Plumb Line Libertarianism

0:00It's a great honor to be asked to give the Murray Rothbard Memorial Lecture. One of the most poignant lines from the movie and the play Amadeus for me was, if God spoke to man, he would speak to man through the music of Mozart. And Mozart is one of my favorite composers. And I guess I would like to extrapolate from that and say that if God spoke to man in economics or political theory, Murray, he would speak to him, us, through the words of Murray Rothbard. I took a long time to think about what I might say about Murray, or in his honor, and my first thought was I'd try to be a stand-up comic and storyteller and regale you with stories Let me just tell you one of those. When I was a young lad, I used to keep track of how many pages I would write per day, and if I wrote five per day, that is double-spaced type of writing.

1:16I've written pages of about 300 words on a page. I figured I did okay. And many days I didn't make it to five. But sometimes I'd make it to 10 or 15 if I really had a good day. Well, one day I got up really early in the morning. I stayed up till 3 in the morning the next day. And I got 22 pages done and, you know, filled with youthful braggadocio. I called up Murray and I said, well, how many pages do you do in a day? I used to pester the hell out of him. I'm amazed that he was friendly to me. So finally I pestered him. I'm a world-class nood, so if you get in my face, you're in trouble. I'll come get you. Finally I got out of him. What he said was eight pages an hour.

2:03So in my most productive day, I did 22 pages, I did almost 3 hours of Murray, and you can see from the width of the books on the shelf that he's produced that, you know, he, I mean a good typist can do 8 pages and maybe a little more, but you know, he's really clacking away and it comes out first draft pretty much, it's just appalling and amazing. I decided not to keep going with these stories, rather to give something more substantive as a better way to honor him. And then the problem is how do you honor him? What can you say about him? Because he's so accomplished in so many different fields. For me though, the essence of Murray is libertarianism.

2:52The reason I was tempted to give all these stories is that my thought is that many people in this room, maybe half the people have not met Murray and only know him through his writings and maybe his tape-recorded speeches. And as the years go on, there are fewer and fewer people that have had personal experience with him, and it's more important, more and more important for people such as myself who have to share it with you. and if you see me over coffee later I'll regale you with the stories but now I wanted to get into some substance and for me the essence of Murray was Mr. Libertarian. It was not for nothing that he was widely called Mr. Libertarian. Further he approached this in I would say and I mean this is a compliment in a rabid maniacal way. He was no pinko type of Libertarian of which there are all all too many. I warn you, the pink-o-ism stops right here.

3:50If you define libertarianism, I think, non-controversially as the non-aggression axiom and private property rights coupled with a Lockean homesteading theory, the essence of Murray was not that he adhered to that. Many, many libertarians do. Heck, many non-libertarians do. If you ask them, do you favor violence against non-aggressives, they're not going to say yes. This is rather the rigid, unyielding, praxeological way that he followed this that I think is the quintessential Murray. He was seen, though, as inconsistent. He was anti-war, so he was seen as a leftist. He was in favor of laissez-faire capitalism, so he was seen as a right-winger. He was for anarchism, so he was seen as a leftist. He joined the Peace and Freedom Party, which was obviously a left activity, but this was alliances.

4:38Murray, for strategic reasons, would join with other groups at various times in his life when his views and theirs coincided. And I certainly see nothing wrong with that. One of the things that Murray did, and here what I'm going to do is to extend on Murray, Lew Rockwell asked, what am I going to be speaking on today? And I told him a defense elucidation and extension of Murray's thinking. Well, one of the things that he did was his attack on the modals. And I'm going to try to elaborate and extend on that. Who are the modals? The modal libertarians are people who are libertarian on many issues, but say on victimless crimes, left-wing libertarians, so-called. They would argue from the fact that you should legalize drugs, which I think is perfectly plumb line, to the fact that somehow you should use drugs, which is very different.

5:33These modals would argue from the fact that we shouldn't put people in jail who engage in weird sexual practices. Somehow we all ought to be engaging in these practices, which again is a little bit off. And I think Murray did yeoman work in this, as he did everywhere. Now, the only possible change I would suggest is, why give them the honorific of libertarian? Why call them left-wing libertarians on these issues? Yes, they're libertarian on other issues, but on these issues they're just crazy. They're just misunderstanding. Now, I want to read something, an email I got from Lew Rockwell.

6:18I'm not sure who wrote this, whether it was Mark Fullwiler. I think it's more full while or two, Lew Rockwell, about the Lincoln cult. And he says to Lew, you don't get Liberty Magazine, do you? There is a fawning review of it, a fawning review in it of a book on Lincoln that shows that the Lincoln cult is alive and well among so-called libertarians. The gist of the reviewer's argument is that Lincoln said he was against slavery, therefore he's a great guy. But the point that I want to focus on is he calls them so-called libertarians. I would be much more comfortable with calling them so-called libertarians, or quasi-libertarians, or semi-libertarians. I mean, Milton Friedman calls himself a libertarian, and if he calls himself a libertarian, you know, we've got a lot of troubles, because he's very different than plumb-lined libertarians.

7:04And so I would be happy to accord them these other words, or libertarian on some issues, but not on the issues where we're disagreeing. What I want to do today is not talk about modals, though. I want to talk about people who are so-called right-wing libertarians, and I'm coining a new phrase. And if anyone has a better word for it, let me know, and I'll use it in my next talk on this. Instead of the modals, I want to call them the schmodals. So who are the schmodals? Well, the schmodals are to libertarianism, as are the modals to libertarianism. Only when the modals deviate, they deviate on the left, the schmodals on the right. And the reason I think it's important is that while Murray himself had distinguished himself from the Schmodels mainly on the Worn Peace issue, somehow it hasn't resonated as much in our community as his wonderful work on the Models.

7:55So I want to get the Schmodels, and I want to get them under the topic of four headings. And I'll try to illustrate my point under these following four headings. One, war and peace. Two, abortion. Three, reparations. And four, misuse of language in the economics profession, for want of a better word. Okay, let me start with war and peace. Lewrockwell.com has done yeoman work on this issue. Certainly an honorable mention goes to Justin Raimondo's anti-war comm. Both of them have done heroic work. Both of them have been unpopular in many circles. I somehow think that Murray is up there somewhere smiling at these efforts.

8:44In my view, what we had been calling the Department of Defense never should have been called the Department of Defense, because if you go by what they did but not by what they were called, they should be called the Department of Offense. If you take a Martian eye view of this, if you're a Martian looking down on the earth and not knowing anything about anything, but you can just recognize who is who, and you want to figure out who is the aggressive nation, you have to ask yourself such things as, well, who's got military bases on foreign territories? Who's got sailors and soldiers all over ships all over the globe? Who used the nuclear bomb on civilians? War is the health of the state, says Randolph Bourne, and I think that's true. We have rent control, price controls, business subsidies, economic regulation and many other objectionable things because of war.

9:34War doesn't create these things, or rather war creates these things, these things don't create war. So if we're for free enterprise, we have to be at least biased in favor of anti-war or peace. There is such a thing as just war, there are defensive wars, but my claim is that the US is an invading power, it's not a defensive power. It's true that we've had civilians of ours killed, but there were many civilians that we've been killing all over the world. Yes, defense, just war, secession, but the world's policeman, I think, is what we've become. And this is unjustified. This is incompatible with libertarian theory. I take a reasonable expression of the libertarian view on foreign policy as George Washington's farewell address, is very well addressed, where he warned us against getting involved in entangling alliances and advised us to take on a peace policy.

10:32Yes, we can criticize modals like the Cato Institute for making modal mistakes, but they also make schmodal mistakes. And the schmodal mistakes, I think, are more important, if anything, than the modal mistakes. namely with the War Street Journal, that's not a mispronunciation. They make left-wing mistakes, yes, but they also make right-wing ones. My point is we're neither. We're neither left-wing nor right-wing. We're plumb-lined libertarians, or at least that's what Murray was, and that's what I intend to engage in. This, to me, is an exercise in product differentiation. We are distinct from them. We are a precious flower. We don't want to be conflated with left-wing semi-libertarians or quasi-libertarians, nor with right-wing ones.

11:20Okay, having briefly treated War and Peace, let me move to my second issue. My second issue is abortion. Now, the right-wingers take a pro-life position. The left-wingers take a pro-choice position. I think libertarians have a distinct position from all of them, from both of them. We have what I call the evictionist theory, namely that the woman has the right not to kill the fetus that she doesn't want but to evict it from her body since she is the private property rights owner of the body and the fetus that is in her when it's unwanted is in effect a parasite, an invader, a trespasser.

12:05Trespasser. Now some of you may or may not follow me along on these principled arguments that I'm now to give but I also have a pragmatic one which I hope will convince you if not the philosophical one. Okay, I start the analysis with when does life begin? Start at the beginning. This is an intractable position. It's sort of a continuum problem. Many people have great debates over this one. My read on this is that the life begins with the Fertilized Egg. As soon as the egg is fertilized, that's it. That's life. Why do I take this position? I take this position for two reasons. I'm going to have to take off my coat. This stuff is no heavy lifting here, but it's hot work. Why do I take this decision? One reason, a philosophical The second reason that I take this position is that I am going to come out in favor of a pro-choice position, at least in principle, therefore I want to make it hardest for myself to assume that the baby is an alive human being baby at the fertilized egg stage.

13:15The second reason is, to me, if you compare, suppose there are two twins, the mother is giving birth to twins and the first twin came out and the second twin is still inside. According to the present laws, I understand it, if you engage in any violence against the twin who's already been born, you're guilty of assault and battery or murder or whatever you do. Whereas if you do something to the baby that's inside, like the partial birth abortion business, it's okay because it's just like a protoplasm or something like that. And yet the babies are like six minutes apart from being born. And you know, they're pretty close, it seems to me. Whereas the difference between a fertilized egg and an unfertilized egg is widely different. Namely, one will not grow into a human being and the other will.

14:02And that seems to me to be a big distinction. But I'll rely on the first one, I'll rely on both actually, that I want to make it hardest for myself so that I can overcome the highest obstacles in my analysis. Abortion, one of the reasons I think we have problems with the abortion analysis is that it's a complex word. Abortion means two things. Abortion means eviction plus killing. Let me say that again because it's crucial, it's absolutely important. Abortion is not just eviction, it's not just killing, it's both. So you really shouldn't be talking about abortion, or if you do, you should be careful to distinguish between the two constituent elements of it, killing and eviction. And my claim is that eviction is justified always since it's the mother's property, but never killing, murder.

14:51Of course, the eviction always has to be done in the gentlest manner possible. If there's a trespasser who comes into the Mises Institute and the Mises people don't want him here, the first thing they can't, they can't first just plug him. I mean, I'm pretty rabid, but you know, but even I am not that rabid because that's not libertarian rabidity. I'm a libertarian rabid person. The first thing is the softest way to eject him. The only way to evict 100 years ago, even in the generalist manner possible, is to kill the baby, because we didn't have scientific technology which would allow us to evict in a non-harmful way.

15:48I posit, I stipulate, that 100 years from now it will be possible to evict, without harming the baby in any manner, shape or form, to evict the baby without hurting it at all. Right now we're in some sort of intermediate stage where we can evict, at certain stages in the late term pregnancy stages, without much harm or without any harm to the baby. But at earlier stages, the baby will be harmed if we evict.

16:21So, the libertarian position is that you can evict, but not kill. My claim is that right now, those of us who are pro-life in our desires, who don't like the prospect of millions of fetuses, millions of people being killed, would do well to adopt this policy of mine, evictionism, Even if you don't follow me so far, and I'll be considering objections to what I said, because the present system isn't working. The present system is a failure. All the pro-life people in the world have not been able to succeed in getting us to a position where we don't have the slaughter of innocent people. I use that word advisedly. Whereas if we adopt evictionism right now, we will be making a compromise. The eviction position is a compromise.

17:07See, the pro-life, what I have in my notes here is a chart. Evict, kill, and the pro-life people say no, don't evict, and no, don't kill. The pro-choice people say yes, evict, and yes, kill. Whereas the evictionists say yes, evict, and no, kill. So it is a compromise. So if we adopt this compromise, this means that right now we will be giving assent to the killing of some innocent people, namely, say, in the first to the sixth month. Just pick that number as an arbitrary number. I don't know what the medical technology is now. Whereas at least we'll be saving people in their 7th, 8th and 9th months. So we'll save some of the people, but the genius, if I may say so, of this argument, is that as time progresses, every decade that goes on, we might save another month.

17:57So in one decade from now, it'll go to the 5th month and to get decades for the 4th month, etc. And eventually, we will have what we want. We pro-life people who want to save human beings who are very young. Whereas if we stick with the present, we're going to lose and we'll always lose and we won't have a compromise and we won't be winning in the future either. So I say let's at least, even if you don't agree with me, let's take a part of a loaf because that loaf will be getting bigger as time goes on and eventually medical technology will solve this problem if we adopt the compromise. But if we don't adopt the compromise, my prognostication is that we'll just endlessly have this slaughter of people. Okay, now let me consider a few objections to my argument.

18:44First, there's this airplane trip business that I invite you on my airplane, and we're up at 37,000 feet, and I say, by the way, this airplane is my private property, and get the hell off. And you say, well, how about a parachute? I say, no, no, no, that's positive obligations. This is one argument against my thesis. My rejection of this is as follows. What we really have here is an argument over implicit contract. My claim is that there is an implicit contract when someone invites you on the plane that they're going to land you. Look, if you go into the restaurant and order a cup of coffee and they present a bill for that cup of coffee of $5 million, this is a violation of the implicit contract.

19:39So now, the question is, what is the implicit contract in the case of birth? Well, my claim is that for there to be an implicit contract, there have to be at least two contracting parties. And at the time of intercourse, if you forget about the father, and the father only comes into this, There's only the mother and the fetus in the eviction or the abortion scenario, and there cannot be a contract between the mother and the fetus, even an implicit one, because at the time of intercourse, there's only a separate sperm and a separate egg. There is no fertilized egg for there to be a contract with, so I claim that there is no fertilized egg. There is no fertilized eggs for there to be a contract with, so I claim that this argument fails.

20:26Another one has to do with positive obligations. One of the essences of libertarianism is saying that there are no positive obligations. So let's talk a little bit about this stem cell research business. Here you have a lot of fertilized eggs, and people are attempting to experiment with them, that is, kill them. And my claim is that if you are, or take a, before I get into that, take a case, there was this case in, well, let me get off the case in Canada, Just take a case where I have a baby and I don't want to feed it anymore and I just leave it in its bed and I don't feed it and I let it starve to death. Have I committed a libertarian crime in not notifying other people that here is a baby that I'm no longer willing to take care of?

21:18Now the libertarian view of babies and ownership is you never can own another human being. I'm not going to get into voluntary slavery, that's a different issue. You can't own another human being. You can only own the homesteading rights to it, namely the right to bring it up. And how do you get the homesteading rights to bring up the baby? Well, by one, by giving birth to it, and then by caring for it, taking care of it. So as soon as you're unwilling to take care of it anymore, like you want to now starve it, you've now lost your rights to homestead it. But is it a positive obligation that you have to go off and notify someone in the common law tradition? My understanding is that the unwanted baby would be put on the church steps or given to the hospital or given to some charitable organization.

22:07My claim is that this is compatible with the libertarian opposition to positive obligations, and here's my argument. It has to do with forestalling. Now, you have to get back into homesteading theory. The point of homesteading theory is to get all unowned property into the hands of people, and then we can have a free market with buying and selling. But suppose what I do is I homestead an area of land that sort of looks like a bagel. It's, say, 100 miles wide. The bagel part is 100 miles wide. And inside, the hole in the bagel is, say, 100 square miles. Am I allowed to do that? My claim is that I'm not, because if I do that, I'm forestalling the rest of you from getting into that 100-mile-square area, which is the whole naval, assuming that there's no technology to dig under my land or to build a bridge over it. I'm precluding you. I'm forestalling you from unowned property.

23:08And this is illegitimate. I have to allow you access or egress into there, otherwise I'm violating what I take to be libertarian homesteading theory. and Homesteading Theory. In other words, I think we libertarians have two problems with Locke. One, he had this nonsense about leaving as much and as good for anyone else, nonsense. You grab it all, anything you can homestead. And two, he didn't have this forescaling theory. Now, let's get back to the baby. What you're doing with that baby that you don't tell anyone else about, that you're keeping, starving, you're forescaling other people from taking over that baby. Now we get to the stem cell case. And to me it's a race. If you don't want to take care of a baby or if you don't want to take care of a fertilized egg, what you have to do under the libertarian legal code, as I understand it, is notify other people that here is a human being, a young one, that I have the rights to keep as long as I feed it and care for it, but I'm not going to feed it and care for it. And it's only if no one in the rest of the world wants to take care of it that you're justified in killing it.

24:13There was a case in Canada where a man killed his 10-year-old girl who was very, very sick with all sorts of diseases. My analysis of that is if he would have first notified everyone else that he no longer wishes to care for her, and no one else in the 6 billion people on the earth around said, I'll take her, then he could have killed her. And it would have been consistent with libertarianism. But he didn't do that notification. So the stem cell people have to notify the pro-life people and say, look, here we have these fertilized eggs. If no one takes them, we're going to kill them. We're going to experiment with them. And now it's a race. Can they build more fertilized eggs than the demand? It's sort of a race between the supply and the demand side.

24:58And I wrote this on the Lew Rockwell web. And I got hundreds of letters saying, you know, you're a jerk. That was the kindest thing. And there was some young lad whose name I don't remember, but I credit him in the article that I'm writing on this. If he's here, please let him say who he is. No, I guess he's not here, but it's in my article. What he said is, look, the pro-life people don't have to promise to bring up all these fertilized eggs. All they have to do is promise to freeze them. Freezing them would be to keep them alive and maybe in 20 years we'll have the technology to keep them alive. So my understanding of the libertarian position on stem cell research is that there will not be any. because my empirical prediction is that the pro-life types will be able to put in freezes any number that the experimental types want to create. Okay another point is on the philosophical business is that all fetuses have the

25:58same rights and in the case of pregnancy due to rape there's not even the possibility of a contract because rape by definition is coercive activity and If that baby has rights to live, then all babies have rights to live, since they all have equal rights. Okay, let me end this section again with my pragmatic point, because I think that's the strongest in somebody's, in many people's view. It would be better to adopt my eviction, my eviction, the libertarian as I see it, evictionism theory, which was really Murray's theory. Even if you don't agree with it philosophically, because of the pragmatic elements of it. I love it. Namely, as time goes on, we will save more and more people, young people, and eventually we'll save them all, medical technology willing.

26:44Okay, my third point is reparations. Now, this is Guy Randall Robinson floating around, who is saying that all blacks should get reparations, and it's trillions of dollars from all whites, And all blacks should get reparations from all whites, whether the whites were here or not. If you're a guy from Portugal and you come over to this country now, you owe reparations since you're white. If you're a black person who comes from somewhere else, you are owed reparations even though you were never enslaved here, even though your grandparents weren't. And in reaction, people like David Horowitz, Mike Levin and Paul Craig Roberts have written Mises saying that these people are all wrong. These people, Horowitz, Levin and Roberts, I take as schmodels. They are right-wing, semi-demi libertarians, and what I'm now going to do is, in a continuing effort to distinguish libertarians from right-wing types or conservatives, is to criticize their views.

27:45I think their views are better than Raynal Robinson's, but just because I don't agree with Raynal Robinson doesn't mean I agree with the conservatives. Okay, so let's get into this return of stolen property business. What's going on here? Many of the conservatives think that reparations is anti-property rights. That per se, if you have a reparation, you're against property rights. To my way of thinking, nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, reparations are part and parcel of private property rights. Reparations are merely the return of stolen property through time. If I steal somebody's watch, David is sitting in the front here, and if I grab his watch and I'm forced to return it, that would be consistently property rights.

28:31Now suppose I steal his watch, and I keep it, and we both die, and I give it to my grandson, and his grandson comes to my grandson and says, you know, that's Grandpa David's watch to my grandson. give it back. In the ordinary course of events had Walter not stolen the watch from David, David's grandson would have had it instead Walter's grandson has it. Now to me it matters not one whit whether I return the watch to David or my grandson returns the watch to his grandson. In both cases private property rights are being respected not denigrated. So don't think that reparations are somehow incompatible with private property rights. Now of course David's grandson, the burden of proof is upon him if he wants to make this claim, because the burden of proof is on he who wants to overturn property.

29:28Possession is not intensely wrong. The excellent property owner is assumed to be the rightful property owner unless and until someone can undermine this. And one way to undermine this is to show, you know, a picture of the grandfather with the watch or an inscription or something like that and that would be evidence and then you would have to force my grandson to return the watch to David because we have a picture of David, you know, blatantly wearing his watch, say that would be the evidence. Okay, it's pretty clear with watches. What about slavery? Well, slavery, and again I'm not talking about voluntary slavery, I'm talking about this slavery that occurred in this country before 1865, was theft. Libertarians analyze these things, I think, in that way. We regard murder as the theft of a life, we regard slavery as the theft of labor services.

30:19Well, what should have happened in 1866 or 1865 whenever the war of northern aggression ended or the first war of southern secession I think is as it's being called now. What should have happened then was that the bad guys, the slave owners, should have been forced to compensate the slaves. One, the rabid The vision would have been that they should have been enslaved by the slaves because the, you know, this two teeth for a tooth is punishment theory. At least the crime for kidnapping is to be kidnapped. The crime for slave-homing or slave-arming is to be enslaved. That would seem to be just.

31:05But these people are beyond our reach. They've all died and it's, you know, 2002. We can't get them. But there are plantations, mainly in the South, but few in the North too, it doesn't matter where they are. There are plantations that those guys had. When they should have been enslaved, those plantations should have gone to the slaves. The slaves were the proper owners of it, they built it, or at least large parts of it should have gone to them. Instead, those plantations and acreages stayed with the white children, And there are great-grandchildren of black slaves, and if it's justified for David's grandson to come to my grandson and get his grandfather's watch back, then it is also justified, I claim, for the black great-grandchild to come to the white great-grandchild and say, look, those plantations that you got from your grandfather, you never should have got from him in the first place. I don't consider you a criminal.

32:07you didn't engage in slave owning but you're now holding land and property and plantations that you never should have got from your grandfather in inheritance and should have gone to my grandfather and he would have given it to me in inheritance okay what's wrong with this what's some criticisms with this one of them is that this is ex post facto law because at that time slavery was is legal, but I don't believe in legal positivism, whatever the law is is right, I'm a libertarian. I believe that libertarian law is the proper law now and in the future and in the past. I believe in the Nuremberg trials, which was also ex post facto. According to Nazi law, it was okay for the Nazis to do, it was a virtue to do, for them to do what they did.

32:54According to US law, it was a virtue to, or at least legal, to own a slave. I don't give a fig for that law. I have a higher law in mind, it's the libertarian law, and I'm willing to go to any society that's incompatible with libertarian law as a libertarian and say, your law is wrong, the libertarian law is right, we're going to set things right. And time doesn't matter, there's no statute of limitations on justice. There's another claim of mine which is obviously debatable. Now this is a very radical philosophical position that I'm putting forth before you. However, the effects of this would be rather less radical, more conservative. They don't think that all the property rights that somehow the Indians once had will go back to them, or that all the plantations will go back to them, because I return again to the position of possession is nine-tenths of the law, and the burden of proof is on he who would overturn property rights.

33:49And the point is that 150 years later, it's hard to meet this burden of proof. There might be a few cases where some black person can come up with a Bible that lists the grandfather and which plantation they were on and can say, look, you know, this is proof, this is written proof, and we're going to claim our one 500th of that plantation given that there were 500 slaves and my grandfather or the black grandfather was one of those slaves. and Slave. Now, the conservatives say it's okay for Japanese Americans, for Cubans, for Soviet people, the people in East Germany to have reparations for the property that was stolen from them by the communist regimes, but somehow it's not okay for blacks or Indians or whoever it is.

34:42And it seems to be the idea that if the people are still alive, then you can have it, But if they've died then somehow the reparations are not valid But on the assumption that the, what do you call it, the inheritance would go along racial lines I think it's very clear who is the legitimate owner of those things I want to read a quote from Murray Rothbard on this And he says, suppose that Jones, Jones is now the white grandson, although Murray is talking about a watch Land, and I'll be talking about land. Suppose that Jones is not the criminal, not the man who stole the watch, but that he had inherited or had innocently purchased it from the thief. And suppose, of course, that neither the victim nor theirs can be found.

35:30In that case, the disappearance of the victim means that the stolen property comes properly into a state of non-ownership, non-ownership. But we have seen that any good in the state of non-ownership with no legitimate owner of its own, of its title, reverts as a legitimate property to the first person who comes along and uses it. Would you like a cough drop, sir? You're welcome. They don't call me Doc Block for nothing. You know, they say if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So all I have is cough drops and I'm trying to cure the ills of the world, where was I?

36:16But we have seen that any good in a state of non-ownership with no legitimate owner of its title reverts its legitimate property to the first person to come along and use it to appropriate this now unowned resource for human use. But this first person is clearly Jones, the white grandson or son, who had been using it all along. Therefore, we conclude that even though the property was originally stolen, that if the victim or his heirs cannot be found, and if the current possessor was not the actual criminal who stole the property, then title to that property belongs properly, justly and ethically to its current possessor. To sum up, for any property currently claimed and used, A, if we know clearly that there was no criminal origin to its current title, then obviously the current title is legitimate, just and valid.

37:04B, if we don't know whether the current title had any criminal origins but can't find out either way, then the hypothetically unowned property reverts instantaneously and justly to its current possessor. C, if we do know that the title is originally criminal, but can't find the victim or his heirs, then C1, if the current title holder was not the criminal aggressor against the property, then it reverts to him justly as the first owner of the hypothetically unowned property. But C2, if the current title holder is himself the criminal or one of the criminals who stole the property, then clearly he is properly to be deprived of it, and then it reverts to the first man who takes it out of his unowned state and appropriates it for his use. And finally, D, here's the relevant case. If the current title is the result of crime and the victim of Mises can be found, then the title properly reverts immediately to the latter without compensation to the criminal

37:56or to the other holders of the unjust title. So the white grandson is not a criminal, but his title to that property is illegitimate if it can be proved that it was the property of someone else, would be the way I would interpret that. Black reparation leaders ought to embrace libertarianism. I'll wait on that. First, it will help blacks apart from reparations. See, the view of Milton Friedman and other utilitarians is a weird one. His view is that, look, land is only 10% of the GDP, give or take. So why all the fuss over reparation of land? of Land, let him keep it, you get more welfare, economic benefits for blacks if instead of worrying about reparations you worry about minimum wages or unions or tariffs or whatever, then he's probably right. But the word justice and the word Milton Friedman don't belong in the same sentence. He doesn't understand what justice is. It's true that it may not be utilitarian to insist upon reparations, but libertarians aren't utilitarians. We don't

39:07I don't care if it's utilitarian, now we're asking is it just? And I've debated with him on this and he just has the gene for justice missing from him or something. Okay, so the first reason that they ought to embrace libertarianism, ha-ha, is that it'll help blacks apart from reparations. Secondly, it supports their claim on principle, whereas the conservatives reject their claim on principle. And thirdly, that in some very few cases in practice, will actually be some transfer of plantations from whites to blacks. Okay, now I'm going to consider objections from Levin, Horowitz and Roberts. Quote from Levin, quote, Payback for manumitted slaves is owed only by their former owners, unquote.

39:59Payback for manumitted slaves is owed only by their former owners. My claim is, no, grandsons too. Why not those grandsons? They've got the stuff illegitimately, if it can be proven, which in most cases it can't, but if it can, why not? Okay, second, Horowitz. Now, Horowitz has ten points, many of which I agree with about it, and I won't mention those, but there's an interesting thing. Well, I mean, in the interest of time, I don't want to say, oh, point three I agree, point four I agree. 1.4, I agree. Now these 10 points have an interesting background. What he did is he put these, or he didn't put these, he asked the newspapers at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and all those great places to run his 10 points opposing Randall Robinson and they all refused or virtually all refused and then he made a big fuss of this. So conservatives aren't all bad. This was good that he showed the Harvard, Princeton and Yale types for what they are, but now let me talk about the points that he makes. First,

41:00Blacks first enslaved blacks, namely the first enslavers of blacks were blacks. And for Horowitz, this is a reductio. Well, it might be a reductio to Randall Robinson's thesis, but it's certainly not a reductio to the libertarian theory of reparations. So what if blacks owned blacks? This is not a racist kind of a thing that if you're black you owe or you don't owe. It's you owe if your grandfather stole from my grandfather. Well, if a black was a slave owner, then that black's grandson owes the other black who had the grandfather who was the slave. So it's no reductio for the libertarian position. The second one is Randall Robinson says all whites benefited from slavery, all blacks for harm.

41:49Horowitz says whites didn't benefit. My way of thinking is it's irrelevant whether you benefit or not. Benefit is not the key. Theft is the key. Look, if there's a frost in California, the orange growers in Florida benefit, but they don't owe anything just because you benefit. Right? Isn't that right? Look, I take a shower once a month whether I need it or not, and you people benefit. Benefit, near benefit or loss is irrelevant. It's theft that concerns the libertarian. Another one is black income in the US is greater than black income in Africa. There's another benefit. Well, it's true. Black income in the US is better than black income in Africa.

42:39And in some sense, we did the blacks a favor by enslaving them. It's not something that I advocate as a libertarian, I'm not a libertarian, but it's something that ex post I can look back upon and say, yes, Horowitz is right. However, this benefit doesn't matter. Suppose a man rates a woman, and it's later proven that had he not raped her, she would have been run over by a truck. Well, he benefited her, right? I mean, this isn't politically correct, so don't tell the people where, you know, you shouldn't. But, you know, just because he benefited doesn't mean that he's not guilty of rape. So, benefits benefit. You know, that's irrelevant.

43:24Okay, another one is that there are a lot of rich blacks, according to Horowitz, like Oprah Winfrey. She's rich. Who could deny that? She's rich. Therefore, she doesn't deserve to have property returned to her that was stolen from her grandfather? This is outright Marxist egalitarianism, right? that if you're rich, you're not owed? You can't be a rich creditor? I mean, that's the depths of the poverty that these conservatives, these schmodels, would be dragging us down to. They don't speak for us. Another one is that welfare has occurred, and this is already... In other words, what he's saying is that reparations have already taken place in the form of welfare. And my view is, well, first of all, This welfare wasn't reparations. It was reparations with an asterisk.

44:16When we gave them this welfare, we insisted that there be no man in the house, which ruined the black family. And according to Charles Murray, you know that business with the frog, if you put the frog in boiling water, it'll jump out. Slavery was like boiling water. The black family jumped right out of that. The black family was just as intact as the white family within a percentage point or two after slavery, Up until the welfare system came in and that's sort of like boiling the frog slowly and the welfare system ruined the black family. Now the incidence of illegitimacy in some cities is 70% among blacks. Also, it wasn't reparations because it came from the entire society and it went to all blacks or went to all poor people and blacks were overrepresented among poor people.

45:03That's not return of stolen property. Return of stolen property is you have to prove with some written proof that your grandfather was a slave here and that this guy has got that plantation and give it back. Another one is that war was over secession, not slavery as we learned from Tom D'Arenzo and Jeff Hummel and other people. Another one is that the northern soldiers helped get rid of slavery and therefore that was part of reparations. Just because some whites help some blacks doesn't mean that the whites who owe money paid the blacks who are owed money. Again, that's the sort of racism business. Now, I'm almost out of time and I have this long, long thing about Roberts and I'm going to skip that. He's a jerk, we don't have to.

45:49And I want to get to my fourth topic and that's this economic schmodels. Now, the chief economic schmodels from whom we have to distinguish ourselves, especially at George Mason University and other places like that, are the public choices. Tom DiLorenzo and I have published, I think, three articles on this stuff, and we've got two more in the pipeline. And one of the things, one of the problems with public choice is they are trying to, or their intellectual strength is having the effect of of Submerging Austrianism or Submerging Libertarian Economics. Language is important, and if these guys are perverting language, just like the feminists are perverting language, then it ties ill for us.

46:38I mean, if the feminists had their way, we couldn't say he, we'd have to say he or she. Well, that's the modals. The schmodals are doing something also even more insidious, because I think more people If you're aware of the danger of he and she and all, then they are of, let me give you a few examples. What you mean by rent-seeking is theft. The way this word is used is theft. And yet you're using the ancient and honorable word of rent collection. You're demeaning landlords or if you're talking about economic rent, you're demeaning economic rent. You shouldn't call it rent-seeking if what you mean by it is theft or booty-seeking or taking or something like that. Another one is this political marketplace. This is very, very prevalent in economics, especially among public choices.

47:25There's no political marketplace, that's theft. And they call it political marketplaces to conflate all sorts of, well no, just one distinction between voluntary and coercive action. But that is the main libertarian distinction between voluntary and coercive action. Another one is they call it conceptual unanimity. When you hear conceptual unanimity, check your wallet. There's no conceptual unanimity. I mean, either the goddamn thing is unanimous or it's not. And they're trying to get across this justification of the state on the basis of conceptual unanimity. Others are collective goods. Collective is, you know, a bunch of friends get together and pool the restaurant bill. What they mean is that if it's collective, it's, you know, it's government.

48:12Another one is democracy. They're always on and on about democracy. Well, Hans Hoppe is the point person, no, not the point person, the point man, on that particular issue. He's shown very eloquently that, you know, what democracy really is. Tyranny of the majority. Public sector is another one. Collective goods. Now, the one about human capital I'm not sure of. I have to think and maybe ask for your advice on this. On the one hand, you sort of see what it means. So on the other hand, it was created by Gary Becker, and Gary Becker was my thesis advisor and you know, there's lots of problems there with that, that I'll get into sometime. On the one hand, you can see what he means. On the other hand, it stills and on the third bad hand, it's denigrating the structure of production and putting it in this neoclassical supply and demand instead of structure of production.

49:06Now, we've been very careful about exploitation of the Marxists and scabs of the leftists, but I think it behooves us to be careful of the schmodels as well. Who is it saying the British are coming, the British are coming, Patrick Henry or somebody? I'm not a historian. Well, I say the schmodels are coming, the schmodels are coming. Be careful. Thank you.

49:36Well, after such a non-controversial lecture, it's a good time we don't have much time for questions. Tom Wood. Okay. Dr. Block, my question is as follows. I think it's possible to have something that is basically good, like Rothbardian property rights analysis, but not good in every single situation. For instance, there are 17th and 18th century philosophers who thought they could use math and geometry to explain morality, for instance. I mean, that was not helpful. There are economists who think they can use math and calculus today in their field, we know it's not useful. But they're taking something that we know is good, they're just simply trying to apply it to everything. Likewise, science is good, but if I wrote my fiancé a letter saying, Dear Heather, I love you very much and I've organized the 16 ways in which I love you in the four categories.

50:30I get punched in the face. The love I have for my town, I can't explain with a mathematical equation. But that doesn't mean math is bad. It simply means you can't extend it to every aspect of life. So my point is that I don't think that those of us who disagree with your analysis about women and their children in terms of parasites and eviction, I completely reject that way of thinking, but I don't think that therefore I'm any less a part of the movement. Because on that point, I think the extension of property rights analysis is just protest. You know what I mean? I don't want to feel like I'm being thrumped out of the movement for that. Well, I'm a big tent kind of guy.

51:18Look, when I first came into this movement, it consisted of people in Murray's living room, and there must have been about 10 or 12 of us in the whole world. And now there are only tens of thousands. I'd like to see millions. So I'm not trying to say that you're not a libertarian. I believe that anyone who answers the libertarian quiz, that smallest political quiz in the upper right-hand quadrant, which I'm sure would encompass everyone here is a libertarian. I'm not trying to drum anyone out of the movement. What I'm trying to do, as you accurately see, is to apply Rothbardianism to the ends of the earth. Now, if I can be shown that it doesn't work, I'll stop.

52:03There are some issues where I disagree with Murray. I haven't mentioned them here. I didn't think it was the appropriate point. But you can't get away with the criticism of applying Rothbardianism to everywhere by giving me these analogies. You have to say, well, look, Rothbardism doesn't work here, and you're not seeing that, or at least you haven't now. And, you know, I look forward to something, getting something in writing from you. If you can show me I'm wrong, I'm not a Rothbardian on that issue. So I don't have this religious cultish thing, you know, Rothbard uberallist. You have to apply him, you know, otherwise you're evil. But on the other hand, Murray is brilliant, and I try to apply him, and if it doesn't work, then I stop. I'm not going to stop, but until I'm shown that it's wrong, I'm not going to stop because you can't send your fiancé a certain letter, and maybe you're wrong with that. I don't know. There's methodological individualism here.

52:56When you talk about... You shouldn't have called on him. With reparations, which I prefer to call restitution, it seems to me that you're engaging in theft. And the reason is that what you want to do is return the land. Now you said before that that what was stolen was the labor services. What the normal payment for labor services is money, so it seems to me that if a debt was owed at the time of a plantation, the owner should have had to compensate them in money. If he had a large enough bank account that he didn't have to sell his land, he gives the slaves the money and that's the end of it.

53:42Now if he dies, the debt passes on down to his children, but provided only that they have inherited more money from him than the debt. I agree with you partially, insofar as they don't have enough money, then we go to the land. But I would agree with you, if you could get the value of what they stole, with the appropriate interest rate and all, and the grandson had it in money, he could give it to him in money. So I spoke loosely and I stand corrected by you. It need not be land. It could be any valuable consideration.

54:28I was wondering if your reparations analysis would apply to other instances of theft, for example, taxation. Can we get our money back from the people who have been receiving the tax money for the past 70 years? Oh, you're darn tooting. I've got an article coming out of, I forget what I call it, something about stringing them up by certain parts of their anatomy. And it certainly follows that, yes, taxes are theft and reparations should be made from the ruling class to the victimized group. Absolutely. I don't regard that as a reductio. I regard that as a wonderful implication of what I'm saying. Just to follow up a little bit on the first question that some of this is epicycling, trying to apply a concept that is very much at home some place to other places where it's not.

55:27I hate the word eviction. Usually when you evict somebody, you first give them a notice, you have some sort of a relationship where a lease specifies all sorts of procedures and so on, but you can't do that with a fetus or a unborn child or whatever you want to call it. So this is why some of us are uncomfortable applying those concepts that have a perfectly good natural application in certain contexts with adults negotiating with each other, signing leases, contracts, and so on. And then suddenly it's being applied to these unconscious beings that are being eventually not evicted but extracted from the womb and put out there to die.

56:12I don't know exactly whether that's a good language, but I do have a sense that the other language is unfitting. Well, I might be convinced to change the word from eviction to whatever it is we do with trespasses, and maybe we don't evict trespasses, maybe we expel them. Judith Jarvis Thompson had this wonderful case where you wake up in the morning and there's an umbilical cord attached from your kidney to some guy in bed with you, with you, and you wake him up and you say, you know, how'd you get here? He said, I don't know. I went to bed last night in the hospital and I woke up here. I'm innocent. Does the person, do you now, who are now attached to this person, have the obligation not to detach yourself from him or evict him from you or expel him from you? I think you do. I think it's a perfectly good extrapolation of Murray Rothbard's property rights to a very ticklish question.

57:03I've never heard a better analysis of the abortion issue. I might be convinced that eviction isn't the right word, but then I would use expalation, or whatever other word that would be like that, what you do to trespassers. That's all we're talking about. Applause