOR thing that eventually snagged him was a particularly...
Interesting case because JSTOR is available to academics and it's available on college campuses.
It's the ultimate kind of internet feudalism in the sense that if you're on a certain IP range, you can get all the material, but if you step out of that range, it's completely blocked to you.
It upset him very much just on matters of justice because the people who wrote this research We're wanting to give it to the world.
This is scientific work.
Over the last hundred years in every field, and it was taken from them by publishers using copyrights and not allowing the authors of these These articles do even have access to them.
And then JSTOR, which is a great company in many ways.
And by the way, JSTOR wasn't responsible for any of the court actions against Aaron Schwartz.
They wanted him to not be prosecuted.
They specifically said, do not do anything.
And also, he influenced them to loosen up their policies.
And today, their policies are far looser than they've ever been.
So you can access JSTOR in ways that you hadn't been able to.
Even in that area, he made a way.
But he went to MIT, put a laptop there, had him Had his laptop download all the JSTOR stuff and send it to him.
And it was all great stuff.
I mean, it's typical hacking kind of stuff, which MIT itself had long encouraged.
Well, and there was no proof, at least not that I've read, there was no proof that he intended to publish this.
He could have been using it for research purposes, which is what he did with other stuff that he downloaded.
There was no indication that he was then going to go publish this on the web, any of this information.
Yeah, I mean, he was offended by the...
What he regarded as unjust barriers.
And I must say this JSTOR situation has bugged me for years and it bugs a ton of people.
Most especially it bugs the scientific researchers who have published this material.
I mean, which is being resold and resold and resold many times over and they're not getting any benefit from it whatsoever.
I mean, they're forced to publish in these copyrighted journals as a matter of career for career reasons.
I mean, more recently, we're seeing more innovation in the area of publishing for academic journals.
But over the last hundred years, the Melsat stuff is just locked up, and it's outrageous.
I mean, to an idealist like Aaron Swartz, he's like, these are gems.
This is treasures.
This is what our civilization has bequeathed to the world.
And these are not private inventions.
I mean, these are, I mean, for the most part, academic researchers are largely funded by public dollars.
And so it is, you know, basically people are forced to pay for it, and then they're forced to pay for it again, and then it's restricted.
And so how can stuff that is publicly funded be kept from the public?
I think that was his basic idea with this stuff.
Yeah, and it was one of the least controversial things that he really ever did.
I mean, he did a lot of edgy things in his life.
So they went after this one, I think, in retaliation for his anti-SOPA activities.
That's what I think of, because they feared him.
They feared his vision, and they feared what he was going to do next.
And, you know, apparently his girlfriend had no clue.
By the way, Stephanie, you've spoken a lot in the past about the role of depression and causing things like suicide.
But the newest information I've seen on Aaron was that, yes, he was moody.
You know, we all are.
You know, he had his ups and downs.
He had days we woke up and he said, wow, this is going to be a great day, even a great year.
Other days, he just couldn't get out of bed, you know.
That's fairly normal, but as far as clinically depressed, there seems to be not quite enough evidence to suggest that.
Well, I mean I think also if you're in the sights of the government who's threatening you with decades in prison, when the money that you've made from your entrepreneurial activities is drained to the point where you're in debt by having to pay lawyers.
When you're entangled – he read Kafka's The Trial, a fantastic book, creepy as hell of course, and said that it's not fiction.
It's a documentary.
This is exactly what happens when you get caught up in this machinery.
I would hesitate to use the word depressed with Aaron any more than I would hesitate to use the word agoraphobic to a political prisoner.
It's not that he doesn't want to go outside.
He's not allowed to go outside.
When you're caught in the sights of this kind of horrible machinery, it is wretched.
It sits on your head every day.
It's impossible to escape.
He was facing the kinds of repercussions that are I mean, close to what Mandela was facing in South Africa.
I mean, Mandela spent 27 years under house arrest.
They were looking at a minimum of seven was the least that they would appear to even begin to negotiate from, and they could hit him with up to 30 years in prison.
In other words, you can...
Blow up the economy, cause trillions of dollars of damage to everyday taxpayers, and you get a bailout.
But if you move some bits and bytes around on a computer, you get 30 years.
I mean, this is the travesty and the hell and the truly Kafkaesque nightmare.
Of the modern industrial judicial system, I hesitate to call it any kind of justice system.
Criminal justice to me is just saying the same word twice.
Well, I'm glad to hear you say that because this is something I wanted to talk about.
I mean, sometimes people look at this Ehrenshorst case and say, oh, he should have fought.
You know, what's with this guy?
Why did he kill himself?
I mean, that's pathetic, you know, but you can...
The only person who would really be able to say that is somebody who hasn't experienced what it's like to live in that web of coercion.
Think of somebody who simply got media attention.
The guy who did that Kony 2012 video.
I mean, they picked over his very bone marrow down to the last degree, and he ended up so insane from lack of sleep, he ended up publicly masturbating and getting arrested.
I mean, I've had a few brushes with this myself.
When you get into the laser-eyed sights of some malevolent people with a lot of bandwidth, it's pretty creepy.
It is a pretty creepy situation, and it's always fine to say fight, but what does that even mean when you're facing the state?
No, it doesn't.
I mean, what does it mean to fight?
You can't leave.
You are in this horrible machine that you can't control.
It's not subject to any external validation.
There's no third party who says, well, the DOJ is acting good or bad.
I mean, the judge, jury and executioner are kind of all in the same bucket.
They have infinite resources that they don't have to pay for.
Everything you have, you have to pay hundreds of dollars an hour for.
It sounds like stay and fight, but even if it's David and Goliath, you've got a slingshot, he's got an eyeball, and you can at least run away.
But when you get caught in the machinery of the state, I've heard this from a number of people, you get caught in the legal machinery of the state, what does it even mean to say, I'm going to fight?
Fight what?
Fight how?
And win what?
And they just make life worse for you when you do.
I mean, I'm very influenced, I must say, by, you know, one Sunday morning when I was sitting at brunch, Sunday morning, there's a knock at the door.
Open the door, and a guy holds up a warrant for my arrest, right?
It's got my picture on it.
And, you know, I said, what for?
He said, well, failure to appear for this traffic ticket thing.
It was just a dumb thing.
And I said, oh, for God's sake, here, let me just write you a check.
And so, you know, he walked me out to the car, had to put my hands on the car, I've got cuffs on me, shoves me, you know, with the head in first in the backseat, drags me down, books me, I go to jail.
I don't know these people.
I mean, they seem like nice enough people.
You know, and I was kind of talking bad to the cop, you know, saying, can't you get a real job?
I mean, this is, you know, stealing a man from his home, you know.
It doesn't really do any good.
I mean, they've got you.
They've captured you.
I mean, you are a captive.
It's worse than a slave, really, because I think that most of the slave owners actually want the slave to have some value they have over the slave, right?
They want you to do some work or something.
When the state grabs you, they don't value you at all.
They're just doing their job.
It's even worse.
Everybody who controls your life, they don't care anything about you.
They take away your watch.
A watch is really important to watch the passage of time so you have no awareness of things like that.
Metaphysically, it got you completely.
It just fries you emotionally and intellectually in every other way.
Your whole world changes.
They did this to Aaron Schwartz and then Let him out or whatever, but continue to bankrupt him and then threaten him that you are definitely going back.
There is no solution to this.
You're going to go back seven years, maybe 40, but if you plead guilty, we'll let you off, send you to jail for seven years.
What a terrifying reality to carry around with you every day.
You can buck yourself up on alternative days, but then But then, eventually, I kind of see it.
I mean, basically, his father was right.
The state killed him.
The federal prosecutor and MIT were responsible for Aaron's death.
It's just a fact.
I mean, his oppressors are the ones responsible for what happened.
There is an existential thing that occurs when you face institutionalized injustice, which is if you're facing injustice from some criminal gang, then you at least have the general support of society that you're facing an injustice.
You know, like so in the movie High Noon, right, where the bad guys are coming to town and Gary Cooper's trying to get everyone to come out and fight.
People said, okay, it's not my fight.
I don't want to come.
But at least I get that there are bad guys coming to town and you're trying to do something good.
I'm just not going to join you up there on the ramparts.
But when you are facing something from the state and you realize that people are saluting the flag, which is the symbol of the state, when you hear the children and the adults at sports events singing the national anthem and praising the state, when you see everyone talking about the candidates' policies and how...
So that's, I think, the fundamental difference, I would guess.
I mean, who knows what was going on in his mind.
But there's an existential thing where you say, Everybody is praising and worshipping and donating money to and obeying and singing hymns to and folding flags delicately to this monstrous institution that is, you know, like an elephant slowly sitting on my chest and crushing the life out of me.
It's the lack of understanding of the general population about the evils that you're facing, and it's almost like suicide is not a way of saying, I don't want to live in this world.
It's basically saying, I don't want to live in this world with all you people.
Because it's one thing to be a slave, but at least the slaves knew that they were slaves.
And they took their Christian hymns and they sang their spirituals as a way of identifying with Moses and his flock and a way of, in a sense, silently protesting and so on, their condition.
And there was an underground railroad and people, of course, tried to escape and there were people fighting against this evil, but they all knew they were slaves.
But imagine – well, I guess we don't have to imagine too hard, but imagine for somebody as intelligent and sensitive and not just being a great coder but seeing the big picture, which is an incredibly rare combination.
To look at the world and to see that people not only don't think that they're slaves but they think that slavery is freedom.
I mean that Orwellian juxtaposition to really genuinely see that everyone is praising the man who whips you.
It's like, okay, so I go to jail, and at the end of jail, whether it's seven or thirty years, I get to get released back out into the society that is cheering and praising and singing hymns to the people who are flogging me.
Do I want to even come out of jail?
Let alone go into it.
I mean, if I had to guess, it would probably be something like that.
The other thing that's very alarming about being in jail is that you know there are people out there who care for you and they're worried for you.
You think about them all the time.
You know, people who love you.
And it's heartbreaking to you being in that cell to know that they can't actually access you.
You have no way from minute to minute to tell them that you're okay to receive encouragement and love from them and to give love and encouragement back.
There's a wall of separation there.
I mean, there's no smartphones.
You can't text people.
You can't post Facebook updates.
Your whole world is shattered.
So the suffering of others outside is very much on your mind.
And the only people that have control over your life They don't care anything about you.
You're not valuable to them.
And actually, they're not interested in you at all, who you are, what you've done.
You're just a number.
It's like in the movie Les Mis.
You're just a number to them.
You have no personality, no unique talents or anything else.
You're just taking up space.
You're a person who consumes Sandwiches and water and a little sleeping space.
Those are the people who are running your life.
The people who love you, you have no connection to them except on particular days that are assigned where you get a few minutes to visit with them in a very sterile environment.
I think your term hell It's really true.
It's the closest thing that this world offers to hell.
And seven years?
I mean, imagine, he was 26 when he died, so seven years would be the whole period of his life between 10 and 17.
This is the formative years for this guy.
He knew what seven years would mean.
This is unspeakable.
He also knew what prison was like, because he had been wrapped up in this In the system all along.
And I think you're right that he was horrified that to live in a world in which something like this could happen to an idealist who just wanted to do good for humanity and who never hurt anyone.
That's what people forget.
He never hurt anybody.
And yet, as you say, he was the one that stayed targeted.
Shocking.
But fortunately, I think his legacy is going to live on.
And the world that he dreamed of, I believe we're eventually going to get there.
I really do.
In fits and starts.
You know, through some resistance.
Every age...
It's great innovations that people resist.
People resisted the printing press.
It was scary.
The scribes were going to lose their business.
People were going to be printing things that were going to upset the social order.
What is this crazy thing where average people can just get books and read them?
Wait, you're going to give the Bible in the vernacular to the people?
It's like a calamity.
It was too disturbing.
And we have real records of protests, people just warning of the coming doom.
What happened in the mid-1990s when the internet was privatized and we began to see this mass migration to the digital world, way more significant for humanity.
So yeah, we're going to see some resistance and that's going to continue.
But there'll be no resisting in the end.
I mean, in the end, I think...
There will be no stopping this revolution.
I think the world that he dreamed of, where there's a fundamental change in the relationship between governments and the citizenry, I think that's coming.
A fundamental change in the way we access information and what's free and what's paid for.
And a fundamental change in the way We look at who our fellow citizens are and the value of each human being on the planet, which is somebody he just dreamed of.
And I think that world is being born thanks in part to his amazing skills and I think more substantially to his vision.
Yeah, and wouldn't it be great if we could have progress without martyrs?
I mean, good heavens, why is it that we need You know, Jesus, Stephen Biko, whoever it is that is going to end up being martyred in order for us to learn something essential about the world.
It would be really great if we could mount the steps of knowledge not on the bodies of the innocent.
But unfortunately, where we don't learn by reason, like every addict, we have to learn by tragedy.
And I really hope that people will recognize this and work to prevent the kind of recurrence by recognizing the relationship that progress has with the state.
The state is reactionary, the state is coercive, the state is brutal, the state is relentless, the state is bullying.
And the state has stolen the resources it uses to prey upon people.
And therefore, as an infinite thief, it will always outlast and outwin and outspend anyone.
And I also hope that people will not view this as an act of cowardice, what this young man did.
But really, I think an act of protest.
And the protest is fundamentally, I would argue, and again, I have no right to say this on behalf of him or anyone to do with this, but I would argue that his protest really is on behalf of the blindness of his fellow citizens Rather than the predation of the state.
It's one thing to be taken down by a lion in the middle of the woods or the middle of the jungle where no one's around.
It's quite another thing to be taken down by a lion in a crowd where everybody praises the lion.
That is, I think, a special kind of hell that we really don't want to inflict on any more people.
It is just a fact that he is not in prison now.
They did not capture him.
As you say, I'm reluctant to speak on these On this at all, but it's true that he's free in a way.
They did not capture him.
They would not triumph over him.
He would not plead guilty.
And look at his legacy.
I'm so thankful that we have his speeches now.
I mean, in the past, Martyrs haven't always had access to such a tangible thing as YouTube.
But now we can go, and now for all time, hundreds of years from now, we can still hear the words of Aaron Schwartz and look into his eyes and see his warmth and look at his clever smile when he makes a funny comment and see how he engages his questioners and things.
It's a beautiful thing to see.
It's very Inspiring.
I think in honor of his memory, the very first thing people should do is go and look at his interviews and speeches and learn from him.
The second thing is to learn from them and be inspired in our own lives and activities and how we continue to fight for freedom and justice in this world.
He was in so many ways a model for us.
And again, this is regardless of politics.
Our political views might diverge here and there, but he had a beautiful humanitarian vision that I think all people can learn from.
And he's our teacher now.
He's left that legacy.
The other thing I would remind people is that there were two groups of people in this world who interacted with him outside of his family and friends.
The one was a group of academics and intellectuals and business people who welcomed a 13 and 14-year-old into their midst and treated him as an equal and respected his intelligence and his contributions and funded him.
He did great things.
He ended up, when he made money after the sale of Reddit, he ended up giving money to somebody he had a business partnership with before that didn't work out just as a way of saying thanks for all your efforts.
He was a good guy and he was welcomed by one group of people into their midst as an equal despite his youth and so on and that's more in the civilized tradition of human interaction.
On the other group there were people who basically hounded him into the jaws of death relentlessly and in a truly sadistic and brutal fashion and if we don't learn to differentiate I think that's a very profound statement.
It's really true.
The idea that these people would have the power to destroy such a brilliant, young, compassionate, humanitarian genius, as Aaron Schwartz is, does reveal something fundamentally wrong with the system.
Absolutely.
I'm pleased about these White House petitions, actually.
I don't really go for this kind of activism, but there are some petitions at the White House petitions site against his persecutors, you know, and I think there are basically two.
I mean, one was the federal prosecutor in Massachusetts, and there was somebody else who was like an assistant attorney that was really after him in a most malicious sort of way.
Like Javert and Les Mis or something like that.
And there are petitions now online to see these people fired.
The White House hasn't responded to them yet, but I'm hoping that maybe that could make some modicum of difference.
Anything that anyone can do to honor his memory and draw attention to his ideals is a good thing.
Well, I think that's great.
Thanks again, Jeff.
And of course, I look forward to seeing you in Vegas.
And if you send me a list of anybody who's maybe attending, I'll post this along with the video, and hopefully we can lure some people to come down.
Do they have to buy tickets to Freedom Fest?
I think that they try to parse them out.
If you're just only interested in the laissez-faire book thing, I think they do have some special packages for you.
But you and I had a blast last time.
It was a lot of fun and I think it's going to be better this time because that was really our first time really.
Laissez-faire had been there in the past.
It was my first experience running Laissez-faire at that event and it was a lot of fun.
I think this next year is going to be way better though.
Yeah, and look, for people who are in the neighborhood and maybe don't have the money, just come and email.
I'm going to be there for a while with my family, and I'm really happy to sit down and break bread with listeners, with fans of laissez-faire books.
Let's just sit down and have a meal together.
It doesn't all have to be within the confines.
If you don't have the money to get in, just come down and we'll chat.
I'm always completely eager and happy to meet listeners and fans of my show or let's say their books.
So that's my offer if you're broke.
Get some gas money and come on down.
It was really fun for me because it was my first time to meet you after having admired you for years.
And I was initially sort of starstruck and kind of like out of words or whatever.
But yes.
I feel that every morning when I'm shaving in the mirror.
I just don't know what to say to myself.
We had lunch, we had dinner, we hung around all the time.
Very accessible and it was a blast.
We all had a really good time.
There's a big room that everybody hangs out in where we've got the book table.
And you get to meet people and, you know, there's a real, you know, kind of a sharing, you know, equality there that it doesn't matter who you are, you know, you're right there walking around.
You get to meet some amazing, amazing people.
You learn a lot of stuff.
I want to also make sure that our event this year is edgy and interesting and explores some topics that are not really so much political as applied.
Because I think it's important.
I think this is the most important thing we can do as libertarians right now is think about ways to apply what we've learned to our own individual lives.
And that's really what I want to focus on.
And I hope to get a lot of attention for this and maybe some debate and discussion.
Yeah, and so maybe we can set up a debate with one of the more prominent people, I think that would be great fun.
So that's freedomfest.com.
Of course, if you want to join the Laissez-faire book club, which I contribute to, I've got an audiobook reading of an Albert J. Knockbook, Our Enemy of the State, up there.
You can go to lfb.org forward slash s-t-e-f-a-n if you'd like to sign up there.
So it's a great deal.
You can read about the details on the website.
This is Jeffrey Tucker, head Nabob, chief Punjabi of Laissez-faire books.
Thank you so much for your time.
It's always a real pleasure, and I'll talk to you soon.
It's really wonderful to be here, Stephen.
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