Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses the necessity for antitrust laws in the face of bullying monopolistic business practices, with reference to Microsoft's Internet Explorer versus Netscape Navigator.
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| So, a fine listener has a question, and I'm sorry that it's taken me a little while to get back to you. | |
| Thank you for your persistence. | |
| I've talked about this topic once before, probably four or so years ago, but the questions remain, and I'm drawing on some fairly far-distant memory of the days of Netscape Navigator versus Internet Explorer, back in the days of Windows 95. | |
| Oh, if only I could remember what year that was. | |
| Oh, yes, that's right. | |
| It was 19 3.1. | |
| So, the question is around antitrust. | |
| And for those who don't know this little slice of internet history, and you can look at works by Robert S. Cringely for more on this, back in the day, there was a browser called Netscape Navigator that sold for, I think, $40 or so. | |
| And it lives on. | |
| It's the base of the open source code for Mozilla Firefox. | |
| But there was, of course, this browser. | |
| And back in the day, getting a browser was not a simple thing because you had sort of slow dial-up modems. | |
| You got paid sometimes. | |
| You have to pay by the mega kind of thing. | |
| And a lot of people weren't that tech-savvy, so going and downloading a browser and getting a browser set up was not the easiest thing in the world. | |
| Now, Microsoft was not interested in the Internet until the mid-90s. | |
| And then the call came down from Bill Gates to make everything focus on the Internet, and they began to try to integrate the Internet into Office. | |
| And now they've done a pretty wild job, I think, with Office 365, which is well worth checking out. | |
| But this is way back in the day. | |
| So way back in the day, Netscape Navigator... | |
| It was considered to be the next big thing for investors and tech-savvy people and so on. | |
| It was going to be great, fantastic, wonderful. | |
| And then what happened was, my understanding is that Microsoft met with Netscape and said, listen, here's how we're going to carve it up. | |
| You can sell to everyone who's pre-Windows 95, and you can tell to Mac users, and you can sell to Linux users, and you can sell to Ubuntu. | |
| I know it's a form of Linux, but some of the other things that were still floating around. | |
| NextCube? | |
| I don't know. | |
| But the other OSes that were floating around. | |
| You can sell to all those people, but come Windows 95 and thereafter, we're going to be bundling Internet Explorer, which is, of course, still around and I think is attempting to regain its rather decrepituted market share. | |
| We are going to attempt to... | |
| Like, we're going to bundle... | |
| Internet Explorer for free in Windows 95, and this is going to kill your market, because once you already have the browser for free, why are you going to go and pay $40 to $50 for it? | |
| Now, what happened was that Windows 95 came out with Internet Explorer, and Microsoft got hit with antitrust stuff, the same stuff that I'm dragging IBM's The legal department through the muck and mire of DOJ summons for the previous 13 years. | |
| One of the reasons why a lot of creative people left IBM, a lot of innovative people left IBM because IBM's innovation got it into trouble with the Department of Justice and it is significant harm for a company to be brought up on antitrust charges. | |
| It makes everyone kind of paranoid in the organization. | |
| The kind of innovation That can occur is everybody's just a little bit more scared. | |
| It's like when you get a bunch of patent trawling going on, right? | |
| Both Microsoft and Apple initially didn't care about patents until they got trawled pretty hard and then they had to start working it, right? | |
| I mean, in the same way that Microsoft, like Hank Reardon, didn't really care about Washington politics until they got hit with the antitrust suit, and then they began to get involved in politics because they realized, you know, once you start getting shaken down in this kind of way that it's important to try and preemptively get involved in this muck and mire of politics. once you start getting shaken down in this kind of I mean, it's just because it can have such a deleterious effect on your business, you kind of got to get involved. | |
| That sort of sucks. | |
| And so Netscape, which had a very high share valuation, tanked. | |
| I mean, just completely tanked. | |
| And Microsoft went on for a while to dominate the browser market until Firefox came out and Chrome and Opera and all these other things, And then Internet Explorer, despite the fact that it was bundled for free, ended up... | |
| I don't know. | |
| I can't remember what the last market share that it was at, but it was pretty below 20%, if I remember rightly so. | |
| So not doing that well, and they're trying to reboot it with Windows 8 and I think doing an interesting job. | |
| I think Windows 8 is a pretty cool thing for Microsoft to have done. | |
| I actually thought it was fairly unstable, but it turned out because I had a really old and beat-up SSD drive that was dropping. | |
| Lots of writes. | |
| But it's a very interesting and innovative approach. | |
| It's one of the more innovative operating system upgrades that's ever come out. | |
| I mean, Windows 7 versus Windows 95. | |
| It's not, but Windows 8, I think it's pretty cool. | |
| And kudos to Microsoft for taking that kind of risk. | |
| I mean, tablets, I think, are the way to go. | |
| And it's a very tablet-based interface and a very good job, I think. | |
| So, what is a free market system? | |
| How is it going to handle something like antitrust? | |
| Well, you know, the first thing that I would say about this is really, really important that if you're going to say, how will the government handle this free market problem, it's really important to try to figure out whether it's a free market problem we were dealing with to begin with, right? | |
| It's a pretty important thing to figure out. | |
| And the question is, Microsoft's dominance, was that due to... | |
| The free market. | |
| Well, if you accept copyrights, patents, all that kind of stuff as the free market, then I guess you would say, well, that is a product of the free market, and therefore the government had to step in because the popularity of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 was sort of the last one before Windows 95. | |
| It wasn't Windows 95, Windows ME, Windows 98. | |
| ME was a real mess, I think. | |
| Bob, the desktop, horror. | |
| Anyway, but too simple for advanced users, too advanced for simple users. | |
| Oh, the chasm of non-acceptance opened up and swallowed it. | |
| But if you think that... | |
| Patents and copyrights, the IP, intellectual property. | |
| If you accept that intellectual property is a manifestation of the free market, then I think you're going to have to be more sympathetic towards antitrust legislation because it gives you a monopoly and you already have a monopoly based upon intellectual property of whatever it is that you're doing. | |
| You already have a monopoly then. | |
| Now, then you face a challenge, right? | |
| So, if you believe that intellectual property is a free market phenomenon, then you have to include the state in your free market phenomenon, because intellectual property requires the state to enforce it. | |
| You don't require the state to enforce property rights. | |
| In fact, the state is a violation of property rights and therefore cannot be used to enforce property rights. | |
| I mean, to protect your property, why would you... | |
| Create an agency which has the power to strip your property from you at will and to fiat currency. | |
| I mean, you know, this is nonsense, right? | |
| I mean, the state requires taxation, which is a violation of property rights. | |
| Therefore, the state cannot be used to protect property, right? | |
| That's like raping someone into lovemaking. | |
| I mean, you can't do it. | |
| Murdering someone into health. | |
| The state violates property rights immediately. | |
| The creation of a state and its capacity to initiate the use of force for the purposes of stripping property in the form of taxation. | |
| Or it doesn't matter whether it's direct taxation on income or indirect through tariffs and excise taxes and all that kind of stuff. | |
| It's all the initiation of force. | |
| So if you're going to say that... | |
| The government is necessary for some aspect of the free market. | |
| What you're saying is that a respect for property rights requires an agency capable and of necessity acting in a way to violate property rights at will. | |
| So you have a massive conceptual, logical, moral failing at the beginning of this. | |
| In any free market problem that you are attempting to solve with the state, you first have to ask if the free market problem that you're dealing with or claiming is a free market problem, if it is enforced by the state. | |
| And if it's enforced by the state, it is not a free market problem. | |
| Let me repeat this again. | |
| If the free market problem you're claiming to solve is something enforced by the state, then Then it is not a free market problem. | |
| Now, you will say, and I think it's a reasonable, of course, thing to say, but staff, I mean, aren't property rights enforced by the state at the moment? | |
| And I would say, well, of course not. | |
| Of course not. | |
| I mean, good heavens, have you ever tried to use the government legal system to enforce your property rights? | |
| I mean, it's mad. | |
| I mean, not a chance. | |
| If you have a problem with, you know, some restaurant overcharges you in a foreign country, as I've mentioned before, I mean, who do you do? | |
| Do you go to the local cops? | |
| Do you go to the cops in your home country? | |
| No, you go to Visa and you dispute the charge through Visa. | |
| If you have a problem with someone and you pay them through PayPal, do you call up the cops? | |
| No, you open a dispute process in PayPal. | |
| Or eBay. | |
| Or Kijiji. | |
| Or whatever it is that you've got. | |
| I mean, you don't... | |
| I mean, we can go to the cops? | |
| Are you crazy? | |
| What are they going to do? | |
| If you have a property right dispute in any electronic frontier, you go to whoever's running that electronic system. | |
| Whether it's Visa or PayPal or eBay or whatever it is, there's a dispute resolution system that occurs in those environments, which is where you go. | |
| If something of yours is stolen, do you go to the cops thinking, oh no, the cops will get it back? | |
| No, of course not. | |
| You go to the cops probably because you have to because of the insurance and that's it. | |
| The cops will make a note of it and then that note will get stuck in a filing cabinet somewhere and never be looked at again. | |
| Cops don't get you your stuff back. | |
| I mean, as I've mentioned before, a friend of mine I had a brother whose Porsche was stolen, the GPS was on, and he phoned the cops and said, it's right here. | |
| They said, well, look into it. | |
| I never got back to him. | |
| I mean, they don't want to go deal with potentially dangerous people. | |
| I mean, for the sake of a car, they know you've got insurance, so you're fine. | |
| When it comes to restitution of your property, we turn to private insurance, not public law enforcement. | |
| I mean, dear heavens. | |
| Right? | |
| So, no, the government almost... | |
| I mean, and if you're in business, if someone does something unjust to you in business, do you really feel like you're going to go to the law courts to go hire a lawyer and get justice that way? | |
| Well, good heavens! | |
| I mean, good lord, no. | |
| I mean, the only people who imagine that are people who live on government propaganda and have never actually tried to use this system, which they claim is so helpful. | |
| I mean, just talk to people who've gotten involved in the legal system. | |
| Just talk to them. | |
| Say, how'd that work for you? | |
| I mean, a lot of people, if they get involved in custody battles, are looking at legal bills of about a quarter million dollars. | |
| Doesn't. | |
| I mean, please. | |
| The government does not enforce property rights at the moment. | |
| Property rights are enforced by private agencies. | |
| Almost exclusively. | |
| I mean, if somebody shoplifts a t-shirt from your store and you call the cops, what are they going to do? | |
| They're going to do nothing. | |
| But what you can do is you can get those little ink markers, right? | |
| And put them on the t-shirts and then take them off. | |
| And that's how your property gets protected. | |
| It's through private means. | |
| Right? | |
| I mean, it's the locks in your car. | |
| It's the alarm system on your house. | |
| It's the anti-theft devices on your car that gives you the... | |
| I mean, nobody doesn't steal a car because they're afraid the cops are going to find them. | |
| I mean, nobody who's in the car stealing business, right? | |
| They don't steal a car because it's not worthwhile, it's not valuable, or because the anti-theft devices are too strong, or they're afraid it's got a GPS thing on it or whatever, right? | |
| Millions of crimes every year are prevented in the U.S. by people who have guns. | |
| The guns are not given to them by the cops, but sold to them by private organizations. | |
| And the private organizations, in that sense, are the ones giving people the tools necessary to protect persons and property. | |
| The people who build fences, they are the ones who will help you protect your property. | |
| So anyway, I mean, you understand, it's not... | |
| I mean... | |
| The government does not protect your property. | |
| The government takes your property. | |
| The government debases your currency, which is a really subtle and insidious form of theft through taxation. | |
| The government runs up national debts. | |
| The government steals your damn childhood through shitty public schools. | |
| The government doesn't protect... | |
| I mean, come on. | |
| We must examine... | |
| I'm not annoyed at anyone, certainly not this writer, but I just hear this so often. | |
| Government protects your property. | |
| Government does not. | |
| The only property protection you're going to get in this life is from voluntary private agencies. | |
| That is the only property protection you are going to get in this life. | |
| I'll give you an example. | |
| Years ago, a friend of mine lent me her vacuum cleaner because I was a bachelor and it was time. | |
| And when I was returning the vacuum cleaner, I had a whole bunch of stuff to take back, to pack in my car, and I couldn't take everything. | |
| And so I left my vacuum cleaner just outside the elevator. | |
| I ran to my car. | |
| I came back and the vacuum cleaner was gone. | |
| Somebody had taken the vacuum cleaner. | |
| I called the cops, because I was young and naive, and the cops said, oh, I guess it got walked. | |
| Do you have a serial number? | |
| No. | |
| Well, give me the make and model, I'll make a note of it. | |
| I mean, even then, you get that sinking feeling of like, yeah, okay, well, nothing's going to happen here, right? | |
| And so I took matters into my own hands, and I posted... | |
| Notices all over the building saying, if you took this vacuum cleaner, this was not abandoned. | |
| It was mine. | |
| Here's the apartment number. | |
| I really, really need it back. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| And the next morning, my vacuum cleaner was sitting in front of my apartment door. | |
| I mean, wiped clean of prints, I imagine. | |
| I didn't care. | |
| I was just happy to have it back. | |
| The cops didn't do anything. | |
| Cops didn't come and put the notices up. | |
| Cops didn't go knocking on everyone's door saying, hey, did you have this guy's vacuum cleaner? | |
| Why would they want to do that? | |
| I mean, they get paid either way, right? | |
| They get paid if my vacuum cleaner gets back or doesn't get back. | |
| So what are they going to do? | |
| Well, least amount of effort possible, right? | |
| Naturally. | |
| They didn't say, listen, we, you know, probably people thought it was abandoned, and you're a taxpayer, so what we're going to do is we're going to go on wallpaper and, you know, tell people to, you know, whatever. | |
| Because you pay so many taxes, you know, we'll offer a $25 reward for anyone who gets it. | |
| They just, well, you know, make a note of it and throw it in the garbage or whatever. | |
| So I had to take it under myself to get my property restored, or my friend's property restored, which I then gave back to her. | |
| I mean, that's how you deal with property. | |
| I mean, if you lose your cat, you call the cops. | |
| Cops aren't like, oh yeah, yeah, no, we'll walk up and down the street and we'll knock on everyone's door and we'll make sure you get your cat back. | |
| No, you have to take a picture of your cat and you put all the... | |
| You wallpaper the whole neighborhood with... | |
| I mean, this woman I was dating, cat got out and we spent an entire Saturday going up and down the neighborhood. | |
| I mean, the idea of calling the cops, well, cat's property, property's gone missing, shouldn't we get it back? | |
| Well, that's not what you do. | |
| That's not how it works. | |
| You have to do it yourself. | |
| And you can come up with a million things this way. | |
| You can come up with a million things this way. | |
| You know, there's a Find My iPad application which will help you find your iPad when the TSA agent has taken it home. | |
| And the Find My iPad app It's not, phone the local police. | |
| It's not the number of your local police station. | |
| Oh, Mr. | |
| Officer, I lost my iPad. | |
| We'll be right on it. | |
| No, of course not, right? | |
| I'll make a note of it. | |
| If it shows up, we'll call you. | |
| Come on. | |
| No, it's the private agency that is, right? | |
| Or notepads. | |
| Notebooks, you can get these. | |
| Locks and, you know, bicycle chains, you get locks. | |
| It's all private stuff that protects your property. | |
| Sorry, I don't mean to labor this point as usual, but I just think it's really, really important. | |
| If you look empirically, rather than at what you're told, it's... | |
| I mean, cops have not done me any good in my life, but they've not been helpful to me, right? | |
| I mean... | |
| My mom called the cops on me once when we were having a fight and I got yelled at by the cops when I was like 15 or so. | |
| And a couple of times cops have pulled me over because I've had an expired license one time and so on. | |
| I've never actually... | |
| And, you know, the cops will give me tickets if I park at the wrong place. | |
| But the idea that they're actually going to help me in terms of protecting me in some manner, it's just not empirical. | |
| And not just to my experience, but just look at your own life. | |
| How do you protect your property? | |
| Well, you lock it up. | |
| The cops don't provide you anti-theft devices. | |
| They don't come and wire up your home. | |
| I mean, these are all private agencies that do that. | |
| If you look at how you protect your property, I mean, you put passwords on your computer. | |
| You don't call up the cops if someone steals you. | |
| You get antivirus stuff. | |
| I mean, it's all private stuff that is protecting your property. | |
| And private doesn't mean you can get encryption software for free. | |
| Tor, I mean... | |
| It's all free, right? | |
| But that's how you protect your property. | |
| You encrypt stuff. | |
| I mean, whatever, right? | |
| So, if you say that a supposed free market problem is government-enforced, then it's automatically not a free market problem. | |
| So, it's automatically a problem that is created by government. | |
| Now, I've done the IP thing so many times, I'm not going to go over it again. | |
| People can look into this in more detail if they want. | |
| And, you know, Steph Kinsella is the guy to look at in this. | |
| But the reality is that patents, copyrights, it's not free market, it's all government. | |
| Government institutions, government, right? | |
| So, this is automatically not a free market problem. | |
| It's automatically a government problem. | |
| So, Microsoft, of course, had a patent on DOS, and there was DR-DOS, Digital Research DOS, QDOS, I think, was another one. | |
| There was a bunch of different disk operating systems that were around that were compatible and so on, but Microsoft, they entered into this arrangement where If you made 100 computers a day and you wanted DOS on any of them, then you had to buy licenses for 100 computers. | |
| You couldn't say, oh well, 50 of them I want DOS for and 50 of them I'll do these other things for or whatever, right? | |
| That's what Microsoft did. | |
| Now, that was a contract. | |
| They'd say, how many computers are you making? | |
| A hundred. | |
| Well, if you want any DAS for one of them, you've got to buy DAS for a hundred. | |
| Because otherwise, you'll just buy DAS for five of them and copy it. | |
| And that's a contract. | |
| That's what people did. | |
| And that's enforceable in the free market. | |
| So, why did people want DAS? People always say, this is true of the Betamax versus Betamax. | |
| I mean, people would say, oh, you know, well, the other one was better, but, you know, it's just some marketing gimmick and so on that got... | |
| No, I don't really think so. | |
| Consumers are pretty smart. | |
| Betamax, like the... | |
| Again, for pre-DVD people, it's just like videotapes. | |
| Betamax was not that efficient of format. | |
| Like LaserDiscs was not that efficient of... | |
| I mean, two big honking discs to watch a movie. | |
| You've got to switch it halfway through. | |
| I mean, just when you're comfortable. | |
| Not that... | |
| And so what people liked, since people work on a whole bunch of different computers, usually, I mean, who had just one computer? | |
| I mean, you have a computer at work, you have a computer at home, maybe a computer at the cottage or whatever, right? | |
| Then people liked to have the same commands everywhere. | |
| And since the one at work was probably MS-DOS because they had the best support, The most worldwide-reaching support. | |
| So the one at work was... | |
| And so, when you buy a computer for home, you want the same operating system that you have at work. | |
| Most people do. | |
| I mean, I love to get around with different operating systems, but that's just me, right? | |
| Most people. | |
| Most people. | |
| Oh, I want the same commands that I did at work. | |
| So they buy a computer at home, and also because they may be, quote, borrowing some of the software from work, they want the same computer at home, same OS at home that they have at work, for the most part. | |
| And so, because... | |
| MS-DOS was very business friendly, and because it was IBM compatible, and because it had the best support, then businesses tended to buy it. | |
| And because businesses tended to buy it, then people who would have home computers would generally want to have the same commands, the same, right? | |
| Because either some other operating system Has the same commands, in which case, why buy another one? | |
| Just buy the one that you know is already worldwide and supported. | |
| Or it's kind of different, in which case you've got to learn a whole bunch of new commands, which is really not that efficient or that effective. | |
| Now, people will do that over time, right? | |
| So, I mean, WordPerfect was the big operating system... | |
| Sorry, it was the big word processing system for DOS, and eventually people moved over to MS Word... | |
| For a variety of reasons. | |
| One of them was that MS Word offered keystroke compatibility with WordPerfect, right? | |
| So, I mean, if you're like me, my first Windows computer was a A notebook, a 38625 notebook, that had no mouse built in. | |
| You could get a serial mouse by... | |
| So I learned to do everything on Windows through keystrokes. | |
| Not having a mouse was one of the most amazingly productive things that ever happened to me, because now I just blur through all this Windows stuff with keystrokes. | |
| And much better. | |
| So... | |
| Microsoft's monopoly on their disk operating system was the result of the state. | |
| And so saying, well, we need more state to deal with the state problems created by the last state solution, well, this is not sensible, right? | |
| And entirely predicted by free market theory. | |
| I mean, once you start the government, it's like Mickey Mouse with those dancing mops, right? | |
| It just gets worse and worse until it collapses. | |
| Because one distortion creates another distortion, which you've got to tamp down with more government, and that creates another distortion. | |
| It's one of the reasons government grows, is you just end up playing whack-a-mole with all the problems created by the last whack-a-mole hit. | |
| So I would argue that Microsoft's excess coffers runneth over, right? | |
| Excess cash flow... | |
| Where they just had, like, $100,000 checks lying around the office that they'd never gotten around to cashing yet, came because of this monopoly. | |
| The monopoly power of government copyright. | |
| This is not a free market solution. | |
| A free market solution to intellectual property is volunteerism, is donations, is contracts, but it's not use the state to Basically blow up people who are doing the same kind of thing that you're doing. | |
| Now, let's look at another possibility, which is, can a third-party product compete with something built into the operating system? | |
| Absolutely it can. | |
| Absolutely it can. | |
| I mean, just two pop into my mind. | |
| One is that since Vista, I think, since Windows Vista, Microsoft has included speech recognition in its operating system, yet there is still room for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is a fantastic product, by the way. | |
| I mean... | |
| One of the people say, oh my god, how can you get all this stuff done that you do? | |
| Steph, you know, one guy until recently, the whole FDR thing, well, it's because of Dragon. | |
| I mean, a lot of it. | |
| I mean, I write my own books with it, emails, communications, Facebook posts, notes, everything. | |
| I mean, if I don't have Dragon on the computer, I mean, I... My productivity drops by like five times. | |
| I mean, Dragon is the shit. | |
| Dragon is the best. | |
| I've been using it since version 7, I think, and it's version 12 now. | |
| It gets better and better. | |
| You've got a multi-core processor, and this thing will keep up with you with almost perfect accuracy, just with a little bit of training. | |
| I mean, I don't want to pimp myself out too much for Dragon, but I just love the product. | |
| It's just fantastic. | |
| And I've tried the Microsoft one, and it's okay. | |
| It's fine. | |
| I've got everything fine-tuned for Dragon, right? | |
| So I can just say one little phrase, and it will type a whole email for me, right? | |
| I mean, so you can get a good keyboard with your phrases set up and your hotkeys and stuff like that, like a gaming keyboard. | |
| Anyway, I don't want to get into my productivity secrets. | |
| Not that they're much of secrets, but Dragon is doing great. | |
| Nuance Software's Dragon, naturally speaking, is doing great, and it's doing well, although it's built in for free, right? | |
| With Internet Explorer, it wasn't just like another browser. | |
| It was integrated into the operating system. | |
| So you could have websites refreshed on your desktop and other kind of funky things that it was not possible for Netscape to do and so on. | |
| I mean, there are other things too, right? | |
| So Microsoft has things in the operating system that things like Excel hook into that they haven't published or at least they haven't some time back. | |
| It's hard to get the same speed if you don't have these things. | |
| But it's their operating system. | |
| Why should they be forced to release everything that they've created for that operating system? | |
| I mean, it seems silly, right? | |
| So, the excess cash, right? | |
| You already have granted a monopoly to Microsoft on DOS and everything that looks and smells and has the same commands and all that kind of stuff, right? | |
| So, saying we need the government to break up a monopoly when the government has created a monopoly through patents and copyrights, It's not rational, right? | |
| I mean, how about just not creating the monopoly in the first place? | |
| I mean, I know that sounds kind of shocking, but how about just not creating a monopoly in the first place? | |
| So, antitrust comes about because of copyright. | |
| Copyright grants a monopoly. | |
| The monopoly grants rent-seeking excess profits. | |
| And raises not only the barrier to entry in terms of cost, but just in terms of danger. | |
| And so, the problem of monopoly is state-created. | |
| And then you say, well, I'm concerned that in the free market there might be monopolies. | |
| It's like saying, in the absence of rape there might be sexual harassment. | |
| You know, in the absence of grand larceny there might be petty shoplifting. | |
| It makes no sense. | |
| I mean, I get it makes sense like if you just assume a whole bunch of things that the government tells you, or that even common sense might seem to tell you, right? | |
| Like you need the government to protect your property, as long as you overlook the fact that the government is de facto and de jure a violation of property rights. | |
| You can't violate property rights, then claim that you're interested in protecting property. | |
| I mean, at least until you've thoroughly examined and exhausted every other possibility by which property might be secured, i.e. | |
| how you secure every single piece of your property that you have, right? | |
| I mean, I park my car and somebody siphons all my gas out. | |
| Do I call the cops? | |
| No. | |
| Nobody's going to siphon my gas out of my car because my car has a lock on the gas tank. | |
| Which was put there by a private company to protect my gasoline. | |
| I don't want to blabor it, but if you look at your own life, you will literally see a thousand times a day that you rely on private organizations to protect your property. | |
| So many times a day. | |
| It's countless. | |
| I say, oh, we need the government. | |
| When was the last time you called the cops? | |
| Because of property problems. | |
| And had something valuable come out of it, then you didn't do it just because that's kind of what you do. | |
| Oh, I had a break-in. | |
| I called the cops. | |
| Or your insurance required you to do it. | |
| But when was it like, oh, thank heavens we have the cops here because now this problem is going to be solved in an infinitely better way than any free market you might be able to do? | |
| When was the last innovation? | |
| That came out of the police, the government police, that revolutionized how we protect property. | |
| Are they working night and day to come up with better ways of securing your property and preventing theft? | |
| No, they'll just come out and give you some lectures about personal safety. | |
| I mean, maybe. | |
| Which is all, I mean, just silly, right? | |
| Was it the R&D department of the local police that came up with anti-shoplifting measures or car alarms or house alarms or Did the cops say, you know, we've got all this tax money, we've got hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide, let's figure out how we can help out Visa from getting stolen. | |
| We're going to figure out how best to put chips in and pay for that, because Visa's paying us a lot of money in taxes. | |
| We're going to do that, and we're going to figure out how to put pins on gas tanks, sorry, the pumping stations that you get your gas from in a gas station. | |
| I don't know why I can't think of that word, sorry. | |
| Are we going to work to put... | |
| Personal identification numbers and all this stuff. | |
| Are we going to find ways to combat ATM theft by putting cameras in? | |
| Are we going to do all of that to help? | |
| No. | |
| Cops don't do any of that stuff. | |
| Of course not. | |
| It all comes from private sector. | |
| Did the cops work night and day to try and figure out how best, conceivably, to put in multi-camera security systems? | |
| Did they come up with those big concave mirrors so you can see around corners in convenience stores? | |
| No. | |
| None of that stuff was there. | |
| All of it came. | |
| Look around you. | |
| Did cops invent locks? | |
| No. | |
| Safes? | |
| None of this. | |
| They don't do anything to protect your property. | |
| Or to recover it. | |
| And again, I'm sure there'll be exceptions. | |
| Oh, I called my cop and they went out and they got my car. | |
| Absolutely, there are exceptions. | |
| For sure. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And there was the occasional great doctor in Stalinist Russia. | |
| But that does not make communism a good system. | |
| Personal integrity will overcome institutional bias, for sure. | |
| And some people act against their own economic self-interest or personal self-interest because they're masochists. | |
| This doesn't mean that the discipline of economics is false. | |
| Every now and then, a horse is born with two heads. | |
| That does not make the discipline or the science of biology invalid. | |
| So, yeah, please don't write me with, oh, you say, cops do nothing. | |
| You know, I called the cop up in my small town who's a buddy of mine, and he worked night and day to get my car back. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| It will happen. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| On occasion, it will happen, for sure. | |
| But it's, I mean, just, you tell me, the last major innovation that came out of the police, technologically for the protection of property that was provided for free to citizens... | |
| It was developed by the cops. | |
| There's no reason why they couldn't. | |
| Their whole job is to protect your property, so why aren't they doing it? | |
| Why aren't they researching it night and day with all the excess money they have? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| They're going to sit behind signs and snag people going 50 in a 45 zone because they're all about protecting your property, you see. | |
| Do I sound bitter? | |
| Maybe a little. | |
| Just I don't like people to take my money and not provide me any services other than holding a gun to my head to take more money. | |
| And the other thing, too, is even if we accept, like, blow away all of my previous arguments, and even if we accept that this Netscape Internet Explorer thing was unjust to Netscape and Microsoft had a completely free market, unfair advantage. | |
| I don't know what unfair means in a free market. | |
| I mean, I don't know. | |
| Like, when I was younger, I would want to go out with some women, and those women would choose other guys than me. | |
| I mean, it happens, right? | |
| Thank heavens they did. | |
| So I ended up marrying my wife, which was the very best thing ever. | |
| So thank you, ladies, for saying no, because that left me in a position to say yes to the greatest woman I've ever met. | |
| And sometimes, I think we've all had this experience if we've been in the dating world, sometimes... | |
| These women I thought were really great would choose guys who were idiots. | |
| Idiots! | |
| I mean, low-quality, square-jawed, beta male idiots. | |
| There's one woman, when I was in my master's, I really wanted to date her. | |
| I thought she was just the best. | |
| And I invited her to a party. | |
| I knew she had a boyfriend. | |
| She bought her boyfriend. | |
| I was chatting with him for like 20 minutes. | |
| He was an idiot. | |
| He was cute, but he was an idiot. | |
| And my order for her somewhat cooled after that. | |
| Is it unfair that these women I thought were great dated idiots... | |
| You know, pretty boy, vacuous dunderheads? | |
| I mean, I don't know. | |
| What does it mean to say fair and unfair? | |
| And what possible remedy would there be? | |
| Force them to date me? | |
| Well, thank you, but no, right? | |
| I don't know what unfair means in a free market environment. | |
| I think it's just a made-up word that says, I wish people had chosen differently. | |
| Well, welcome to being alive. | |
| Of course we wish people would choose differently all the time! | |
| Of course! | |
| We all imagine how beneficial it would be if we were the tyrants of people's free will and got to lash the horses of their decision-making in a vastly productive way. | |
| Put down that drink. | |
| Put down that cigarette. | |
| Stop working so hard. | |
| Go see your children. | |
| Get off the couch. | |
| Put down the Cheetos. | |
| Exercise. | |
| Lose weight, for God's sakes. | |
| Get a haircut. | |
| That beard looks terrible. | |
| Shave it. | |
| Blue and green should never be seen without a color in between. | |
| Pull up your socks. | |
| Pull up your pants. | |
| You're not in prison. | |
| The musical you listen to is terrible and misogynistic. | |
| Put down the rap. | |
| Pick up some Queen. | |
| I get it. | |
| I can't believe you people like these movies. | |
| when they hear about sports figures being paid multi-hundred millions of dollars because they're good at hitting little white things that aren't David Spade. | |
| I can't pay to watch that. | |
| But of course people make ridiculously bad decisions, and not even subjectively, but objectively, all the time. | |
| All the time. | |
| You don't need to buy that DVD of Queen live in Budapest. | |
| You already have 900 other live Queen CDs. | |
| And you don't have a job. | |
| Stop buying stuff you don't need. | |
| Find it on YouTube. | |
| Whatever, right? | |
| People make ridiculously bad decisions all the time. | |
| Are they unfair? | |
| Are they, you know... | |
| When I was younger, I mean, hell, I've always thought I was a really great catch as a boyfriend and a husband. | |
| I'm a really good boyfriend. | |
| I'm a great husband. | |
| I'm a great dad. | |
| Why couldn't women see this? | |
| I mean, I could get dates. | |
| I just... | |
| I never felt that I was given... | |
| The objective value that I could bring to the table. | |
| I'm pretty good looking and healthy and fit and a decent earner and hard worker and dedicated to my family. | |
| Like, my God, I couldn't even tell you. | |
| It's a force of nature for me. | |
| Loyal. | |
| I don't flirt with other women. | |
| I don't sleep around. | |
| You know, I don't drink. | |
| I don't smoke. | |
| I will do anything to make my loved ones happy. | |
| Anything to make my loved ones happy. | |
| I am a slave. | |
| To those I love. | |
| A happy slave. | |
| Because I love because of the mutuality of these values. | |
| Was it unfair that women did not see the value that I had when I was younger? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I think it was pretty dumb of them. | |
| But you can't make people see your value. | |
| Was it unfair that I did not get published as a fiction writer despite receiving some unbelievably great reviews from my work? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I think it was kind of stupid of people. | |
| They could have made a fortune off my books. | |
| But is it unfair? | |
| I mean, again, I can disagree with it. | |
| I don't know what it means to be unfair. | |
| I don't think so. | |
| Because the only way to interfere with that unfairness is with the gross injustice of the initiation of force, right? | |
| So, even if we call it unfair, I'll take the unfair over the evil. | |
| Unfair is just, you know, could be better. | |
| People could make better choices. | |
| Evil is somebody's pulled out a gun. | |
| Was it unfair for Microsoft to embed... | |
| It's Explorer, Internet Explorer. | |
| I mean, let's say that it was all free market. | |
| Well, okay, so it was unfair. | |
| It was an unfair advantage. | |
| So what? | |
| So what? | |
| Brad Pitt is gorgeous. | |
| He has an unfair advantage to all of the other actors who aren't as gorgeous. | |
| Because all other things being equal, wouldn't you like a gorgeous actor? | |
| Yeah, of course. | |
| They're easy on the eyes. | |
| I mean, on the other hand, you have Mr. | |
| Potato Heads like Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, they all have their niche markets. | |
| Or as Robin Williams said about Jumanji, it's the closest I'll ever come to being an action hero, right? | |
| Because of the way he looks. | |
| Is it unfair? | |
| Celine Dion has an incredible voice. | |
| Sometimes I sound like a crow-slash-bullfrog being slowly sat on. | |
| Well... | |
| Is it an unfair thing? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Hair models have great hair. | |
| Is it unfair? | |
| I mean, you get it, right? | |
| I don't know what it means. | |
| What is the option? | |
| Do we pull a Robert De Niro and Raging Bull and pulp up Brad Pitt's face to even things out? | |
| Right? | |
| I mean, do we cut off the beautiful hair model's hair so you can make wigs for people who... | |
| I mean, you can't without the initiation of force. | |
| I don't know what unfairness... | |
| Maybe you can say things are unfair, but without the initiation... | |
| I mean, you can't slide over to evil to fix unfairness. | |
| I mean, you can, but you actually will not fix the unfairness. | |
| You will only make the evil. | |
| Let me just look at the welfare state, right? | |
| Well, it's unfair that some people are born with more advantages and their parents are rich. | |
| Of course it's unfair. | |
| Of course it's unfair. | |
| The people I grew up with in my high school, their dad was the head of the Toronto Stock Exchange. | |
| I mean, they had a house. | |
| I never saw the end of it when I went over. | |
| They both got... | |
| I mean, these two sons have got cars for their 16th birthday. | |
| They had alligator shirts and polo shirts and preppy shit like that when that stuff really meant something. | |
| Completely unfair. | |
| I mean, I was a broke-ass kid with a mentally broke-ass mom and getting eviction notices and couldn't afford to buy food half the time. | |
| So, yeah, it's not fair. | |
| But what's the alternative? | |
| Take a gun and steal from those guys? | |
| No, of course not. | |
| It's unfair to bundle Internet Explorer into the opera. | |
| It's unfair to Netscape. | |
| Well, that actually is for the consumer to choose. | |
| If you make the case of the consumer, you say, this is unfair, this is unjust. | |
| And if the consumer says, you know, I agree with you. | |
| I will go and support this other company. | |
| Okay, then you've made your case. | |
| But you don't get to pull out guns for things that you think are unfair. | |
| You don't get to pull out guns for stuff that you find unfair, unjust, unfair advantage, unequal economic power. | |
| You don't get to do that. | |
| I mean, it's like saying, I want to have sex with this woman. | |
| She's making a bad choice. | |
| She's dating some guy who's not good for her, who's indifferent to her, who's an idiot. | |
| So I get to rape her. | |
| No, no, no, no. | |
| We all understand that's not right. | |
| I offered this guy fair market value for his house. | |
| He doesn't want to sell. | |
| So I'm just going to go and take his house by force, throw him out on the street. | |
| I offered him a fair price. | |
| It's unfair. | |
| That he won't accept it, so I'm just going to go and take his house. | |
| You get that you can't do that, right? | |
| You get that you can't do that. | |
| I wanted to buy this diamond ring. | |
| It was overpriced by a thousand dollars. | |
| I offered them a thousand dollars less. | |
| They said no, so I just gave them the money and took the ring by force. | |
| Well, you get that you can't do that, even if they're being unfair. | |
| Even if it is unfair. | |
| It's not evil. | |
| They're not initiating force by being unfair. | |
| Putting a browser into your operating system is not using a gun on anyone. | |
| The moment you start cooking up antitrust schemes with the state, well, suddenly you're the one bringing a gun to the card game, right? | |
| I mean, if you really want to be a painter, but unfortunately you're colorblind, you don't get to rip out Someone else's eyes and put them in your head so you could be a painter, right? | |
| It's unfair, it's unjust, right? | |
| No, you don't get to do that. | |
| You don't get to steal two inches of some guy's shins because you're short. | |
| How do you get to steal someone's hair because I'm follically challenged? | |
| No, of course not. | |
| So, that's the aspect that you really need to focus on, is who's bringing a gun into the room? | |
| Oh, Netscape, sure, it's unfair, advantage, monopoly. | |
| Okay, let's say it wasn't free market, but let's say it all was. | |
| Let's say Microsoft is unfair. | |
| Let's say that they say to someone, I'm going to buy your company, and if you don't sell me your company, I'm going to go into business and compete with you and reduce the value of your company, you'll get nothing. | |
| Well, that's kind of mean, but they're not forcing anyone, right? | |
| And so, if you say, well, I'm going to prevent Microsoft from doing that through the government, through force, through law, through jails, through guns, well, you're taking people who are being kind of mean, but not evil, and you are now supporting the initiation of force. | |
| You're bringing evil to an unsavory environment, right? | |
| I mean, you're saying this food doesn't taste good, I don't like it, so I'm going to bring poison into the kitchen. | |
| Well, that's a whole different equation. | |
| That's a whole different reality. | |
| And you just can't go there. | |
| Unless you're willing to say... | |
| That we should be able to rape women who make bad dating choices, then you can't say, I want antitrust for companies who pursue unsavory but not immoral business practices. | |
| You can't do it. | |
| I mean, that's just a principle thing. | |
| So I hope this helps. | |
| Thank you so much for your patience. |